why do i think bush stole the '04 election?

i'm posting this as a way of archiving the information. from a post on DU :

http://dailykos.com/story/2004/11/18/81044/392 (non funct. links in the story striken out to avoid confusion) by markusd Thu Nov 18th, 2004 at 05:10:44 PDT (...) It is not based on exit polling that we can't get the internals of (although I have BIG doubts about the exit polling/ actual results discrepancy) but on a reliable set of data - and it's not being put out by a partisan but by a well- respected statistical expert and his team of graduate students. It is thorough, fully documented, and makes a damning case that the E-Voting numbers in Florida are way off, and totally in Bush's favor. I say that we should bombard the media with this one - it is time to get this out there. THE LINK TO THE STUDY IS: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu / go down the page a bit - it's right under VOTING. COMPUTERWORLD ARTICLE LINK: http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/governmen... / 0,10801,97614,00.html AND HERE'S THE REPORT FROM WIRED NEWS ALONG WITH THE FIRST FEW GRAFS. http://www.wired.com/news / evote/0,2645,65757,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1 Electronic voting machines in Florida may have awarded George W. Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received, according to statistical analysis conducted by University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor, who released a study on Thursday. The researchers likened their report to a beeping smoke alarm and called on Florida officials to examine the data and the voting systems in counties that used touch-screen voting machines to provide an explanation for the anomalies. The researchers examined the same numbers and variables in Ohio, but found no discrepancies there. Their aim in releasing the report, the researchers said, was not to attack the results of the 2004 election in Florida, where Bush won by 350,000 votes, but to prompt election officials and the public to examine the e-voting systems and address the fact that there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount on the paperless machines. The analysis -- which hasn't been formally peer-reviewed, but was examined by seven professors -- showed a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used the touch-screen machines and counties that used other types of voting equipment. The researchers examined numerous variables that might have affected the vote outcome. These included the number of voters, their median income, racial and age makeup and the change in voter turnout between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Using this information, they examined election results for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in the state in 1996, 2000 and 2004 to see how support for those candidates and parties measured over eight years in Florida's 67 counties. They discovered that in the 15 counties using touch-screen voting systems, the number of votes granted to Bush far exceeded the number of votes Bush should have received -- given all of the other variables -- while the number of votes that Bush received in counties using other types of voting equipment lined up perfectly with what the variables would have predicted for those counties. The total number of excessive votes ranged between 130,000 and 260,000, depending on what kind of problem caused the excess votes. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic.