[Links added are mine – Oui]
Your vote is endangered by overzealous activists by Real History Lisa @BooMan on Feb. 25th, 2009
Look. The first test of whether someone is a useful activist, or even a good person, for that matter, is whether they tell the truth. Whether by ignorance or design, some of the leading voices in the election activist community are failing that test.
A lot of people follow others unquestioningly simply because they don’t know they are being hoodwinked. I see it on Orange frequently – a mass stampede when a few voices speak out in a certain direction.I’ve always admired that our own BooMan is one of those who is never afraid to stand against the herd, to point out when the conventional wisdom is wacko.
In the electronic voting community, two voices speak very loudly, and have a lot of reach: Bev Harris, and Brad Friedman. Both have done some very excellent work reporting on election problems. But both have also proven abominable at reviewing and commenting on proposed legislation, and their ignorance and overblown hysteria is truly hurting the election reform movement.
Right now, nearly 1/4 of all voting jurisdictions are using DRE machines that have no voter-verified auditable permanent paper trail. I won’t take the time here to explain how dangerous that is. If you don’t understand this, search “DRE hack” in Google and self-educate before you read the rest of this.
For the last three Congressional terms, a brave little team in Rush Holt’s office has been diligently trying to find a way to protect our elections from hacking. Each session they have introduced a bill to protect elections. Each time, opposing interests, which include Republicans, voting machine vendors, those with an agenda to steal elections, and, sadly, Brad Friedman and Bev Harris, have banded together to defeat it. Pretty odd company, don’t you think?
The Need for Independent US Exit Polls – Election Integrity [doc]
From the outset, the polls performed well. Until the 2000 election, the only significant controversy about exit polls occurred in 1980, when exit polls allowed NBC to project a victory for Ronald Reagan three hours before the close of voting on the West Coast. Critics blasted the polls and NBC for calling the election before everyone had voted. In 1984 this was repeated with all three networks declaring victory for Reagan over Walter Mondale hours before the polls closed in the West. During a subsequent House Subcommittee hearing, executives from the three networks agreed not to project races until everyone had voted.
No one, however, debated the accuracy of exit polls. Scholars and practitioners, supporters and critics all agreed. In 1987, Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote that exit polls “are the most useful analytic tool developed in my working life.” And according to Albert H. Cantril, a leading authority on public opinion research, “As useful as pre-election polls may be for measuring the evolving disposition of the electorate, they are not nearly as powerful as exit polls in analyzing the message voters have sent by the ballots they cast.” [See also Hadley Cantril] While political scientists George Edwards and Stephen Wayne put it this way: “The problems with exit polls lie in their accuracy (rather than [in their] inaccuracy). They give the press access to predict the outcome before the elections have been concluded.”
That assessment was revised following the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections. Since 1992, the media has joined forces to conduct a single exit poll, reportedly for economic reasons, and a single poll has been held since. The polls were conducted under the auspices of Voter News Service (VNS). In the 2000 Presidential election VNS and exit polls in general were tainted by two highly consequential failed calls in the state of Florida. The first call was for Gore, after VNS projected a victory, based on exit polls suggesting 7.3% Gore victory (an exit poll discrepancy in Florida that has never been investigated); the second proclaimed a Bush victory based on a computer error. In the 2002 elections, VNS suffered a computer meltdown. (These data have never been made available).
That led to the demise of VNS. The exit poll for the 2004 federal elections was conducted by a new creation, the National Election Pool (NEP), likewise a consortium of six news organizations (ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC) that pooled resources to conduct a thorough survey of each state and the nation. NEP, in turn, contracted two respected firms, Joe Lenski’s Edison Media Research and Warren Mitofsky’s Mitofsky International, to conduct the polls.
1.3. Using Exit Polls to Ensure Election Integrity
Despite the (2002 meltdown and attribution of error in the 2000 and 2004 US exit polls, there is a worldwide consensus that a highly transparent exit poll is one of the best means available to ensure an honest election.
In established democracies, exit polls play a central role both in ensuring election integrity and in quickly projecting results. In Germany, the entire process is totally transparent. The minute the polls close, television stations publish exit-poll projections conducted by independent firms. The exit-poll results provide independent data that can be compared to the official tallies. They also provide the nation with an immediate projection of the winner and mitigate the need for a rapid count. (Like most democracies, Germany, despite its technological prowess, votes by hand-marked ballots, counted in full public view by volunteer representatives of the political parties.) This highly transparent system provides good evidence of just how reliable exit polls are. In three recent years for which data are available, exit polls for both the German national elections and the German elections for the European parliament have averaged results within 0.44 percentage points of the official results. (Freeman & Bleifuss 2006: Appendix A.)
More below the fold …
○ @BooMan – Steven D: Authors’ Pages 14 & 15 Analyzed
Student Axel Geijsel specifically points to previous statistical studies. Earlier studies have suspected fraud and irregularities, this new write-up is a repeat of similar studies done especially in the 2004 presidential election. Read their own works and their refernce works by earlier staticians …
JUST DOING THE MATH
Electoral Fraud In The 2016 Democratic Primaries by Giovanni and Marcello PietrobonMy brother Marcello and I have been talking about electoral irregularities for months. He’s an astronomer by training, a software engineer, and an avid follower of American politics. I’m a microelectronic engineer and a finance person living in the United States for the past 20 years. As Italians we both look at American politics with a great deal of curiosity and sometimes disbelief. As a naturalized American, I worry.
Recently, Marcello became interested in the sort of calculation that could actually detect electoral fraud having heard about so many indications of electoral rigging in these past democratic primaries. After delving into the investigations of mathematician and numerical control engineer Richard Charnin, FBI journalist investigator Greg Palast [1], and election investigator and analyst Bev Harris [2], among others, he is persuaded not only that statistical methods can show when fraud has taken place, but that in fact the American electoral system is structured to allow it and to hide it [3]. He spent a few days unpacking a few statistical concepts for me regarding this proposition and I will try to convey them to you.
First we should be aware that exit polls, the polls of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations, are the only way to check against fraud in elections while keeping the vote confidential. A discrepancy between the declared vote (recorded vote) and the vote extrapolated from the exit polls is an indication of fraud when it is above a margin of error of 2% within a confidence level of 95%.
…
Poorly informed `experts’ frequently argue that the statistical analysis of exit polls can be misleading because it assumes that real life data is randomly distributed (as in the Gaussian curve) when that’s not always the case. And here is where they are missing a central point. The expectation that sample data will be randomly distributed ALREADY takes into account all possible relevant factors in a practical observation in real life. When extraneous factors intervene, a discrepancy will make the recorded value fall outside of the interval of confidence signaling only one possibility: a systematic error.…
Election results in the United States are obtained with a 95% confidence level within a 3-4% margin of error. This is because relatively recent laws in the United States have intentionally rendered reference data less reliable (HAVA, Bush 2002). By law exit polls must be adjusted to match the final recorded vote, which means that evidence of fraud is suppressed. Exit poll results, already partially manipulated, must disappear after a given election and become public only 5 years later.
How trustworthy are electronic voting systems in the US? by Beth Clarkson on 05 June 2015 - posted in Politics Feb. 25th, 2009
I’ve recently written an article for the Royal Statistical Society on the trustworthiness of US voting systems.
Here is an excerpt:My statistical analysis shows patterns indicative of vote manipulation in machines. The manipulation is relatively small, compared with the inherent variability of election results, but it is consistent. These results form a pattern that goes across the nation and back a number of election cycles. I’ve downloaded data and verified the results from several states for myself. Furthermore, the manipulation is not limited to a single powerful operator. My assessment is that the data reveals multiple (at least two) agents working independently to successfully alter voting results.
You’ll find the article in its entirety, here – link.
In story Steven D refers to a statement by Beth Clarkson [page 15], a longtime activist on election anomalies.
The theater is on fire! | ShowMeTheVotes |
“My specialty is statistics and I’ve pulled down publicly available data independently, analyzed it myself, and corroborated analyses which points to massive widespread election fraud. Joshua Holland [article in The Nation] disparages the mathematical work of Richard Charnin *, but I have not found an error in any of the analyses of his that I have repeated.
In particular, his assessment of the binomial probability regarding the likelihood of the exit poll results, is both accurate and appropriate. I have verified it myself. This binomial analysis was ignored by Mr. Holland in favor of criticizing a different approach that was also used. That approach is also sound, but I have not reproduced those calculations. That both models show results that are consistent with the hypothesis of election fraud is more than doubly damning.
If we assume no election fraud, then the two different types of analysis of the exit poll errors are unrelated because one analysis looks at the size of the error while the other is based on whether it benefited Hillary versus Bernie. That they are both consistent with fraud could be considered a third piece of evidence in support of that hypothesis. There are only two possibilities – a) Bernie supporters are more likely to respond to the poll or b) there is widespread election fraud altering election results in favor of Hillary across the U.S. Cumulative Vote Share (CVS) analysis pioneered by Francis Choquette shows problems across the nation for the past decade or more. Interestingly enough, places that use hand counted ballots do not show the same trends and within a state, analyzing by machine can show sharply different trends for different equipment. Such analysis shows trends that are indicative of rigging that favors Hillary.”
2008/2012 Election Anomalies, Results, Analysis and Concerns – Sept. 2012 by Francois Choquette, James Johnson
Back in February 2012 during the South Carolina primaries, a keen observer noted that Republican candidate Mitt Romney had an unusual gain of votes in larger precincts. Analysts noted this effect violated expected statistics. Specifically, the percentage of votes in each precinct strangely increased as a function of precinct size (vote tally). The vote gain is correlated to precinct size, not the precinct location, be it in cities or rural areas. This anomaly is not apparent in other elections that don’t include Republican candidates. In 2008, Mitt Romney had the benefit of this anomaly and then the gain switched to John McCain once Romney exited the campaign. The Democrat Party elections we looked at don’t show this problem.
Further Reading:
1) Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation
By R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, Susan D. Hyde
2) Witness To a Crime: A Citizen’s Audit of an American Election
By Richard Hayes Phillips http://witnesstoacrime.com/
3) Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes, and the National Exit Poll
By Richard Charnin
4) The Forensics of Election Fraud: Russia and Ukraine
By Mikhail Myagkov, Peter Ordeshook and Dimitri Shakin
5) What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft And Fraud in the 2004 Election
By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, Harvey Wasserman
- Upcoming Dec. 2012: “Rigged”, by Dr. Cass Ingram
- Website: The Evidence: http://www.votescam.org/the_evidence
- Website: Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
These staticians seem to be pointing to studies in a circular fashion, corroborating one another and vilifying anyone criticising their method and conclusion. A decade old dilemma proving the system is corrupt and there is voter suppression on an immense scale. Welcome to the herd Axel Geijsel. Voter fraud has been obvious for a much longer period in time with U.S. Presidential and Congressional elections. Both parties want it that way to manipulate the results … democracy? NOPE!
