It was previously reported (at www.electoral-vote.com, among possibly other places) that while actual ballot results matched exit polls to within the margin of error in counties that used paper ballots or electronic ballots with a paper audit trail, counties that used electronic voting with no printed audit trail consistently showed an unexplained surplus of pro-Bush votes in the actual ballot totals averaging about 5% relative to the exit polls. Now someone has charted ten paper-ballot states vs. eight paperless electronic ballot states, and the results are enough to arouse curiosity.
Unfortunately, this being in PDF form, I can't easily insert the charts themselves here. You'll have to look at the charts yourself. Also, note that the charts cover only 18 of 50 states. I don't know the basis on which these 18 states were selected; per Benjamin Disraeli, one can lie convincingly by cherry-picking one's data carefully. A reasonable assumption would be that the ten and the eight were selected to most clearly show the result being asserted; however, any conclusion drawn from incomplete data must necessarily be suspect.
However, that said, if verified, and if borne out by the data from the remaining 32 states, the comparison is highly suggestive. It implies that discrepancies in electronic balloting had dramatic effects upon the election outcome in several states. It is already known that errors occurred; USA Today has reported, for example, on one Ohio county in which a malfunctioning electronic voting machine generated 3,893 extra votes for George Bush from a single precinct in which only 638 votes were cast, and over 4,500 votes were lost in one North Carolina county when voting officials didn't realize they had overflowed the voting machine's memory capacity.
Now, this chart points out that actual results varied from exit poll results in the eight paperless-ballot states charted by as much as 16%. Notably, Kerry's margin of +17 in the New Hampshire exit polls turned into +1 in the final results, and Bush's margin of +4 in North Carolina exit polls turned into +13 in the machine tally. More significantly, in two states, this discrepancy flipped the outcome of the election, from +1 Kerry to +5 Bush in Florida, and from +2 Kerry to +2 Bush in Ohio, and came within a hairsbreadth of flipping the result in New Hampshire.
The implications of that should be immediately obvious. If this did indeed represent an actual error in the vote totals reported by the paperless electronic balloting systems in those two states, and the exit polls actually accurately represent the number of votes cast, then those two states should have been won by Kerry rather than by Bush. If we refer back again to electoral-vote.com, we see that Florida has 27 electoral votes, and Ohio 20. A little arithmetic shows that reversing the result in either of those two states is sufficient to give Kerry the election, and if both should in fact have gone to Kerry, this would change the election outcome from 279 Bush, 252 Kerry -- a victory for Bush by 27 electoral votes -- to 299 Kerry, 232 Bush, a victory for Kerry by 67 electoral votes.
Now, what does this tell us about the correct outcome of the election? The truth is, nothing definite... it's suggestive at most, because there's no paper trail, no way to audit the result. But one thing is unequivocally and undeniably clear from that very fact:
We absolutely must have that paper trail in future elections. We cannot afford not to have that ability to audit.
This should not be negotiable. The situation of having just held an election and being unable to audit or verify its result should never have been allowed to come to pass. We can never know whether the electronically tallied vote totals are correct or not, and we can never recount them. All we can do is take the manufacturers' word for it that there are no hidden bugs or backdoors in their code (on machines in which multiple, frequently trivial to exploit, vulnerabilities have been found), and that the vote totals as reported were correct.
This is simply, flatly, unacceptable.