USCountVotes: Evidence of Election Irregularities in Snohomish County, WA

[eomer]

EVIDENCE OF ELECTION IRREGULARITIES IN
SNOHOMISH COUNTY, WASHINGTON
GENERAL ELECTION, 2004

By Paul R. Lehto, J.D., Attorney at Law
[email protected]
Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, Ph.D.
[email protected]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
<snip>
• The chances that 2/3 of the vote would show a Democratic lead of 97044 to
95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the vote on touch screens would show a
Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic) as a
result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch
screen is one in 1,000 trillion! A true impossibility.
• Simple mechanisms exist for multiple voting or hacking the Sequoia touch screen
machines by single individuals, and they are further identified in the paper.
• Machines with repair histories within two weeks of the election or exhibiting
problems on election day with observed vote switching, prevoted ballots, or
freezing up performed better than the average Republican gain in the governor’s
race on election day (of just under 5%) in 46 out of 58 polling locations, and did
better than the absentee results for the same precincts in 56 out of 58 polling
locations. In the remaining two instances, electronic results were roughly equal to
absentee results.
<snip>
• Given the coincidence of observed vote switching behavior doing this very thing
with actual precinct results reporting enhanced Republican outcomes relative to
absentee paper ballots, the probability is that Democratic votes and/or undervotes
are being assigned improperly to Republican candidates and contrary to at least
some voters’ intent, and forensic analysis of the machines along with their
impoundment is necessary to rule this out.
<unsnip>

Rest of the report here.

[On the Road]

1. "Voters Randomly Choosing" to Vote by Paper or Machine?

Did voters have a choice? Because if so, it's not random. That means it's not correct to assign a probability. Democrats, for example, are much more likely to be concerned about electronic fraud this election than Republicans.

Having said that, the machines should be available for examination. I hope they are successful and are able to show fraud.

[Land Shark]

2. "randomly choosing"

means that if one assumed the actual result was correct, then put voters into paper and touch screen randomly, with 2/3 into paper and 1/3 into touch screen the chances of D having a 2000 vote lead in the (large) paper vote population and yet losing by 8500 in the (small) touch screen population are .... IMPOSSIBLE. Beyond impossible actually, since the number trillion is understated.

But, that is just the first step to show the populations are very different. Such a impossible result could be created by the Ds having an extremely heavy absentee program while the Rs have none and prefer election day. The study goes on to show many other reasons why these political reasons don't apply.

It also shows that both Rs and Ds voting for Governor form bell curves (and lots of absentee ballots are cast on election day at the polls by being dropped off, and provisional ballots are also counted as "absentees"), yet even though both parties form bell curves on paper ballots (with some natural "noise" or variation), the Rs and the Ds form TWIN PEAKED curves on touch screen voting, and the curves are smooth, which is more consistent with an artificially managed process than random voter behavior.

So, trillion means paper and touch screen are definitely different. Twin peaks means that a large force acted on touch screens that did not act on paper. The fact that one of the twin peaks coincides with the single peak on paper indicates the second peak in the twin is likely the added peak, and is smooth. This indicates that the large force that acted on touch screens did not act evenly throughout the county but unevenly (this tends to rule out TV for example), and the smoothness of the curves is at least suggestive of computerized "shaving".

These numbers "speak" to someone with experience in manufacturing quality control or mechanical engineering, like the co-author Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman. If you had bell curves in your process of manufacturing and suddenly you got twin peaks, you'd stop the assembly line immediately. Something is wrong.

So many absentee paper ballots are cast on election day that time-based differences are hard to fathom (the "late surge" for candidate R) plus the fact that the CNN exit poll showed the D candidate getting a small majority of late deciding voters.....

The study goes on to systematically show why no proffered explanations are very well founded.
the study is attached also to the Snohomish lawsuit, you can see all of them including the April 7 filed lawsuit at
www.votersunite.org

[On the Road]

3. Thanks for the Long Explanation

It also helps to see what background the author is coming from. I have a background in experimental psych (in college) and tend to take soft factors like response variables more seriously than most people from a math background, or most of the folks here at DU, for that matter.

I'm just uncomfortable with making quantitative claims when at least one of the factors is not quantifiable, in this case, choice of absentee or live voting. It's really not possible to quantify the extent, if any, of Democratic preference for absentee voting. But a disconnect like this should raise suspicions and call for a recount or investigation.

I had a long exchange with Truth is All on another thread about this. It's a matter of presentation as much as it is substance. I tend to see the "trillion-to-one odds" claims as not being helpful to the cause. I support any and all efforts to uncover fraud.

[Land Shark]

5. no attempt made to 'quantify' these factors, rather certain

evidence is presented that transcends those factors, like the performance of malfunctioning machines, which, since they are superficially indistinguishable from correctly functioning machines, can not possibly be explained by a theory of differential attraction by Ds and Rs.

[TruthIsAll]

17. NORMDIST confirmation: Prob. is less than 1 in 447 trillion...

The chances that 2/3 of the vote would show a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the vote on touch screens would show a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic) as a result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch is less than 1 in 1000 trillion.

Step 1: Calculate the MoE for a 192272 sample:
MoE = 1.96 * sqrt<.50472*(1-.50472)/192272>
MoE =0.002234852
StDev= 0.001140306

Step 2: Calculate the percentages for 192,272 and the total 284,817

Vote Group I.
Vote Pct
Dem 97044 50.472%
Rep 95228 49.528%
Total 192272

Vote Group II
Dem 42145 45.540%
Rep 50400 54.460%
Total 92545

Total Votes
Dem 139189 48.870%
Rep 145628 51.130%
Total 284817

St3p 3: Calculate the probability
We need to compute the probability of the 50.472% Democratic percentage (first 192,272 votes) declining to 48.870% for the 284,817 vote total.

The .2% MOE gave an error in the function (too small), so I doubled it to 0.4%

Probability =1-NORMDIST(0.50472,0.4887,0.004/1.96,TRUE)
= 2.10942E-15
or 1 in 474,063,118,670,578

Therefore the probability must be less than 1 in 474 trillion.

[Land Shark]

19. thanks TIA, will send to my statistician, this is the type of

debate we like.

I'm wondering what i meant when i wrote 'less than' 1000 trillion. Does that mean 474 trillion? Or 1 in 1,100 trillion? I frankly don't recall the exact number we came up with but i will check to see if the calculations are matching or at least similar.

[LatePeriduct]

4. Its all coming to a head!

Final fricking-ly USCountVotes has woken up and listened to Rodney!!!!!

He was correct the entire time, took them long enough to figure out the whole programming problem couldn't be off by that much just due to chance alone.....

"Given the coincidence of observed vote switching behavior doing this very thing with actual precinct results reporting enhanced Republican outcomes relative to absentee paper ballots, the probability is that Democratic votes and/or undervotes are being assigned improperly to Republican candidates and contrary to at least
some voters’intent, and forensic analysis of the machines along with their impoundment is necessary to rule this out."


Undervotes pre-rigged in every system, like he has always been trying to explain.

((Great blog for anyone who doesn't get how fraud can work, http://rigged-aggregators.blogspot.com))

[Bill Bored]

6. This is Land Shark's Paper

Did USCountVotes contribute?

BTW, Story County, IA had the same pattern.
Kerry won early voting and Bush won Election Day voting.
However Kerry won the county overall. The problem is that the whole state of IA was only decided by 10,000 votes and Kerry beat Bush by 4,000 in the early voting in this one county.

[eomer]

7. My apologies to Land Shark

for not noticing and giving him credit as co-author in the OP.

USCountVotes has this paper in their section called "Statistical Analyses by USCountVotes Statisticians".

[Bill Bored]

10. Land Shark is a good man. Good heart. Strong leader! Strong JAWS too! nt

[FogerRox]

13. Please rememer that a directive came down thru the Kerry

campaign to tell voters to vote early.

[Land Shark]

15. Don't forget

that there were similar directives with Republicans and Republicans historically have had advantages with absentee ballots because they always have preferred absentee voting.

more importantly, when absentee constitutes 68% of the total vote as it does here, it's hard for either side to swamp it.

even more importantly, you apparently haven't read the paper or you wouldn't be talking about the "relevance" of absentee voting. the type of analysis focuses on factors that can't possibly be related to things like who has the better absentee program: the changes in malfunctioning machines, for example.

[Wilms]

8. kick n/t

[Wilms]

9. kick n/t

[Wilms]

11. n/t

[Land Shark]

16. Very nice, where is this from? i need an icon n/t

[Wilms]

20. Jaws. The Icon.

http://www.spokaneschools.org/itsc/DeskTop/archive/Sept2003/Shark%2001.gi

Just add the letter "f" to the end of the url, and you'll have it!

Also, you can "right click" the image, then click "properties" and the image's url should be viewable.

;)

[eomer]

12. Kick for Land Shark's awesome work. n/t

[berniew1]

14. more documentation on Snohomish County

http://www.flcv.com/snohomis.html
EIRS reports and etc.

[LatePeriduct]

18. Kick

Important EIRS.