[Mb-civic] More on election: I Smell a Rat + more action opportunities

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

I Smell a Rat
  By Colin Shea
  Zogby.com

  Friday 12 November 2004

  I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the
species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four
years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are
becoming distressingly apparent.

  The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of early
exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to
the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports
bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home to
bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of
early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

  By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and
watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further
to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in
and handed us a printout.

  "Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively.
"Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry
only needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with
the world a better place. Victory was at hand.

  The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for
Kerry - Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not
even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The
pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful
mandate. Onward Christian soldiers - next stop, Tehran.

  Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

  I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me
the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida - all wrong. CNN's
results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and
independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

  Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself
quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual
results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by
identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost
3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.

  The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted
a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared
them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total
votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican:
this gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the
actual result.

  Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess
of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in
that county. They key phrase is "certain counties" - there is
extraordinary variance between individual counties. Most counties fall
more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of
Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.

  How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding
factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper
ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with
touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected
results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with
optical scanning.

  The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed
into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose
results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after
physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external
hackers.

  It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the
results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number
of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll
to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then
used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of
Republican votes per county. I compared this 'expected' Republican vote to
the actual Republican vote.

  The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in
counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties
with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange
if it were spread across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11
different counties, the 'actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than
the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50 - 100% higher than
expected. In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush
got nearly two thirds of the vote - three times more than predicted by my
model.

  Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that
wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to
give the 'actual' result.

  I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to
have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had
been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures - i.e. far more
Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I
assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans
had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.

  In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents
voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the
result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this
scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical
scanning counties - barely exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also
does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7 counties in
this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least
100% higher than predicted by the model - an extremely unlikely result.

  In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the
vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling
results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes
for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic
registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14%
voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many
Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

  In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have
gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots - not an
unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50%
of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the
county result - in four counties, at least 70% would have been required.
These results are absurdly unlikely.

  The Second Rat

  A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has
been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state
legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was
preparing an army of enforcers to keep 'suspect' (read: minority) voters
away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant
mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter
turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.

  They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for
Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the
national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered
voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who
have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

  In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in
the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot
in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty
precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote -
this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal
differences - this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was
well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000
ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of
Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we
should not be surprised.

  What to Do?

  This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two
critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has
gone horribly awry in our electoral system - again. Like many Americans, I
was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was
resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we
must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it
might appear.

  With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush
Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would
recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the
majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus
wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we
believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the
over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral
system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

  This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but
ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical
to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I
state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and
Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now
that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious
results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure
fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.

  The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one -
massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004
presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are
rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the
horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and
assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one
time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until
then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the 'Accidental President' of
2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of
seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his
brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very
heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit
this to happen again.

 
 © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org

----
Quote of The Day (from Rhino's Blog)
"We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office 
immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and 
new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded 
to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve 
our election systems and administration."
- - Congressmen John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler & Robert Wexler
Members of the House Judiciary Committee
(Letter dated 11/ 5/04 to Comptroller General, David Walker, posted on the 
House Web Site)
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504...pdf

----


WHAT YOU CAN DO
- Email your support to the 3 Congressmen who wrote the letter as quoted in 
the Quote Of The Day 
athttp://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18055

- Sign 2 petitions demanding an investigation at:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/uselect/petition.html
http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/
Monitor election fraud websites for more suggestions on how to help:
Voters Unite: http://www.votersunite.org
Black Box Voting at: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Vote Scam at: http://www.votescam.com
Want To Know: http://www.wanttoknow.info/electronicvoting

View the 30-minutedocumentary, "Votergate" at:
http://www.votergate.tv

Green Party Has Raised More Than $98,000 Towards Estimated $150,000 
Ohio Recount
By John Byrne, RAW STORY, 11/11/2004
The Green Party in concert with the Libertarian Party has raised more than 
$98,000 towards an estimated $113,000 filing fee for a recount of Ohio ballots 
in the presidential election as of 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning, RAW STORY 
has learned. The Greens have also raised their collection threshold to 
$150,000 total, to pay for associated costs. The party, which posted an appeal 
and press release at 11 a.m. Thursday, has received a flood of small 
contributions, according to Green Party Media Coordinator Blair Bobier. Their 
donation site is  www.votecobb.org...


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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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