I’m just saying, is all.
OK.
I think readers of this blog will know that I am a severe cynic where vote fraud claims are concerned. I think that most accusations of vote fraud are completely farcical, and I have openly rejected any claims of vote fraud being made on behalf of my favorite candidate. And in Ron Paul’s case, I still do.
That doesn’t mean something really, really weird didn’t just happen in New Hampshire.
Take a look at this post, and follow up by investigating for yourself. That’s all I’m suggesting.
If the numbers are accurate, the implications are really, really staggering.
What this clearly shows however, is where the 14% points some polls indicated Obama was leading by went. As you can see, the ballots that were counted by hand give Obama a 7.5% win while the Accuvote “count” gives Clinton a 5.5% win. The combined “shift” is 13%. Here is where the percentage points disappear that were expected right up to the casting of ballots. Not tears, not lazy young people, right here in this “shift”.
That is incredibly stupid reasoning. The facts on the linked page say this:
Hand ballot counting – 53.7% Obama 47.3% Clinton
Accuvote ballots – 52.7% Clinton 46.3% Obama
That is a six point difference between Clinton and Obama even when hand counting. There is no 13 point shift…such a thing is not logical. Even if you presume that the hand ballots were accurate and the accuvote machines were rigged, that is it becomes a six point race: 53% Obama – 47% Clinton. It’s false logic to compare a Clinton win on accuvote machines of 5% and a Obama win on hand counted ballots of 7.5% and add them? The sum of each win does not represent a polling difference between the two.
The spread between the two is what matters…7.5% and 5.5%. That’s the margin that either Clinton or Obama would have won on if one method of counting ballots only had been used. Even with those numbers, the polls were very off.
I won’t even delve into the geographical skew of the difference between counties which hand count and use the accuvote system which likely accounts for the polling disparity. This entire argument is false.
Comment by Cameron — 1/10/2008 @ 4:14 am
There’s a pretty good documentary about voter fraud that I saw a while ago called I think Stealing Freedom- it focuses mostly on the ways the voting machines can be manipulated and was really interesting.
Comment by Juno — 1/10/2008 @ 9:15 am
I’m not convinced.
Comment by Adam — 1/10/2008 @ 10:26 am
I don’t think there’s anything CONVINCING, in the sense of definitive proof, to be found here. Cameron explains some of the reasons why.
It is still a weird discrepancy, to say the very least.
Comment by Rojas — 1/10/2008 @ 10:36 am
Just a quick clarification. Vote fraud is about hordes of brain eating dead people and hispanics voting illegally so they can break down the white Christian male power structure. As you can guess, this is a scenario which worries Republican vote activists. As you can also guess, it is a hyper-inflated threat and mostly not real.
Election fraud is about election corruption when you have machines and electronic records which are easy to tamper with, being used in elections where, say, the overseeing officials are also the chairs of a candidate’s campaign. As you can guess, this scenario only worries lunatics and fringe folk and not democrats, republicans, nor the media.
And then there is voter suppression, which are tactics used to depress the turnout of unwanted voters. This involves creating lists of felons and using loose name matches to knock legitimate voters off the list; or sending voters who live in a certain precinct junk mail and then challenging their right to vote if they failed to respond to the junk mail.
Oh to go back to the simple days when it was enough to say “You cheated.” Dishonest people have been much too creative.
Comment by thimbles — 1/10/2008 @ 1:11 pm
Oh, sheesh.
There goes the neighborhood.
Comment by Rojas — 1/10/2008 @ 2:12 pm
By the way, a bit of a clarification: the Diebold machines in this case are optical scanners which read printed ballots. In other words, there IS a paper trail in New Hampshire, and Obama’s people could have asked for a hand count in any precinct about which they were concerned.
The fact that they did not choose to do so would presumably validate Cameron’s objections.
Comment by Rojas — 1/10/2008 @ 2:14 pm
Warren Smith offers some comments:
The same web page as before is now
updated to split towns into big, small, and medium. This is a good page.
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
Note that in large towns the machines DISfavor Clinton.
This would seem to show that the fraud hypothesis is bunk…
However, before you drop that hypothesis, I just want to point out that this big-towns result is based on only 1891 hand-counted-votes, which is
a small amount of data, and therefore leads to a large standard error, namely, +-2.3%. The anti-Clinton machines give Clinton -4.0% versus hand count in big towns.
So this big-town stat is NOT by itself statistically significant.
Similarly, their small-town Clinton stat is not significant either.
..
They have a similar page on republicans in NH:
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS
and NONE of the Romney discrep figures (for either big, small, or medium) are
significant by themselves.
===
This web page was pointed out on the rangevoting blog:
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS
I am not responsible for and cannot vouch for their data.
But here is the thing. Clinton had what all said was a remarkable come-from-behind victory in New Hampshire, completely off what the pre-election polls had predicted, and supposedly “saving” her
campaign.
And golly. Gee willickers. According to this data, Obama would have beaten Clinton if we’d had hand counting. The machines gave it to her. Machines systematically gave Clinton more and Obama fewer votes than hand counts.
(Approximately 207K votes were counted by machine and 59K by hand in New Hampshire.)
Is this statistical proof of fraud?
Well, IF the two (hand & machine counted) voter subpopulations were identical in every way
except how they got counted, and if the voters were all independent, and if this data is correct, then yes, this is proof of fraud.
Because the chance of an anomaly this large (7.5 sigma)
is, I find using normal distribution tables
http://www.rangevoting.org/NormTble.html
about 3.2*10^(-14) = 0.000000000000032 .
HOWEVER, voters are not actually independent (e.g. husbands and wives) and conceiveably machines just happen to be located in pro-Clinton
anti-Obama regions. So, it might not be fraud.
(Meanwhile, machines also heavily favored Romney.)
Still, it makes you wonder…
Comment by weltschmerz — 1/10/2008 @ 2:57 pm
I think voter fraud has always been with us and always will be. However, I suspect that voter fraud is far less common and/or heinous now than in other times during the life of this republic. That having been said, range voting ain’t ever gonna happen. Ever.
Comment by James — 1/10/2008 @ 7:46 pm
There is no public discourse to deal with voting fraud, which should be a cause for concern.
Comment by fred — 1/11/2008 @ 7:24 am
If only there were some sort of organization–preferably associated with a Presidential campaign–that would hyper-aggressively monitor elections for any sign of fraud, and make frequent accusations of blatant election-rigging.
Comment by Rojas — 1/11/2008 @ 10:32 am
If only all the efforts of the blogosphere were not completely void in the face of 1: Easily riggable machines 2: Unexplainable election results.
It’s clearly too big a deal to take seriously.
Comment by fred — 1/12/2008 @ 9:05 am