I’ve been using spamassassin for quite a while now. It’s a great spam filter, and supports Bayesian training on messages. Actually doing the training is a little annoying, though, as I have to log in to the server, separate out all the messages into a separate file, and then run the command line program sa-learn on that file. That finally got to be too annoying for me. I looked around quickly for some web-based training app, but couldn’t find anything. They may exist, and I may just not have looked hard enough.

Anyway, not having found one quickly, I wrote my own. It’s really simple to install and use. From the README:

You can download it here.

Note: This will only work if the user the web server runs as has read access to your mail file. To delete, it needs write access as well. This only works on mbox files. There are no plans to expand it to anything else.

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Attorney General John Ashcroft has resigned!

Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.”

Woohoo! We’re safe from terror! Ashcroft’s job is done. He is no longer needed. Do we still need Bush?

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So, all the extra votes in Florida may be due to absentee ballots not being on those pages initially. It certainly is possible, though the pages had a nice big “Y” in both the Absentee and Final Report columns. They’ve since been updated with new numbers, but no other changes. (See here.)

In Ohio, though, absentee ballots cannot quite account for this. There weren’t just more votes than turnout… there were more votes than registered voters. In some cases, by huge margins. See here. All the data on that page comes directly from Cuyahoga county’s website. I’ve again made a copy, in case the original changes. Copy is here. Some of these number might be explainable by people voting in the wrong precinct. However, I don’t think 8296 extra votes in a precinct with 558 registered voters (Woodmere Village) can be shrugged off easily. Similarly, 8062 extra votes in a precinct with 760 registered voters (Highland Hills Village) can’t be an accident.

All in all, there were 97,489 extra votes in Cuyahoga county. That’s just one county in the state. I’ll see if I can find data on the rest of the state.

Update: Several things I’ve read on this say it might be absentee ballots here, too. Apparently, they might be counted in all the precincts in a ward (or all the wards in a precinct? or precincts in a municipality? I don’t know) until it’s sorted out where they all belong, or something like that. I don’t know what to believe. Several of the precincts have counts that have the exact same numbers of extra votes, though. link

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Taking my cue from Michael, here is my first check:

This one was for September 8th through the end of the month. Not too shabby. Thank you, Google.

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There was a problem with one of my original referrals which never get straightened out, but I finally managed to get another one and to get them to take my account off hold. Hopefully I’ll actually have it soon…

An interesting note: The “Click here to redeem!” button didn’t work in Firefox. I had to use IE to do it.

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Do I believe that any of my recent posts about election results will get anything changed in this election? Not at all. It would be nice, but it’s just not going to happen. That doesn’t mean I should just stop. There were clearly problems with vote counting this year, and I have no idea who the country really voted for. By pointing this out, and getting people to look at them, hopefully we can fix them for future elections.

I can accept the fact that John Kerry wasn’t a great candidate. I can accept the fact that George Bush won reelection, if that is the case. What I cannot accept is that I don’t trust the vote count results. Honestly, I don’t think any of these things I’ve mentioned are enough to push Kerry over the top. Bush won the national popular vote by a huge margin, and both Florida and Ohio by significant amounts, probably more than can be accounted for with fraud.

What I want to accomplish with all this is to clean up the election system to the point where I will trust it in 2008 (or 2006, really). We need to get for-profit companies out of the business of making voting machines, or at the very least make all of their systems auditable with a paper trail. It doesn’t look good when the CEO of Diebold says he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” It doesn’t look good when the exit polls (yeah, yeah) are so far off. It doesn’t look good when there are hundreds of thousands of extra votes, and lots of reports of missing votes. It doesn’t look good when vote counts are walled off from observers under the “threat of terrorism” excuse.

I have no delusion that I can fix the problem for this year. I have no strong evidence that, even if fixed, Bush wouldn’t still be the President-elect. I want to help restore my faith in our election process for the future. It’s going to take a lot of work to do that.

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Hopefully. Bloggermann, Keith Olbermann.

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren County farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown.

What will Bush do with his Mandate and his Political Capital? He got the highest vote total for a presidential candidate, you know. Did anybody notice who’s second on the list? A Mr. Kerry.

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The more I read about the election, the more I’m sure something’s not right. Check out the article here. I don’t really have anything to add to it.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again – but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

The optical scan machines are the ones made by Diebold.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. “The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn’t likely to be perfect,” he noted, “but one would normally expect that the gap – of 1.5 million votes – to be far smaller than it was.”

But I agree with Fox’s Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, “This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.”

Related links:
A graph of optical scan vs. touchscreen counties: http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.html
Table of the same data: http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

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Everyone on both sides claims they want every vote to be counted. So do I, and if that means George Bush is President, so be it. Each vote should only be counted once, though. I’m sure everyone’s already heard about the error in Franklin County, Ohio. Almost 4000 extra votes for Bush (which has been corrected, thankfully). Unforunately, there’s more.

The following pages were copied from the Florida Dept of State website. Here are the originals: [turnout votes] and my copies: [turnout votes]. I made copies because I don’t trust the originals to stay the same, as they will be changed with updated counts, most likely.

Now, take a look at the turnout in Palm Beach county: 452,061. Add up the total number of votes for President in that county: 542,835. Somehow, 90,774 more votes were cast than people showed up at the polls.

Miami-Dade: Turnout of 716,574. Total votes for President: 768,553. 51,979 more votes than voters.

All in all, there were more reported votes than voters in 10 counties in Florida. These were the two biggest, by a large margin, and also happen to be heavily Democratic counties. The other counties:
Glades: +742, Highlands: +7495, Lake: +187, Leon: +85, Okaloosa: +222, Orange: +1648, Osceola: +18598, Volusia: +19306. Let’s take a look at the ones with large mistakes. Highlands, Osceola, Volusia (and of course Palm Beach and Miami-Dade).

Highlands looks reasonable. I might even be convinced that Miami-Dade does as well, though Kerry only gaining 8000 votes when the turnout was 150,000 higher than 2000 seems odd. A switch from Gore winning by almost 2000 to Kerry losing by almost 4500 in Osceola? Strange. An increase in turnout by 117,801 in Palm Beach county, which Gore took with 64%… and Kerry doesn’t gain on that? I find that hard to believe. And losing 11,000 votes in Volusia, again with higher turnout, which Gore took with 54%? I just don’t buy it.

Something’s wrong here. We know, because the vote counts are wrong, that the numbers have to be wrong somewhere. I don’t know where. Thanks to the Diebold electronic voting machines with no paper trail, we can’t even do a recount. It’d be the equivalent of having the computers just spit out the same stored numbers they did the first time. No auditing. No paper trail. No hand recount. Obvious vote count inaccuracies.

Thanks to Gray at DailyKos for most of these numbers.

Update: Highlands, Osceola, and Volusia used paper ballots. Recounts there should be possible. Palm Beach and Miami-Dade used touchscreen with no paper trail.

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This has been making the rounds on the internet lately. At the bottom, it links to this and says the data “correlates somewhat.” Sure, if by somewhat, you mean not at all.

The chart using the data linked to looks like this.

Now, stop posting and e-mailing this to people. Calling conservatives stupid is wrong (factually, not just ethically), and just makes all liberals look bad.

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