Reply #19: A Possible Reply to The New York Times

[g9udit]

All,

I'm offering the below letter, as one possible reply to the
Friday NY Times hatchet job story on Computer Voting concerns .

The below letter has a LOT of data and information that credible
sources have posted on the Internet.

Please understand that I have not done the below research, and it is not my work, so I do not deserve or want any credit for it.

I am simply putting it together in one place.

And while the below letter has a lot of information, I want the Times to address all of these issues, rather than sweep them under the rug via the use of derogatory labels, such as 'Conspiracy Theorists' :


Dear New York Times Editorial Staff,

Below is detailed information regarding reported E voting numbers, from various mathematicians, Computer Scientists, statisticians, and other qualified people , experienced in statistical norms and acceptable levels of deviation, between poll studies and reported E voting totals for the 2004 Presidential Election.

These numbers need to be looked at and verified for their validity, and reasonable plausible explanations need to be made to account for the very significant differences between exit polls that were highly accurate in 2000, but now report a statistical significant variation, beyond the acceptable statistical norm, between exit poll results and E voting numbers in Swing States, that did not implement a paper audit trail, along with their Computer Voting machines.

I must point out that I have not had the opportunity to personally validate the accuracy of all of the below numbers.

However, since the implications to our Country are very profound, IF the below numbers are correct, in the interest of protecting our Democracy, I have chosen to make them available to you for study and verification.

I have put the below list of 8 E Voting Discrepancy Cases in order of Importance, as I see them, with what I perceive as the most critical Cases appearing first.

Lastly, I have included a lot of data here, but there is no need to read this entire document, in order to understand the significance of the arguments presented here.

Some of the underlying supporting data is included here, since it's significant and without it , it's difficult to show the magnitude of the the statistical anomalies in the reported E voting totals. In cases where the supporting data was too large to include, I have provided the URL link to it.

Just an fyi. I"m a Database Administrator, and I was a member of my College Debate team.

If you wish to rebuttal these numbers, do so with facts, and not with 'persuasion by ridicule' tactics, by using emotional labels such as 'conspiracy theory', 'kooks', 'sore losers', and other attempts to discredit an individual, because you can not discredit their facts or position via a logical and reasonable rebuttal.

The Collegiate Rules of Debate, not only disallow any and all attempts of 'persuasion by ridicule', but actually deduct one point for every attempt that a Debater made to win the debate by personal attack, instead of via facts and logic.

The originators of Collegiate Rules of Debate were wise enough to know that if you make a factual assertion, and I respond with a personal attack, then by my lack of addressing your facts, I am actually admitting that your facts are correct.

If the best 'research' that the N.Y. Times can do is to label people as 'Conspiracy Theorists' because they can not refute their facts, than the very act of having to resort to labeling, instead of providing credible evidence on how and why the people questioning the official results are wrong, only underscores the validity of the Premise that the reported Computer Voting totals contained significant errors, either of an intentional or an unintentional nature, and of a scope large enough to tip the race to Mr. Bush.

Therefore, please respond to the below findings, with a logical and fact based rebuttal, or admit that you do not know whether the Election results may or may not have been tainted.

But please don't resort to the type of labeling that we have come to expect from FOX News.

You're supposed to be above that sort of 'journalism', which does not do justice to your reading public, the Country, or the great stature of the New York Times.

So Please read on, check the validity of the numbers, and then follow your motto of reporting 'All the News thats Fit to Print.' :

I) EXHIBIT I : Dr. Steven Freeman of Univ. of Pennsylvania research paper puts the odds of exit poll statistical anomalies being off to the degree that E voting totals indicate at 1 in 250 Million

In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman, who has a PH. D from MIT and whose expertise lies in Research Methods, states :

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one.

The 12 page Research paper can be read in it's entirety at : http://www.ilcaonline.org/freeman.pdf

A brief article on this research paper can be found on The Washington Monthly magazine at :
<<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/20... >>

Professor Freeman concludes the research paper with this statement :

"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."

II) EXHIBIT 2 : George Bush's 8 Million New Votes Found - Statistical Analysis

By Alastair Thompson - Co-Editor <http://scoop.co.nz >

WHAT I DID

The raw data is below and I will post an excel spreadsheet of this online soon so people can fill in the gaps (this is really a bit of a work in progress as is the DU tradition). I picked and chose my states on the basis of where I thought it likely that the votes came from and stopped when I got to 90% of the vote difference this only took 31 states.

FINDINGS

1. Bush did not pick up many votes at all on the West Coast.. in fact he lost ground in both Washington and California. This is interesting as this is arguably where the BBV machine manufacturers have been receiving the most heat. However it could reflect a relative lack of interest in so-called "moral issues" out west.

2. The five states I picked on the basis that they are known to have lots of voting machines (and particularly Diebold machines) had a significantly higher percentage increase in bush voters than average… 25% compared to 17% nationally.

3. Likewise the swing states also had a higher average rate of new bush voters at 21%. This however might be expected as they also had much more active campaigns.

4. Among the 31 states I examined were three big democratic states NY, NJ and IL. I selected them on a hunch because a) they are unlikely to be suspected of being used in a vote rigging exercise, but b) necessary to include if you want to achieve a large across the board popular vote gain that does not look too suspicious. These three states averaged a 21% vote gains for Bush and NJ and NY achieved around 25%. However between them they contributed 1.7 million new bush votes, or nearly 20% of Bush's total vote gain.

5. The remainder of my selection of states is broadly defined as "red states", they averaged 20% in terms of voting gain for bush. Notably both Kansas and Utah achieved % gains for bush below the national average. I am guessing here but I would have thought both states were "moral issue" based voter heavy.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE VOTES

6. In sheer numeric terms Bush gained far and away the most votes in Texas and Florida, 900k and 700k respectively.

7. 60% of all Bushes new votes, 5.2 million votes, were gained in just 11 states…FL, TX. NY, OH, PA, GA, MI, NJ, TN, NC, IL

8. Add in another 8 states and you get to 82% of all bush's new votes or 7.1 million… the states are WI MN IND AL OK KY AZ LOU & MD

9. Put another way 7.1 million votes or 82% of bushes gain was achieved in states totalling 65% of the popular vote. Within these states he achieved an average vote gain of an astonishing 23%.

10. 92% of the vote gain is found in the 31 states I selected data for.

11. The rate of bush vote growth in the remaining 20 states was just 5% on average.

12. In percentage terms Florida and Georgia (both heavily Diebold equipment using states) were the standouts with 32% gains respectively.

13. In percentage terms five other states showed more than 25% growth in the bush vote, in ascending order they were Arizona, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Of these AZ, NM and OK both recently upgraded their machines to new tech machines. NJ and TN also both use computerised voting machines, albeit older models.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHICH MACHINES ARE USED WHERE - VerifiedVoting.Org\'s Verifier

<http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/index.php?topic_stri... >

RAW DATA SUPPORTING THE ABOVE HYPOTHESIS CAN BE FOUND AT :

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... >

SOURCES OF THE DATA AT THE ABOVE SUPPORTING LINK ARE :

2000 Results Via CNN <http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/ >
2004 Results Via C-Span <http://network.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/election_n...

Exit PollingReported Vote

State Kerry Bush Diff .Kerry Bush Diff Bush Gain

AR 45 54 -9 45 54 -9.8 0.8
CO 49 50 -1 47 52 -5.6 4.6
FL 51 49 2 47 52 -5.0 7.0
IA 50 49 1 49 50 -0.9 1.9
MI 52 46 6 51 48 3.4 2.6
MN 52 46 6 51 48 3.5 2.5
MO 47 52 -5 46 53 -7.3 2.3
NH 54 44 10 50 49 1.4 8.6
NJ 54 44 10 53 46 6.2 3.8
NM 50 48 2 49 50 -1.1 3.1
NV 49 48 1 48 50 -2.6 3.6
NY 62 36 26 58 40 17.3 8.7
OH 51 49 2 49 51 -2.5 4.5
PA 53 46 7 51 49 2.2 4.8
WI 51 48 3 50 49 0.4 2.6
WV 45 54 -9 43 56 -13.0 4.0

III) EXHIBIT 3: Regarding Exit polling

Historically speaking, Exit polling always correlates within 2% with voting tallies.

We need reasonable answers, or in the absence thereof, a serious investigation of the following facts:

a). In Election 2004 the only exit polls that did not correlate closely with voting tallies were in states using BBV or a combination of methods including electronic machines. <http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388 > "

Why?

b). In Election 2004, in every instance where there was significant statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the voting tallies, George W. Bush was the recipient of additional votes and never John Kerry.

Why ?

Below are just some of the numbers of the states that reported a significant discrepancy between historically
reliable Exit polls, and Reported Voting totals, with the plus factor indicating the percentage in favor of Mr. Bush :

NJ +4B NC +9B FL +7B OH +5B CO +4B PA +5B NH +8 NM +3B

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000 ... <http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000... >
<http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm >

http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news /... <http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/... >

***The statistical probability of a & b resulting from something other than random chance will be published shortly.

c.) "The last wave of national exit polls we received, along with many other subscribers, showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent.
( Please note that the below source is the New York Times )

" http://nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll .... <http://nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll.... >

Lastly, If you think that I am screaming fraud, you are missing the point .

I do not claim that the above is proof that fraud occured.

I submit that these issues should be thoroughly investigated, not in any attempt necessarily to overturn the election, but to pursue the truth which is the mainstay of any democracy and which used to be the heart and soul of news journalism

IV) EXHIBIT 4 : OHIO NEWSPAPER FINDS E VOTING GLICH GIVES BUSH NEARLY 4,000 EXTRA IN ONE PRECINCT. ARE THERE MORE LIKE THIS ?

In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry.

While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct
supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering
that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center.

The Columbus Dispatch has investigated the matter and the director of
the board of elections within the county admitted that Bush only
received 365 votes. He stated that a "glitch" occurred in the
electronic voting machine during the vote tally. This glitch could have given nearly 4,000 fake votes to George Bush if it had not discovered.

The Gahanna incident is just one confirmed mistake and was discovered by activists on the Internet. It was a fairly easy "glitch" to detect given the large discrepancy between the head count at the polling station and the votes for Bush.

Given this voting error one must ask, how many more glitches occurred that only involved tens or hundreds of votes?

In Florida, exit polling data showed the opposite of the final results provided through the state. Even more surprising are the changes in votes per party that occurred on November 2nd.

Counties using e-touch voting machines in Florida showed an average vote gain of 29% for Republicans and a 23.8% increase for Democrats, which is a quite reasonable and normal difference and to be expected.

However in the Florida, counties that used optical scan vote machines showed drastic differences.

Republicans gained by 128.45% in counties using optical scan voting machines while Democrats had a -21% loss (Yes, that is a NEGATIVE 21% ).

Some districts in Florida showed Bush gains over 400% while one, Liberty County, gained over 700% for Republicans.

These types of Gains are virtually without precedent and require a
plausible explanation.

V) EXHIBIT 5 : Major Media Reports of Major E Voting Problems by Victoria Collier, author and Editor

Below are links to a powerful documentary and several revealing articles reported by major news media exposing serious problems with electronic voting machines. This is followed by excerpts from an excellent article which explains core problems within the elections system.

Washington Post - "In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a computer."
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29190-20... >

New York Times - An article titled "Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud," presents the troubling results of a detailed study by Johns Hopkins University. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws." "The systems....could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment." "Ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.htm... >

Associated Press/ABC - "Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates."
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=220927 >

CNN - "An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus."
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.proble... >

USA Today - "Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning." "Most of the machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount". "Over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly."

<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-11-03... >

These are only a few of the many problems that we know about. How many more votes were changed or disappeared that we don't know about?

VI) EXHIBIT 6 : Why a full, unbiased Investigation is required .
From Marc Sapir MD, MPH, Executive Director,
Retro Poll, www.retropoll.org

Despite the fact that the Democrats registered far more people in the past six months than the Republicans did, and despite a huge voter turnout, with first time voters (according to Warren Mitofsky's poll) giving Kerry a 60:40 edge, President Bush appears to have increased his national vote total by 8 million votes
compared with the 2000 election.

Yet Mitofsky saw no desertion to Bush from 2000 Gore voters (90% of Gore voters stayed with Kerry and 90% of Bush voters stayed with Bush).

How can these contradictory pieces of information be reconciled?

They can't, if Mitovsky's data is correct.

So let's assume Mitovsky is wrong and there was some shift of former voters to Bush.

One possibility is that an increased rural vote went for President Bush more heavily percentage wise than it did in 2000.

However, there do not seem to be enough rural voters in the U.S. to improve that vote by more than perhaps a few million votes.

A second is that perhaps Mr. Bush uniformly made major inroads in the urban-suburban areas and lost them by a much slimmer margin this time, adding vastly to his urban vote totals as well as to rural increases.

Reviews of the actual major urban-suburban vote totals will confirm or refute this hypothesis.

A third possibility is that Mr. Bush improved dramatically in some urban areas in particular and not in others.

If such asymmetrical results were to be determinative in a few states such as Ohio,
one would have to ask the question "how did it happen?"

The more valuable approach, were there to be significant non uniformity seen across urban areas, would be to carry out a study of results comparing urban counties in key states that had used the Diebold electronic voting machines versus those that had used other methods of voting; to also evaluate the turnout and results of each of these metropolitan areas comparing their 2000 and 2004 experience both controlling for and not controlling for a shift in the
methodology to touch screen computers.

And thirdly to consider the issue of potential absentee and provisional vote suppression

If there are some urban areas with lower turnout, looking at the challenged voter experience (though this last concern is separate from the 8 million vote demographic issue).

Because neither the polls nor the demographics appear to statistically explain the 8 million vote (16%) surge for Mr. Bush in this election, the 2004 Presidential race can
not be declared final, free or fair without such studies.

They are, of course, easy to perform for people in the business and could lessen any concerns of fraud.

XII ) EXHIBIT 7 : The following exit poll analysis is from Jonathan D. Simon, an attorney and former political survey and exit poll analyst living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

EXIT POLL VS VOTE TABULATION ANALYSIS

By Jonathon Simon [email protected]

<mailto:[email protected] >

I'm working on Warren Mitofsky (head of exit poll consortium used by all of the major television networks) to see if I can get a few answers.

I can tell you that his methodology was, as the night wore on, to mix in actual tabulation data with the initial
pure exit poll data in such a way that by the time the full vote count was in, the "exit poll" would conform very closely to the "actual" vote.

The only thing "sinister" about this is that very few people knew what was happening and the publishers of the rolling data (such as CNN) continued to refer to it , erroneously and deceptively, as an exit poll, when it was no longer an exit poll but based on increasing amounts of "actual" vote data from target counties, and therefore contaminated by whatever vote counting "inaccuracies" were going on.

It was certainly not Mitofksy's purpose to have his polls act as a check mechanism against vote fraud, but strictly to develop a better and better projection of final results as more data was available and it became possible.

It is very important for anyone attempting to use his polls as part of a check mechanism to obtain data from the right time of the day, when the number of respondents was more or less complete but the contamination with "actual vote tabulations" had not yet begun.

Using Ohio as an example, I have printed out results at two times, 7:32 pm (shortly after the polls closed, when it was probably pure or nearly pure exit poll), and 1:41 am (when the poll data had been conflated with, and largely displaced by actual vote counts).

The differences are striking.

At 7:32 pm, it was Bush 47.9%, Kerry 52.1% in the exit poll, which represented a discrepancy of 3.1% from the ultimate tabulated results of Bush 51% Kerry 49% (actually I believe Bush had slightly more than a 2% lead when taken to the next decimal place, so the discrepancy was even greater), and significantly was outside the poll's supposed margin of error.

At 1:41 am, the exit poll had been "corrected" with "actual" results to Bush 50.9%, Kerry 48.6%, which of course very closely conformed to the "actual" tabulations, and eliminated the discrepancy.

This occurred without any appreciable increase in # of respondents (i.e., it was not a "better" exit poll, it was just not an exit poll at all). It's a miracle!

I have printed out what I think is some fairly pure exit poll results for 47 states (incl. DC), but missed four.

I'll append the results below, with crude analysis. It would be very useful, but I'm not sure how difficult given that so few people knew that the exit polls were melting under their noses, to retrieve the best Mitofsky data from the peak times when the exit poll was complete but no tabulated data had found its way in.

There are also the Zogby polls to consider, and perhaps others.

The media is once again blithely dismissing the "early" exit polls as mysteriously invalid, without so much as a mention that when two counts don't match up they both need to be investigated (obvious, right?).

Mitofsky himself has no inclination to defend his own polls but is willing to fall on his sword and "admit" that they were "off" to help insure, in his words, "the orderly transfer of power."

Apparently it is not much of a concern to him to whom, and it has not occurred to him that, under the current set up, no transfer of power can be possible at all before Hell freezes over, because the imcumbents control the voting machinery and will take no steps to unrig it.

I am working on either helping him see the light or at least teasing some helpful information out of him, but I'm not optimistic.

Here's some data and, as I said, crude analysis

Further note: “I examined the discrepancies between the actual vote tabulations as reported and the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll results in 47 states, incl. D.C. (in 4 statesNJ,NY,NC,VAI did not have early exit poll results available, and the later results had already been amended to reflect input of actual vote totals, which rendered them corrupt as exit polls and useless for the purpose of checking the veracity of actual vote totals).

I noticed an overall red shift (to Bush) across the spectrum of states, but the shift was significantly nonuniform.

Having divided the 47 states examined into two groups, 35 noncritical states and 12 critical or suspect states (Nebraska included because of ES&S control and prior anomalies even though not a battleground state), I calculated that the average discrepancy in the 35 safe states was a +1.4% red shift, that is the average of the vote totals in each state was 1.4% more favorable to Bush than what the exit polls predicted (= total movement of 2.8%).

In the 12 critical states (CO,FL,MI,MN,NE,NV,NH,NM,OH,PA,WI,IA) the average discrepancy was a 2.5% red shift (= total movement of 5.0%), nearly twice that in the safe states.

This in spite of the fact that the average sample size in the critical states was nearly twice that in the non-critical states and should have produced significantly more accurate results.

Further, assuming a 3% margin of error and 95% confidence interval for each state poll (the standard Mitofksy protocol, but a conservative assumption here, since the sample sizes were significantly increased in critical states), the red shift exceeded the margin of error in 4 of the 12 critical states (and equaled it in a fifth).

The chance of this occurring in 4 of the 12 states in the absence of "mistabulation" can be computed using a simple probability equation and is approximately 0.002 or one in five-hundred.

It's a relatively crude analysis and better analysis would have to wait on more complete data, but basically what it's telling us is that we can say with 99.8% certainty that "mistabulation" played some significant role in this election.

From the specific discrepancies in Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico; from the amazing voter turnout, which any analyst on truth serum will admit should have guaranteed a Kerry victory; from what we know, but the media has now chosen to forget, about how suspect and partisan the vote counting equipment is; and from pieces of circumstantial evidence, such as Bush not deigning to campaign in Ohio (crazy unless the fix was in): we can be all but certain that another election has been stolen and that the toilet has been flushed on our democracy.

Kerry has conceded. But the truth remains to be dug out to lie in the light and stink in the open air.

If we can do no more, let's at least make sure we don't rest until we have done that.

Later note: “ Warren Mitofsky says that he knew in the afternoon that his exit polls were off in nine states, but this does not sit well with me (I'd need to know how he would know at that point and, assuming he knew, why he would go ahead and promulgate them without caveat?).

Way too much work went into getting the exit polls right this time for me to just accept that they can't do as well as they were doing routinely in the 80s and 90s.

This is not, like stained glass, a lost art.