Reply #156: Ballot Order, Machine Distribution, and How to Fix an Election for Dummies

[L. Coyote]

Well, maybe for statisticians, but that's not as catchy! It may be difficult to follow even for not-so-dummies. Bear with me.

As posted before, remember the percent Kerry sorted by standard deviations in Percentage of Non-Votes is:

stat	< 1.5	> 1.5	County wide

mean	66.45	87.56	67.79

This made me suspicious.

There is no combination of ballots where you can directly swap Bush votes for Kerry votes across both precincts in a two ballot order location. However, if Kerry and Bush are in the same position on two orders at one location, cross-precinct voting will switch their votes. So, basically you want cross-precinct voting to occur where your opponent has the highest support. If 90 percent are voting Kerry, for every 9 votes switched from Kerry to Bush, 1 vote switches from Bush to Kerry. (Anyway, that's when both precincts cross over equally. If you can get just one precinct to cross over, say by shorting just that precinct of equipment for example, the equations change dramatically.)

With only two ballot types at a location, if Bush and Kerry swap votes in one position, from their other positions Kerry and Bush votes go to Badnarik and Peroutka.

b B d K	p --- b	B d K p	
d K p b B --- K p b B d 

These are "crawl 2" and "crawl 3" scenarios. In the first instance the lower ballot order has crawled 2 positions, the next 3. In 90 percent Kerry precincts, for every extra Badnarik vote, Kerry lost 9 and Bush gained 9.

In precincts with a 50/50 support split for Kerry and Bush, they lose equally and the third party candidates gain equally. No problem. Disqualified has no real role in the two ballot scenario that swaps Bush and Kerry votes.

Disqualified can get candidate votes from "crawl 1" and "crawl 4" scenarios as follows:

b B d K	p --- b	B d K p
B d K p	b --- p b B d K	

In these two crawl scenarios, Kerry losses votes to disqualified and Peroutka, Bush losses to disqualified and Badnarik. No Kerry votes go to Bush, no Bush votes go to Kerry. This should be detectable as equal skews in disqualified and Peroutka.

So, which "crawl" would you place in the 90 percent Kerry precincts if you had the opportunity to allocate voting machines and you wanted to skew the vote? Placing as many "crawl 2' and "crawl 3" machines as possible the two ballot type locations with highest Kerry support would shift votes to Bush. The other two deprive Kerry of votes, but do not switch them to Bush. Maybe this is for Dummies after all!!

Given this understanding (which I did not clearly communicate), I wanted to know more about the distribution of ballot orders. I found this to be the county wide pattern:

#	Ballots	Count
10	5	1
9	4	1
7	5	1
7	3	1
6	5	2
6	4	3
6	3	1
5	5	4
5	4	22
5	3	6
4	4	28
4	3	26
4	2	6
3	3	106
3	2	43
3	1	2
2	2	176
2	1	18
1	1	134

Here we see that there are 6 locations with 5 precinct and 3 ballot orders, 22 locations with 5 precincts and 4 ballot orders. I wondered why locations with 5 precincts did not have all 5 ballot orders, and why all locations with 4 precincts did not have 4 ballot orders, etc!! I wondered how they were combined--which "crawls" with which!

The post above shows the distribution numbers. That finding prompted more statistical questions (easier than checking every location).

So I asked, "What is the correlation between Bush and Kerry percentages?" Statewide in Ohio it is -0.9938, a near perfect inverse relationship, as expected without Perot. For E-voting statewide it is a startling -0.9994, as if the voting was pre-programmed. Here are the Pearson correlations for Cuyahoga precincts with high Kerry voting:

Kerry vote	> 90%	80-90%	80-60%	

Bush		-0.63	-0.76	-0.87

In precincts with higher than 90% Kerry support, the correlation drops to -0.63

Here is the precinct count and average number of non-votes:

		> 90	80-90	80-60	<60

Count 		106	59	183	155

Non-Vote	12.11	10.03	7.69	5.91

The higher the Kerry percentage, the more non-votes there are for those precincts.

So, questions remain. Next step is to have Excel count the ballot types in these categories. Meanwhile, this post.