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New Hampshire Primaries Follow-Up Analysis
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica has posted a lengthy follow up analysis of the 2008 New Hampshire Primaries outcome. The article deals with the O'Dell machine/hand-count table that has been circulating through emails. It also points out the combination of factors that resulted in such an odd symmetry of numbers, although the article notes that these numbers have been corrected. The corrections still indicate a discrepancy among the tallies. The article also goes on to talk about the nature of the communities that arrived at these numbers and what/how the handcounts proceeds. This process has been inconclusive; something that does not bode well for the rest of the primaries and indeed the election itself, as only 16 states currently mandate both a voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) and a random manual audit of election results."
It doesn't matter which way the popular vote goes, the electoral college elects the president... if you really wanted to screw with the election in this country, it would be WAY cheaper just to buy some electoral votes than to try to manipulate tons of ballots which won't have any effect on the actual election outcome.
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I had just submitted this other story about the Primaries in NH to Firehose: Diebold Effect Persists even after statistical removal of demographics covariates. http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/01/the_diebold_effect_hillarys_vo.php
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The article doesn't even mention Romney's unusually high numbers when optical scanners counted the vote. Oh, and I support Ron Paul, so arstechnica has called me loopy because of my political beliefs. Looks like there is one more location I won't be going for any kind of news in the future!
So, I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. But has anyone who has gotten excited about this even bothered looking for unobserved variables. I don't know say, the affluence of a community and the likelihood that they have expensive voting machines. And that affluent communities might have different voting preferences that poorer communities?
Are we going to start banning ice cream to lower the murder rate next??
no comment
It's good to know they're doing a public hand recount of paper ballots (which is exactly what they need to do), but the primary result of the New Hampshire primary is the media coverage of the winner the day after, so even if the Diebold machine count was wrong by such a huge margin, the damage is already done because the media has already crowned Clinton as the winner of the New Hampshire primary.
I don't get it. How would anyone benefit from hiding Paul-votes? From what I understand (from across the Atlantic) Paul is not a big contender anyway.
I have always found it incredibly curious how, of all countries, the United States has such big problems for vote counting. I know that problems like these are everywhere to be found, and that the US hava a very atypical election machinery (with each state presenting votes as they see fit, and other decissions based on a per-county basis, etc etc), but all in all, it should be pretty obvious that you have some serious election problem.
Down in my country (i'm form Chile), the electoral system is incredible clean and efficient. Every vote is hand counted, and the aggregated results of the election are official one or two hours after the last table closes, with a certainty of about 99.9%... and it's not a technological wonder: just ordered hand counting, and coordinated recollection of results. i know, we are a small country, but the voting population is about 4 mill people... more than NH in any case.
And in the event that there's a problem (i don't remember any in the last 20 years), we can track each ballot to the specific table where it was counted and check it all the way down to the ballot.
And Chile is a country with a reputation for chaos and disorder. Should i be amazed for our electoral system, or be amazed for how crappy the united states' system is?
in other words... with all due respect (and i mean it, it's an honet question...), why do you have such a crappy system? wouldn't it be cheaper to implement a low-tech, efficient and accountable sytem rather than risking every election with a thrillion different systems for each district and all this eternal debate about who probably got more votes?
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Example: What if the precincts with higher proportions of Obama supporters happen to be those with hand counted ballots? This is well within the realm of possibility, and from a statistical standpoint, just as likely a hypothesis as wrongdoing.
So, what's the answer? Regression. Regression not only gives you the correlation (which everyone knows is high), but also explains the significance of that correlation - how much it matters.
The result? I ran regressions of Clinton/Obama total vote percentage against hand/machine counted from the first 150 or so precincts (alphabetically) from the list of results and there were two important figures:
p-value of less than .05 (the relationship between method of vote counting and the final vote breakdown was significant).
Adj R-Squared less than 0.10 (the method in vote counting explained less than 10% of the variation in vote totals).
In plain English: 90% of the variation in results across precincts CANNOT be explained by the counting method.
Furthermore, the even with significance, the model may merely pick up variables related to the ones being used. Perhaps precincts with machine counting are wealthier, and wealthier precints trended Clinton. In that way, machine-counted precincts would skew Clinton but with no sinister activity.
My look wasn't by any means fully rigorous or conclusive, and I can't claim to be expert enough to be certain. And there are probably a few Slashdotters with greater stats skills to puncture my amateur analysis. But I think this is overblown. Let's focus on the real enemy, vote machines with no paper trail.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Americans have been conditioned to accept the narrative that exit polls can be wildly askew from actual results and suspicious results (like Ron Paul's disappearing votes) can be ignored. Properly administered exit polls are highly accurate. Now, I'm not saying that New Hampshire was rigged, but I want to know EXACTLY what happened to change the outcome from a near certain expectation. Only two explanations that I see as viable.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That's strange. He seems to be beating Thompson and Guilliani in nearly every primary. Yet, I continue to see both those candidate receiving significant news coverage. Lots of face time, and constant reports that Guilliani is going to win in Florida (as if that one state can get him nominated). What's more, neither of those two seem to have anything significant to say. Voting for Paul is a least a call for doing things that are significantly different than the status quo.
I can only say that the major media have gone out of their way to actively ignore Ron Paul. When they have provided any modicum of coverage to his campaign, it has been in the form of slander or ridicule. Why did Paul get a derisive question about "electability", instead of the policy issue everyone else was sidestepping, when he had won more of the vote than the proclaimed 'winner' of the debate?
If they'd forgotten Thompson and Guilliani, I might agree, but given the evidence, there seems to be a concerted effort to keep Paul from running at all.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Canada crosses 5 time zones, and we always have a result before midnight EST. And we don't have any electronic voting machines - every thing is done by hand. A couple of hours to tally results? Most polls report results in under an hour after closing. Maybe it's because you have that ridiculous system where you vote for 20-30 offices on a single day. We only have to count for one.
What was once true, is no longer so
I also try to live my principles, but being human, I am not 100% on that.
It's clear that there has been fraud.
Just like it was clear (and proven conclusively) that there was fraud that altered the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, and 2000 as well.
The mainstream media is completely compromised. Anybody who is waiting to hear this proclaimed on NBC wil be waiting forever (stupidly).
Many people just don't understand that this isn't a right/left dem/rep issue - The powers that be have a vested interest in ensuring that if it's democrat it is Hillary - if it is a republican it is MCCain or Giuliani.
They also want to limit mainstream exposure of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich...They certainly couldn't have straight shooters like these guys on a live TV major network debate speaking truth right next to a bunch of controlled corporatists who want to talk about the crap the mainstream media has been forcefeeding the public without making media darlings look like the cardboard kleptogarchs they are.
It's a problem waiting to happen again. Currently pollsters don't call cell phones. I, and many other young people don't own land-lines.
I grew up in a small Southern town where a lot of "simple human errors" were made at the polling place that happened to be in the black part of town. Such innocent errors are still common even today, though more subtle than in years past. In the 2004 election, representatives from the Republican party showed up at polling places in the state's predominately black colleges to make sure that each voter also had a photo ID with them before they were allowed to vote. But, thanks to what was no doubt a simple human error, the Republican representatives who were supposed to do this at the state's predominantly white colleges got lost and never made it. Those maps can be pretty confusing, you know.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
From what I understand (from across the Atlantic) Paul is not a big contender anyway.
And I presume that, as someone across the Atlantic, you got that understanding primarily from his coverage (mainly, his lack of coverage) on old-media outlets, right?
In case you hadn't noticed, Ron Paul has a very large following among those who have actually HEARD his political positions and voting record. And it is growing, doubling about every two months.
His meet-up groups alone - people actively getting together to plan and execute activities to promote him - now number over 1,500 with members totaling over 108,000 members (about 9% waiting for a group to form), more than 2/3 the US troop strength in Iraq.
In the fourth quarter he raised nearly twenty million dollars. Volunteers unconnected with the campaign staged two "money bomb" donation days, with the first breaking the previous one-day fundraising record for a Republican candidate with over four million, the second shattering that (and the Democrats' record, too) with over six million. And all this from hundreds of thousands of individual contributors and an average donation of about $100 - no PACs, corporate contributions, etc.
Meanwhile, separately, his fans raised about another half-million to rent a blimp and fly it around the US. His signs are hung and posted all over - many handmade. Banners on overpasses. Signs in yards. Clusters of people on streetcorners waving them. And so on. He wins most straw polls. He dominates online call-in polls (such as the "who won the debate" polls - which, counter to claims, allow one vote per cell phone number.) Make a post critical of him and see how many people respond to defend him. B-)
The problem, though, is that virtually all this support comes from people whose primary news source is the Internet. On the old media his name is virtually never mentioned - to the point that people have been cracking jokes about "He who Must Not be Named". The popularity of both Ron Paul and his message crosses party, age, education, race, and income distinctions. So if he got anywhere near as much exposure as the "annointed" candidates get, one could expect him to be a leader in the nomination process and the probable landslide winner in the election if he got the nomination.
But his programs, if adopted, would amount to a major defeat for both major factions currently in power. So he gets major opposition from them.
As for the US (old)media, you need to understand that they are partisans as well. "Freedom of the Press" doesn't mean that the press is unbiased. It means the government must keep hands off while the operators can bias it any way they want. The hope is that all significant opinions will be represented. In current practice not all of them are.
To oversimplify: The (formerly) mainstream media (MSM) are in virtual lockstep, carrying the "progressive" (big-government left-wing) viewpoint while talk radio carries conservative stuff but mainly the Neocon (big-government interventionist) faction. Newscorp (especially Fox News) was thought to cover the conservative side of things but has come out of the closet as being strictly Neocon and blatantly partisan. The other conservative factions (such as the libertarian and paleoconservative, to name two) are still under the cone of silence when they aren't being directly attacked or ridiculed.
Ron Paul is primarily a libertarian with paleoconservative leanings. His candadacy, and the progressively more blatant attempts of the media to squash it, is what shone the spotlight on Fox News' partisanship - especially during the debates. (Turning off his monitor earphone, and the way he exposed that, was particularly ludicrous. See the link in my current sigline for where they cut one of his best comebacks from the west-coast delayed version of last Friday's debate.) But Fox News is not alone in this unintentional humor. For instance: The New York Times real-time election result page had the othe
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