Here, in full, is a dispatch from Phil Agre (Red Rock Eaters mailing list owner), who has rapidly pulled together alot of concerns about the Florida vote situation:
[People have been sending me a flood of material about the Florida
vote, so much that I can hardly keep up with it as I’m typing here.
The situation is a mess, and it just gets worse. I’ve gathered URL’s
for a great deal of relevant information, and I urge you to pass
it along to everyone who can use it. I’m getting so much material,
the situation is evolving so fast, and the relevant Web sites are so
overloaded, that I cannot guarantee that I have summarized everything
100% accurately, or that the URL’s all still work. I’ve done my best.Earlier I passed on a report that a locked ballot box had been discovered
in a Democratic area. Now the cnn.com Web site reports that, according
to “Miami-Dade County election officials”, this box contained no ballots:http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/08/ballotbox.found/
There is a lot of vague talk about other missing ballot boxes, but this
is the only one that has been formally reported to my knowledge.But the missing ballot box was hardly the only problem, or the worst.
For example, there are the misleading “butterfly ballots”. Here is an
article from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Palm Beach County:http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/daily/detail/0,1136,36000000000123102,00.html
This article is being continually updated. The Sun-Sentinel Web site is
overwhelmed, so keep trying.You can see an image of the misleading ballot on these pages:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/elections/palmbeachballot.htm
http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,sunsentinel-nation-82373,00.html
The Democrats are asserting that this ballot design was illegal under
Florida law:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.html
Bob Kerrey is calling for a new vote in Florida:
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/07/results/
The problem has two aspects. First, statistical arguments and massive
anecdotal evidence suggest that the misleading ballot produced easily
enough bad votes to throw the election. Second, one of the authors of
the Sun-Sentinel article just said on public radio that something like
20,000 more ballots than one would statistically expect were discarded
in the strongly Democratic areas where the misleading ballots were used.There is a brief statistical discussion of the issue here:
http://cuwu.editthispage.com/2000/11/08
This page should include a dramatic plot of the voting data, but it only
seems to appear under certain browsers. Here’s another URL for the plot:http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/palm-beach.pdf
Here are some more articles on the subject:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20001108/el/eln_ballot_confusion_1.html
http://www.time.com/time/campaign2000/story/0,7243,60132,00.html
I have enclosed another statistical discussion by Jeff Harris, a former
official at the Office of Management and Budget now working a public
policy consultant in Los Angeles. I have also enclosed a message by a
friend, also in Los Angeles, who was involved in an investigation of a
rigged election out here. He knew about the 1988 case in Florida, and
I found his message interesting. People have made further claims about
the 1988 election that they aren’t willing to put their names on, so I
won’t repeat them.Nobody to my knowledge is arguing that the ballots were consciously
designed to bias the election. They are only arguing that the ballots
were badly designed, illegal, and very likely had the effect of changing
the outcome on the national level.Enough about the butterfly ballots. Here are some other subjects…
For a while last night, the cnn.com Web site said that CNN was trying
to investigate an apparent discrepancy between the Florida voting figures
that were reported to the press and the actual count. If I understood
the sequence of events correctly, these discrepancies may have had an
impact on the bizarre sequence of events last night, possibly motivating
Al Gore’s premature concession call to George W. Bush. I was watching
the numbers minute-by-minute until about 5am EST, and there certainly did
seem to be a discrepancy. But I have not heard anything further about the
matter on cnn.com or elsewhere.The Wall Street Journal mentions complaints of voter intimidation
(or fraud or something) based on claims that at least one conservative
radio host in Florida broadcast an assertion that, due to high turnout,
Democrats should vote on Wednesday. In the few days before the election
I saw just that claim, framed as a joke, in messages circulating on
the Internet. But then other messages said that it was Republicans
who should vote on Wednesday. In any case as I say these messages were
clearly jokes. If a radio host made such assertions in anything but a
clearly joking way then that would be a serious matter as well.The police have locked the elections office of Volusia County, Florida
(which Gore won) after they caught an employee removing bags from it.http://orlandosentinel.com/news/1108guard.htm
http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,247897-412,00.shtml
You can get county-by-county numbers at cnn.com. The numbers do look
strange for the down-ballot candidates compared to other counties.It is worth remembering that Dade and Broward counties in south Florida
have big-time histories of voter fraud. For a story on one recent
episode, see today’s issue of Feed:http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily_master.php3?a_id=1389
One Florida journalist mentioned on public radio that the whole Miami
area is full of ex-CIA people including right-wing anti-Castro activists
and many of the major figures of the Watergate scandal, and that people
in Florida are not surprised to hear of strange goings-on in that area.I also recommend the concise analysis at http://www.orvetti.com/.
My conservative friends are telling me what a pissy loser Al Gore is
for contesting this problematic vote in Florida. So it’s worth noting
that the Bush campaign was quite prepared to contest an election if
(as widely predicted) he won the popular vote but not the electoral:http://www.nydailynews.com/2000-11-01/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-86769.asp
On a different and flakier subject, Consortium News reports that a voter
has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that the
New York Times made improper in-kind contributions to the Bush campaign
by repeating large numbers of false statements about Al Gore from Bush
press releases:http://www.consortiumnews.com/110700a.html
The complaint probably won’t (and shouldn’t) succeed, but it does point
to a real and serious problem:http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.New.Science.of.C.html
I’ve been told of all sorts of scenarios involving compromises between
the Gore and Bush campaigns, but I see no evidence that these things are
really happening.I have also received all sorts of unsubstantiated reports of problems
with the vote in Florida, including rumors about suspicious turnout
levels and the handling of write-ins (and not just in the southern part
of the state). But I don’t want to report any of these reports until
someone can document them. The only reason I’m mentioning them is
because people (who I don’t know) claim to have heard about them in the
Florida media, which is something but not very much. At the same time,
I would encourage students of Florida politics to study the numbers all
across the state very carefully. You can start at cnn.com.I am also hearing unsubstantiated reports of street protests. Have
you noticed the widespread pattern of inadequate provision for voters
in African-American communities? These include Miami and New York.
In St. Louis, large numbers of voters who had been waiting in line
were sent home by an appeals court after a day of chaos; according
to cnn.com, George W. Bush won Missouri by fewer than 80,000 votes.
