New Hampshire Primaries Follow-Up Analysis 315
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica has posted a lengthy follow up analysis of the 2008 New Hampshire Primaries outcome. The article deals with the O'Dell machine/hand-count table that has been circulating through emails. It also points out the combination of factors that resulted in such an odd symmetry of numbers, although the article notes that these numbers have been corrected. The corrections still indicate a discrepancy among the tallies. The article also goes on to talk about the nature of the communities that arrived at these numbers and what/how the handcounts proceeds. This process has been inconclusive; something that does not bode well for the rest of the primaries and indeed the election itself, as only 16 states currently mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results."
Re:doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
what about the fraud with Ron Paul votes? (Score:5, Informative)
Forget the "skew", there was clear evidence of fraud in certain towns where they reported zero votes for Ron Paul, and a couple of supporters who lived in that town came forward and said "uh, I don't think so, I KNOW I voted for him, as did several friends"?
The town did a re-count and magically those votes re-appeared. This wasn't a case of "oops, we were off by a few"- every single vote for a particular candidate was GONE. What's fascinating is that all of the news stories I've read about the NH primary concerns have neglected to mention this, and far as I can tell, nobody has done jack shit to figure out why it happened.
Furthermore, if they lost ALL of the Ron Paul votes- how many other votes did they lose?
Re:Correlation and Causation (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Big Story Ignored (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Correlation and Causation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:what about the fraud with Ron Paul votes? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Face Facts (Score:5, Informative)
"random audit" does not matter. (Score:1, Informative)
Each county is supposed to have an election commission that does the random audit of one or a couple precincts. How random? Decided by the county. Where are the results? not posted at
the Sec of State of MN. Not at the County (Hennepin largest population. Did it even take place?
Maybe.
Just like "having a paper ballot" does not mean they get counted by the machines, having "audit" does not mean it is a real audit of an election. It is in the transparency of the process, secret audits are not transparent, not posting results is not transparent.
Re:doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
The Constitution defines how we elect the pres and VP. It says nothing about a nationwide popular vote. The STATES pick their allocated number of electors, and it is those electors who vote for specific people to be pres and VP. It is not even specified in the Constitution that the electors must vote for the people that the state picked them to. Some states don't even mandate that.
It is emotional hyperbole to pretend that someone is "screwed out" of winning a vote that doesn't exist. It makes no more sense to say that someone won the "popular vote" for US president than to claim that someone was elected president of north america because he got more votes for president of his country than others got to be president of theirs.
Whoever it was that started adding up the state-by-state vote counts and calling it the "popular vote" should be shot. Any school that teaches it should by decertified.
Not only is the "popular vote" undefined, it is not a true representation of popularity. People vote not just for who they prefer, but for who they think can win. If you prefer A over B and B over C, but you know that A cannot win, you'll probably vote for B to prevent C from winning. B's good showing in the "popular vote" is biased; no, rather A's low "popularity" is biased based on expected failure. A self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, in the US, there IS NO popular vote, so wasting time talking about it is just wasting time.
Re:what about the fraud with Ron Paul votes? (Score:5, Informative)
In absolute terms, it was a handful: 31. In absolute terms, it was VERY relevant: that number is 7% of the total for that precinct. I know because I checked up on that on one of the vote-watch sites that listed by precinct. I apologize, however, for not knowing how to quickly get back to that so I can post a link; I'm sure you will discover the same, however.
I don't have to tell you what adding 7% of the voters to Ron Paul's *aggregate* NH total would be, do I?
And supporting Ron Paul is great and idealistic and all, but a complete waste. He has 0% chance of winning anything, especially after those racist newsletters came out with his name on them, regardless if he wrote them.
You think this is just about making Ron Paul president? No. This is a long-term fight to move the nation in a more libertarian direction. This surge in grassroots support (compared to what libertarian-minded candidates used to get) is a culmination of all the "internet-only" support the libertarian movement built up beginning in the late 90s, as those younger voters aged, and it's only getting bigger.
The more publicity we can get for libertarian ideas, the better, even and especially of Ron Paul doesn't win. I would know. I'm a local organizer.
The news about the racist remarks worries me, of course, but I think Paul is still at the stage where "any publicity is good" esp. as he gets endorsements from those minorities who have worked with him.
Re:doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Face Facts (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/08/international.observers/index.html [cnn.com]
The story above predates the 2004 election, interesting quotes from the article are:
A quick trip over to the OSCE office of democratic Institutions and human rights reveals the following page on the monitoring of the last three elections in the US: http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/14680.html [osce.org]
It should be noted that only the UN certifies elections, and generally doesn't send observers to countries such as those in western Europe, the US and Japan as these countries have a long tradition of democracy. OSCE found the US elections to have only some minor problems, mostly to do with laws that restrict felons from voting, no national system or nation requirements (voting is at the state level), some districts having problems with provisional ballots and the presence of party election observers in the polling place being possibly to close to the voting booths. The 2006 observers drew issue with electronic voting where there was no paper trail as their single largest issue, but also discussed were provisional ballot differences, absentee voting by fax (allowed in a few states), voter identification (requirement to show ID), better training for poll workers, absence of non-partisan observers, felon voting and district boundaries (a concern with gerrymandering).
I see nothing in the reports that tells me fraud is widespread. Actually in my experience voting judges and poll workers (all volunteers) are quite ethical and upstanding. Some aren't trained as well, the best poll workers are the ones who have done it for many elections but in general the system is incredibly fair. With both parties observing not only the voting but the counting and all tasks being handled mostly by volunteers the system actually seems to be very difficult to tamper with. Although voter fraud has occurred in every election in this country (name a single election where dead people didn't vote) I've never seen a situation where ther
Re:Face Facts (Score:2, Informative)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs [youtube.com]
Really, it's not that hard to go to youtube and search for a two-word topic. In fact, easier than writing a reply to complain about not providing a link
Re:doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
Source: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/laws.html [archives.gov]
Re:Face Facts (Score:2, Informative)
I worked during the federal election in January 2006 here in Canada, and we had international observers come to our polling station.
The reason UN observers do not monitor US elections is because US officials refuse to invite them.
- RG>
OSCE sent 92 observers to monitor the '04 election (Score:3, Informative)
UN observers are usually sent to third-world nations and "flawed democracy", not countries like the US or any other Western country for the matter. So, as a matter of mact, UN observers won't certify US elections because nobody asked them to, not because they were there and refused to do it in light of widespread fraud, as your message implied.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A team of international observers will monitor the presidential election in November, according to the U.S. State Department. [...]
Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.
After Annan rejected their request, saying the administration must make the application, the Democrats asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to do so. The issue was hotly debated in the House, and Republicans got an amendment to a foreign aid bill that barred federal funds from being used for the United Nations to monitor U.S. elections [cnn.com], The Associated Press reported.
From David de Sola, CNN, Monday, August 9, 2004 Posted: 9:08 AM EDT (1308 GMT)
And their report [bbc.co.uk], on the BBC.
Re:doesn't matter (Score:2, Informative)
This is something that I have never understood about USA elections. How do non-citizens and dead people get on the voters list? And how do they stay on the list?
In Canada, the list of eligible voters is publicly available, open to scrutiny by anyone as soon as an election is called (AFAIK, at any time even if an election has not been called).
Scrutineers at election time do not just watch as the votes are counted, they can (and do) watch every part of the process. They verify that the ballot box is empty before it is locked prior to the poll opening. They watch as the voter hands his voter registration card to the poll worker, as the poll worker (usually two poll workers) verifies that the person is entitled to vote, as the poll worker (again usually two) crosses the voter's name off the roll, and as the (usually a third) poll worker hands the voter a paper ballot.
When the voter returns after marking his ballot, scrutineers watch as the voter hands his ballot to (yet another) poll worker, and watch as the poll worker puts the ballot into the ballot box.
After the poll closes, scrutineers watch as the ballot box is opened and as the ballots are counted by multiple counters simultaneously. Scrutineers watch as the tallies are then recorded.
The major parties always have people serve as scrutineers, but anyone (who is eligible to vote) can watch any part of the process. All you have to do is request ahead of time to be present. (And no, your request will not be denied.)
There is no part of the process that is not watched by multiple (dis)interested watchers. So how do dead people get to vote?
And before someone complains that this requires a lot of eyeballs, what could possibly be more important than free and fair elections that can be seen to be free and fair. If USA citizens put as much effort into scrutinizing elections as they happen as is put into analyzing and agonizing over theoretical results versus actual results versus exit polls, there would be no need for agonizing.
Re:Face Facts - they were asked (Score:3, Informative)
I believe that the U.S. government denied them permission. Too bad. They are certainly needed.
Re:what about the fraud with Ron Paul votes? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html [reason.com]
Re:Face Facts (Score:1, Informative)
Stuffing the ballot box led to lever machine based voting, where you select your choices and pull a lever to increment a tally. This has the drawback of making recounts impossible because there are no per-voter ballots.
To get around this, they invented optical scan voting, where you punch a hole or fill in a bubble to indicate your vote. This has the problem of ambiguous ballots, where some holes may be punched out improperly (see "hanging chad") or not fully penciled-in. The ballot design can also cause confusion (see "butterfly ballot").
Those problems were solved with electronic voting machines, which also have the advantage of allowing the order of candidates to be easily randomized, letting disabled voters easily vote, and making it impossible to vote incorrectly (like both for and against an issue). These machines had the same problem as the lever machines, namely that you couldn't do an effective recount.
So the latest solution is an electronic voting machine with a voter-verifiable paper trail. These have printers that are like internal receipt printers in a cash register. The problems are that the paper can jam leaving no ability to recount and the votes are stored in order, so somebody who knows the order of voters can tell how a certain person voted (the last is particularly acute in a small precinct with low turnout, where a given machine may have only 5 people using it in an election).
Being computers, all electronic voting machines suffer from typical problems -- dead batteries, lost memory cards, buggy programming, and the fact that it requires a computer tech on-site during an election to handle any problems.
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