UC Berkeley Study Questions Florida E-Vote Count

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.

UPDATE: Their report is now online. From the summary:

Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of
Hispanic/Latino population.

In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

FURTHER UPDATE:

You can read a Wired News story giving details of this story.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:

PC World has an article up (apparently only geeks can cover this story):

Hout says that the odds of the Florida irregularities happening by chance were less than 1 in 1000, and he calls for an examination of the results. "It's like a smoke alarm and it's beeping," he says. "We call upon the voting officials in Florida to determine whether there's a fire."

They go on to mention that the study found no irregularities in twelve other FLA counties nor in Ohio, for those who think it's a partisan hack job.