Reply #52: A cautious further analysis

[Faun Otter]

First of all, thank you for this excellent and well researched report. Your raw figures are very valuable. I have taken them and done a further analysis which (unfortunately) seems to indicate that machine type changes alone would not have swung the state to the Democratic column. This assumes (silly me) that there was no other jiggery pokkery with the ballot process.

I came to this conclusion by calculating the effect of giving all counties Op-Scan machines OR giving all counties Touch Screen machines. For giggles, I also checked what would happen if the counties with crappy touch screens were given OpScans and vice versa.

The formulae are simple excel stuff and I have put them in a footnote.

Results:

If all NM counties used Touch Screen machines, Kerry would have a net gain of 481 votes

If all NM counties used Op Scan machines, Kerry would have a net gain of 1076 votes

If the machines were placed in opposite counties (that is Op Scan counties were using Touch Screens and vice versa) Kerry would have had a net gain of 1557 votes.

I do draw one very strong conclusion from your set of figures and that is that the residents of different counties in New Mexico were deprived of their fourteenth amendment rights, Viz.:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Equal protection includes having voting machines that are no more nor less likely to dump your vote than the machines given to other residents of the state. Touch Screens suck compared with Op Scans. Why should someone's vote be worth 0.9735 of a vote in one county and worth 0.9947 of a vote in others? Multiplied over the whole state, it makes a darned big difference; a bigger difference than the margin of victory in some races.

Since it is obviously in the best interest of the counties of New Mexico to:

1) Ensure the least spoilage or other loss of ballots due to machine failures
2) Use the least costly machines that get the job done
3) Use machines which cause the least increase in waiting time at polling places

It must be concluded that Op Scan systems should be adopted across the whole of new Mexico and the Touch screen systems should be discarded.

This would have the added benefit that the paper ballots could be recounted by hand if there was a dispute and that random hand count audits can be employed to check the vote count and vote tabulation software is not 'malfunctioning,' as the Janet Jackson wardrobe department might term certain events.

Faun


Math stuff:
Take the average percentage ballots lost on the alternative system and divide by reported percentage loss in the county. Multiply by the actual lost votes to find out how many total votes would have been lost if the alternative method had been used. Multiply this by the proportion of the recorded vote for each candidate. This assumes (haahaa!) that there was no other source of error in the reported vote totals.

As an example, I'll use the biggest county to show why this machine change doesn't swing the state quite far enough for it to go blue:

Bernalillo Uses Touch Screens
Kerry had 0.51 (51%) and Bush 0.49 (49%) of the vote
The machines failed to count 5806 votes which represent 2.21% of the votes cast
This cost Kerry 2961 and Bush 2844 of the votes cast

If Bernalillo had used Op Scans with 0.47% spoilage rates, Kerry would only have lost 630 and Bush 605 votes with a net gain for Kerry of 91 votes.