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July 25, 2001
There is no longer any doubt that crimes were committed in the course of George Bush assuming the presidency. Both supporters and
opponents of Bush have confessed in print to having cast illegal ballots. Thousands of primarily Democratic constituencies were selectively prevented from voting, and thousands of felons who come from
those same constituencies may have voted. Thousands of Bush ballots tainted by illegal assistance in filling out absentee applications and hundreds of illegal overseas ballots, some probably cast after
Election Day, were counted. And now credible evidence has emerged that certain counties deliberately tampered with ballots.
The legend that Bush's team created around Florida purported that vote counters, under the glare of cameras, spoiled Bush ballots. On
the Democratic side, there is a widespread suspicion that the election was stolen for Bush by software that miscounted ballots—as candidate Buddy MacKay believed happened in the Mack-MacKay senatorial
election of 1998. But the reality is that any tampering in the Bush Gore contest probably took place on Election Night, before the cameras were turned on. It was probably on a small scale, perhaps 1
percent of the vote of a county. As Paul Lukasiak has shown, Escambia County appears to have outright minted Bush votes from their pool of double-voted discards. We undertook to do a statistical study that might highlight where such cheating could have taken place.
What we found was implausible enough to justify an investigation by law enforcement authorities. Precinct level information from 11
northern counties revealed that two parameters which can be logically connected to electoral fraud (ballot spoilage and the number of Gore votes divided by the number of Nelson votes) account for
two-thirds of the variation in Gore's performance; the chances of this happening by chance are about 1 in 1047 (10 raised to the 47th power). This was true in aggregate as well as individually. Each of
the eleven northern counties that we studied had patterns consistent with cheating by Republicans. These were Bay, Bradford, Calhoun, Columbia, Dixie, Gulf, Hamilton, Jackson, Suwanee, Union, and
Washington. Precincts in some counties had discard rates of up to 40 percent of ballots cast! Calhoun and Dixie showed profiles possibly suggestive of ballot box stuffing. We suggest that the most
consistent explanation of the statistical anomalies is a pattern of criminal tampering with ballots, primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by Republicans. In just 14 suspicious precincts with
suspiciously high ballot discard rates, 844 ballots for Gore were destroyed in excess of what would be expected. In the 11 counties, the total number of Gore ballots involved is probably in the tens of
thousands, our model suggests that 7,100 votes may have been destroyed, so the number destroyed in all northern counties may have been many tens of thousands.
There may also have been Democratic cheating. If so, the likeliest counties in which to find it are Broward, Charlotte, Collier, Lee,
Palm Beach and Sarasota. In most cases, the cheating would have most likely been on behalf of Senator Nelson rather than Al Gore, though in some cases, Gore could have been an accidental beneficiary.
After this article was completed, we received precinct level information from Escambia County. The results floored us. While we expected
to see a correlation of the spoilage of Gore votes to African Americans, consistent with the findings of Professor Allan Lichtman and the US Civil Rights Commission, the correlation of ballot spoilage to
Gore's vote appeared to be even higher. With just two parameters, our model accounted for 91 percent of the variation in Gore's performance. All on its own, ballot spoilage accounted for 79 percent of
the variation in Gore performance. In other words, ballots were destroyed because they were cast for Gore. The probability that Escambia's vote distribution occurred by chance is less than 1 in 1056. One
chance in ten raised to the power 56 means that the Escambia results are about as likely as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Loch Ness monster running into one another at a Shriner's convention.
In the eight most suspicious precincts of Escambia County (spoilage more than 12 percent vs. Escambia's average spoilage of 4.5
percent), 536 ballots in excess of the average of all precincts were spoiled. The Gore vote in those precincts averaged 82 percent. In 10 additional suspicious precincts (spoilage more than 8 percent),
another 362 votes were spoiled. The Gore margin in those precincts averaged 69 percent. In one miracle precinct, precinct 110, Bush managed a Stalinesque victory margin of 98.5 percent and a Stakhanovite
spoilage rate of 0.8 percent.
Statistics, of course, prove nothing; prosecutors do. The culture warriors who have covered their eyes to avoid seeing the connection
between skin color and ballot spoilage will doubtless be blind to the connection between deliberate ballot spoilage and the theft of the presidency. In the 35-year campaign to prove that tobacco is both
dangerous and addictive, tobacco lawyers spun similar shameless lies. The people of this country, and especially those African Americans, who have been patient beyond endurance in the quest to make this
a just society, deserve to know the truth. The Justice Department and the Attorney General of Florida, faced with the powerful suggestion of wrongdoing that statistics provides, have no cover to pretend
that a failure to investigate is anything but corrupt.
Finally, if a fair investigation is done, let any Democrats guilty of electoral fraud be punished as well. This country can no longer
endure the lawlessness of misusing the law courts to fight and win political battles, as Republicans have done in the Starr investigations and again in Bush v. Gore.
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