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The US Presidential Election of November 2004 was very strongly contested, with record voter interest and involvement on both of the major sides. George W Bush, the incumbent president (Republican) faced Sen. John Kerry (Democrat), the challenger, against a background of international terrorism, US policy in Iraq, domestic economic troubles, and increased conservatism values domestically. It was in a sense, an election with "all to play for", billed by pollsters as "too close to call". It was also an election which would to a great extent determine US domestic, religious, and foreign policy and supreme court direction in the 21st century. It followed on from the 2000 Presidential election, where the vote of millions had effectively hinged on a recount of a mere few hundred ambiguous machine votes in Florida and a subsequent court ruling on vote admissibility and recounts.

Against this background, a highly polarised electorate voted between Bush and Kerry in November 2004.

Some of the issues arising are common during elections. It is usual (if undesirable) for candidates to exaggerate their own case, and cast doubt or mildly distort others positions, and by and large members of the public allow for this if they wish. However in this election especially, there were also concerns and allegations raised relating to matters which if correctly specified, would possibly not have fallen within the scope of "generally acceptable US election activity".

Issues affecting the perception of fairness of that vote in some people's minds included:

• New electronic Voting machines. Proprietary machines would be used for voting. Their reliability and accuracy had not been established by a long track record, nor was there openness by which sceptics could confirm the software was not flawed or partial. Some machines lacked a means to verify the count against some form of hard copy audit trail. Some were reprogrammed whilst in use on election day.
• Fears regarding Voter suppression, intimidation, selective or manipulative collection of postal votes and other related issues and practices.
• Fairness of debates, there were allegations made prior to and after the election that one of the candidates could be seen with what appeared to be some form of device under his jacket during debates. This device looked like a wire, that is, a device to allow a third party to assist in the debate unseen.
• Rhetorical and exaggerated claims both of own side's track record, and other sides intentions.
• Clear evidence of error or misrepresentation in exit polls.
• Lost or undelivered votes (especially Florida)
• Voting issues connected with Americans overseas and minority groups.

Scale and Significance of Issues

At present the media and general consensus appears to be that there were teething troubles in regard of the voting machines, that there was a higher than usual degree of vote monitoring, and therefore irregularities due to these concerns were probably insignificant compared to the number of votes cast.

However against this are two issues: In some states a few hundred votes may have been be critical, and if there were systematic factors able to affect more than individual voters, or related to specific critical counties or voting stations, this would be a more serious matter.

There is also substantial comment online, including online media, where the perceived significance and nature of some of these issues has led to questions of improper conduct and illegally affected results becoming considered plausible. Some people feel that in view of the major discrepancies seen, there is a likelihood that some key reported results were not in accordance with actual voting. Some people and some media carried stories openly questioning whether the election was "rigged" (that is, fraudulently influenced). No formal investigation has yet been carried out at this time into such speculative questions.

Electronic Voting machines

In many cases there were concerns as to whether votes were fairly, reliably and accurately recorded and reported by the electronic machines involved. Below is a map of electronic voting machine incidents reported to the EIRS. Red states have >100 reported incidents, orange >10, yellow >1. Below that are by-county maps of Florida and Ohio, showing the democratic-voting counties in shades of blue proportional to the population, and the machine incidents in yellow, orange, and red.

File:Florida machine.gif File:Ohio machine.gif

Examples of complaints and aberrations

• Discrepancies in claimed totals of provisional ballots in Ohio
• As many as 2000 "votes" present in at least one electronic voting machine before the polls opened
• Unexplained 3-hour gap in the security audit records of at least one voting machine at King Co., WA.
• A substantial number of people said they voted for one candidate but the vote was recorded for another. Some spotted this, there are fears that most may not have.
• Machines are supposed to not lose votes in a power-out. Voters cannot tell whether vote integrity was in fact be maintained as intended when power goes down, as happened at least in one polling station (Dekalb Co. GA, 15 minutes powerout)
• Machines are not robust against error and

(Also some machines malfunctioned and demo machines were used instead, hastily programmed to replace them. It is not clear to those who voted who did this or what was involved in this "programming" )

• Machines do not always produce an audit trail, that is, if there is a doubt as to whether the machine has accurately represented and counted votes, there may not always be a way to verify neutrally the stated result.
• Machines do not have "open" software, so it has not been generally possible for people to confirm that the software does not mis-state votes periodically.

(Anecdotally from websites, a common theme on this topic seems to be that claims of vote mis-statement are more often made by people who voted for Kerry but the vote showed for Bush. It's not clear whether were this to be studied, it would turn out to be urban myth or verified fact)

• Unless exceptionally well designed, computers can be "hacked" and manipulated in an undetectable manner by experts.
• Other sources of lost data include hard drive crashes, inappropriate deletion, and the like, including failure when audit trails are kept, for the totals to match the tally of votes as reported by machines .

Voting Fraud is also both possible and hard to prove with some versions of electronic voting machines.

Sample source: "Experts said the company designed the machines and software so that vote totals could easily be altered without leaving a trace. Losing candidates in one race charged that when the computer acted up on election night, a CES employee inserted control cards into the machine. The plaintiffs sued to retrieve the source code, and the court, for once, consented. When computer experts examined the software, they determined that CES had changed the computer's instructions for tallying votes on election night. But because the program lacked adequate auditing mechanisms to track the nature of those changes, no one could determine if the company had rigged the election." for this and similar stories.

Voting Machine political ties with George W. Bush

Of note too, is the widely reported promise made by Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, to "deliver" Ohio to Bush in the 2004 election. Diebold are the company which make the electronic voting machines used in Ohio and other states. Diebold's voting machines are one of those at the heart of many of these concerns. (Ohio was one of a few critical states in the 2004 election, and the one which ultimately sealed the result)

Similarly, Chuck Hagel, the previous chairman of ES&S, another major manufacturer of voting machines and still a $1m stock-holder in McCarthy & Co which owns a quarter of ES&S, became a Republican candidate. Hagel's Democratic opponent made a formal protest to the state of Nebraska over the conflict of interest.

(Source: )

Evidence of electronic voting bias

Note: As with all statistics, it is very important to consider other causes of apparent anomalies, and to provide verifiable and neutral source data that can be checked in a neutral way by 3rd parties. All the information and sources below appear prima facie to be statistically reasonable in terms of both analysis and assumptions, and to be based upon verifiable public data.

(1) An analysis of Florida counties with between 80 - 500,000 registered voters concluded (with a few caveats of a usual kind) that machine type (E-Touch vs Op-Scan) was a "significant predictor" of vote at the p < 0.001 level (less than one chance in a thousand of this degree of anomaly happening by chance) Source data and calculations

(2) One website discusses Gahanna, Franklin Co. Ohio. The vote reported by the county in Gahanna 1-B was 4258 Bush, 260 Kerry, and the total votes cast in Gahanna overall were 20,736. However:

• Gahanna has some 20,000 people elegible to vote and the reported turnout was around 70%. On a casual reckoning approximately 14,000 people voted, and yet nearly 21,000 votes were reported by voting machines.
• 4258 Republican votes were electronically reported for Bush in Gahanna 1-B. But there were only 638 votes cast in the precinct. Furthermore the 3893 extra individuals who are said to have queued to vote for Bush, and were therefore presumably Republican, did not appear to vote on any other matter bar the Presidency. (These other matters included the Senate race, County Commissioner, several County and State officials, and the imfamous Gay Unions vote, issues of great importance in the election)

Source: , source data from govt website pdf

(3) An analysis reported in the New Zealand press looks at the differences between exit polls and reported voting in more detail. It identifies that in a selection of non-swing states, the exit polls and final results match. However in a large proportion of what were identified before the election as key swing states (Wisconsin, Pennysylvania, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire etc), the exit polls and final votes do not match.

The error was in each case a statistically anomalous and electorally critical 4 - 15% swing (change between exit polls and electronic voting) and furthermore the anomalies were not random. In each of the above swing states, this variation between what voters said they voted, and what the machines reported, was in favour of Mr Bush. Source , article discussing here, graphs here.

(4) An interesting article comments that:

• Exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 actually showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry?s victory in the Electoral College.
• The exit polls covered both the Presidential and Senate races. The votes reported by voting machines for the Senate races were in line with the exit polls for the Senate race, however the votes reported by the same voting machines for the Presidency often significant disagreed with the exit polls for the Presidency.
• It also comments that "Democratic suspicions also were raised by Republican resistance to implementing any meaningful backup system for checking the results on Diebold and other electronic-voting machines."

Specific criticisms levelled at Diebold's voting machines

• Unreported faults and problems known to manufacturer

Oct. 27, 2004 ? The state of California has ordered that 15,000 brand new touch-screen voting machines not be used in next week's presidential election. These electronic machines were manufactured by Diebold Inc., a North Canton, Ohio-based company that also specializes in automated teller machines and electronic security.

"Of course we would have wished the situation would not have happened, but it did," Rapke told ABC News. "There was back up available. But again, with additional familiarity with the system, again, this problem would not have happened." But a former Diebold technical worker, James Dunn, told ABC News the company was aware of the software and electronic problems before the election, and never reported them. "The machine would lock up or lose its software load. A very uncommon thing and not a good thing," said Dunn. "And once that machine's locked up you're unable to produce voter cards, which means you're unable to open the election voting machine and people can't vote. But they shipped it anyway."

• Poor security against hacking and other electronic fraud

The same source also claims that "Experts have raised questions about the machines' security features, which some say can be easily defeated, making it possible to manipulate the actual vote count.

"In all of my consulting work and all of my work in industry I've never seen a system that I thought was this vulnerable to abuse," said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who, along with other security experts, analyzed Diebold's source code for the electronic voting machines."

In at least one case it appears a voting machine was hacked during a primary election in King County Washington and a warning was issued to disconnect all voting machines from the internet. But this would not prevent the effects of hacking totally .

• Political impact of anomalies on voting

March 5, 2004 : "Harris has also posted a post-mortem by CBS detailing how the network managed to call Volusia County for Bush early in the morning. The report states: "Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made." As Harris notes, the 20,000-vote error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and nearly led Gore to concede.

What's particularly troubling, Harris says, is that the errors were caught only because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore's vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible. Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a "faulty memory chip," which Harris claims is simply not credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease. The hackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents on various web sites ? documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this "wholesale reproduction" of company material."

(Sources for this section: 1) ABC News and 2) )

Voting Machine problems (including Diebold): Electronic voting#Problems with electronic voting

Manipulation of exit polls

The following tables compare final exit poll data with penultimate exit poll data, note the large swing of support towards Bush, with Kerry losing votes which is mathematically impossible if votes are only being added. It was claimed that initial exit poll data was "inaccurate" but no details and little comment on this discrepancy were provided. (direct link to screenshots and data: CNN website 12.21am CNN website 1.41am):

CNN screenshot #1:

12.21 am, 1963 respondents so far

Total vote: Male 47% , Female 53% of which:

	Male - Bush		47% x 49% x 1963		452
	Male - Kerry		47% x 51% x 1963		471
	Female - Bush		53% x 47% x 1963		489
	Female - Kerry		53% x 53% x 1963		551
	TOTAL - Bush				941
	TOTAL - Kerry				1022

(rounding: estimates of voters in each category accurate within +/- 10)

CNN screenshot #2:

1.41 am, 2020 respondents so far (57 more than above)

Total vote: Male 47% , Female 53% of which:

	Male - Bush		47% x 52% x 2020		499
	Male - Kerry		47% x 47% x 2020		451
	Female - Bush		53% x 50% x 2020		535
	Female - Kerry		53% x 50% x 2020		535
	TOTAL - Bush				1034
	TOTAL - Kerry				986

(rounding: estimates of voters in each category accurate within +/- 10)

The addition of an extra 57 voters at this station was therefore reported as +93 votes for Bush by AP and CNN at least, and voters monitoring the exit polls were told authoritatively  that Bush had now taken a lead from Kerry.

Lost or Undelivered Votes

Florida - 58,000 absentee postal vote forms went astray and were not delivered to voters. No real explanation has been given.

Minorities

Specific concerns were raised in the course of the election in respect of votes from key minorities, such as Blacks or Cuban Hispanics.

Related Articles

• U.S. presidential election, 2004
• Voting machine
• Electronic voting
• Vote-rigging

(NPOV note: the presence of this link is for those seeking further information on election irregularities in general. It is not an opinion on this specific election)

• Voter suppression

External links

• blackboxvoting.org
• blackboxvoting Articles and voter field reports
• Institute for Public Accuracy
• Expert testimony as to procedures needed to make electronic voting secure
• article written by the founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., on Electronic Voting.
• Article by The Economist

• Politics and technology
• U.S. presidential election, 2004