I keep seeing this article cited, alleging voter fraud. It’s not impressive:

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida’s counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Wow, a lot of Democrats voting for Bush there. Now, considering this is a southern state, where it’s not exactly unknown for Democrats to vote Republican nationally, shouldn’t we look at past election results? This could be fairly normal, right?

Baker:
2004: Bush 7,738 Kerry 2,180; Party: Dem 69.3% Rep 24.3%
2000: Bush 5,610 Gore 2,392; Party: Dem 83% Rep 13.6%

Dixie:
2004: Bush 4,433 Kerry 1,959; Party: Dem 77.5% Rep 15%
2000: Bush 2,697 Gore 1,826; Party: Dem 85.6% Rep 10.4%

Franklin:
2004: Bush 3,472 Kerry 2,400; Party: Dem 77.3% Rep 15.9%
2000: Bush 2,454 Gore 2,046; Party: Dem 80.8% Rep 13.7%

Holmes:
2004: Bush 6,410 Kerry: 1,810; Party: Dem 72.7% Rep 21.3%
2000: Bush 5,011 Gore 2,177; Party: Dem 83.4% Rep 12.5%

So in every case, we have the same result as last time, but with increased Republican registration and turnout. I’m sorry, I don’t see how this proves anything. Looking at 1996, Clinton won a couple of the counties, Dole won a couple, and they had roughly the same affiliation numbers. Nothing odd there either, Clinton trounced Dole overall.

My biggest problem with this is they keep mixing in e-voting machines with the partisan fraud claims. Touch screen machines need a lot of work. However, if you use that as a partisan weapon, you give people a reason to dismiss the very real problems. It’s kind of annoying, considering those machines have very serious problems.