New Mexico Was Blue: 18,659 Missing E-Votes

[ignatzmouse]

In New Mexico, the election was very close. The official canvas at http://www.sos.state.nm.us/PDF/Gensumm_04.pdf shows just a 5988 vote win for Bush over Kerry. But also in the canvas is evidence of 18,997 missing votes. If one takes the 775,301 total voters at the top of the canvas and subtracts the presidential totals of all candidates (Kerry 370,942; Bush 376,930; Cobb 1226; Peroutka 771; Badnarik 2382; Nader 4053), one will find a nearly 19,000 vote discrepancy. It has been known. The question is from where and how did the discrepancy occur.

The good thing about New Mexico is that Democrats are running the show and have nothing to hide. They are likely as perplexed by the data as anyone else. Try getting some of these numbers from Ohio and Florida, for example, and you will get a royal runaround. I know -- I've asked. But here in New Mexico we have a full canvass posted with county figures broken down by absentee, early voting, and election day precincts. It's a simple matter to simply take a county's total voters and subtract the presidential votes cast to discover exactly how many votes are missing in each county. My first guess was that it would be fairly uniform and undecipherable, just another dead-end.

I was wrong, and I was startled. There was a discrepancy, a big discrepancy, and it lay flatly at the feet of the counties using electronic voting technology. There are only 33 counties in New Mexico. In the eleven optical scan counties there were a total of only 338 missing votes, a miniscule percentage of 0.47 of the total voters. But in 22 the e-voting counties, there were an astonishing 18,659 missing votes, a 2.65 missing vote percentage. What is more, there is a strong correlation of missing votes to how strongly a county voted for Kerry. In general, the more people voted for Kerry, the more missing votes added up.

Only Danaher and Sequoia have e-voting contracts in the state and both faired poorly. Counties with predominant Sequoia e-voting returned a 3.09% missing vote rate, while predominant Danaher Controls counties came in at 2.55%. DeBaca is the lone optical scan county out of place. It only had just over 1000 votes, so either there is misplaced batch or one of their three scanners needs repair. Only two predominately e-voting counties rated below a 2% missing rate, Lea County with the highest percentage (79%) of Bush voters in the state and Valencia who went Bush (56%) and who se primary system is Sequoia's Edge rather than the AVC Advantage that dominates other e-voting counties.

Here are the full results ranked by percentage of missing votes:

County:......Kerry%:.no.miss:..%miss:..Voting System
DeBaca:......28%:.....91:......8.39%:..OpScan ES&S (3)
McKinley:....63%:.....1600:....7.20%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (115) & Edge (33), ES&S Optech (2)
Cibola:......52%:.....516:.....6.45%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (53), Sequoia AVC Edge (23)
Mora:........66%:.....175:.....5.83%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (20)
San Miguel:..72%:.....716:.....5.58%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (55)
Colfax:......47%:.....291:.....4.65%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (25), ES&S Optech (2) & Eagle (2)
Taos:........74%:.....647:.....4.18%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (52)
Rio Arriba:..65%:.....614:.....3.93%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (60)
Socorro:.....51%:.....307:.....3.76%:..E-Voting Danaher Shouptronic (45)
Guadalupe:...59%:.....87:......3.70%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (18)
Torrance:....37%:.....208:.....3.10%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (23), Seq. Edge (1), ES&S Optech (2)
Sandoval:....48%:.....1322:....2.88%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (150), Sequoia AVC Edge (25)
Dona Ana:....51%:.....1817:....2.85%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (200), Sequoia Edge (75)
Lincoln:.....31%:.....259:.....2.79%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (55), Sequoia Edge (1)
Otero:.......31%:.....562:.....2.64%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (100)
Grant:.......53%:.....359:.....2.61%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (64), Sequoia AVC Edge (26)
Sierra:......37%:.....129:.....2.44%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (20)
Santa Fe:....71%:.....1582:....2.33%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (238)
Bernalillo:..51%:.....5806:....2.21%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shoup. (1098), Seq. Edge (300), ES&S Op-Tech (16)
Chaves:......31%:.....451:.....2.04%:..E-Voting: Sequoia AVC (120), ES&S Optech (5)
San Juan:....33%:.....932:.....2.03%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (188), ES&S I-Votronic (25) & OpTech (1)
Harding:.....40%:.....5:.......0.77%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (3)
Lea:.........20%:.....136:.....0.74%:..E-Voting: Danaher Shouptronic (100), ES&S Optech (2)
Union:.......22%:.....13:......0.69%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (20)
Catron:......28%:.....13:......0.65%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (6)
Hidalgo:.....44%:.....11:......0.56%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (10)
Valencia:....43%:.....143:.....0.55%:..E-Voting: Sequoia Edge (115); Danaher Shoup. (97), ES&S Optech (6)
Luna:........44%:.....32:......0.42%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (16)
Eddy:........34%:.....70:......0.34%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (50)
Los Alamos:..46%:.....35:......0.31%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (18)
Quay:........35%:.....12:......0.29%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (15)
Roosevelt:...29%:.....19:......0.27%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (23)
Curry:.......25%:.....37:......0.26%:..OpScan: ES&S Optech (42)


Quite obviously, with the lone exception of DeBaca, we find all the op-scan counties (with a paper trail) bunched at the bottom with very few missing votes and correspondingly small missing percentage. All but two of the e-voting counties break well above them with the strongest Kerry counties generally settling near the top and the strongest Bush counties dropping near the bottom. If we break the e-voting counties down into county groups according to how strongly they voted Kerry, indeed we find a sliding scale:

Strong Kerry: (7 counties): 3.89% missing votes
Favor Kerry: (5 counties): 2.47% missing votes
Favor Bush: (3 counties): 2.24% missing votes
Strong Bush: (7 counties): 2.08% missing votes


The seven counties that were Strong Kerry look like this:

Taos: 74% Kerry 4.18% missing votes
San Miguel: 72% Kerry 5.58% missing votes
Santa Fe: 71% Kerry 2.33% missing votes
Mora: 66% Kerry 5.83% missing votes
Rio Arriba: 65% Kerry 3.93% missing votes
McKinley: 63% Kerry 7.20% missing votes
Guadalupe: 59% Kerry 3.70% missing votes

All but Santa Fe had an absurd amount of missing votes even for e-voting counties. Six of the seven round to a percentage of 4% or higher missing votes.

Now, here are the seven e-voting counties that were Strong Bush followed by the
amount of Bush's vote and the percentage of missing votes:

Torrance: 62% Bush 3.10% missing votes
Sierra: 61% Bush 2.44% missing votes
San Juan: 66% Bush 2.03% missing votes
Lincoln: 67% Bush 2.79% missing votes
Otero: 68% Bush 2.64% missing votes
Chaves: 68% Bush 2.04% missing votes
Lea: 79% Bush 0.74% missing votes

It's night and day. It is absolute proof that the higher the percentage of Bush votes, the fewer missing votes we find. I can only conclude that this is because there were fewer Kerry voters. If there is another explanation, I would like to hear it. I even thought perhaps it is an anomaly of high absentee votes that are counted differently, so I subtracted the absentee votes and recalculated the missing percentage without them. The results rank nearly identical except of course with higher values. Santa Fe, for instance, jumped to a 3.30%. Here is the breakdown of missing vote percentage for the same counties with the absentee vote subtracted:

Strong Kerry: 4.86% missing votes
Favor Kerry: 3.11% missing votes
Favor Bush: 2.84% missing votes
Strong Bush: 2.57% missing votes

Overall Kerry counties: 3.60%
Overall Bush counties: 2.67%

These results demand an explanation. The discrepancy between e-voting counties and op-scan counties is too great for it to be an aberration. The correlation of missing vote percentage to Kerry support is glaring. It strongly suggests a New Mexico win for Kerry if the votes hadn't vanished. If it is in New Mexico, county by county by county, it will doubtless be in other states as well.