Election paranoia
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, in part because I don’t have the math. But there’s stuff circulating on the Web (so you know it can’t be wrong!) that’s giving me pause. In particular, here’s a page that graphs results in Florida counties where the Democrat:Republican ratio got inverted in the Kerry:Bush votes. Here’s the data the charts draw from. All of these counties used optical scanners.
I don’t know if the raw data is accurate, if the charts accurately reflect the data, whether this type of inversion just shows that Bush did extraordinarily well among some Florida Democrats, and whether there are ways to hack optical machines.
I refuse to become paranoid until I know the answers to those questions. Until then, I’m only suspicious enough to ask you to punch holes in this nasty little conspiracy theory.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I remain concerned that black-box voting leads to poor outcomes, whether planned or not. But I am reluctant to ascribe to Diebold et al the sophistication and subtlety that would lead to some of what’s being reported.
The voting companies would have to carefully tweak their software and have better polling data than anyone else in the world to ensure the outcome they wanted and avoid a recount. I can understand cheating with electronic-only voting with no paper trail, but when I start to see people saying that optical scan ballots are being miscounted–well, that’s a huge risk on the part of someone trying to throw an election.
It only takes one successful challenge and a manual recount of the optical-scan ballots to reveal a problem. Then a few subpoenas and the machines are discovered to consistently miscount. Then a programmer or two freaks out about 10 to 20 years or more in jail, and goes whistleblower.
It requires too many neat pieces to make it work.
There’s so much paper involved in elections — half of the ballots in Washington State were absentee, for instance — that evoting’s potential for fraud is mitigated because you’d have to have incredibly blatant fraud in the evoting machines to ensure the desired outcome. With paper ballots, there’s far too much risk to skew things enough to effect an outcome.
The eight counties in question all voted Bush/Cheney in 2000. Eyeballing the numbers (comparing #’s from 2000 with the 2004 graphs) it looks like all eight were a bit more enthusiastic in the their support in 2004. They represent about one percent of the Florida vote.
These graphs expose the fact that many southern Democrats abandoned the party in the aftermath of the Civil Rights initiatives of the 60’s. Apparently they left without changing party affiliation. Are they flip-floppers?
Can you say Zell Miller? Or Reconstruction? In much of the South, virtually all registered voters were Democrats — and local contests were decided entirely in Democratic primaries — long after those voters gave up on Democratic presidential candidates. It’s still the case in a lot of places, and we’re still seeing “first since Reconstruction” records being broken (e.g., in Louisiana this past Tuesday for U.S. Senate), as incredible as that seems. Though the transformation has been dramatic, it still takes a while to dwindle from 100% of registered voters to — well, who knows how low it can go? You will find the pattern described above in much of the South in most presidential elections since 1948.
Why not just ask for a reasonable requirement on voting systems, rather than engage in conspiracy-think? Even if there were no suspicious mimes, it seems to me you could reasonably ask for state systems to adhere to Six Sigma quality standards. While they have mixed results and fan bases in industry, they are theoretically very predictably transparent and their processes have whole sub-industries behind them.
I think there’s no way to ensure fair voting without sacraficing the privacy of who voted for who.
Either votes will be tampered with, or people will be tampered with. :(
There’s plenty of highly suspicious irregularities to make us uncomfortable about the outcome of this election, let alone black box voting or Florida’s registered-versus-polled statistics. Did you catch Keith Olbermann at MSNBC’s Bloggerman? see his 07-NOV-04 6:35pm post. (I’d link it but your robot thinks the URL smells like spam.)
Glenn,
Modeming in to insecure vote-counting servers avoids the coordination you envision.
ridiculously easy to change the numbers.