The 2004 election revisited, part 11–Florida

Revisiting the 2004 election in Florida

Following up previous posts—

The affidavit by computer programmer Clinton Curtis, written about previously, refers to the unexpected death of Raymond C. Lemme. After Curtis left Yang Enterprises (YEI), he went to work for the Florida Department of Transportation. There he found instances of over-billing by Yang Enterprises, a state contractor.

Curtis

Curtis discussed Yang several times with Lemme, an IG investigator for the DOT. Soon afterward, Mr. Lemme was found dead in a motel room in Valdosta, Ga., death reported initially as a suicide. He died July 1, 2003. Lemme was 56, in good health, and had no known ties in Valdosta. Lemme’s supervisor at the Florida DOT, Robert (Bob) Clift, said in telephone interviews that “So far as I know, only Ray Lemme knows what he was doing in Valdosta, Georgia.”

The question remains, what was Lemme doing in Valdosta? July 1 was the Tuesday before the Fourth; was he on vacation? Was he on a work assignment? Calling in response to questions by voice mail, Clift said, “Neither.” Clift added, “As you know from the police reports, his wife and children are in Tallahassee, so he wasn’t on vacation or anything.  And he certainly wasn’t on a work assignment.”  In answer to a further question, he says also, “No, he wasn’t on leave.”

At the time of the interviews, Clift himself supported the hypothesis that Lemme’s death was suicide. He declined to speculate on motives, saying the family had been through enough. Clift said emphatically, however, that the death was not related to Lemme’s job performance, which he called “stellar.”

This assessment is borne out by a house organ of the transportation department. The Aug. 2003, Perspectives on Excellence, a Florida DOT newsletter, features an award won by the Inspector General’s Contract Fraud Investigation Team. Lemme was on the team.

A team photograph is followed by paragraphs of praise:

“The Inspector General’s office executed Florida government’s most successful attack on vendor contract fraud, producing 15 criminal convictions and recovering $1.5 million. This team is responsible for placing 83% of individual and company names on the Department of Management Services’ list of convicted vendors who are no longer eligible to compete for state business.

Governor Bush’s Inspector General recently presented this accomplishment as a best practice, at a national conference of Inspectors General.”

One of the vendors “no longer eligible to compete for state business” was Curtis’s former employer and Rep. Tom Feeney’s former client, Yang Enterprises. Curtis alleges in his affidavit that the vote-tampering software developed at Yang was a project initiated by Feeney. Feeney, who also served in the Florida state house and had been Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor in 1994, went on to Congress in 2002.

Feeney

Lemme’s supervisor confirmed that Lemme was part of an award-winning team and reiterates that his work was excellent. “I worked with him probably for about 18 months to two years,” Clift said, and Lemme was “an outstanding performer, one of the most thorough investigators that I’ve ever worked with.”

“Everyone here who worked with him would say the same thing; we would all say that.”

Clift also emphasized that “All of us who worked with him support the conclusions of the Valdosta, Georgia, police,” that the death was a suicide. Calling suspicions about the surprising death “unfortunate,” Clift also repeated emphatically that Lemme’s “assignment had absolutely nothing to do with voting machines.” “It was not anything secret.” The IG unit investigates “employee misconduct and contract frauds as they impact  DOT,” Clift explained, giving as examples employees claiming more time than actually put in, or travel claimed that is not supported, etc. “On the contractor perspective, [we investigate] contractors who billed us for work they did not do.”

Clift clarified emphatically that Lemme’s job was not in jeopardy. Asked whether Lemme had been fired or going to be fired, Clift said, “Absolutely not. I was his supervisor. His job performance was stellar; other people under him and around him looked up to Ray and modeled their performance on his.” It was Clift who nominated the contract fraud investigation team for a job award. Whatever the cause of death, it was not related to Lemme’s job performance.

But in Clift’s opinion, “this voting machine stuff doesn’t square with the cause of death either.” He reiterated that the cloud of suspicion was “unfortunate.” Responding to further questions, Clift said he had read Clinton Curtis’s affidavit. He confirmed that Curtis reported Yang’s over-billing to the Florida DOT. Without going into specifics, he also confirmed what Curtis said. “Every investigation has varying degrees” of accuracy in its leads, Clift said in general terms, with some facts or details more solid than others.  Referring to public record, he also confirmed that Yang Enterprises “doesn’t hold the contract any more.”

 

Clift filed an affidavit with Florida police about Lemme June 30, 2003. Clift told police, in part,

“I arrived at my office this morning at about 6:30 a.m. My message light was blinking. I had a message from Ray which was left at 6:20 a.m. He said “Something’s come up. I’ll be in late. I’ll call you later I knew Ray had a appointment at the FDOT General Counsel’s office at 1:30. I was called about 2:00 by the attorney he was to meet—he didn’t show up. This is very out of character for Ray . . .”

 

Strange timing

The unexpectedness of Lemme’s death, Lemme’s unexplained presence in Valdosta, Ga., and the timing of the death in the context of Florida’s nefarious electoral politics raised questions that were never answered. As written previously, Clinton Curtis’s sworn statement alleges that software company Yang Enterprises had developed a prototype for vote fraud. The project was developed, the affidavit states, at the specific request of Rep. Tom Feeney (R- Fla.).  Before running for Congress Feeney was lobbyist and counsel for Yang. The strangeness of Mr. Lemme’s death, like Curtis’s affidavit, was not considered a news topic by larger corporate media outlets—intensifying suspicions that the death might be foul play, and might be connected to events at Yang. A more normal reaction in the press would at least have reported allegations in the affidavit.

One lengthy account of the matter is given here, with graphic photographs included. Setting aside any hypothetical China connection, from the perspective of several years afterward it still looks as though the crime should have received greater, sober attention than it got.

Ad wars in Florida not just money, ads

Ad wars in Florida not just money, ads

 They couldn’t work without an element of verite.

Talking Points Memo runs this piece on Florida today, reporting that Romney forces are outspending Gingrich forces there five-to-one.

“The Dems think these figures suggest something else: that it’s not Romney who’s winning votes in Florida, but the size of his wallet. ”

Point taken. However, these trend lines should not be over-simplified.

Certainly money has a devastatingly corrosive effect in politics. So do infamous ad campaigns–Willie Horton, the Osama bin Laden attacks on Max Cleland in Georgia, etc. This writer opposes on constitutional grounds any notion that a) money is speech, or b) corporations are persons.  The effect of the unanswered ads against Gingrich in Iowa is now part of the history of election 2012.

But the success of that ad campaign went beyond money. The ads were devastating because they showed Gingrich in live and still footage doing things he actually did, because they revived press accounts of Gingrich’s actual deeds.

Romney ads are not the only ones playing in Florida. As another local source points out, pro-Gingrich ads are running every ten minutes in Miami, in rush hour–in Spanish. The line is always the same. The ads attack not Romney but Obama.

“Same ad.  The ad attacked only Obama–the theme was broken promises–jobs, housing. ”

At a guess, it is aimed at Hispanics facing either foreclosure or pink slips, or who know someone who does face either one, betting the farm that the voters will blame the president and will see Gingrich as the GOPer best poised to oppose the White House.

Gingrich

It is hard to imagine Gingrich flying high in the Latino demographic. This has less to do with Cuba than with how he comes across–as disrespectful and presumptuous. Aiming over Romney’s head at the Rose Garden is liable to look much the same way, as far as I can tell.

‘Broken promises’ looks to be the line against Obama in the general election, at this point. They must be hoping for an awful lot of amnesia, even more than usual, given the state of the economy at the end of the GWBush administration and the GOP opposition to every improvement since.

One big question about election 2012 right now is whether the amnesia will be facilitated, or how much, by news media predisposed to a ‘close election’.

The 2004 election revisited part 10, Florida

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 10–Florida

Today there are still gaps in federal regulatory authority and oversight of the voting technology industry. Not surprising, when you look at the standard GOP talking point about ‘regulation’ as a ‘job killer’, but it is a bit jarring that even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) had a complete list of all the voting machine manufacturers responsible for counting votes in 2004. The GOP in Congress has sustained an ongoing tactic of refusing to confirm nominees for the FEC (as for other agencies and commissions), leaving it consistently short-handed under the Obama administration.

Not that the election commissioners were exactly unleashed under the GWBush administration.

Cartoon

 

Something to remember, when GOP presidential candidates rail against ‘regulation’:

Diebold, now Premier Election Solutions, and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) made most of the electronic voting machines. The two companies, competitors, were also similar and entertwined. A former president of the company that became ES&S is Bob Urosevich. Bob Urosevich went on to become president of what became Diebold. A former vice president of ES&S, meanwhile, is his brother Todd Urosevich. Predictably, both brothers were significant GOP donors. The political ties between Diebold in particular and George W. Bush, in both 2000 and 2004, have been widely reported.

Imagine what GOPers and the Tea Party would say, if a voting machine manufacturer today had equally close ties to the Obama White House?

 

This is not to imply that problems stemmed only from the largest companies. Far from it.

The most startling and dramatic testimony on Florida’s election problems in 2004 has come from computer programmer Clinton Curtis. Curtis was an employee of Florida company Yang Enterprises, Inc. He left YEI in good standing.

 

Curtis

While at Yang, Curtis had an experience since brought to light in sworn testimony and in a startling affidavit.

In fall 2000, Curtis witnessed Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), at that time YEI’s company counsel and lobbyist, visit the company with an unusual request. In a meeting with at least half a dozen people participating, “Mr. Feeney said that he wanted to know if YEI could develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable.”

The request was not a joke. In the conversation, which involved company personnel including Curtis, Feeney “was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program,” Curtis testified. Curtis was directed to create the vote fraud software prototype and did so.

 

Feeney

Feeney, also a Florida state legislator who had run as Gov. Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor, ran for Congress in 2002 and won. His 24th district was one of the new Florida House districts drawn after the 2000 census, while Feeney was in the Florida state house.

 

Note: When I was working on this issue after the election in 2004, I called Feeney’s congressional office. Through spokespersons, Feeney declined to comment on the affidavit, saying “We’re not making any statements on the Clinton Curtis affidavit. We haven’t made any statements about it, and we have no plans to make any statement.”

I published an article on the issue–including this flat statement that there would be no comment on the allegations, whatsoever, in future. The column ran in a small local community paper, The Prince George’s Journal. Curtis’s affidavit was not reported at the time in the Washington Post (picking a random example here). For a time, Feeney’s office attempted to pass off the allegations as a joke, Feeney laughing heartily in the occasional interview. However, the “we’re not making any statements” phase soon passed. Subsequently Feeney denied the allegations in response to questions placed by Florida newspapers. Feeney lost his race for reelection to Congress in 2008.

 

What Feeney did not comment on

Given the content of the affidavit, this was one of the more remarkable “no comments” in legislative affairs.

Curtis made his notarized statement on Dec. 6. A registered Republican, he began working for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in 1998. He became lead programmer and had daily meetings with the company CEO. In fall 2000, Curtis sat in on “at least a dozen” meetings about computer projects with Feeney, with Curtis as technology advisor.

 

Yang Enterprises

The affidavit details a chilling sequence in which the vote-altering project was developed, was handed to one of the company managers, and was then delivered elsewhere after an open statement that it was intended to control the vote in South Florida by manipulating margins and percentages in some precincts.

Feeney, the affidavit continues,

“was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program. He detailed, in his own words, that; (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable, (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, (c) the programming to accomplish this remain hidden even if the source code was inspected.”

After discussion, the company CEO agreed to try to develop the prototype. The affidavit goes on to describe the vote fraud software prototype developed.

“Hidden on the screen were invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons could then use them to alter the votes of any candidate listed.”

Fairly simple, the software was also fairly easy to conceal.

“In an actual application, the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred. Since the vote is applied by race, any single race or multiple races can be altered. The supervisors or any voter would never notice this fraud. Additionally, the procedure could be repeated as many times as was necessary to achieve the desired results. No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine.”

Vote fraud could be detected by someone looking at the source code.  But the source code would have to be provided.

Curtis’s affidavit goes on to describe other conversations in which Feeney “bragged that he had already implemented ‘exclusion lists’ to reduce the ‘black vote.’

[Update

Speaking of vote suppression tactics, today Florida seniors and others gathered in Tampa to protest legislation designed to reduce the vote. The new law reduces opportunity for early voting, creating an additional burden for seniors and Americans with disabilities who cannot stand in long lines.]

On a separate tactic for influencing the election, Curtis alleges that Feeney “further mentioned that ‘the proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%’.”

Curtis left YEI soon afterward and took a job in the Florida Department of Transportation. YEI threw a farewell party for him. His farewell card is posted on Brad Blog, which has done a solid job reporting this story. At the Transportation department, he found that YEI, a state contractor, was over-billing. He and another whistleblower were fired, as the affidavit narrates.

Yang Enterprises subsequently lost the contract with the state of Florida, according to Bob Clift, a supervisor in the fraud investigation unit.

 

Meanwhile, in Congress

Rep. Feeney, Jeb Bush’s running mate in the unsuccessful race for governor against Lawton Chiles in 1994, served on the House Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on the 2004 election. Curtis’s testimony was presented fairly early in local hearings convened by Conyers. (In the Judiciary hearings on Capitol Hill that I observed, Feeney did not speak much. He tended mostly to sit, red-faced.) The election hearings went nowhere under the GWBush administration. Massive counter-attacks and a DOJ investigation involving Conyers’ wife, Monica Conyers, continued to take their toll even after the 2008 election.

Feeney also served on the Committee on Science. One of its subcommittees, Environment, Technology, and Standards, shared oversight with the full committee on issues regarding voting standards. Their press person stated that the subcommittee and full committee have both been “very active” on vote issues.

Feeney was also a member of Judiciary subcommittees on Commercial and Administrative Law; the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security; and the Subcommittee on the Constitution.

Florida now, and 2004 election revisited, part 9

Florida–Revisiting the 2004 election, and now

Two debaters in Jacksonville

In Thursday night’s GOP debate in Jacksonville, Newt Gingrich made a point of sounding more decent on stage for CNN than in his stump speeches around Florida (and South Carolina). The “food stamp” prevarication, while repeated, was somewhat softened. He even mentioned his grandchildren. Gov. Marco Rubio’s advice aside, the rhetorical tack of sounding nice temporarily is routinely adopted by the GOP in a national election, to blur the line with Democrats as much as possible in order to pick up votes or to cause enough confusion to get voters to stay home. That ‘voter apathy’ we used to hear so much about, in the national political press.

Also, being in Florida with its large Latino population, Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all made a point of sounding humane on illegal immigration. Gingrich attacked the notion of deporting grandmothers. Santorum mentioned his immigrant grandfather. Romney mentioned his father’s having come to this country from Mexico and his wife’s father’s having come from Wales.

Immigration as a hot-button issue is a staple of Republican Party campaigns and events, of course. The way to help would be to help Mexico.

Sign

Considering the human suffering and injustice involved, what they do not say is galling:

  • The majority of people entering the U.S. illegally come through Mexico.
  • Conditions in Mexico are deplorable. It is hard to make a living there.
  • Ergo, one could infer that many undocumented immigrants are seeking not only freedom but survival.

Where GOPers don’t go:

  • Therefore, to forestall illegal immigration from Mexico, it would make sense to help Mexico.
  • We could stop buying drugs from Mexico, a commerce that bloats the cartels at the expense of everyone else. Sticking it to the man is much more like buying it from the man, where kingpins come into the picture.
  • We could stop shipping assault weapons to Mexico. The cartels use them to impose a reign of terror on the populace.

The only candidate on stage capable of recommending sane and reasoned policy in regard to Mexico and the border, as usual, was Ron Paul. In a nutshell: “You can’t deal with immigration without dealing with the economy.” Paul also noted that we have expended vast resources on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Border-security fanatics might be well advised to fantasize less about building a fence between the U.S. and Mexico and to focus on bringing those resources home.

Or such was the suggestion. Most of Paul’s statements received friendly rounds of applause from the audience—as did converse statements from the other candidates.

Back to Florida—

Nothing I saw or heard in the debate last night dispelled my standing contention that the GOP nominee, whoever he is, will need all the help he can get in a general election. Hence the history reminders–

For background:

Predictably, voting technology tends not to arise as a topic in these debates either. As previously written, Florida was one of the four states in 2004 where the biggest swing from exit poll to published vote tally also swung the state from to Bush. (The other three were Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa.)

Remember, the big voting legislation called the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002 by a GOP-controlled Congress under the GWBush administration, at a time when Team Bush was flying high in opinion polls because of 9/11. One of the bill’s key features was what it did not include—a paper trail. Following the ‘hanging chad’ debacle in Florida, the act (HAVA) authorized the use of electronic voting machines in presidential elections. (N.b. Chads were not the real problem in Florida.) Regrettably, HAVA did not require a paper receipt for voting. Thus there was effectively no provision for ironclad verification, for independent and objective assessment of whether data produced by the voting machines accurately reflected the votes cast. Democrats largely tried to require the paper trail in the bill, but the provisions were successfully fought off by Republican congressional leaders including Tom DeLay. Without the paper trail, it is impossible to have a separate recount.

Problems with Diebold

Among voting machines used in Florida, questions have swirled around Diebold voting machines in particular for years. A reader reminded me earlier of this paper on Diebold machines published back in 2004 by Dr. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. Rubin and his students studied Diebold’s source code—theoretically protected lines of code making up the software that runs the e-voting machines.

Diebold scanner atop its garbage can, also from manufacturer

The software program was supposed to be encrypted. To its surprise, however, Rubin’s team found that Diebold machines were encrypted by a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES)–a code that was broken in 1997.

Furthermore, the key to the encryption was in the source code. Thus all Diebold machines would respond to the same key; breaking into one was breaking into all.

Rubin’s paper was published in February 2004. In April 2004, California’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel said that the Diebold machines had malfunctioned in the state’s March 2 primary. The panel recommended unanimously that the state not use Diebold machines. In September 2004, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting successfully taught Baxter the chimp how to hack Diebold. The film is available on YouTube here.

Voting technology scrutinized by Black Box Voting

And all this is relevant to Florida how?

Florida was one of the close states in 2004 showing exit-poll anomalies, written about previously. The differences between op-scan counties and touch-screen counties in 2004 in Florida look like part of the same picture.

Florida counties, op-scan and touch-screen

It is a pattern of great-to-greater variation between party registration and party presidential voting in 2004, in all 52 Florida counties using op-scan. (Florida has 67 counties.)

The 15 Florida counties using touch-screen machines showed much less variation between their party registration and party presidential voting.

Simplifying here, there are three main areas to focus on—counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of the 2000 outcome; counties where the 2004 outcome was the reverse of party registration in the county; and counties where the 2004 outcome was extraordinarily close.

Op-scan technology predominated in all three categories—but this may reflect the fact that op-scan technology predominated across the state.

Starting with the slightest example, in only three op-scan counties was the 2004 outcome the reverse of the 2000 outcome:

  • Flagler
  • Hernando
  • Osceola

All three switched from Democratic (Gore) in 2000 to Republican (Bush) in 2004. Two touch-screen counties switched from Dem in 2000 to GOP in 2004—Pasco and Pinellas.

But in 28 op-scan counties, the 2004 outcome was the reverse of majority party registration:

  • Baker—switched from punch card
  • Bradford
  • Calhoun
  • Columbia–from punch card
  • DeSoto–from punch card
  • Dixie–from punch card
  • Duval–from punch card
  • Franklin
  • Gilchrist–from punch card
  • Glades–from punch card
  • Gulf
  • Hamilton
  • Hardee–from punch card
  • Hendry
  • Holmes
  • Jackson
  • Lafayette
  • Levy
  • Liberty
  • Madison (close)–from punch card
  • Okeechobee (close)
  • Osceola–from punch card
  • Polk
  • Putnam
  • Suwanee
  • Taylor
  • Wakulla–from punch card
  • Washington

Again, there were 28 Florida op-scan counties where the vote went for Bush in 2004 although more registered voters in each county were Democratic. Eleven of these had also switched to op-scan from paper balloting (the much-maligned punch card).

In six op-scan counties, the outcome was very close:

  • Flagler—switched from Gore to Bush
  • Madison—Bush won, more Dems registered
  • Monroe
  • Orange
  • Saint Lucie
  • Volusia

Bush won all these nail-biters, including one county where the outcome switched from Gore to Bush and one that had more Democrats registered than Republicans.

These op-scan counties are interesting. Many of them are small, and some of the excellent statistical analyses of the 2004 election in Florida exclude small populations. But in toto they were significant, because they showed a heavy preponderance of Democratic Party registration. Of 15 touch-screen counties, only one had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters–Broward, with 50.5 percent.

But of the 52 op-scan counties, 30 counties had the Dems with more than 50 percent of registered voters. In most of these (21 counties) the Democrats constituted more than 60 percent of registered voters. In thirteen of them the Dems had more than 70 percent of registered voters, and in four the Dems had more than 80 percent of the registered voters.

Incidentally, Baker County, with a whopping reversal and 77 percent turnout in 2004, was the only county using Sequoia op-scan machines. Diebold is not the only problem.

Outcomes in op-scan versus touch-screen counties, Florida 2004, have been presented in simple contrasts here, but this is not to say that the 2004 outcome was a clean sweep. For the 52 op-scan counties, of the 43 counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than Republican registration, Bush still lost seven.

For the 15 touch-screen counties, in the three counties where Bush votes went up over 100 percent more than did Republican registration, Bush still won. In the three touch-screen counties where Kerry votes went up over 100 percent compared to Democratic registration, Kerry still lost. There are, as we know, problems with DREs (touch-screens).

There are problems with Florida.

Reiterating: For Florida counties, the biggest difference in the 2004 election was not between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ but between touch-screen and op-scan.  Fifteen Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines, produced by ES & S or Sequoia. The other 52 counties used paper ballots processed by optical-scanning equipment manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia.

The difference is a simple and clear pattern. Touch-screen counties’ vote for president almost always went with their party majority. Op-scan counties’ vote for president mostly went against the county’s majority party. Of the 52 counties using op-scanned ballots, only 21 voted in the direction predicted by their voter registration, fewer than half. The other 31 counties went opposite their own voter registration, all but one going to Bush. The exception was Monroe County, with an exceptionally close outcome.

Even where the op-scan vote ran with party registration, the margin was different, suggesting again that at the last minute John Kerry lost Democrats, independents, and unaffiliated voters–in an election where independents and new voters were trending toward Kerry.

A manual recount of two counties and part of another by two Miami Herald reporters netted Kerry 11 additional votes in one small county, 24 in another. They discontinued the count in a larger county where his projected pick-up would be about 1,300 votes.

Much of the voting public was well aware of these issues after 2004. They were submerged in the Obama landslide of 2008. But they could surface again in 2012—especially if a drumbeat of “close election” predictions is sustained.

In my opinion, resentment at the cavalier treatment of the vote itself fueled public anger and distrust of the GOP before the elections of 2006 and 2008. That neither the FEC, Justice, nor anyone else was able to address these problems after the 2008 election contributed to the outcome in 2010. The right to vote is fundamental. Congressional Republicans, for obvious reasons, have done everything in their power to prevent meaningful safeguards for election integrity.

 

2004 election revisited, part 8: Florida

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 8, Florida again

“Something went awry with the electronic voting in Florida”

Several organizations, groups of investigators and individual researchers were intrigued by the results of the 2004 election in Florida. Among them was a research team at Berkeley (U. Calif.).

The research team, led by Professor Michael Hout, announced its study of the results of the Florida election in a press conference Nov. 18, 2004. In short form:

“A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 – 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance–the probability is less than 0.1 percent.”

Prof. Hout, a sociologist, walked listeners through the study in a short talk followed by questions.

The research team used quantitative methods. Salient points:

  • Its released report showed 130K-260K excess votes to GWBush in Florida in counties where electronic voting machines were used, an unexplained discrepancy. This could occur by chance, Dr. Hout stated, less than 1 time in 1000.
  • The discrepancy was most prevalent in the more heavily Democratic counties—Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade, in order of magnitude.
  • Voting machines tallied a net gain of 81K votes for President Bush; 41K in Palm Beach; 37K in Miami-Dade.

 

U-Cal Berkeley

Dr. Hout reiterated that the discrepancy could not be explained by other factors, and there was virtually no chance of its arising by chance. “For the sake of future elections, officials should explore this.”

The genesis of the project was that after the election, two grad students shared their frustration at having so many rumors, re the outcome of the election, with a lack of statistical basis. Key concern was to start with a model that accurately predicted votes or vote breakdown; to knock down false claims. So they decided to start with measuring change between 2000 and 2004, and they downloaded data from Florida and Ohio. The results showed that something odd was happening. Further tests showed that “the anomalous effect of this e-vote held up. It couldn’t be made to go away.”

“The students and I went back and forth several times with a number of revisions,” Hout said, and “results held up.” They were also run by a number of different faculty members, who concluded that “something went awry with the electronic voting in Florida.”

Organizers of the press conference hoped to draw the authorities–“somebody”– “to examine the results in Florida.”

As he commented, “a statistical approach is just about the only way to find out if anything goes wrong with e-voting, except in Nevada which has a paper trail.”

Walking the audience through some of the results, Hout concisely explained that a multiple regression analysis was used in the study. Statistical technique was used to assign different weights to different variables, for example the Bush vote in 2004 compared to the Bush vote in 2000; raw percentages in 2004 compared to 2000. Researchers assigned weight to a number of reasonable factors or not-so-reasonable factors. Expectations were taken into account.

Three counties stood out–Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.

Three metro counties in Florida

 

All three counties produced “a different pattern from what we would expect” given factors including their median family income, history of voting Republican, markers of age structure (senior populations), and racial ancestry.  Not that Metro Miami went for GWBush by large margins. But the popular vote showed some oddities.

With all the other variables statistically controlled, the e-vote variable continued to show a significant relationship with both change in votes 2000-2004 and the absolute level of support for Bush in 2004.

“Inability of all other factors to explain away this discrepancy,” Hout said, “has us convinced of an e-vote anomaly” of 1,018,010 compared to 1.16M votes actually tallied for Bush. “130,000 to 260,000 is our best estimate of the number.”

“How this happened beyond our ability to observe.” Researchers left it to Florida officials to explain.

Didn’t happen, of course.

The formal study in final form was published on the Berkeley web site, where it remains.

A short round-up of similar or related material on Florida is accessible here.

 

Side note:

This year I finally read Timothy Crouse’s book on the 1972 election and the press, The Boys on the Bus. Should have read it earlier. Ranging back and forth between the elections of 2000 or 2004 and this year’s primary season is illuminating, but going back to the obsession with Who-will-win in 1972 is even more so. How did it happen that hordes of hard-working (often) reporters could miss so much about Nixon’s plans to consolidate control?  How could the reporters fail to report the Nixon team’s ongoing control of the press?

Same way it happens now, apparently, with days of air time devoted to speculation over who will win—and perhaps one one-hundredth of that time devoted to cogent, accurate analysis of what GOP candidates’ policies would actually do to the U.S.

Needless to say, even less than one-hundredth of the coverage time goes to problems with voting technology. Little goes to vote-suppression efforts, either, although at least the open efforts to suppress the vote in a number of states have been mentioned, mostly on cable.

Now as ever, Bev Harris’s team continues to do good work on this crucial issue at Black Box Voting.

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 7: Florida

2004 election revisited, part 7: Florida further

Following up previous posts

Obama at SOTU

President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night demonstrated again the greater quality of this president over the loon rhetoric coming from our current GOP debates. The quality gap is huge, and growing larger.

Mitt Romney

As written before, the guys coming out of the GOP field are going to need all the help they can get at election time, and previous elections involve some warning signs. Forewarned is forearmed.

In the 2000 election, 25 Florida counties used the maligned punch-card ballots, 41 used op-scan, and one county used paper ballots counted manually. Seventeen counties switched to optical scanners for the 2004 election.

Florida

Counties that switched from punch-card to op-scan did not necessarily show the biggest swings to Bush, but there was a distinct difference—in Bush’s favor–between op-scan counties and other counties. The picture over-all:

  • Total registered voters in the 15 counties using touch-screens:  5,576,264
  • Total registered voters in the 52 counties using op-scan ballots:  4,725,026
  • Outcome in the touch-screen counties:  Kerry 1,983,210 to Bush 1,845,876
  • Outcome in the op-scan counties:  Bush 2,110,414 to Kerry 1,591,790

Statistics come from election results and from election researcher Kathy Dopp’s analysis of touch-screen machines versus optical-scan paper voting in 2004.

There were further differences between op-scan voting results and touch-screen results, Florida 2004:

  • 15 Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines. Only 3 of these counties showed a 100+ percent jump in Republican votes, and 3 others showed a 100+ percent jump in Democratic votes. Neither party jumped more than 120 percent.
  • 52 counties used op-scan ballots. Of these, 43 showed a triple-digit jump for Republicans, two for Democrats. One had a whopping 602 percent jump in votes for Repubs, one over 400 percent, and two over 300 percent. Another ten op-scan counties had an over 200 percent jump in votes for Repubs. Nothing equivalent for Dems.

Leaving the eye-blearing numbers aside, think about the larger context of the 2004 election. Was John Kerry two or three times less popular in Florida in 2004 than Al Gore in 2000? Was GWBush—after the escape of Osama bin Laden, the invasion of Iraq, the war profiteering, the tax cuts for the rich—two or three times more appealing?

Back to those voting machines

Only three counties using op-scan machines had larger jumps for Democrats than for Republicans. The percentages below are vote gains, 2000 to 2004:

 (Dem Senate candidate Betty Kastor won Flagler County over Mel Martinez.)

Only four counties using op-scan had balanced percentage jumps in party voting:

Note that where the jump in voting by party was balanced, the outcomes were also reasonably divided. No one party or candidate (Bush) won all the time.

Turnout always matters.

Ten Florida counties with biggest turnout by number, in 2004:

  • Miami-Dade:  772,743
  • Broward:  707,202
  • Palm Beach:  547,340
  • Hillsborough:  464,253
  • Pinellas:  457,426
  • Orange:  388,095
  • Duval:  379,257
  • Brevard:  265,764
  • Lee:  242,434
  • Volusia:  229,098

Of these, Brevard, Duval, Orange, and Volusia used op-scan voting.

Ten Florida counties with highest turnout by percentage of registered voters, in 2004:

  • Flagler:  81.9% –jump gap only 102 to 103, Bush won, but close
  • Sarasota:  81.6%
  • Jefferson:  80.7% –jump gap 171 to 61, Kerry won
  • Leon:  79.8% –jump gap 105 to 81, Kerry won
  • Lee:  79.5%
  • Nassau:  79.2%
  • St Johns:  79% –jump gap 100 to 84, Bush won
  • Sumter:  79%
  • Brevard:  78.6% –jump gap 101 to 89, Bush won
  • Gadsden:  78.5% –jump gap 207 to 66, Kerry won

Of these, Brevard, Flagler, Gadsden, Jefferson, Leon and St Johns used op-scan voting. Nobody flipped the elections in Gadsden or Jefferson and Leon counties.

Ten Florida counties with lowest turnout by percentage of registered voters:

  • Hendry 57.2%
  • Osceola 63.3%
  • DeSoto 64% –jump gap 146 to 44, Bush won
  • Okeechobee 65.7% –jump gap 126 to 47, Bush won
  • Union 66.7% –jump gap 263 to 23, Bush won
  • Broward 66.8%
  • Dixie 66.9% –jump gap 305 to 26, Bush won
  • Hamilton 67.1% –jump gap 244 to 37, Bush won
  • Putnam 68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
  • Highlands 69.6% –jump gap 77 to 44, Bush won

Of these, DeSoto, Dixie, Hamilton, Highlands, Okeechobee, Putnam and Union all used op-scan voting. Low turnout, discouraged voters, unappealing voting technology—Bush swept.

The pattern held in the ten counties with lowest voter turnout by number, in 2004. Numbers are local turnout as reported:

  • Liberty 3,051 –Bush won
  • Lafayette 3,352 –Bush won
  • Glades 4,204 –Bush won
  • Union 4,714 –Bush won
  • Hamilton 5,131 –Bush won
  • Franklin 5,973 –Bush won
  • Calhoun 6,006 –Bush won
  • Dixie 6,472 –Bush won
  • Gilchrist 7,047 –Bush won
  • Hardee 7,281 –Bush won

Of these, all used op-scanned paper ballots, and all went for Bush. We have a winner.  Were they Florida’s ten smallest counties? Not quite: A list of the state’s ten smallest counties would bump Hardee, Gilchrist, Dixie, and Union. Baker, Bradford, Gulf, Holmes, Jefferson, Madison, Taylor, Wakulla and Washington all had populations in the twenty-something thousand range. The smallest counties also all used op-scan ballots, so we have another winner: Of these, only Jefferson went for Kerry, and Madison was close.

On a brighter note, in all these counties but Hardee, about half the total population (2000 census) turned out to vote–not too shabby for the lowest numerical turnout in the state. It was a high-interest election.

The middle

Continuing the test of brain-strain, let’s look at some middling turnout. Since the highest turnout ran 82% and the lowest percentage about 57%, midpoint would be about 70%.

Ten Florida counties with mid-range turnout, 2004:

  • Charlotte:  70.4%
  • Glades:  70.5% –jump gap 134 to 37, Bush won
  • Hardee:  70% –jump gap 182 to 32, Bush won
  • Okaloosa:  70.5% –jump gap 95 to 61, Bush crushed
  • Calhoun:  71.9% –jump gap 381 to 30, Bush won
  • Highlands:  69.6% –jump gap 77 to 54, Bush won
  • Pasco:  72.1%
  • Santa Rosa:  69.9% –jump gap 97 to 54, Bush won
  • Putnam:  68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
  • Polk:  71.5% –jump gap 107 to 68, Bush won

Of these, all but Charlotte and Pasco counties used op-scan. Charlotte and Pasco had predictable results, in line with voter registration and with voter turnout, with some crossover (Dem for Charlotte, Repub for Pasco).

I wrote on this material at the time.

A similar analysis can be found here. The author further pursues similar anomalies in the rural areas of other southern states. The author sums up:

“I started this page when I first saw the breakdown by voting machine of the results in Florida. Since the way people vote shouldn’t depend on the machines they use, it seemed to signal cheating. A careful examination of the voting patterns in Florida in 2000 and in Louisiana in 2000, however, has led me to conclude that the difference was due to the lopsided use of the opscan machines in rural northern Florida counties where there is a preponderance of “Dixiecrats”. A statistical analysis of the data from the 1996 election also supports this conclusion. The remainder of this page contains my analysis and reasoning in detail.”

 

Why did Freddie Mac have to hire more lobbyists post-Gingrich?

Why did Freddie Mac need more lobbyists after Gingrich departed?

 

Newt Gingrich’s 2006 contract with Freddie Mac offers little direct information. The contract runs 15 pages. Services to be provided by Gingrich appear in “Exhibit 2.”

Here is the text from the page headed “Exhibit 2,” in its entirety:

Exhibit 2

“Consultant will provide consulting and related services as requested by Freddie Mac’s Director, Public Policy in exchange for which Freddie Mac will pay Consultant $25,000 per each full calendar month during which Consultant provides Services.”

 

The $25K-a-month question, of course, is what Gingrich did for Freddie Mac, and in particular whether his “consulting and related services” included lobbying. Gingrich has denied being a lobbyist. In Monday night’s GOP debate in Tampa he said he has “never” done any lobbying, repeating the “never.”

Tampa debate stage

When direct information on such questions is limited, one must find indirect information. Lobbying Disclosure, U.S. Clerk’s office, House of Representatives, confirms indirectly that the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) needed a bunch more lobbyists after it no longer had Gingrich Group as a consultancy.

Short chronology: The Gingrich Group worked for Freddie Mac from 1999 into 2007. The original contract from 1999, renewed through 2002, reportedly cannot be found, although one would think congressional investigation of Freddie and Fannie would turn it up. (Where is Issa when we really need him?) The now available Gingrich Group contract was signed in 2006 and reportedly was renewed in 2007.

Searching the U.S. House Disclosure site for registered lobbyists and their clients does not turn up the name Gingrich or the names of Gingrich’s companies.

Not much new there.

However, checking the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation as a lobbying client yields a few hard numbers.

  • Freddie Mac filed client forms on its lobbying 81 times from 2004 to 2008, only once in 2004, most often in 2008
  • Freddie Mac filings increased in 2007 to 19, only mid-year and year-end
  • Freddie Mac filings increased in 2008 to 30, all quarters, with more individual lobbyists—new and former*

Thus for what it’s worth, Freddie needed significantly more lobbyists and more lobbying activity from some point in 2007. Freddie Mac had one lobbyist registered in 2004. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 it had respectively 8, 10 and 9 lobbyists. In 2008 it had 12 lobbyists, filing quarterly reports, which is a lot of activity.

As mentioned above, the 2007 filings for individual lobbyists for Freddie Mac are only for mid-year and year-end. It might be illuminating to know exactly when in 2007 Gingrich Group stopped working for Freddie Mac. The question, emailed to Gingrich’s campaign, has not yet been answered.

While I await response

The arguments here are obvious. Freddie Mac was in hot water getting hotter, and had a track record of poor document handling and of hiring more high-paid hired guns to get it out of trouble. So its growing contingent of lobbyists is explainable without reference to Gingrich.

On the other hand, it looks as though a gap opened up when the Gingrich Group and Freddie Mac parted ways. If the gap could be filled only by lobbyists, then Gingrich looks like a lobbyist.

 

This, be it noted, is the overwhelming probability anyway.

She said it too

 

Another search can be done on the lobbyist disclosure site, though only back to 2008. One can look up entities in the database by “Contribution.” Checking Freddie Mac in the Lobbying Contributions Search yields 22 filings for 2008: Again, significant activity. Nine individual lobbyists contributed services to Freddie Mac in 2008, some of the same names as on the other lobbying filings, plus a few additional.** Again, it looks as though Freddie Mac needed some extra lobbying in 2008.

Regrettably, we do not have documentation on lobbying ‘contributions’ before 2008. Regrettably also, the only Gingrich contract available is for 2006.

As with so many scandals, the superficial political scandal–Gingrich’s prevaricating–is dwarfed by the open scandal that a taxpayer-supported entity was hiring lobbyists in the first place. Fortunately, Freddie Mac filings for 2009, 2010, and 2012 are zero. Following its well-publicized difficulties, it was prohibited from lobbying, thus roping off one well-heeled potential client from the white-collar goon squads in Washington. Thus far one waits in vain for GOP debaters to mention this improvement.

None of the above should be construed as saying that Freddie Mac hired more lobbyists than did other megaliths. For comparison/perspective, Verizon company has 1,334 filings under Lobbying Disclosure going back to 2005.

One firm Verizon hired for lobbying is Wiley Rein & Fielding, the firm Gingrich hired to represent him during his unfortunate congressional ethics investigation. Gingrich has since heartily dissed Wiley Rein, faulting the firm’s work in his case.

Baran, Wiley Rein attorney for Gingrich

2006 was the year of most filings for Wiley Rein. Wiley Rein & Fielding is a bigtime lobbying firm every year, but 2006 was especially active. The lobbying database shows 912 filings for Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP:

118 in 2007

153 in 2008

164 in 2009

146 in 2010

148 in 2011

(183 in 2006)

 

btw Freddie Mac obligations can be used as collateral in Florida. Romney’s Freddie Mac-oriented attacks on Gingrich might not play in Florida, after all.

 

*2004 names, Freddie Mac lobbyists: Clarke Camper

2005 names: Rhod Shaw, Doyle Bartlett, Dwight Fettig, James E. Boland, Sarah Dumont, Richard Roberts, Lendell W. Porterfield, Chris Fox (8)

2006 names: Shaw, Boland, Bartlett, Timothy McBride, Fettig, Lawrence Romans, Andrew Lowenthal, Roberts, Dumont, Stephanie Silverman (10)

2007 names: Shaw, Boland, Bartlett, Fettig, Romans, Richard Roberts, Lowenthal, Dumont, Silverman (9)

2008 names: Virgil Griffin, Richard Tarplin, Jack S. Deuser, James E. Smith, Anne Urban, Shaw, Fettig, Romans, Bartlett, Boland, Porterfield, Roberts (12)

 

**Names: Robert Zimmer, Virgil Griffin, Kirsten Johnson-Obey (filed amended form 2009), Timothy McBride, David Lynch, Christopher Young, Brian Smith, Regina Shaw, Lisa Ledbetter (9)

2004 election revisited, part 6: Florida

2004 election revisited, part 6: Florida

Monday night’s GOP debate in Tampa ( NBC) may not have produced much warmth or light, except for Ron Paul’s comments on the Strait of Hormuz. But it further highlighted reason to look back at the 2004 campaign. These guys are going to need all the help they can get in the general election. Citizens United notwithstanding, half a billion in paid political ads goes only so far when the the other ticket is Newt Gingrich. He says his message is that of Washington outsider because he was detested in Washington.

Gingrich is campaigning on a claim to be about “changing Washington.” It’s like the fat, intemperate, unreliable old Falstaff yelling, “They hate us youth!”

Shakespeare

Déjà vu all over again

The issue went nowhere in the political press at the time, but there were striking anomalies in the Florida vote count in 2004. The headlines were different from 2000. The problems were less blatant. No tiny white-collar mob of Republican congressional staffers and lobbyists raised fists against the vote counters. But even after all the attention directed to Florida’s electoral process in 2000, there were still problems in 2004.

Take a look at the numbers on the ground, including party registration. Unlike South Carolina, Florida registers voters by party.

Florida counties 2008 election

Of Florida’s 67 counties, in 2004 Republicans constituted more than 50 percent of registered voters in only eight. This fact might surprise readers who get their information from the national political press, which represents Florida as a red state. But eight it was:

  • Collier
  • Indian River
  • Martin, Clay
  • Okaloosa (57.2%)
  • Santa Rosa
  • St. Johns
  • Walton (barely)

Population of the eight red counties in 2000:  1,083,846.  Population of Florida:  15,982,378.

In contrast, Florida had 31 counties where Democrats constituted more than 50% of registered voters. In 21 counties, Democrats constituted more than 60% of registered voters. In thirteen of them more than 70% of registered voters were Democrats, and in four of them more than 80% of registered voters were Democrats.

Population in preponderantly Democratic counties:  2,700,000+.

This is a red state?

In 28 counties where neither party registered more than 50%, nineteen had more Republicans and nine had more Democrats. The biggest plurality county was huge Miami-Dade (pop. 2.3 million, 43% Dem). The smallest was Highlands (pop. 87K, 45% GOP).

Population in counties where GOP registration was heaviest, over 50 percent, totaled less than majority-Democratic Broward County alone. Population in counties with a less lopsided Democratic majority totaled 8.4 million.

A bigger anomaly

The biggest divide between Florida counties in the 2004 election was not red and blue but touch-screen and op-scan.

As in voting machines.

Fifteen counties used touch-screen voting machines, produced by ES&S or Sequoia. The other 52 counties used paper ballots, BUT not counted manually. Instead, the paper ballots were processed by optical-scanning equipment similar to that used by supermarkets, manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and (in one county) Sequoia.

Optical scanning in voting has been used for years, generally without the checking that turns up mistakes about 5 percent of the time in supermarket scanners. Mathematician and independent researcher Kathy Dopp tabulated differences between touch-screen counties and op-scan counties.

The difference? A simple and blatant pattern:

  • In touch-screen counties, the county’s vote for president went with its majority party almost always.
  • In op-scan counties, the county’s vote for president went opposite to its majority party most of the time.

If this sounds like a small difference, it’s not. Whatever problems the touch-screens had, 14 out of 15 counties using touch-screen equipment had an outcome at least in line with registration. Counties with more Republicans went Republican. Counties with more Democrats went Democratic. Plant a tomato, get a tomato.

Of the 52 counties using op-scanned ballots, 21 voted in the direction predicted by their voter registration–fewer than half. The other 31 counties went opposite their own voter registration. The kicker is that almost always, they went to Bush.

In the 21 op-scan counties where the vote ran with party registration, it was often skewed. Somehow Democrats there did not vote Democratic, and Kerry also picked up NO percentage from independents and unaffiliated–in a national election where the independent vote trended toward Kerry.

How it works

If an operative wanted to help a candidate win, in a state like Florida with many counties, the way to do it would be subtly so as not to affect the outcome of any individual county. That way, no local challenges would be provoked; the only way to examine the outcome would be to challenge the entire state. A few hundred or a few thousand votes in a lopsided county would not be missed, or suspect.

This process would be aided by the predominant media focus on red and blue.

Access to county statistics on population, demographics, and voter registration is already in the hopper, remember. Source code does not control turnout, but the political experts could weigh in on that little problem; look at the lines in big touch-screen counties inadequately supplied with voting machines, the problems with provisional ballots and early voting, the misleading flyers and robo-calls, etc. In the op-scan counties, I wouldn’t need help with turnout; I would need primarily to be able to work without scrutiny.

This is not to say that touch-screen machines are off the hook. If as a shady operative I wanted that badly to help my man win, odds are that I would overreach once in a while.

Florida counties 2004

More later

“An avowed Muslim . . . get him out of our government”

More lying in Republican circles in Florida, and some of it probably naive.

Woman in Rick Santorum’s audience just said the president is “an avowed Muslim.” Her question: “why isn’t anything being done to get him out of our government?”

N.b. the MSNBC caption missed/omitted the “our” part.

Pressing on

Santorum, a senator, did not correct her.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that other people in the audience clapped when she said it. Wonder how many of them actually believe it. That anyone could believe it is not a tribute to the press in our time.

YouTube catches the exchange here.

Also here.

This is backwoods politics at its worst. It is heartbreaking that rural Florida, and other places like it, have been left to the tender mercies of the hard right for thirty years now. This is the result.

Not that there haven’t been worse comments, like this one from a hard-liner in Florida calling openly for violence against the president. Fortunately other Jewish leaders swiftly condemned the remarks. If they had been Santorum types, maybe not.

The only bright spot in those remarks caught on video is that the lady referred to the U.S. government as “our government.”

It’s a wonder GOP leaders haven’t already jumped down her throat for that.

South Carolina behind (way behind), Florida ahead

Two days after

South Carolina behind again, Florida ahead

The Florida GOP primary next up—Jan. 31—is the newest make-or-break or Big Moment, the newest primary event characterized as shaping up to be important or crucial. Gingrich won South Carolina’s heart by acting like a ghastly creep–SC is, after all, the state of Joe “You Lie!” Wilson. Question: What face will Gingrich turn toward Florida?

Newton Leroy McPherson

Partial answer: The day after South Carolina, Sen. Lindsay Graham appeared on Face the Nation, making Gingrich sound halfway decent and humane on the topic of undocumented immigrants. Florida, we are reminded, has a large Latino population. Graham suggested that Gingrich as president would favor extending something like amnesty (although not called that) and legal status to some undocumented immigrants. Graham spoke becomingly about a hypothetical combat veteran with Hispanic name coming home from war, only to see his mother or grandmother deported.

Every little bit helps.

South Carolina polls were mostly right

Back to South Carolina—

Gingrich’s win vindicated most polls leading up to the primary, although it probably didn’t do much for all the experts who shortly before had been writing and talking about Mitt Romney as inevitable.

Rick Santorum made a cogent point on the air Sunday, by the way. Santorum reminded his host that it was not necessary, after all, for religious or social conservatives to ‘coalesce’ behind one candidate, in order for Romney to be beaten.

But on Gingrich–

As a Southerner who has consistently defended the not-David-Duke parts of the South, I would not have thought South Carolina could sink any lower. Shows me. It is scant consolation to reflect that Gingrich probably would have lost to David Duke, if Duke had been running in the primary. If only the pollsters would conduct a poll on a hypothetical match-up of Obama and Duke. It would be instructive to see how many states Duke carried.

There is still time for Duke to jump into the Republican race.

We’ve seen one of them already. Turnout in the primary was record:

 “South Carolina’s Republican voters set a new primary turnout record Saturday when more than 600,000 of them went to the polls, shattering the previous mark set in 2000.

With 13 precincts still uncounted Sunday morning, 601,166 votes already were recorded, topping 2000’s turnout of 537,101 and well ahead of 2008’s 445,499 voters. Earlier in the week, officials had projected a moderate turnout about equivalent to the 2008 primary.

And the vote totals for the individual candidates were just as intriguing. Saturday’s winner, Newt Gingrich, collected 243,153, and second-place finisher Mitt Romney won 167,280. Both of them exceeded 2008 winner John McCain’s total.

And that also means Mr. Romney did far better than his own 2008 performance here, when he won just 68,142 votes en route to a fourth-place finish.”

The 600K+ turnout exceeded even that of South Carolina’s Democratic primary in 2008, an all-time high 532,468 voters, when Barack Obama bested Hillary Clinton. Of course, many people believe that a lot of the Clinton voters there were actually Republicans looking to slow down or hurt Obama. The GOP primary in 2008, as mentioned above, involved 445,499 voters.

John McCain, who got under 200K votes in that primary, went on to get 1,034,896 votes in the general election against Obama’s 862,449–a clear gain of over 800,000 votes for McCain in ten months. McCain must have climbed mightily in many people’s estimation during that time. Maybe somebody gave the populace refresher courses on Vietnam.

Presumably South Carolina voters will turn out in equal or greater numbers to vote against the president this year.

Gingrich won across the state, losing only three counties to Romney—Beaufort, Charleston, and Richland. Of these three, only Beaufort was among highest-turnout counties. Gingrich won in 43 of 46 SC counties.

State election board results show that turnout was 20 percent to 30 percent for most counties. This is high for a primary and especially high for a place in the condition of South Carolina, with close-to-the-bottom per capita readership and number of newspapers, libraries, and bookstores.

Still, it would be distortion to call the primary a landslide, as the example of York County shows. Turnout in York was higher than in 2008, and voter registration is up by 30,000 according to the local press—but turnout in the county was still 23 percent. Nor did women give Gingrich landslide treatment, cat-fight representations notwithstanding. Gingrich won the women’s vote with a plurality of 30 percent. Thus he lost 70 percent of women voters, which strikes me as about where he would stand in a general-election match-up. Women also were only 47 percent of the primary voters. So more of them voted with their feet.

Gingrich benefited mightily from his treatment by ‘media elites’. Wonder whether there might be a grain of truth in the Gingrich accusation that ABC wanted to help Romney. (“ABC acted as an arm of the Romney campaign.”) Either way, calling ABC “liberal” is hooey. ABC,  another union-busting corporation, might want to help Romney as plausible GOP contender, but there’s nothing liberal about it if so.

South Carolina has not benefited from its treatment by educated people who should know better, who have tossed No-prestige-land away, leaving it lying on the floor of a seldom opened closet. A public discourse that ropes off any part of the polity does harm to the whole.

If Matt Kibbe’s bunch have their way, things will get even worse for SC. They’re trying to get a publicly funded ‘school choice’ act on the books. H.4576 would assist, at public expense, any parent willing to pay to put his/her children into a  for-profit school. This would mean that the depleted public schools would shoulder even more of the burden of the poorest children, from the poorest families. So much for opposing an entitlement society. Any time you have a proposal to harm the greatest number, and get the taxpayers to pay for it, you have a good chance of lining up the GOP on your side.

How do they pull off this kind of thing? Well, for one, they call a for-profit school an ‘independent school’ and they include the same taxpayer-funded gift for home schooling, to sweeten the deal. Also, as summarized by supporters, the bill would send the taxpayer money to charity—‘Non-Profit Scholarship Granting Organizations’. Those orgs would then be obligated to pay over the money for tuition, books, etc.—to a private school, if the parent ‘chooses’:

“This bill will encourage parents to have a more direct impact on their child’s education as they will have a stronger voice in deciding how their child is educated. At the same time, the parent or legal guardian will have more money to save and put towards the child’s education. One of the most important aspects of the bill is that it does not favor any independent school or form of education in particular, but rather lets the parent decide what is best for their child. The Department of Education, Department of Revenue, or any other state agency can’t regulate the operations of a not-for-profit scholarship granting organization. Same rules follow that these state agencies can’t regulate the educational program of an independent school that accepts students who receive grants from the not-for-profit scholarship granting organization, except for the school’s compliance with the requirements of the bill. This bill will encourage school competition while engaging the parent directly in their child’s education.”

The legislation is introduced by Rep. Eric Bedingfield (R-Greenville), a staunch defender of one’s right to be poor. Bedingfield also crafted legislation enabling a former state Republican Party director to become a six-figure lobbyist for the University of South Carolina. The legislation was supposed to crack down on taxpayer-funded lobbying.