Election fraud in Ohio 2004? In Florida 2000? In Alabama 2002? In New Mexico?

[L. Coyote]

The recent thread "Was fraud really responsible for Bush's '04 "victory" in Ohio?" devolved into personal acrimony and accusations, "absolute proof or shut up" style rhetoric, and generally missing some very important points and issues. Most importantly, fixing elections is criminal and unconstitutional, irrespective of the impact on the outcome. I thought a new thread is in order, one with a new focus, and hopefully one that can retain a useful focus.

Why isn't anything being done about past election fraud and irregularities? Even Rep.John Conyers, who chaired an inquiry, seems to have forgotten the past. The conclusions in the Conyers report indicate it is imperative to do something about the problem. What is wrong? Why is nothing happening?

"... we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities
and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by
intentional misconduct and illegal behavior...."

Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio
Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, Jan. 2005.

"... it is imperative that we examine any and all factors that may have
led to voting irregularities and any failure of votes to be properly counted."

PDF of The Conyers Report: http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf

As long as everyon stays on topic, I'd say let this thread go anywhere.
But, as initial suggestions, I offer these questions:
What evidence do you think warrants further inquiry?
Which elections are the most troubling?
Which illegal activities impacted elections?
Which abuses of power require action from justice officials and oversight by Congress?
Who should be investigating for what, or should be investigated for doing nothing?

[L. Coyote]

1. New Mexico had an obvious vote counting problem

In New Mexico, why did the Sequoia and Danther E-voting equipment
fail to count so many votes? On average, 2.62% of voters did not vote
per these machines, compared to 0.46% non-votes in the Op-Scan counties.

New Mexico Election Data with a Statistical Summary and a Non-Voter Analysis.
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/xls/new_mexico_county.xls

United Voters of New Mexico - Statistical Analysis of Voting Results
http://www.uvotenm.org/info-da.html

New Mexico reacted by changing their voting system.
BUT, has anything been done to explain the past problem, to investigate the causes?

[Warpy]

5. As far as I know, there are still several cases slowly grinding

their way through the courts, being delayed by the DRE companies who keep trying to erect one stupid roadblock after another to protect their "intellectual property" against a forensic search.

Eventually, this will be settled one way or another. However, we do now have 100% paper Opti Scan ballots that can be manually counted should any sort of question arise.

17,000+ of us had our votes erased by DREs in 2004, handing Stupid a 4,000 vote victory when he should have had his ass handed to him.

He was not and is not liked in this state.

[Bill Bored]

22. And your chance of actually having an opti scan ballot manually counted is the same as:

[Wilms]

24. These misunderstanding are OUR fault.

How many voters have some version of "we do now have 100% paper Opti Scan ballots that can be manually counted should any sort of question arise" that they got from reformers talking short-hand, at best, or just plain being mis-leading?

I appreciate the full-tilt effort to be rid of DREs, but these stubborn memes are among the rewards reaped through an effort that arguably was/is a bit reckless with it's Optical Scan Evangelicalism...HCPB Fundamentalism notwithstanding..

So we've got a lot more areas that rid themselves of DREs only to implement as easily rigged Optical Scan, with a false sense of security for added charm. NC, NM, FL, and if certain activists get their way, even NY.

With "at least I vote on paper ballot" Optical Scam, bad guys can...

Rig the election.

Rig the election to miss any recount trigger.

Rig the election to hide from fixed percentage audits.

And in Florida, they can steal in near-plain sight as the "audit" catching a messed up election has a probability so low even TIA would be unable to calculate it.

-on edit-

There are jurisdictions that audit/recount elections by RE-SCANNING the ballots!

[benld74]

2. simple answers YES! YES! and YES!

[kansasblue]

3. Georgia 2002 smells.

New voting machines.

In Georgia, Democratic incumbent and war-hero Max Cleland was defeated by Saxby Chambliss, who'd avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" but ran his campaign on the theme that he was more patriotic than Cleland. While many in Georgia expected a big win by Cleland, the computerized voting machines said that Chambliss had won.

Around 1:30 a.m., White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced that for the first time in U.S. history the president's party gained seats in the House during the administration's first midterm elections. He also noted that the same Republican coup d'etat was accomplished in the Senate.

[tbyg52]

6. Yep.

Whenever I notice anyone saying "well, they can't steal it this time because the margins will be too big," I mention this case.

[L. Coyote]

8. This was a case where Diebold made extra-legal updates in Key DEM areas

Georgia switched to electronic voting in 2002. I've researched this one a bit.

The illegal work was done in two counties: DeKalb and Fulton

DeKalb and Fulton counties are the two most central counties in the Atlanta metro area.
DeKalb and Fulton counties represent over 50% of the Georgia Dem vote.

I expect this to become another focus about Diebold memory cards altering results.

[Stevepol]

9. 02 GA doesn't smell; it STINKS to high heaven.

[L. Coyote]

14. What was done in the two Dem stronghold counties was illegal. That's "criminal" and yet

nothing has been done.

[Fly by night]

17. I met Mike Gray in CA: wrote a seminal article on GA election theft 11/03 in GQ

Unfortunately I can't find a link to it online. But Mike sent me the Adobe file of the article. If anyone here wants it, PM me with your email address. It is an excellent article about the perils of paperless voting more than a year before many of us woke up.

[benld74]

4. Oh and I forgot HELL YES!

[OnTheOtherHand]

7. it's a nice idea n/t

[L. Coyote]

10. And, you have nothing to add?

[OnTheOtherHand]

11. I guess I can try to answer your q about New Mexico

The people I've talked with strongly suspect that it had to do with the implementation of straight-party voting on the pushbutton machines. People could void their votes by voting straight-party and then voting for Kerry -- or, actually, deselecting Kerry. Of course there could have been any number of problems (or "problems") with those machines.

It somewhat illustrates a broader issue here, which is that trying to understand what happened in New Mexico may not be very helpful from the standpoint of safeguarding future elections. Of course sometimes it's hard to anticipate what will be helpful. NM no longer has those machines, but I think PA still has some.

[BeFree]

12. Maybe this will help?

Get rid of all computer based vote counting systems. Can you say that?

[OnTheOtherHand]

13. "As long as everyon stays on topic, I'd say let this thread go anywhere." n/t

[L. Coyote]

15. Who are those people you cite? I'd like to talk to them more about that.

This is the first time I've heard that excuse.
Does it mean the voting machines were incorrectly programmed?

New Mexico Election Data with a Statistical Summary and a Non-Voter Analysis.
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/xls/new_mexico_county.xls

98.2% of undervoting was in 24 e-vote counties, with a mean of 2.62 undervoting.
Nine op-scan counties had 334 undervotes!!
Op-scan counties average under 1/2% undervoting.

There is a 0.45 correlation between % undervotes and % Kerry based on county data.

The Bush victory over Kerry official margin : 6,029
Ballots without reported vote for President: 18,731

[OnTheOtherHand]

16. a couple of links

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=404&Itemid=84

http://www.thelandesreport.com/SantaFeReport.pdf

The behavior I described wouldn't necessarily be "incorrect." Insane, perhaps. Well, seriously, there needs to be a mechanism by which a voter can convert a vote to an undervote if he or she really wants. But if it promotes inadvertent undervotes, that's bad.

The second report adds two other things that can go wrong with straight-party. One is that choosing straight-party and then voting for some candidate outside that party may clear all the other straight-party votes. (I don't know directly whether that is true.) The other -- and this would be huge -- is if some machines were actually misprogrammed so that selecting straight-party Democratic did not prefill for Kerry. I think we would probably have more evidence if that phenomenon were widespread, but with user interactions, it's hard to know.

There's no question that excess undervotes in New Mexico could have determined the outcome. I don't know if they did -- there's no definitive way past the ecological inference barrier -- but I tend to think they did.

[Wilms]

18. That straight party hack/error can happen as easily on optical scan...

And has.

A recent thread on the matter includes Bill Bored's "How to STEAL an Election -- for real!".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=503034

[OnTheOtherHand]

19. yup, good point

Straight-party votes can be butchered in all sorts of ways, on scanners as well as all kinds of DREs. (They make it harder to get hand counts right, too.)

[Wilms]

20. What hand count?

:shrug:

[OnTheOtherHand]

21. any hand count (or scanner count) of ballots with a straight-party option

This is axiomatic. If you have a voter-marked ballot where it's possible for candidate votes to duplicate or to contradict a stated straight-party preference, then you'll have to be careful counting the straight-party ballots, no matter how you do it.

[Bill Bored]

23. See post #22. nt

[demodonkey]

25. PA has 3,136,710 voters STILL stuck on those same two full-face machines...

...the Danaher 1242 and the Sequoia Advantage.

That's the equivalent of over THREE TIMES the total number who voted in New Mexico in 2004, that will be stuck using these paperless dinosaurs in November. In key DEMOCRATIC areas of one of the biggest swing states, with 21 electoral votes at stake.

Folks, we are potentially in huge trouble here.

And yes we CAN figure out something that will be helpful from what happened in New Mexico. We need to GET RID OF THESE MACHINES AND GET VOTER-MARKED PAPER BALLOTS, scan them, and audit them in a meaningful way.

[OnTheOtherHand]

26. except that we already know that!

I absolutely agree that it's way past time to get rid of those machines. My point was that we don't have to know any more about New Mexico 2004 in order to know that. It might or might not be useful to know more about New Mexico (if possible), but it isn't an end in itself.