The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud

cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."

Comments

Re:He Won!

[Chris Mattern]

The problem I see with this being some kind of fraud - is what kind of idiot would choose, as their puppet, this person.

The kind of "idiot" who wants a Democratic candidate that's sure to lose. The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.

Re:Voting machine = Perpetual Motion machine

[JWSmythe]

I had an in-depth discussion with several people years ago about doing electronic voting. That was before the whole electronic voting fiasco started.

On the site that I was the Sr. SysAdmin for, and I did a good bit of programming for, it had a voting system. The original programmer couldn't handle the number of votes coming in, so he randomly took 1 in 10 votes and counted it. Sampling is fine and dandy, but in my world I like completely accurate numbers. The final system stayed in place for years. It very typically maintained millions of votes for thousands of items. It had some primitive components, but that was by design. The votes were stored in flat files, as it would bog down the database server trying to insert the votes in real time. The end user submitted their vote, and it was counted immediately (like milliseconds). The entire vote database was retabulated every 15 minutes. Two people had root access to the server, and it required root access to be able to view the voting information.

In that system, it wasn't a simple "pick a candidate". It was a scoring system (1 to 5) for the item being voted on. For years, one lonely dual 400Mhz machine with 512Mb RAM handled the tabulation and reporting. We did on occasion have someone question the results. It was usually on something that they were responsible for. "Why did my score drop from 4.5 to 3 in a hour?" It was simply that as the voting numbers rolled in, it adjusted their score. The preliminary numbers were favorable, but subsequent votes weren't so favorable. I could generate reports off of it for that specific item (it took about 10 seconds), where you could see the votes, and how it adjusted the score.

After a while, we had more robust equipment, and I began storing the voting information in a database. A replica of the database was used for tabulation, so the tabulation machine didn't slow down the vote recording process. That, and a better tabulation machine, brought processing tens of millions of votes down from 5 minutes to less than 1 minute.

So we talked about what else we could do with such a system. Real political voting could be managed in such a way. We ran into the same problems that are being questioned with the voting machines in use. Only two people with no interest in the outcome of the voting had access to the system. To manipulate the votes would be a very cumbersome task (by design). What if we did the voting for real politics.

Problem 1) How would we prove to the voting public that the people running the servers had absolutely no interest in manipulating the votes. There's no way to prove that.

Problem 2) How could we provide for anonymity of the voters. We stored the IP and identifying information with the votes, so we could eliminate voting fraud. Those who voted multiple times on the same item were categorically eliminated from all voting. Their records were stored, but ignored for tabulation. Real political voting requires anonymity. We could provide pseudo-anonymity by storing an ID number with the vote, that would associate with the voters registration. It would then be traceable back to the voter, which is illegal/immoral/just bad. For our application, no one cared.

Problem 3) How would the general public know that our tabulation program gave an honest result. When the votes don't go your way, people assume there had been some tampering with the results. Really, it would have been easy to lower votes ($vote = $vote -1), and make someone score poorly. Who would you trust more, a couple computer experts, or the government. I know I don't trust the later, but the general voting public wouldn't know if we were trustworthy. If presented with $100 million in cash, who's to say we wouldn't subtly adjust the results in favor of the group who paid us. Again, I believe in honesty in voting, but the general public doesn't know I won't accep

Re:Open Primary

[cappp]

That point is actually made in the originally cited FiveThirtyEight post and then somewhat undermined.

The Republican crossover theory debunked. In addition to many smart comments from 538 readers to the previous post on the SC race, I received an email from one particularly astute reader named Harrison Brown. Complete with an excel spreadsheet to back up his conclusions, Brown basically argues that there's neither any logic to, nor statistical evidence to support, the idea of Republicans crossing over to infiltrate the Democratic primary. Here are the key sections from his email to me, verbatim:

1. Suppose people were being brought into the Democratic-primary voting pool (from unregistered voters, the Republican faithful, or wherever) for the sole purpose of voting for Greene. Imagine a variable encapsulating the proportion of primary voters in each county who are Greene partisans; this (hidden) variable ought to be strongly positively correlated with both Greene's final results and with the participation rate in each county. In particular, this implies that Greene's vote share and the participation rate, both of which we can measure, would be correlated. But this is not the case -- under either linear or rank correlation! The R-squared and rho-squared are both effectively 0.
2. Even if that effect didn't show up, there should still be other signs. For instance, we can see if there are any counties where turnout for the Democratic primary exceeded the number of votes Barack Obama received in 2008; those would be prime suspects for Republican influence. And, in fact, there are three such counties: Hampton, Lee, and Union. But these are all fairly small counties where McCain/Palin received under 30% of the vote -- hardly Republican-dominated...
A more robust analysis of turnout levels reveals similar patterns. Although I didn't collect data for Republican voters (except for the McCain vote share), I came up with a rough estimate of GOP voters in 2008 by assuming the two-party share was 100% in each county. Running a linear regression to predict the number of Democratic primary voters from the number of votes Obama and McCain received, we find that the McCain raw vote total is statistically significant--but it has a negative coefficient. If anything, this points to voter suppression (no real surprises) rather than ballot box stuffing.
3. Finally, there's the simple question of where the Republican voters would have come from! From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high, which seems more-or-less corroborated by what Google's told me. But barring widespread voter fraud and/or corruption by local election officials, high turnout in the GOP primary should be incompatible with infiltration into the Democratic primary.
In conclusion, while the voting patterns in the D-Senate primary are strange and may not be totally legitimate, they don't bear the expected hallmarks that would arise in the case of a Republican plant.

With all that now added to the record, so to speak, how does the matter now stand?

Well, I think it's safe to say that the third possibility I raised in the previous post--GOP cross-primary infiltration--can be eliminated. There doesn't seem to be any direct or circumstantial evidence for that, and there were sufficient motives to participate in the very contentious GOP gubernatorial primary (especially with Nikki Haley running). So we can almost certainly eliminate the idea that there was a coordinated GOP effort to get Republican and/or conservative voters to pick up Democratic ballots with the intent of selecting Greene as DeMint's general election opponent.

Re:Voting machine = Perpetual Motion machine

[ultranova]

How is it impossible to build a voting machine again? I have quite a bit of experience with secure systems, and while I grant you that extant voting machine makers need to be dragged out and shot, I don't see any evidence to conclude what you do.

It's possible to make a ballot-based voting system that's tamper-proof and simple enough that Joe Voter can understand it. It's not possible to build a voting machine that's tamper-proof and simple enough for Joe to understand, which means that Joe has to take your word on blind faith, and, well... it's always possible to get "experts" to testify for the quality of your product if you pay them enough.

Apart from this, hand-counting votes happens in the open, while a voting machine is a black box. Even if you had sufficient intelligence and expertize to understand how it works, you have no way to know whether a particular voting machine actually works the way you think it does. So even Joe Genius can't really trust them, and has to take their trustworthiness on blind faith.

Once people can reasonably suspect that any election that didn't give the results they wanted was rigged, and that any future election might be as well, democracy is dead. And that means return to violence as the only effective method people can influence their higher-ups.

Re:He Won!

[Kierthos]

Safe Republican seat? Yes and no.

He won his seat in 2004 by around 9%.

Back in December of 2009, he had a 9% lead against a generic Democrat. That's not a huge lead against a completely unnamed opponent. AND there a lot of people here in South Carolina who really like this whole "anti-incumbent" trend. (Enough to make a difference? Probably not. But enough to scare DeMint a bit.)

Alvin Greene ran no advertisements. He didn't attend the Democratic Party Convention in South Carolina. He had practically no name recognition when compared to his opponent, Vic Rawl, who at least was a state legislator. He was able to pay the filing fee for running for the Democratic primary with a personal check (the filing fee is over 10 grand), but he's poor enough to qualify for a public defender for the felony obscenity charge against him. (Also, please note, that the law being used against him is one that is generally only used for people who show bestiality, extremely violent porn, etc., not the simple hetero porn that Greene allegedly showed someone. So that too comes across as a bit hinky.)

According to the FEC, at least through May 19, DeMint had around $3.5 million in cash on hand for this election cycle. Greene has $0.

Now, as to your last question, could this be the Democrats up to something instead of the Republicans up to something? I don't know. But the whole damn thing smells to high heaven.

Re:He Won!

[MontyApollo]

It was a silly scheme, but from what I have read this is business as usual in SC politics. Republican operatives sometimes pay entry fees for black candidates just to "stir the pot" of racial division among the Democrats during the primaries so that blacks will be less likely to vote in the general election.

I have also read that this is often not much more than a practical joke, especially in this case when the candidate did nothing but pay the entry fee and did not even have campaign signs up in his own yard. I think the Republicans really don't want these candidates to win because it would bring national attention to the way SC politics work, and they were probably just as shocked that Greene won as everybody else was.

This exact same tactic has been used before in SC

[elrous0]

Back in 1990, Rod Shealy used this exact same tactic in a Lt. Governor race in SC. He recruited a homeless black guy with a criminal conviction in an attempt to take out the Democratic frontrunner, so his sister (a Republican) could win. It was a crass attempt to play on the racial prejudices of SC (both for blacks in the Democratic Party and against blacks among the general populace) to get his sister elected. He almost succeeded to. And he is still working in SC Republican politics (most recently in the Bauer gubernatorial campaign).

All of you who are saying this is a preposterous idea have obviously never been involved in SC politics. This isn't even a particularly nasty tactic by SC standards.