2004 Election Weirdness Continues

I've read dozens of submissions about election anomalies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I've decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report that shows that optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry. Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters; that machines in LaPorte, Indiana discounted 50,000 voters; in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes; in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards; Lastly, precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.

Liars

It's all a democratic ploy to discredit or dethrone our duly elected Pope. The first rule of the Democratic process is: Do not talk about the Democratic process. The second rule of the Democratic process is: Do not question the Democratic process...

Re:Liars

So umm, how many electoral votes does our representative Jesus get?

A third of them, duh. You obviously don't know religion!

Who will be the first

to put me down for pointing out the glaringly obvious. Democracy is easily stolen, but I was ridiculed for mentioning that last wednesday. Dont you realize this isnt about Bush? I dont care who won! Its about E-voting removing your right to affect change in your country by making a democratic choice.

Something new?

Does anyone else get the impression that this kind of crap has been going on since day one? At least now we're paying more attention and noticing it -- that's a good thing.

Saw this earlier

The Florida Election "inconsistencies" page was emailed to me earlier. Here's what I sent to my friend in reply:

Well, it's interesting, but that's not a useful study, just a dump of a bunch of numbers. There has been at least one serious documented instance of major electronic voting machine failure/fraud in Ohio (the precinct that counted 4,000 too many Bush votes), but this isn't even an analysis let alone proof of anything in Florida.

They list number of registered Republicans and Democrats, but don't show how those same countries voted in the last Presidential election, and more importantly, they don't show any exit poll results.

Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. The best way to flag fraud is to note when the exit polls are substantially out of line with actual returns, and particularly if they are out of line in a systematic (and unpredicted) way.

Beyond that, I have several questions about these numbers shown.

While I have every reason to distrust Diebold given their atrocious history of faulty machines and rabid partisanship, it's hard to believe that a conspiracy of three vendors, all of whom sold optical scan machines to different precincts, worked together to create this fraud.

Furthermore, the most rural counties seem to be the ones that had the most radically Republican results, despite Democratic voter registrations. This just seems to be in pattern with the rest of the South - the thing about Florida as any long time resident will tell you is that southern Florida, and its urban parts in general are culturally much closer to the Northeast, while the rest of Florida is culturally much closer to the South (the accents follow the same pattern too - they speak with a Southern drawl in a lot of the rest of the state).

And registered Democrats voting Republican in a Presidential election en masse is not news to the South.

So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.

How not to write voting software

Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.

Rule #1: Do not use signed shorts to count the total number of votes.

Black Box Voting

Please watch this free 30-minute film [votergate.tv] about black box voting machines.

We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting [wikipedia.org] machines, and for good reason [cnn.com]. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 [wikipedia.org] years [wikipedia.org]. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?

Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software [scoop.co.nz]! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation [wikipedia.org] trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.

Tinfoil hats

Is there anywhere I can invest in tinfoil futures?

Sufficient condition for election fairness

Your side wins.

All count mistakes benefit Bush? None for Kerry?

Notice there are NO reports in the media of ballot count mistakes, or diebold glitches which gave Kerry votes. Hmmm Of all the precincts in the US, not one can be found to have one count mistake in Kerry's favor to report on.

16 bit number?

Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000

Somebody PLEASE tell me that that has nothing to do with 32,000 being close to the maximum value of a signed 16-bit number.

Who writes this software?

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

It's not about trying to get Kerry into office. It's about the fact that the voting system is flawed.

I believe Bush won fairly (even though I despise his policies), but I also believe we need to work on getting the most accurate vote count possible, and that's only possible when we admit there are flaws. Geesh.

Re:Oh for the love of Pete

Your guy lost. Your reported anomilies aren't going to change that. Get over it.

No.

All anonmilies should be investigated, even the ones that don't have a chance of changing the outcome.
If cheating is going on, then it should be stopped. No exceptions.
Even if it's just stupidity and not malice, it should be stopped.

-- should you believe authority without question?

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

what is being alleged is that the E-voting machines are buggy at best, registering obvious erros with no paper trail to offer an alternative counting method.

John Kerry's name is mentioned nowhere in the article. Its just about the quirks of the voting system, which should by and large be fixed. Stop being so defensive, not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.

I agree with you

...but the title of the main story in the submission is:

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

It's comments like that that put people on the defensive, when we should be simply working to ensure ways to make the machines, systems, and processes more reliable, and that a voter-verified paper trail exists.

Though, someone raised a valid concern in a previous slashdot story: if we have so little faith in our ability to oversee, manage, and use e-voting systems, what's to stop any number of groups from demanding paper recounts in almost every jurisdiction, every time. Yes, our democracy is *that important*; I'm not saying it isn't. But this is a double-edged sword: many people have alleged that poorer communities have always gotten the shaft from old, poorly working, or broken election equipment; HAVA aims to ensure that consistent voting systems that meet a certain standard are available to ALL voters - and, naturally, we chose to go down the electronic path. We trust computers with just about everything under the sun: our power, our health, our lives, our money - and we've developed reliable systems for many tasks. Why can't the same be accomplished with e-voting? Sure, if Diebold itself was counting the votes on a single central computer under their control with no audit trail, I could understand the concern. But these are literally thousands of independent, non-network-connected systems in thousands of jurisdictions, monitored by people who have been charged with monitoring our elections forever.

So, what's fundamentally different now? And yes, I'm fully aware what not having a permanent audit trail means. We should have that. But that's not what I'm asking.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

H.R.2239 and S.1980, discussed further here [verifiedvoting.org], will amend the Help America Vote Act (an act designed to ensure consistent voting systems that meet certain standards be available to ALL voters in ALL jurisdictions), such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter.

The EFF has made it easy to send an email, fax, or letter to your senators [eff.org], encouraging them cosponsor the Senate bill.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

Bush won. Again. Get over it.

I believe this. The electronic voting issues have been issues since well before this election however, and I'm not about to stop inquiring into the many documented problems just because I accept that Bush won this one any way you slice it.

As for why it takes a while for this stuff to start coming out, a lot of the detailed numbers and vote counts aren't released until at least a week or two after the election occurs. So it's not possible to find these serious errors on day 1.

I think a lot of this stuff is being overstated, like the Florida "inconsistencies", which don't seem so unreasonable to me when you correct for geography, cultural makeup, campaign time and other issues. And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable.

However, the 4000 Bush votes that mysteriously appeared in an Ohio precinct with less than 1000 registred voters is a proven and acknowledged issue - that's why this story was carried by CNN, not just some crazy blogger. And other legitimate issues will crop up, I'm certain of it. Whether anything will indicate provable, large-scale fraud, I am very doubtful, but more evidence is surely forthcoming that indicates the inherent weaknesses of many of the black box electronic voting systems that have been put in place over the last few years.

Re:What is being alleged, here, exactly?

You always talking the same shit Dave. The last article on blackboxvoting I saw you posted 10 comments all spouting the same crap. You seem to be very fired up about this topic, perhaps because you either voted for Bush or perhaps you are a closet Republican.

The big point you don't seem to get is that without an audit trail these machines are totally unaccountable. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU HAVE, so yes, even the "300M Kerry campaign" wouldn't be able to find out what really happened. This is the whole fucking point. So, please, pull your head out of your ass. You can't say with *ANY* certainty that Bush actually won.

Re:Big fucking suprise

I don't trust this government.

I hereby revoke your membership in the tinfoil hat club. The correct phrasing is I don't trust government.

Your statement implies there is/was/will be a government you trust. That thought is just plain scary.

-Charles

Re:Just guessing....

Which certainly could be true. But if they are indeed this widespread, I would have to say the election couldnt have reflected accurately what the people voted. With an election as close as this, wouldnt you feel better if they did it again and found Bush still won, rather then not approaching it, and wondering for the next 4 years...?

Re:Random noise?

It's the election not some radio receiving test, there should be no anomalies.

Re:False Alarm

There's a good discussion over at Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] about the same issue.

In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):

==========
Thanks for sharing the data. Looking at it, I don't see any indications of Republican foul play. My analysis follows.

First, I loaded your data into R from The R Project for Statistical Computing [r-project.org]:

> ohio
county reg.voters precincts evoting turnout.2004 turnout.2000 bush.swing
1 Adams 17696 35 FALSE 65.94146 60.77620 -0.00219
2 Allen 68174 139 FALSE 69.60278 65.05813 -0.03396
3 Ashland 34847 65 FALSE 69.36322 69.49464 -0.01306
4 Ashtabula 62926 127 FALSE 70.18720 60.81940 -0.01259
5 Athens 45100 69 FALSE 60.49002 53.53627 -0.06889
6 Auglaize 33094 39 TRUE 66.97891 70.44227 0.01753
7 Belmont 44452 83 FALSE 73.18231 60.26522 0.03944
8 Brown 28922 35 FALSE 67.55411 62.55611 0.00865
9 Butler 238117 289 FALSE 67.58022 64.26633 0.07879
10 Carroll 20076 26 FALSE 68.34529 65.92923 -0.01509
11 Champaign 25376 29 FALSE 71.65826 59.84996 0.01343
12 Clark 89683 100 FALSE 75.00641 65.74651 0.03348
13 Clermont 125823 191 FALSE 69.15429 62.39119 0.08463
14 Clinton 25092 32 FALSE 71.21393 63.96370 0.02330
15 Columbiana 78536 103 FALSE 61.24070 60.96343 0.01846
16 Coshocton 22679 43 FALSE 70.03836 68.79806 -0.01573
17 Crawford 29591 46 FALSE 71.95769 62.60209 0.00060
18 Cuyahoga 1005807 1436 FALSE 64.51397 58.06637 -0.43531
19 Darke 38290 43 FALSE 66.68060 65.90556 0.02968
20 Defiance 25847 42 FALSE 68.48377 64.42229 0.00557
21 Delaware 100676 123 FALSE 78.19937 69.83352 0.04064
22 Erie 55517 62 FALSE 69.65614 64.24870 -0.01385
23 Fairfield 91498 118 FALSE 72.54585 67.34156 0.00302
24 Fayette 16093 38 FALSE 71.24215 64.46000 0.00296
25 Franklin 845720 788 TRUE 60.27633 61.26558 -0.68834
26 Fulton 28561 35 FALSE 75.42103 68.82543 -0.00806
27 Gallia 23567 35 FALSE 57.31744 60.89664 -0.00163
28 Geauga 65393 96 FALSE 75.73899 68.72101 -0.03420
29 Greene 105079 142 FALSE 72.50735 67.70133 0.03101
30 Guernsey 27129 37 FALSE 59.59306 64.84132 0.00374
31 Hamilton 573612 1013 FALSE 70.88328 65.58803 -0.54742
32 Hancock 49607 62 FALSE 69.09307 66.81487 -0.00663
33 Hardin 18921 38 FALSE 68.23107 61.67072 0.00914
34 Harrison 11769 24 FALSE 69.18175 66.77524 0.00746
35 Henry 19685 33 FALSE 75.16891 69.13808 -0.00666
36 Highland 28243 31 FALSE 63.31834 63.88105 0.00927
37 Hocking 18369 32 FALSE 70.15080 65.36343 -0.01329
38 Holmes 18089 19 FALSE 60.37371 59.26876 0.00001
39 Huron 37436 55 FALSE 66.53221 58.05025 -0.01538
40 Jackson 23997 38 FALSE 57.92807 55.87854 0.01179
41 Jefferson 49655 91 FALSE 71.61615 64.12859 0.02110
42 Knox 36971 56 TRUE 71.10979 61.14969 -0.00844
43 Lake 160165 217 TRUE 73.72772 67.60981 -0.05749
44 Lawrence 41424 84 FALSE 65.30514 57.18568 0.03291
45 Licking 111387 122 FALSE 69.52517 64.26959 0.03209
46 Logan 29406 52 FALSE 70.48902 61.72690 0.00504
47 Lorain 196601 239 FALSE 69.30941 61.55434 -0.05374
48 Lucas 302136 495 FALSE 70.92137 62.36231 -0.03023
49 Madison 23477 44 FALSE 72.45815 64.42444 0.00847
50 Mahoning 194673 312 TRUE 66.50537 65.10254 0.02792
51 Marion 43323 84 FALSE 65.14092 60.71360 0.02260
52 Medina 118330 149 FALSE 70.33212 66.17253 -0.02282
53 Meigs 15205 27 FA

Re:False Alarm

You are right. The outcome of the election will never be changed. It will never be allowed to. We can't allow this to continue though. The electoral process in this country should be as close to flawless as possible.

It is time to take the manufacture of voting devices and the auditing process out of the hands of partisans. And to all of you out there saying, "Boo hoo, Kerry lost. Get over it." How is it that Democracy in America is being hijacked, and you don't seem to give a shit? I'd wager you are the true anti-Americans. You do a lot of name calling, but when the shit hits the fan you show your true natures. Sunshine Patriots. Educate yourselves, and stand up for the Constitution you so loudly claim to believe in. Stop being little automatons.

Re:Simple question

One thing to bear in mind is that more than just the presidential election was on the ballot. Lots of state and local elections may have been affected by these anamolies and may have had their outcomes changed.

Apparently, really hard.

int douche = 0; int turdSandwich = 0; if(voteFor = 'BUSH') douche++; else turnSandwich++;

You used '=' instead of '=='. If we assume that the constant BUSH is a non-zero value, then the test is always true, and all votes get counted for Bush. You've proven the point in spectacular fashion.

I mean fuck, if you can make a mistake like that in a simple one-liner, how many flaws do you think there are in a multi-KLoC system?