Stealing Elections through Manipulation of County Central Tabulators [View all]
I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. I’ve drafted most of the book. I am posting large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback.
This post deals with manipulation of the vote count by county central tabulators. Nobody knows how frequently central tabulator mediated election fraud is used to steal elections in our country. The concept is very simple. Monitoring it and therefore preventing it should theoretically be very simple. Yet in the 2004 Presidential election it proved impossible to adequately investigate it. Why is it that we are unable to verify whether a county’s sum total of votes from its individual precincts equals the county’s total votes?
Introduction to central tabulator mediated fraud
Every Election Day, after precincts tabulate their vote count, they send the results to a central location in the county, where the votes for the whole county are tabulated. The central locations generally receive the counts electronically by modem, and they receive a whole bunch of physical evidence (tapes from individual voting machines, memory cards, provisional ballots, etc.) as well. The machine that tabulates the county-wide vote is often referred to as the county’s central tabulator. The central tabulator reports out the county-wide vote count, along with the vote count from each of the county’s precincts. These vote counts are referred to as “post-tabulator” vote counts, which constitute the official vote count for the county, using processes that vary from state to state. These processes can be quite complicated, as indicated by an article from Verified Voting, which explains how people can monitor the tabulation process.
The vote count that each precinct sends in to the central tabulator is referred to as the “pre-tabulator” vote count. These vote counts should be posted at each precinct after the vote is tabulated. Obviously, the pre-tabulator vote count and the post-tabulator vote count for every precinct should be the same. If not, then something is wrong, since there is no legitimate reason why a vote count should change after a precinct sends its supposedly final count to the central tabulator.
Central tabulator mediated fraud may involve vote-switching, but it may not involve vote-switching. For example, if a central tabulator simply adds votes in the same proportion as the real votes to a heavily Republican voting precinct, that will help the Republican candidate even though his percentage of votes in that precinct will not change. Or, the same effect will occur if votes are subtracted from a Democratic voting precinct.
Reasons why central tabulator mediated election fraud may be more practical than vote switching on individual electronic machines
Though millions of people believe that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, I doubt that anyone but the perpetrators know precisely how it was done; nor does anyone know precisely why exit polls in 2006 predicted a much larger Democratic Congressional victory than the official election results indicated. More important, nobody knows what mechanisms of election fraud will be perpetrated in future elections.
But there are reasons, I believe, to think that central tabulator mediated fraud is a more practical way to influence a national election than is programming vote switching for individual voting machines. Few voting machines register much more than 100 votes per machine. So consider how many individual voting machines would have to be rigged to change the results of a presidential election.
County central tabulators, on the other hand, tabulate the results for a whole county, which in large counties may account for a million or more votes. So you’d have to rig the results of ten thousand individual voting machines to achieve the impact of rigging the results of a single large county central tabulator.
Another advantage of using central tabulators over individual machines to electronically rig the vote is that it is easier to cover up the statistical manipulations. When individual machines are relied upon to rig the vote, statistical anomalies are generally produced, showing up as big spikes for the favored candidate in selected precincts (unless voting machine rigging is evenly distributed over the whole county). Using central tabulators, a computer program can be written to make the theft evenly distributed over the whole county, thereby hiding the statistical manipulation in the event that statistical analyses are performed to search for evidence of election fraud.
Evidence of central tabulator mediated election fraud in recent elections
2004 Ohio Presidential election – Cleveland
As Election Day 2004 approached it became clear that Ohio was the most important key to victory for either presidential candidate. Hopes were running high in the Kerry camp because of reports of massive increases in voter registration in Cleveland, the most Democratic area of the state. These hopes were further encouraged by reports of very high voter turnout all over the state, especially in highly Democratic areas such as Cleveland, as well as the Ohio exit poll, which was trending heavily for Kerry. I later spoke with one of Kerry’s Ohio campaign workers, who told me that at the time the polls closed in Ohio, he and his fellow campaign workers were certain that Kerry had won. Exhausted from their days of continuous work, many went to bed that night thinking it was all over.
Very long voting lines in Cleveland
To verify the anecdotal reports of very high voter turnout in Cleveland on Election Day, I looked at data from the national Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS), which received tens of thousands of Election Day reports of voting complaints. This database contained 1,509 complaint reports involving long voting lines. Of these, more than a third, 548, came from Ohio. Of those, more than a quarter – 150 cases – came from Cuyahoga County, and of those Cuyahoga County reports which mention the name of the city, 46 of 75 reports were from Cleveland. Therefore, Cleveland accounted for about 6% of complaint reports of long voting lines in the whole United States, compared to only a little more than a tenth of a percent of votes in the 2004 election.
Very low official voter turnout in Cleveland
Yet despite the very long voting lines reported all over Cleveland, official voter turnout was not recorded as high. In fact, it was quite low compared to elsewhere in Ohio. According to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website, the voter turnout percent in Cleveland was in the low 50s, compared to about 70% in the rest of Ohio. This finding had been earlier reported by Richard Hayes Phillips, a statistical expert in identifying statistical anomalies, whose findings have been widely publicized. Phillips had stated that there were at least 30 precincts in Cleveland with inexplicably low voter turnout, ranging as low as 7.1%. These findings translated into a voter turnout in Cleveland of 51%.
Why the very long voting lines in the presence of very low official voter turnout?
One theoretical reason why a city can have a very “low voter turnout” despite long voting lines is that insufficient voting machine allocation causes large numbers of voters to leave the voting lines because they couldn’t afford to wait for hours to vote. This is in fact what happened in Franklin County in 2004, which was allocated insufficient numbers of electronic voting machines (See Chapter 6). But Cuyahoga County used punch card voting in 2004, not electronic voting. According to data used to produce the Democratic National Committee report (Section IV, page 3) on the 2004 Ohio Presidential election, only counties that used electronic voting were characterized by long lines caused by too few voting machines. Counties that used either optical scan voting or punch card voting did not experience that problem. In Ohio as a whole, voter turnout was strongly related to the ratio of machines per voter – because of the problem posed by too few voting machines. However, this was not the case in Cuyahoga County, which did not use electronic voting machines.
To obtain some better insight into this perplexing issue I looked at the other Ohio counties that reported lots of complaints of long lines and that used punch cards for voting. Other than Cuyahoga, there were only two such counties that were characterized by 10 or more reports. Not including the 150 reports from Cuyahoga County, of the Ohio complaint reports that involved long voting lines, 61 came from those two counties – Summit (49 reports) and Hamilton (12 reports). So, what kind of turnout was reported in these other punch card counties that were characterized by complaints of long voting lines? Summit had 76.4% turnout, and Hamilton had 75.5% turnout. Furthermore, of the other 8 Ohio counties that reported any long voting lines to the EIRS database, all 8 had over 70% turnout.
To summarize the quandary: Without the explanation of too few voting machines as a plausible explanation for the long voting lines in Cleveland, the most plausible remaining explanation is an exceptionally high turnout. This explanation is consistent with the massive efforts that went into obtaining a high voter turnout in Cleveland, as well as wide-spread observations of long voting lines on Election Day. And yet, official voter turnout in Cleveland on Election Day was exceptionally low, rather than exceptionally high.
What would explain a very high real turnout of voters in Cleveland, in the presence of a very low official turnout? That finding alone suggests foul play, since long voting lines should be associated with high voter turnout, not low voter turnout. And since Cleveland is a very heavily democratic city with over three hundred thousand registered voters, the potential for massive fraud is obvious. More specifically, votes from Cleveland precincts could have been deleted by the Cuyahoga County central tabulator after being reported there. This would have caused the apparent voter turnout from these counties to be low, in spite of the widespread reporting of long voting lines in Cleveland.
Incomplete attempt to verify the vote count in Cleveland
Some people would say to me, in response to my voicing of my suspicions of central tabulator fraud in Ohio, that that kind of fraud was unlikely because it could be so easily proven by simply comparing the pre-tabulator to the post-tabulator vote count, to see if they matched.
Because I was very suspicious of this, I tried to ascertain whether or not the pre-tabulator and post-tabulator vote counts for Cuyahoga County matched. The post-tabulator vote counts were published on the Cuyahoga county web-site, so that part was easy. I then requested the pre-tabulator vote counts from the Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, Michael Vu. Though Vu repeatedly promised to obtain those for me, he never followed through.
Consequently, I collaborated on this issue with a computer science professional, Ron (last name withheld), who worked for Ray Beckerman’s Ohio Project. Ron’s initial audit of 15 precincts (out of 1458 in Cuyahoga County) showed the post-tabulator (official) vote count to be less than the pre-tabulator count, as indicated in the poll book summaries. The audit identified an apparent vote undercount of 163 votes that resulted in a net loss to the Kerry/Edwards ticket of 140 votes (almost all of that attributed to four precincts). Ron tried to proceed with a more thorough audit of the Cuyahoga County vote, but he ran into numerous technical problems, and he was never able to complete it.
2004 Presidential Election – Elsewhere in Ohio
Another county that likely involved central tabulator fraud was Warren County. That was the site of the infamous lockdown, which allowed Republican officials to tally the Warren County vote in private. Their initial excuse for disallowing any observers to watch the vote count was that they didn’t want interference with the counting process. Later, they changed that excuse to say that the FBI warned them of a terrorism alert of grade 10 on a 1 to 10 scale. That claim was later denied by the FBI, and county officials refused to name the FBI agent whom they claimed gave them the warning. Several months later I called Erica Solvig, the reporter who broke the story, in an attempt to find out more about what happened. She told me that she wasn’t at liberty to discuss it.
Yet the Warren County results continued to stand, and without any serious investigation. It also may be significant that this event occurred when it still looked very much as if Kerry would win Ohio. Bush picked up thousands of additional votes in Warren County, compared with his performance in the 2000 election against Al Gore, and the number of voters officially increased by 30% compared to the 2000 election. By the time the Warren County votes had been “counted”, victory had all but slipped away from the Kerry/Edwards ticket.
In Miami County, after 100% of precincts had reported, an additional 19,000 ballots were reported, giving Bush an additional vote margin of about 6,000 (in exactly the same percentage of the previous votes). What makes this additionally suspicious is that Miami County reported a 20.9% increase in turnout for 2004, compared to 2000, despite a gain in population of only 1.4%. Miami County reported the second largest vote gain for Bush of Ohio’s 88 counties (2nd to Butler County), compared to his performance in 2000. Furthermore, the final official voter turnout figure for Miami County, after the additional 19,000 ballots were added, was a highly suspect 98.55%.
2002 Alabama Governor’s race
Election night, November 5, 2002, Bay Minette, Alabama
Republican controlled Bay Minette is the county seat for Baldwin County, Alabama. In 2002, Baldwin County used optical scan machines to tabulate vote counts from paper ballots filled out by voters and fed into the machines. The paper ballots themselves were saved, which means that they were available for recounting in case of close or contested elections.
The machine tabulated results from each precinct in the country were recorded on individual “data packs”, which were picked up by sheriff deputies after the polls closed, and delivered to the Bay Minette Board of Elections, which then used a central tabulator to tabulate the county-wide vote count.
The initial vote count for Governor for Baldwin County, reported from the Bay Minette tabulator at 10:45 p.m., was quite surprising to say the least. It reported: Riley (R) 30,142, Siegelman (D) 11,820, and the Libertarian candidate, John Sophocleus, 13,190. Although it was expected that Siegelman would lose Baldwin County, the margin of the loss was not believable, as he had lost Baldwin County in the Governor’s race in 1998 by only a little over four thousand votes. Furthermore, the idea of his losing to the Libertarian candidate was not plausible.
So, “someone” from the sheriff’s office went into the tabulation room to look into the matter and returned a few minutes later, announcing that the problem had been fixed. The new totals, which were reported at 11:04 p.m. and picked up and distributed by the AP, were: Riley 31,052, Siegelman 19,070, and Sophocleus a much more reasonable 937. The pickup of 7,250 votes by Siegelman was enough to give him a slim state-wide victory.
But two minutes later, at 11:06 p.m., the results were changed again, reducing Siegelman’s total back down to 12,736, a decrease of 6,334 votes, which gave the election back to Riley. William Pfeifer, the Baldwin County Chairman of the Democratic Party, was just outside the tabulating room at 11:04 when the second report, giving Siegelman the victory, was announced. But he didn’t find out about the reversal until he returned home and turned on the news.
Next morning, November 6, 2002, Bay Minette
The next morning, Pfeifer arrived at the probate court building in an attempt to speak with probate officials to find out what had happened. Pfeifer related his experience:
The board certified the election results a little after 10:30 a.m., and Riley gave his victory speech around 11:00 a.m.
Failed request for recount
Two days later, Pfeifer petitioned for a hand recount of the Baldwin County ballots. But Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor ruled later that day that the seals on the boxes containing the ballots could not be broken without a court order to do so. He claimed that his ruling was based on the Alabama Constitution. Don Siegelman contested the ruling and continued to seek a recount, which may have been the reason that he was framed for bribery and sent to prison, as testified to by Dana Jill Simpson:
In an apparently unrelated incident, Bill Pryor was appointed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush during a Congressional recess in 2004.
Statistical anomalies
It is worth noting that when the original computer error was identified, which resulted in adjusting Siegelman’s vote upwards from 11,820 to 19,070 and reducing the Libertarian candidate’s vote downward from an implausible 13,190 to 937, there were also five other races that had to be re-adjusted at the same time. But when the third and final report was issued, the totals in those five other races remained at what they had been adjusted to, while Siegelman’s vote total was the only one that was re-adjusted (downwards).
I’ve already noted that Siegelman’s vote total in 2002 in Baldwin County was totally out of line with what would be expected from his performance in 1998.
James H. Gundlach, a professor of sociology at Auburn University, performed an analysis of the data and concluded that someone with a wireless connection must have changed the tallies. He presented his analysis at the 2003 annual meeting of the Alabama Political Science Association in a paper titled "A Statistical Analysis of Possible Electronic Ballot Box Stuffing". In that paper Gundlach emphasized the reduction in Siegelman’s vote count from 19,070 to 12,736, saying that such a dramatic decrease is:
Columbia national election 1998
An intriguing example of how an apparent case central tabulator mediated election fraud was thwarted in mid-stream comes from Ingrid Betancourt’s “Until Death Do Us Part – My struggle to Reclaim Columbia”. Betancourt was running for Senator as a third party candidate, for the Oxygen Party, which she had just recently founded, in the Columbia national elections of 1998. A victory for her or her party in that election posed a great threat to the status quo powers of the country.
After viewing the initial returns, which appeared to show a clear and very surprising victory for her, and experiencing momentary elation, she goes on:
My intention is to follow the returns city by city…. We sit down in front of a terminal. It’s six in the evening, and almost half an hour goes by without a single problem. Then, the returns from Cali suddenly stop coming in. While everywhere else the figures keep rising, the ones from Cali don’t budge….
I say, "let’s go up to see the Registiador"....
Betancourt: What’s happening? Cali is no longer transmitting results.…. I want to know why….
Registrar: They’ve had a power outage, no reason for concern….
I call our people on the scene. They’ve closed the Registraduria, and they’re not letting anyone in…. There’s no outage, the lights are working perfectly….
This time I explode: “Listen here, there’s neither wind nor a power outage in Cali. It’s obviously a ploy to conceal fraud. I’m warning you, I was leading in that region before the interruption, and if my votes decline after the returns start coming in again, I’m going to inform the reporters.”….
When the results start coming in again twenty minutes later, the trend has completely reversed. I had about fifteen thousand votes in the Cali area when the reporting was interrupted, but for the rest of the night, I don’t get a single additional vote. Of course the votes for the other candidates continually increase.
Betancourt went on to win a resounding victory and become a first term Senator. A month later she was told by employees who worked in the Registrar’s office that about 42 thousand votes were stolen from her on Election Day. She notes that if she had not gone up to the Registrar’s office that day she might have lost the election.
Solutions: Identifying central tabulator-mediated fraud early
In theory, monitoring for central tabulator-mediated fraud should be very simple. A county’s central tabulator totals up the votes for every precinct in the county. A precinct’s total vote counts for each race are typically posted at the precinct for a designated period of time after the polls close. If one has access to the pre-tabulator vote counts at each precinct (the counts posted by each precinct after poll closing), all one has to do is add up all the pre-tabulator precinct counts or simply compare the pre-tabulator precinct counts with the post-tabulator precinct counts to see if they match. If they do not match, and especially if the central tabulator count favors one candidate more than the sum of all the pre-tabulator precinct counts, that means that there is something very wrong with the way that the central tabulator counted up its totals. The concept can be visualized as follows:
Precinct 1 count + precinct 2 count + ….. + precinct N count = central tabulator count (also known as “post-tabulator count” or the official vote count).
The post-tabulator counts are easy to identify, since they are the official counts and are posted on the county Board of Elections web site as soon as the results become official. The pre-tabulator counts are more difficult to obtain. Because of the difficulties I had obtaining those counts following the 2004 Presidential election (in my attempt to verify the accuracy of the vote count in Cuyahoga County) I spoke with Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite! about her experiences with this issue. She told me that persons interested in investigating the 2004 election were having a hell of a time trying to get pre-tabulator vote counts from anywhere in the country.
Thus, it appears that within weeks or days following the 2004 Presidential election, many of the pre-tabulator vote counts either disappeared, or else county Boards of elections simply refused to make them available to enquiring citizens – as my experience with Michael Vu demonstrated. Apparently there was no systematic nation-wide effort in 2004 (or any other year) by election protection organizations to obtain pre-tabulator vote counts for President throughout the country.
This raises several questions: How difficult would it be for election integrity organizations to obtain those counts throughout the nation on Election Day or later? In how many precincts throughout the country are the pre-tabulator counts not posted – either because the law doesn’t require it, or because election officials choose to ignore the law? If election integrity organizations could show a discrepancy between the pre-tabulator counts and the central tabulator (post-tabulator) counts, what legal bearing would that information have on the election results if fraud was suspected? Can election officials be required to provide pre-tabulator counts days, weeks, or months following an election, if requested by concerned citizens? If so, how could it be determined whether that information was accurate?
In the absence of answers to all these questions, I can only suggest the following: Election integrity organizations should be able to obtain accurate pre-tabulator vote counts in all precincts, and should actually do so, as a check against central tabulator-medicated election fraud. Where state or local law doesn’t allow for this, federal law should require it.
If we could do that, it would then be possible to spot central tabulator fraud almost immediately after a county announces its official results. In a close election, the election may not have even been called by then. Indentifying situations where a county’s official vote count fails to reflect the sum total from its individual precincts (i.e. where there are substantial mismatches between pre-tabulator and post-tabulator vote counts) should signal a high likelihood of election fraud. In any county where that occurs in a close race, automatic hand recounts should be required. With that kind of evidence in hand, it could immediately be made available to the candidate, who would then be a fool to concede the election if the mismatch between pre-tabulator and official (post-tabulator) vote counts seemed great enough to alter the results of the election. Such a scenario very likely could have prevented John Kerry from conceding in 2004, and very well could have altered the results of that election.
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