How to Have Fun With Elections; A Primer for Screwing Democrats

[Land Shark]

I am the guy that messed with American elections to help *, and here's what I had to consider and deal with to come up with my method of election fraud:

1. The method MUST provide a NET BENEFIT to * in terms of votes, at least in the targeted Electoral states, and is EXTREMELY LIKELY to provide a net benefit nationwide to insure popular vote victory.

2. Expectations are all formed by the immediately prior presidential election, which the 2004 election is shaping up as a replay of. I MUST stay within spitting distance of Bush2000's percentage performance, or have plausible cover for exceeding it.

3. If my method involves directly distorting/changing the actual reported or recorded election results as opposed to the suppression of voters prior to actually voting, the method MUST use actual votes as an input or else pollbooks showing the number of voters will be way too far away from actual counts of ballots. (i.e. we can't have 1000 votes in 500 voter precinct, but we can have 503 voters in a 500 vote district since officials will blithely conclude that 3 voters "forgot" to sign)

4. If computerized, the fraud method would BE EXTREMELY LIKELY TO use a randomizer of some sort, in order to avoid detection by well known mathematical tests for randomness.

5. My PREFERRED METHOD FOR ELECTION FRAUD WOULD BE VERY LIKELY to mix it up a little, providing some benefits for the opponent Kerry so long as the net benefit to the favored candidate *. The outliers for Kerry will give, if it ever becomes an issue, something for Rs to scream about, and the media is obligated to give at least equal time to Rs and usually more than that. As Florida2000 proved, having the better of the voting argument is no substitute for media control or court control, the first of which makes unequal things seem equal, and the second of which ensures victory.

6. To deal with exit poll problems, I would want my FRAUD TO MASQUERADE AS POLLING BIAS, (that age old bugaboo of all polls) thus totally cutting off any enterprising (and oh so PARTISAN) election activists at the knees with an army of very able and honest and completely noncomplicit statisticians and political scientists who will sincerely argue that the exit poll data is more consistent with polling bias than anything else.

SO, HERE'S HOW I SCREW THE DEMOCRATS AND JOHN KERRY:

(1) "EQUALIZE TO 2000" Using Bush 2000% performance as a baseline, (with widely published precinct figures) I would keep total votes constant in virtually all precincts I can affect, but make Bush2004% come out very close to Bush 2000%. In code, this means that where Bush2004% is less than Bush 2000%, then we use a randomizer to place Bush 2004% close to Bush 2000%, using the randomizer to keep variation in the data. Politically, this is always believable since the country has been prepped for a repeat of 2000. "ROUGHLY EQUALIZE TO 2000, NET AT 2000% plus 0.4%" or something like 0.4%.

(2) USE VOTE SWITCHING TO SPRAY NONRANDOM PRECINCTS. Based on the "repeat of 2000" scenario, the additional margin of victory is provided in large part by select precincts where touch screen DREs switch votes as widely reported across the USA. The vote switches not caught and reversed by voters are then "sprayed" randomly across the defined and non-random selection of precincts that the individual touch screen machine is assigned to serve. For example, a single corrupted touch screen DRE in an polling place containing 6 DREs switches votes right in front of the faces of the voters, and then in effect sprays those extra unearned votes across the 4-12 precincts it serves at that given polling location (each touch screen machine holding multiple ballot styles being one of the advertised "advantages" of touch screen DREs) for the simple reason that touch screen machine results are placed into various different precincts and thereafter recorded and reported to the public as "precinct" results, thus scattering the margin provided by corrupted machines over the entire polling place MIMICKING A LEGITIMATE VICTORY because the whole polling place "trends" Republican. Adding additional elegance and beauty to this method, vote switching via miscalibration of the touch screens can be caused by both accidental miscalibration as well as deliberate miscalibration, thus endlessly obfuscating issues of what causes the observed vote switches, the amount of the vote switching error is enhanced by pollworkers themselves who are trained to "blame the voter", and then when they finally do re-calibrate the touch screen voting machine the pollworker, who is totally noncomplicit, nevertheless destroys the evidence of what was producing the irregularity of vote switching in the first place. In any event, the extra switched votes are sprayed over the other precincts served by the same machine, and 99% of all the people think it's a "glitch" and that no fraudster would make their fraud visible (99% of all people plainly ignoring the "hide in plain sight" and "deniability" principles behind the need for every criminal to cover their tracks and leave false clues) VOTE SWITCHING AND SPRAYING NONRANDOM PRECINCTS.

AND/OR

(3) DEMOCRATIC VOTES ARE NOT RECORDED OR DELETED in high minority areas, establishing high undervote rates in those areas but which can be attributed strongly, as in Florida 2000, to dumb or apethetic voters who can't figure out machines and therefore probably shouldn't even be considered smart enough to vote. See New Mexico, where this happened a lot. DEMOCRATIC VOTES ARE NOT RECORDED OR DELETED

AND

(4) In recountable areas that will be close, TIME-HONORED VOTE SUPPRESSION TACTICS are used, along with(later on) recount suppression tactics if necessary, to first keep people from ever approaching the polls, then to keep them in long lines if they do approach by shorting heavily Democratic precincts from having adequate numbers of voting machines, and finally as necessary to spoil thousands of ballots by marking them with additional marks creating "overvotes" for President that don't count for anything. All of these suppression tactics in (4) are NON-RECOUNT DETECTABLE and NON-EXIT POLL DETECTABLE and otherwise invisible to exit polls except for the portion that constitutes deliberate spoilage after the voter successfully votes.

WHY THIS WORKS:

In the trench warfare where suppression is necessary or the balloting systems less penetrable or diverse such as Ohio, the discrepancies created are not detectable by a recount, nor are they detectable by exit polls because voters are supressed from seeing exit pollsters as well.

In high Dem areas and high minority areas, it's not believable for Bush to equal or exceed his 2000 performance because there are so few * supporters they could be counted up in some precincts after the election, so the preferred method is disenfranchisement through converting dem votes to undervotes, which is demonstrated in spades in New Mexico. <http://www.votersunite.org/info/NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport.pdf>

Methods are forced to adapt to diverse voting technologies, and when electronic touch screen voting is available with machines serving multiple precincts, outlier machines can be used to spray their margin (the rest are too close to call as a whole and don't provide margin), so the vote sprayers provide the margin of victory, but it looks like a regular "glitch" and in any event it will be (fallaciously) argued that every vote successfully switched the vote back to Kerry, ignoring all those that didn't see it, and this glitch aslo can provide the cover for an additional and larger outright theft of electronic votes without entry of the same by voters in the maximum amount that can be attributed to any plausible number of people who failed to spot and correct the "switch glitch" and are thus too "stupid" to have their votes properly counted anyway, like Palm Beach County Buchanan voters in 2000. The "vote switching" phenomenon is #5 on Time For Change's list recently and also has the merit of not being exit-poll-detectable. It OBVIOUSLY is not recount-detectable.

And, with regard to number (1), where election results are equalized to 2000 performance and this raises * performance, the discrepancies creatd by this tactic can plausibly be attributed to polling bias or "reluctant Bush responders". Because the exit polls will show more Kerry support than the actual election results which have been upgraded to 2000 numbers on a "rough random" basis, the discrepancy created is also consistent with rBr or polling bias, which posits that the Bush election results are real but the Bush voters shy (or Kerry voters ebullient). However, the same discrepancies are even more consistent with fraud that roughly equalizes on a somewhat randomized basis to 2000 performance.

Because statisticians are very self-conscious of polling bias issues that crop in essentially every poll, most will attribute the 2000 equalization fraud to the bias, not fully realizing that it is equally if not more valid to attribute the WPE (Within Precinct Error) to the "biases" of the election as it is to attribute it to the "biases" of the exit poll.

Finally, I suggested above that the most elegant way of all to screw the Democrats would be make it look as accidental and as Pro-Kerry as possible consistent with delivering the correct NET BENEFIT to *. This can be readily done by giving Kerry a few outliers as "gimmes". This will not destroy the net benefit to *, it gives one's own team something to complain loudly about in the press if there's ever an issue, and it destroys the "expected" correlation between redshift (Bush doing better in election result) and performance relative to 2000. In reality, one would only expect such a correlation between 2000 and 2004 if there were in fact two legitimate elections under politically stable and nonchanging environments between 2000 and 2004, and to be relatively non-correlated if there is instability politically or fraud in either election.

Remembering the above argument that a fraudster would wish to cover his tracks and obfuscate the issues by throwing a few bones to Kerry (making it look like Dem dirty tricks), take a look at this paragraph from the recent USCV report on the History of the Election Debates, focusing on Mitofsky's own findings on his own exit polls:

"An interesting finding from Mitofsky's scatter-plot is that it showed exit polled precincts in which exit polls had over-estimated the Bush vote share by amounts well beyond the margin of sampling
error. Although such over estimates of Bush vote share occurred in fewer precincts than overestimates of Kerry vote share, if such large discrepancies are being caused by vote fraud, it is not
confined to one party."

Thus, USCV correctly notes that there are these bizarre outlier precincts (and that there are more of them that favor Bush then that favor Kerry) but they fail to realize the NET BENEFIT principle, and instead suggest solely the possibility of TWO party involvement. While two party shenanigans are not only possible but likely (and would also help explain some Dem reluctance to push the issue of election fraud), USCV cites Mitofsky work without fully exhausting its possible significance, consciously describing it as "interesting". They should, and probably are, working on it more.

SO there you have it, how I'd screw the Dems and Kerry. It powerfully allies Mitofsky on my side along with a lot of statisticians, but without the slightest need for their complicity. It is truly elegant in how it gets pollworkers to first amplify the fraud with their delayed responses due to the assumption of a voter mistake, and then has the pollworker unwittingly destroy all the evidence with a recalibration. It destroys the correlations many intuitively expect between redshift and 2000 performance, but still provides NET BENEFIT to *. It allows me to focus my real calculations for the winning margin on the vote switching sprayers (a relatively finite number of nonrandom machines) knowing that the rest of the precincts will zero out to equal 2000 performance anyway, if this is even necessary in a race that was generally mimicking 2000 anyway. And, millions of Republican operatives who have no idea that I even exist will be working hard on their own suppression schemes in Ohio, which are also non-recount detectable and non-exit poll detectable.

None of my tactics will be exit poll-detectable except some of my sprays and tabulator grabs, but if they are exit poll detectable than I thow a few precincts the other way as camouflage and bait. None of them are recount-detectable (particularly the spraying electronic voting machines, so I will be laughing my ass off as nubile feminazi colege-age activists work hard to get a "recount" that won't enlighten them much at all except in a couple states. Most wonderfully, any one of these methods is probably not "enough to change the result" so the media won't care, but if they do, then there's plenty to counterattack with in terms of contrary inferences.

One final, and personal, note. A lot of you might think that I'm scared or that I was nervous or whatever doing all of this rigging. I laugh at that idea. You haven't been listening to the fact that our Western Civilization is engaged in a perpetual war with Islam that's been quiet a couple centuries but is flaring up again. I swear on my family, my country, and every single thing I hold dear in western civilization that these BARBARIANS will not destroy our civilization as they made so clear their intent to do so on 9-11. Liberal pansies like John Kerry will directly lead to the ruin of our civilization, which can not be tolerated.

So, I can tell you that the very most satisfying day of my life, and the happiest day of my life, was being the guy that threw the election for George Bush. I am the captain of my soul, and I have no doubt that history will vindicate my actions in the election of 2004. But in case there's any legal troubles in the mean time, it was all a glitch, and in any event you have no evidence, and voters are human, they make mistakes, you know???