Beth Clarkson's editorial in the Wichita Eagle about her attempt to verify the vote

[Stevepol]

BETH CLARKSON: ALLOW AN AUDIT OF THE VOTING TAPES

"Some Kansans appear to see my research into the integrity of our electronic voting machines as an attack on Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, and on Tabitha Lehman, the Sedgwick County election commissioner. Others appear to see my statistical analysis of voting results in 2014 as an attempt to overturn that year’s elections. Neither of these perceptions is correct...."

Read the rest here: http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article32685087.html#storylink=cpy

[malokvale77]

1. Some people...

prefer the allusion of fair elections.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

3. The illusion too!

[malokvale77]

7. Yes that too.

[sketchy]

2. K&R

[Sienna86]

4. Allow the audit!

Very interesting that the story continues.

[Stevepol]

6. What if we had an election without electronic voting machines?

Let's take MA. I would have thought that MA is already a state that deeply distrusts the use of voting machines but this is not so if Jon Simon's book CODE RED is right. For the special election of January of 2010 where Scott Brown was running against Martha Coakley for the open seat resulting from Ted Kennedy's death, 97% of the vote was counted in cyber space and absolutely no attempt was made to verify the vote. There was paper because MA uses opti scan machines that merely count the paper. So the paper was there. It just was never used to verify the results. There were no exit polls. No ballots were examined. No memory cards were examined (a quite possible way of rigging the machines), the code within the machines was never examined because everything is proprietary and CANNOT be examined.

Fortunately 3% of the vote, 65,000 votes in 71 communities, was counted BY HAND UNDER PUBLIC OBSERVATION. This 3% makes for a great sampling of the vote, a natural "audit" as it were.

Now it's not fair to compare such discrete segments of the vote without somehow making sure that the composition of the sample is about the same as the larger group being "audited." In this case, the two groups had exactly the same percentage split of Dem and GOP voters (31.3% GOP, 68.7% Dem) as determined by the previous two election cycles. So you would think that the hand-counted group would provide a very good "audit" for the whole election.

The ACTUAL RESULT: "Where votes were observably counted by hand, the Democrat Martha Coakley defeated the Republican Scott Brown by a margin of 2.8%; where votes were counted unobservably and secretly by machine, Brown defeated Coakley by a margin of 5.2%"

Extrapolate that to the country as a whole and imagine what we could have today in Congress.

[Scuba]

5. K&R