Democrats.com is co-sponsoring the 2004 Roundtable on Progressive Politics & Technology Thursday afternoon in DC, so I'm blogging early. If you happen to attend, please say hi!

A brand new study by U.C. Berkeley researchers suggests electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to Bush in Florida. As Buzzflash writes,

"The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic counties, not the [conservative] Dixiecrat counties you’ve all heard about before, but the more heavily Democratic counties that used e-vote technology, including Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties in order of magnitude," said Professor Hout.

The statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predicted a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s share of the 2004 vote in Broward County, but the machines actually tallied an increase of 51,000 votes for a net gain of 81,000 votes for the President.

With the research team’s statistical model, it was expected that President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County but instead he gained 41,000, a difference of 49,900 votes.

And President Bush should have gained only 18,000 votes in Miami-Dade County but in fact gained 37,000, for a difference of 19,300 votes.

"The disparity in favor of the incumbent President Bush cannot be explained away by other factors. The study shows that counties that used electronic voting resulted in disproportionate increases of votes for the President," said Professor Hout.  

Paging Bev Harris - start heading towards South Florida!

At long last, the Ohio Democratic Party is going to court to fight for every vote.

The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to impose uniform standards for counting provisional votes on all 88 counties. Democrats want the judge to take action quickly - before the results of the election are certified...

Most of Ohio's provisional ballots were cast in urban areas where Kerry typically fared well. Cuyahoga County had the most - nearly 25,000. About 13,000 of those had been verified as of Wednesday, with about 8,600 of that group deemed valid.

Meanwhile, the presidential candidates from the Green and Libertarian parties have said they will demand a recount of all the ballots in Ohio - which could include a review of another group of votes; 92,672 "spoiled" ballots that recorded no vote for president.

But the most important number in Ohio is the number we will never know - the number of people who didn't cast a vote because the lines were so long. And as Harvey Wasserman writes, this was the result of a systematic effort by Karl Rove and Ken Blackwell to suppress Democratic votes.

Hour after hour the testimonies are the same: angry Ohioans telling of vicious Republican manipulation and de facto intimidation that disenfranchised tens of thousands and probably cost the Democrats the election.

At an African-American church on Saturday and then at the Franklin County Courthouse Monday night, more than 700 people came to testify and witness to tales of the atrocity that was the November 2 election.

Organized by local ad hoc groups, the hearings had a court reporter and a team of lawyers along with other appointed witnesses. At freepress.org we will be making the testimonies available as they're transcribed and organized, and we will present a fuller accounting of the hearings, along with a book that includes the transcripts.

But one thing was instantly and abundantly clear: the Republican Party turned Ohio 2004 into an updated version of the Jim Crow South.

The principle overt method of vote suppression was to short-change inner city precincts of sufficient voting machines to allow a timely balloting. In precinct after precinct, virtually all of them predominantly black, poor, young and Democratic, the lines stretched for two, five, eight, even eleven hours. The elderly and infirm were forced to stand in the rain while city officials threatened to tow their cars. No chairs or shelter were provided. Crucial signage was mysteriously missing. Thousands came to vote, saw the long lines and left.

How many thousands? Enough to turn the election? Almost definitely.

None of this was accidental. This was a well-planned GOP attack on the right to vote, and on Democratic candidacies. Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was also co-chair of the Ohio campaign for Bush. A right-wing Republican was in charge of the Franklin County Board of Elections.

They all said the election went "smoothly." By their standards they were right. At least 68 voting machines sat in a warehouse while precinct managers called desperately for help. Republican precinct judges and challengers harassed would-be voters. The names of long-time activists mysteriously disappeared from registration lists. The arsenal of dirty tricks was virtually endless.

With it the Bush/Rove team deprived countless Ohioans of their right to vote just as surely as if they'd levied a poll tax or invoked the grandfather clause.

In the coming days we'll issue a more complete accounting of these devastating hearings. No one who cares about democracy and fears the consequences of its destruction could come away from them without being both infuriated and terrified.

Ralph Nader's NH recount is today. Kim Zetter of Wired explains the anomalies that prompted Nader's recount request, which were flagged by Ida Briggs of Michigan, a programmer with 20 years of experience:

Most people would have expected John Kerry's performance at the polls this year to be similar to Al Gore's in 2000. And in 229 out of 300 voting districts, or wards as they're called in New Hampshire, that was the case. Kerry either matched the percentage of votes that Gore received in 2000 in those wards or did better than Gore. But in 71 wards, Briggs found, Bush did better in 2004 than he did in 2000.

When Briggs broke the 71 wards down by voting equipment -- separating wards into those that used traditional paper ballots and those that used optical-scan machines -- she discovered that 73 percent of the wards used optical-scan equipment, while only 27 percent used traditional paper ballots. Even more interesting was the breakdown per brand of voting equipment. New Hampshire wards used optical-scan equipment made by Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software. About 62 percent of the wards with anomalous results used Diebold machines.

"Which is pretty high," Briggs said. "Especially in comparison to hand-counted paper ballots, which accounted for only 27 percent of the out-of-trend wards."

In one ward in the city of Manchester, the change was remarkable. In 2000, Gore beat Bush 49 percent to 48 percent. But this year Bush carried the ward with 53 percent of votes. In another Manchester ward where Gore won 52 percent to Bush's 44 percent in 2000, Bush won with 50 percent to Kerry's 49 percent this year.

"The numbers could be real," Briggs said. "But to be this dramatically outside of the trend raises some red flags."

Some people have explained away the numbers as a result of affluent Massachusetts voters moving to New Hampshire to take advantage of its tax system. These transplants would be more likely to vote for Bush. But Briggs thinks this is too anecdotal and shouldn't be used to dismiss the numbers.

"It's also anecdotal that urban voters tend to vote more liberal than rural voters, but in New Hampshire we see that trend reversed," she said.

Briggs said the wards with surprising numbers account for about 235,000 votes, at least 200,000 of which are in wards that used Diebold machines. This is significant because earlier this year, activists found security flaws in the Diebold counting software that could allow someone with access to the system to alter votes.

But Briggs stressed that there was nothing to indicate fraud.

"My take is this could simply be a glitch. And if someone made a mistake, then it's an easy find," she said. "Thank God New Hampshire has a paper trail so we can just sit down and count the paper ballots."

Unlike states and counties using paperless touch-screen voting machines, New Hampshire passed a law in 1994 requiring all voting machines to produce a paper trail, so the paper can easily be used to verify the vote results.

But this isn't why Briggs chose to examine New Hampshire's machines. She chose the state because Kerry won there, with 50 percent of the votes to Bush's 49 percent, and people would be less likely to view her examination as a partisan tactic to overturn Bush's victory.

The recount will consist only of 11 wards, taken from a list of wards that Briggs supplied to the Nader campaign. Because state officials are already busy conducting 15 recounts in close local races, they will only be able to count five of the wards Thursday and will do the remaining six wards at a date to be determined...

[Nader spokesman Zeese] said they looked at data showing that in Florida counties using optical-scan machines numerous Democrats had voted for Bush. But he concluded, as several academics did, that "it's not unusual," since many Democrats in Florida had been voting Republican for years.

But if the New Hampshire recount uncovers problems with the machines, the Nader campaign will consider seeking a recount in Florida, since the state uses many of the same Diebold and ES&S optical-scan machines as those in New Hampshire. The process in Florida, however, would be more complicated and expensive.