Was Ohio Stolen?

Apparently not. More and more studies are coming out concluding that in fact, nothing overtly illegal happened in Ohio. Not to say that there wasn't intimidation or understocking of machines going on, it just seems that actual voter fraud did not occur in the Buckeye State. Florida, on the other hand, according to a UC-Berkeley study, just may have once again fallen victim to all kinds of bad things and given Bush more than 130,000 extra votes. Kevin Drum does a decent job reporting on it here.

I should warn you though, that after reading Drum's sources, I feel that he too easily dismisses the notion of fraud in Florida. The source he uses to debunk the UC-Berkeley study even says that:

Something unusual seems to have happened in Broward and Palm Beach counties in 2004. One possibility, as suggested by Hout et al., is cheating, possibly set up ahead of time (e.g., by loading extra votes into the machines before the election or by setting it up to switch or not count some votes). This explanation makes a certain amount of sense, in that, if someone wanted to cheat ahead of time, it would make sense to do it in Florida, and it would make sense to do it in the large-population counties where a 5%-or-so swing in votes could make a difference in the statewide total.

What Drum doesn't understand is that from a statistical standpoint, because there were only two counties that had crazy results as compared to the other thirteen that didn't, these two are considered anomalies and are thus easily written off. Statistics don't take into account that these are by far the two heaviest Democratic counties in the state, as well some of the largest populated.



Drum says that this graph proves that there was "almost certainly not any systematic fraud" because if there was "it would have shown up in more than just two counties." What he doesn't realize is that widespread systematic fraud is entirely unnecessary when all you need are those two counties.