Report from Kansas newspaper on rigged voting machines
Hello DU
Couldn't get the link from my earlier post to work, so I'm reproducing the article here with apologies if I am violating any DU rules about quoting other sources...I'm not so good with links and things, but this article will help anyone who's interested to understand how electronic vote manipulation can be implemented at the precinct level. Pleas read! Peace, Hannah
Voting machines may be rigged
Bob Grover Emporia May 13, 2016 2
Analysis of voting records in Kansas leads a statistician to the conclusion that voting machines could be rigged. “Our democracy has been compromised,” Beth Clarkson, Chief Statistician at Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research, said in an interview last week.
Clarkson’s investigation into voting records began with the 2000 presidential election. “I actually began looking at voting after the 2000 election between Bush and Gore in Florida. I was teaching statistics at that point, and I wanted to bring in a real-world example my students could relate to, and that made an excellent choice. Votes are very simple to analyze if you’re dealing with just two parties; you can model it as a basic binomial distribution.”
She examined voting data from Ohio in 2004. “Ohio in 2004 [the presidential election] has been investigated; there have been lawsuits, and it’s pretty much a given at this point that the election was rigged. Other statisticians were exploring the data, and it was an interesting exercise. I’m a statistician, and you look at the data. If the vote was being rigged, you would expect to see this pattern of data in your errors or residuals for a model, and, sure enough, you did.”
“Then in 2012 I had an acquaintance who was running for office, and he asked me to do some survey work with him. As part of that I came across an analysis that was pretty shocking if it was true. That analysis is called a ‘cumulative vote share analysis’ It’s abbreviated ‘CVS analysis.’”
Clarkson began sampling voting records in Kansas and detected a consistent pattern. “Something was going on that was not explained,” she said. “I started acting as my own attorney in 2013 to get access to the 2010 records.” County election officials told Clarkson she was not allowed to see the voting data. She then filed a lawsuit requesting access to voting records from her precinct. “They denied me because they said I couldn’t identify a precinct because it might compromise voter confidentiality,” Clarkson said. “It’s kind of a stretch, but it has plausibility to it; that’s why the judge denied my request.”
Following the 2014 election, she requested a recount on the ballot question that year because only candidates are allowed to submit a request to recount races for public office. “What I was looking for is called the real time audit log — RTAL,” Clarkson said. “It’s a paper tape that records every keystroke, every button that is pushed on the machine. It’s so they can do an audit and make sure that the machines are counting correctly. No one ever looks at these. They made it essentially illegal for anyone to look at them. The election officials we have never look at the records. So we’re completely in the dark about how our votes are being counted. There’s no check on it by any independent source. It’s really disturbing.”
Her subsequent efforts to access voting records for the 2014 ballot question have been stymied. “I filed suit in February 2015 and named Derek Schmidt as the defendant, and he wasn’t the right person to sue. A month later I had a hearing with the judge, who was nice enough to let me refile, so I didn’t have to pay the cost of filing a lawsuit a second time. On April 1, I filed against [Secretary of State] Kris Kobach and Tabatha Lehman [Sedgwick County Election Commissioner]. Kobach ignored me for months. I had to have a subpoena delivered by the sheriff’s office and have him acknowledge that he had received it. Then he responded, asking the judge to dismiss it and to charge me money for going through the trouble of having to defend himself.”
The 2014 governor’s race also shows suspicious polling results. “If you look at the cumulative vote share analysis for the governor’s race in Kansas, it shows a distinctive pattern of getting a higher and higher percentage of the vote as the precincts get larger. This is the pattern that is indicative of election rigging. The larger the number of votes in a precinct, the more votes can be flipped or added. For vote flipping with machines, it’s incredibly easy to program and input a higher percentage of the vote as the precinct has more and more votes cast in it. That’s exactly the pattern you see in the data.”
Clarkson’s experiences reveal an election system that lacks transparency and accountability. “I just want to know that our votes are being counted properly,” she said. “I have the background and the credentials to make a professional assessment, and my professional assessment is we can’t trust the reported results.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
