As Ohio and New Hampshire prepare for a vote recount, a research team at University of California - Berkeley has turned its attention to studying voting results in the state of Florida. According to sociology professor Michael Hout, who headed the research team, the study reveals that electronic voting machines in Florida may have awarded between 130,000 and 260,000 excess votes to George W. Bush.

[Hout 1] : Discrepancies as large or larger than the ones we observed could occur by chance less than one time in a thousand.

The three counties where the anomalies were most prevalent are also traditionally the most Democratic : Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. Based on statistics gathered from other counties that do not use electronic voting, the statistical pattern predicted a decrease of more than 18,000 votes in those counties combined. But in the end, Bush received a net gain of 159,000 votes. Hout says his team isn't calling the anomalies in Florida voter fraud, but for the sake of the future of voting something needs to be done. He says that with no paper trail, the statistical approach is the only way to determine if something is wrong with the electronic voting machines.

[Hout 2] : The approach is like a smoke alarm. And it's beeping. And we call upon the vote officials in Florida to determine whether or not there is a fire.