Florida E-Vote Study Debunked [View All]

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65896,00.html

A study by Berkeley grad students and a professor showing anomalies with electronic-voting machines in Florida has been debunked by numerous academics who say the students used a faulty equation to reach their results and should never have released the study before getting it peer-reviewed.

The study, released three weeks ago by seven graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team and sociology professor Michael Hout, presented analysis showing a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used touch-screen voting machines versus counties that used other types of voting equipment.

But Bruce McCullough, a decisions science professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and Binghamton University economics professor Florenz Plassmann released an analysis (.pdf) of the Berkeley report criticizing the results.

According to the Berkeley study, the number of votes granted to Bush in touch-screen counties far exceeded expectation, given a number of variables -- including the number of votes those counties gave Bush in 2000 -- while counties using other types of voting equipment gave Bush a predictable number of votes.

The analysis was not peer-reviewed, although Hout and the students said that seven professors examined their numbers. They would not speculate about what occurred with the voting machines, but voting activists on internet forums seized the study as proof of faulty voting machines or election fraud. Drexel University's McCullough, however, found fault with the study.

Kim Zetter is a good reporter and friendly to anti-BBV issues. I fear now that she will be attacked as (pick one):

A Freeper
Agent of Karl Rove
Diebold Shill
Sleeper agent planted in her mother's womb by The Evil Cabal(tm)

David Allen
www.thoughtcrimes.org