Justice Through Music is offering a $100,000 reward for finding 2004 presidential election fraud (see terms below).

I have assembled a lot of Ohio data (from the Secretary of State) in a spreadsheet called 2004-Ohio-2.xls.

There are a lot of ways to analyze this data for fraud. My first hypothesis was to compare the 2004 Presidential results by county with the 2004 Supreme Court Chief Justice race. This race featured a Republican incumbent, Thomas Moyer, and a Democratic challenger, C. Ellen Connally.

In theory, this race would be a fairly neutral "control," reflecting the basic partisanship of the state. To make things a bit more interesting, Ms. Connally is a black woman from Cleveland, which I would expect to increase her margin in Democratic counties, and decrease it in Republican counties, compared to the Presidential results. But I found something quite different.

Look at column AG (in yellow). This is the difference between Moyer's % and Bush's %. I sorted it in ascending order, so the first row - Mercer County - has the biggest dropoff (Bush got 75%, Moyer got 59% - a dropoff of 16%).

What could account for that? Fraud, possibly. Maybe Bush really got only 59% in Mercer, but the results were altered somehow to push him up to 75%.

If Karl Rove wanted to steal the election, he could commit this crime in a few Republican counties and give Bush a big lead. So I highlighted (in orange) the margins in the 7 most unusual counties (Mercer, Shelby, Butler, Auglaize, Clermont, Darke, and Warren). I summed the total Republican margins for those 7 counties in Row B. I repeated this in all 4 races in the spreadsheet: Pres2004, Sen2004, Jud2004, and Pres2000.

That's just one way to look for fraud. It's just a "stab", it's not rigorous in any way. Perhaps someone could do something stronger with that idea.

In column B you'll find the voting machine type, which is another variable to work with.

If you find the fraud, first submit it to JTMP.org to win your reward - and then post it below to tell the world!

Justice Through Music, which strongly supports the democratic principles of transparency and honesty in the electoral process, is offering at least a $100,000 reward to any person or persons who provide conclusive and verifiable evidence that the results of the 2004 presidential election were not correctly tabulated because of one or more of the following reasons: 1) hacking into the voting machines; 2) software or coding problems with voting or tabulating machines; 3) multiple counting by machines or humans, 4) improperly implanted codes in voting machines; 5) tampering with voting machines, voting cards or final tabulation numbers; 6) officials or machines not counting all the votes or adding votes; 7) official influence which changed vote totals, or 8) other problems with vote tabulation not noted here. All information and evidence should be submitted to reward@jtmp.org . Questions should be submitted to questions@jtmp.org .

In order to receive the reward, the evidence provided must be sufficient to affect the outcome of the presidential race, and evidence from more than one state can be used for that purpose. If a person who provides the information desires confidentiality for any reason including a fear of retribution, he or she should indicate that in their submission. A board of five persons will determine the disbursement of the reward on or before February 1, 2005.