Statistical Tools For Detecting Electoral Fraud 215
RockDoctor writes "A recent paper published in PNAS describes statistical techniques for clearly displaying the presence of two types of electoral fraud (PDF) — 'incremental fraud' (stuffing of ballot boxes containing genuine votes with ballots for the winning party) and 'extreme fraud' (reporting completely contrived numbers, typically 100% turnout for a vote-counting region, with 100% voting for the winning party). While the techniques would require skill with statistical software to apply in real time, the graphs produced in the paper provide tools for the interested non-statistician to monitor an election 'live.' Examples are discussed with both 'normal' elections, fraud by the techniques mentioned, and cases of genuine voter inhomogeneity. Other types of fraud, such as gerrymandering and inhibiting the registration of minority voters, are not considered."
Re:Impossible (Score:3, Informative)
Your post is proof that you did not even look at the first figure from TFA. The irregularities are very clear in all of the figures.
Fraud (Score:2, Informative)
Gerrymandering is the creative drawing of district boundaries to ensure a desired outcome. It's not a good thing, but it's hardly fraud, since there's no disconnect between who got the votes and who got elected.
Intimidating voters is an evil thing — using extortion to influence an election. But once again, not fraud.
Not all evils are the same, which is why we have different laws to cover stealing from a bank with a forged check and stealing from a bank with a gun.
Re:Impossible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Voters' intent (Score:4, Informative)
It was a violation of "equal protection under the law" because different ballots were treated differently by different voting districts. Just so happened that disqualified ballots from liberal districts were treated a lot more leniently than disqualified ballots from conservative districts.
This is all well documented. The Minnesota Supreme Court refused to intervene because they were using a high malice standard.
That doesn't make what happened right, and I highly doubt that a fair recount would have resulted in the election of Franken.
4 million Democrats without Govt ID (Score:3, Informative)
There's 4 million people likely to vote Democrat that don't have the Government issued ID card in Pennsylvania alone, a capacity of 100,000 ID cards a month.
It's October, so you go figure whether they can get an ID card in time to cope with this law change!
Republicans 1% are scum for undermining democracy like that. How are Koch brothers any better than Putin's backers?
Republican House Leader can help you (Score:5, Informative)
Well the Republican house leader from Pennsylvania can help you out there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o32tF-S6K60
Even the Republican House Leader admits the law was intended to let Mitt Romney win Pen State.
They made a list of specific forms of ID that are valid and ones that are not. That list gives a heavily weighted bias to Republicans. So 15 million people need a new government ID in Republican states, those people are mostly Democrat and unaligned voters. They'll have to get this Id from governments under GOP control that haven't invested in the capacity to issue all of those IDs until after the elections.
That's enough to probably win Pen State for Mitt Romney. They know it, that's what it was intended to do. Yet the claim is of 'buses' moving fake voters from state to state. When they've investigated that claim, it's been found to be completely bogus. Misregistrations being so far below statistical significance as to be one of the more ludicrous claim Fox has made.
Re:and then there's this (Score:4, Informative)
Because every time you mention Democrats or Republicans in a thread like this, it tends to deteriorate into an argument about which party cheats the most, drawing attention away from the real issue being discussed.
Re:How can anyone legitimately object to Voter ID? (Score:4, Informative)
Does getting the ID require that a person provide any documents that they must pay for? How hard is it for poor people to get those for free, and how much extra work do they need to do to prove they're poor enough to qualify for the free ID or ancillary documentation? Does it require that they go to a particular place during working hours to obtain it and if so does it compensate poor people for their time and travel expenses, as well as contact their employer to ensure that they are not penalized for taking that time? Does it require that they actually have a home address/proof of address in order to obtain one, and if so, how are homeless people handled? How are voters informed of the need for an ID in order to vote, and does it take into account language issues, homelessness issues, and any other obstacle to being informed that disproportionately affects poor people and minorities?
Those are very, very real problems for people who are already on the margins, and those issues act as a massive disincentive for those people to get an ID and the people behind those laws know it.
For you and me, getting an ID is nothing more than hopping in the car, going to the DMV, paying pocket change to get the ID and then being on our merry way. Our employers won't fire us for needing a couple of hours to run that errand. For someone who is on the margin, though, it can be a goddamn epic adventure through bureaucracy that ultimately is confusing, frustrating and ultimately may end in failure and come at a cost far higher than you are aware of.
I do research with participants who are below the poverty line, and believe me, the hoops my participants have to jump through and the extra effort they have to go through to even get to the point where they can jump through those hoops is staggering.
Further, the problem that voter IDs are intended to prevent is not, in fact, a problem: retail voter fraud of the sort IDs would theoretically address is pretty much nonexistent, and is completely dwarfed by wholesale vote manipulation that is either intentional or accidental.
Finally, many voter ID laws allow some forms of ID but not others, and the allowed types of IDs in those states overwhelmingly are owned by people who tend to vote more conservatively, while the disallowed ones tend to belong to people who would skew more towards the liberal demographic.
It's a bullshit issue, it costs way more money to implement than the "problem" it solves costs society and it is intended to limit turnout of those people who most need representation in our society. Anyone who is a fan of voter ID laws is, to be charitable, misinformed at best and actively seeking to disenfranchise others at worst, and they are encouraging costly government intervention where none is needed.