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Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried |
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By
TOM ZELLER JR.; FORD FESSENDEN AND JOHN SCHWARTZ CONTRIBUTED
REPORTING FOR THIS ARTICLE. (NYT) 1554 words
Published: November 12, 2004
Correction Appended
The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy
cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. ''Evidence mounts
that the vote may have been hacked,'' trumpeted a headline on the Web
site CommonDreams.org. ''Fraud took place in the 2004 election
through electronic voting machines,'' declared BlackBoxVoting.org.
In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas
surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.
But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for
the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has
come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon
able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed
conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen
election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong
-- though many were still reluctant to let them go.
Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved real
voting anomalies in Florida and Ohio, the two states on which victory
hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah.
''I love the process of democracy, and I think it's more important
than the outcome,'' said Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living
near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp's analysis of the vote in
Florida (she has a master's degree in mathematics) that set off a
flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who were
certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that were
leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning handily, that something
was amiss.
The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site,
www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of
Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of
votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with
other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a
''surprising pattern'' in Florida's results showing inexplicable
gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used
optical-scan voting systems.
The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp's number crunching was hard
to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own
bar charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a
breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories -- along with
their visual aids -- were distributed by e-mail messages containing
links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where other eager
readers diligently passed them along.
Within one day, the number of visits to Ms. Dopp's site jumped from
50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number
tipped 17,000. Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web
logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three
Democratic members of Congress -- John Conyers Jr. of Michigan,
Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida -- sent a
letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an
investigation of voting machines. A link to Ms. Dopp's site was
included in the letter.
But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick.
Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford,
pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news
of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in
Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential
elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other
researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion
of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split
in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.
Still, as visitors to Ms. Dopp's site approached 70,000 early this
week, other election anomalies were gaining traction on the Internet.
The elections department in Cleveland, for instance, set off a round
of Web log hysteria when it posted turnout figures on its site that
seemed to show more votes being cast in some communities than there
were registered voters. That turned out to be an error in how the
votes were reported by the department, not in the counting.
And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of
television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely
inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio,
continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated.
But while authorities acknowledge that there were real problems on
Election Day, including troubles with some electronic machines and
intolerably long lines in some places, few have suggested that any of
these could have changed the outcome.
''There are real problems to be addressed,'' said Doug Chapin of
Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of election reform information,
''and I'd hate for them to get lost in second-guessing of the result.''
It is that second-guessing, however, that has largely characterized
the blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have
become frustrated by the rumor mill.
''It becomes a snowball of hearsay,'' said Matthew Damschroder, the
director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting
machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes
to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation.
That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it
was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.
''Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation,''
he said, ''but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want
to know what really happened.'''
Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online pundits,
however, is a matter of debate.
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive
telecommunications program at New York University, suggests that the
online fact-finding machine has come unmoored, and that some bloggers
simply ''can't imagine any universe in which a fair count of the
votes would result in George Bush being re-elected president.''
But some denizens of the Web see it differently.
Jake White, the owner of the Web log primordium.org, argues that he
and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely by
partisan politics. ''While there are no doubt large segments of this
movement that are being driven by that,'' he said in an e-mail
message, ''I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the
election was held.''
Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in
Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.
John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says
it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being
inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an
alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid.
''Of course you can say blogs are wrong,'' he said. ''Blogs are wrong
all the time.''
For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the
conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is
to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.
''We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very
upset,'' said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry
campaign in Ohio. But, he said, ''I have not seen anything to
indicate intentional fraud or tampering.''
A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a
cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar
conclusion. Its study found ''no particular patterns'' relating to
voting systems and the final results of the election.
''The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet,'' the study
concluded, ''appear to be selectively chosen to make the point.''
Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.
''I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to
be true,'' said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, ''but
blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't
rewrite the past.''
Correction: November 13, 2004, Saturday A front-page article
yesterday about the rise of conspiracy theories on the Internet
regarding the presidential election referred incorrectly to
FreePress.org, which carried some of them. It is the Web site for The
Free Press, a community newspaper in Columbus, Ohio; it is not a blog.
Photos: Electronic voting machines, like these at a polling place in
West Palm Beach, Fla., are at the center of Internet rumors about
election fraud. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images); The Internet was
flooded with suggestions of voting fraud. (pg. A20)
Chart/Map: ''Not So Unusual: Registering One Way, Voting the Other''
Some Web pages compared Florida's election results with each county's
party registration, drawing suspicious attention to numerous counties
in which people were registered mostly Democrat but voted mostly Republican.
2004 REGISTRATION
NO. OF COUNTIES
Bush: 30
Kerry: 1
Counties won by the candidate whose party has the most registered voters
But this voting pattern existed in previous elections. In 2000, there
were more counties where people crossed party lines than in 2004.
2000 REGISTRATION
NO. OF COUNTIES
Bush: 35
Gore: 4
In 1996, fewer counties switched, but among those that did were many
of the counties that switched in 2000 and 2004.
1996 REGISTRATION
NO. OF COUNTIES
Dole: 20
Clinton: 3
Map of Florida highlighting counties won by the candidate whose party
has the most registered voters.
(Sources by Associated Press [2004 results]; Florida Division of
Elections [1996 and 2000 results and voter registration figures])(pg. A20)
