Reply #1: Miami Herald hand recount of 3 Florida counties: significant Kerry gain [View All]

Miami Herald hand recount of 3 Florida counties indicates signficant Kerry gain and possible Kerry win in Florida

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/20021...

Here are the tallies for Union County:
Bush original: 3396 Bush hand count: 3393 (-3)
Kerry original: 1251 Kerry hand count: 1272 (+21)
Net change: Kerry +24

Here are the tallies for Lafayette County:
Bush original: 2460 Bush hand count: 2452 (-8)
Kerry original: 845 Kerry hand count: 848 (+3)
Net change: Kerry +11
I
t's a bit more complicated for the third county they looked at, Suwannee County, because they only report the totals for a hand
count of "almost 60%" of the ballots. Here is the result of their 60% hand count:
Bush 60% hand count: 6140
Kerry 60% hand count: 2984
Which gives us the following tally for Suwannee County:
Bush original: 11153 Extrapolation of Bush 100% hand count: 10549
Kerry original: 4522 Extrapolation of Kerry 100% hand count: 5126
Net change: Kerry +1208
In the original count, 71.2% of the votes cast for Bush or Kerry (n=15675) went to Bush. In the hand count, this drops to 67.3%. That is a significant drop. Let's translate that into numbers. If you take the percentages from the hand count and extrapolate, here's
what you get:
Bush = 15675 x .673 = 10549 (loss of 604)
Kerry = 15675 x .327 = 5126 (gain of 604)
Net change: Kerry +1208
A switch of 1208 votes in a county with less than 16K votes cast is obviously huge. Which begs the question...why did they stop counting in Suwannee County when their tabulation of 60% of the ballots deviated so much from the original total? And without actually counting those remaining ballots, how can they possibly report that nothing is amiss when the data they have so far suggests a possible problem?

What I see is a possible gain of 1243 votes for Kerry from three small counties in which only 23627 ballots were cast. That
represents about 0.3% of the ballots cast for Bush and Kerry statewide. If Kerry gained votes at the same rate statewide, he picks up nearly 400,000 votes and wins Florida.
Thanks Miami Herald, you just revealed to us in your hand counts that there's a possibility that
Kerry won Florida.