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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."
This is all a bunch af HOOEY to justify tossing out a legit candidate that none of the BIG MONEY wanted. Too bad, so sad, HE WON!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You know an election has gone seriously wrong when the total number of votes reported in the Republican primary is not equal to the total voter Republican turnout in the same area.
Was he listed under "A" or "G"? Were the other candidates listed around "Z", "Q" and "U"?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Here's the problem... if this was a "dirty trick" by the Republican side.... why in this much of an already red district? This was a safe seat that's now in jeopardy if this scandal goes much further.
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
The P value of this test is 0.1, pretty much all research I read demands a P value of 0.05 to justify a hypothesis. How many elections are there in the USA every year? By this standard even if all of them were not tampered with and totally legitimate 1/10th of them would be found to have been tampered with. That's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation.
Basically, bullshit, either do better research to get a lower P value or stop drawing such spurious conclusions.
South Carolina voter registration is close to 50% AA according to NPR. Greene is black. Greene had the first position on the ballot. Rawl did not raise money or campaign. Rawl did not do basic opposition research to find out Greene's shortcomings before the election. It sounds like Rawl should have lost because he is a terrible candidate and basically assumed he would just win because he was the "establishment candidate". In case people have not noticed the "establishment candidates" haven't been doing particularly well lately.
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.
Just no. There's 10 percent chance of a type 1 error, assuming the null hypothesis (no cheating) is true.
Ya'll racists can't accept that Mr. Greene, a popular African-American, won the election fair and square so you guys undermine the integrity of our very system that is so great so you can throw out the will of the voters that elected him.
Why don't you guys put on the white robes, toss the bed sheet on the horse and chase this guy out of town you bunch of racists!
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.
I don't know, to know all the crap the fellow in office is going to jail for ahead of time quite refreshing really. Saves a lot of drama later.
hey guys, Been stuck on Grepolis.net the past few months. Anyways I feel that daily voting can fix lots of this. I am wondering if an open source software system could be made. -anon voting while preventing double voters (craigslist email style, only system knows yer identity) -330 million Americans, 30 million Canadians, 60 million UK residents, all downvoting "RIAAtarded" laws no one wanted in the first place Hoping "iVote" will take the lead someday. If voting is so important every 5 years why do we not do it everyday? With secure voting systems the military would use to protect THEIR systems (heard they run varities of Linux b/c Windows is too insecure) My big question is can this even be done? You guys are the smart ones on here. I await the idea of online 24/7 voting on some website to be cut up and reverse engeneered for the betterment of man. :P
I just thought the ideals of Linux could port over to our corrupt government, easily bought. They should ref the game, not give home team advantage....
Anyways I felt enough about this issue to buy up:
http://www.opensourceg.com/
Just a place to rant and save ideas about the possibility of voting each day like e-mail of facebook.
Thanks for reading. :)
FreeSCV
http://www.opensourceg.com - A Man Can Dream
Of cause, if the other side won, it's still only 90% chance. I don't think 9 times the chance is sufficient to say that no tampering was involved.
It's worth noting that in some precincts, Mr. Greene received more votes than were cast. As in, he got 115% of the votes. In others, he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60. There are major, major discrepancies in vote tallies in this election. You can quibble about confidence intervals and statistics all you want, but it won't change the fact that *something* went wrong here. While it's probably not malicious, it absolutely should be investigated.
My other sig is clever.
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
There are two problems with everyday voting, you are only trying to solve one: the technology. The other problem is that to make important informed decisions every day you need to do research and think about the issues. Most of us have jobs and family to keep us busy and many of us aren't really interested in "researching and thinking". The realistic expectation is that everyday voting would lead to ultra-low participation, rampant sensationalism (as that would be the only way to make people actually vote on specific issues) and hiding important issues as "everyday stuff".
In other words you are attempting to solve a human problem with technology. It will not work.
South Carolina uses an open primary system where any registered voter can vote in the Democratic primary, not just registered Democratic Party members.
Is it possible that thousands of Republicans decided to vote for Alvin Greene not because they want him to be their next Senator, but because he is such a hopeless candidate that he will be crushed by the Republican nominee?
On the face of it, this open primary system seems open to abuse. If you vote for candidate A in the primary, and he wins the primary to move onto the general election ballot, shouldn't your vote be "locked in" to support him in the general election?
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else. Not to mention beating 1 in 10 odds isn't that suspicious.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's funny that everyone is up in arms about a nobody winning this race. If there's fraud, may it be found and dealt with (not fabricated). But couple this with Bob Ethridge's behavior http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/06/rs-_etheridge.html and the arrogance of the professional politician is revealed, it would seem. I recall some local podcasters being called to a "meeting" to discuss new media with some journalists from our local newspaper (a major city newspaper, mind you). Essentially they were sat down and told who the real journalists were. Arrogance generally reveals more stupidity than mastery.
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 $100 million in cash, who's to say we wouldn't subtly adjust the results in favor of the group who paid us. Again, I believe in honesty in voting, but the general public doesn't know I won't accep
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
There were threads about him with 1000+ Diggs *** AFTER *** the election, due to an interview with Keith Olberman (AFTER the election) where he appears to be several bricks short of a load. What does his becoming known after the election have to do with Alvin Green being unknown prior to voting in SC? Illogical argument.
So not really any different from the typical politician.
Apart from being broke, but I'm sure that'll fix itself soon enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How is it impossible to build a voting machine again?
The voting process has to be verifiable by the average citizen, when a voting machine is involved it almost certainly isn't. You could of course build a voting machine that prints out paper and make the process transparent that way, but then why would one want to go to all that trouble and buy a voting machine for thousands of dollars when a one dollar pen could make the cross just as easily.
Stop the snow job. He's a military intelligence vet and a man with a Poly Sci degree. So what if he's unemployed after he leaves the service? It's tough out there. The ABC interview was a butchering.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
His name was the first one on the ballot. Many people just pick the top one. No scandal, human nature, get over it.
A voting machine provides a clear interface so the voter knows precisely his vote. He can go forward or back until final submission. At that point a printout is made that is very clear on the voters intents. You won't have any hanging chads or any impartially filled circles that will allow people to throw your vote out as unclear.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
How do you suppose we investigate suspicious elections?
On any given election day, imagine how many different elections are going on. There are over 10,000 cities in the US. In a presidential election, the ballot I see tends to have at least ten people to vote for, a mix of local, state, and federal.
Every election cycle, even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance, it's almost certain to happen multiple times each election.
We're always going to have election results that are unlikely.
So what do we do about it? Yes, I will support investigations in events like these, but at the same time, I think we need to start before the election, with the machines themselves.
The ballot entries were listed in alphabetical order. Green comes before Rawls. Both were relatively unknown quantities. People are stupid.
I think, as I heard someone on NPR say this morning, people just choose the first guy on the list.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So, you're saying that Democrats in SC are so racists that their whole party platform can be brought down by having someone running that is ostensibly on the same side but of a different heritage?
Damn. Just, damn.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Well, no, it didn't work. Read the post.
Republicans have a theory that black people vote for black Democrats over white Democrats, no matter how incompetent they are, or how much they are 'real' Democrats. Ergo, they think if they run incompetent black people as Democrats, they will split the vote. Or at the very least, have some black people, disgusted at the primary outcome, not vote in the general election.
They also think the same thing about women. (Re: Sarah Palin and the whole PUMA thing they invented and pushed in the media)
This doesn't really work that well. It does work a little, though, and it just costs a filing fee.
And it lets the Republicans have better stats. Sure, they don't elect black guys in their primaries much, but, statistically, neither do the Democrats. (Because half of them are Republican plants.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Seems like we only hear about election fraud when the Democrat National Committee gets a result they don't like.
But in this current political climate, what's so hard to believe about an unknown outsider at the top of the ballot winning?
The only ones who can't believe it are the ones heavily invested in forcing the outcome to what we're led to believe is the "predictable" outcome.
It seems quite undemocratic that the fee is so high that you'd *have* to have external support just to throw your name into a hat.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Parent poster points out some interesting things about the GOP and racism. The irony of the Deep South being both 'Republican' and racist, is that they were the 'solid South', voting staunchly Democrat, up until Lyndon Johnson signed the Equal Rights Amendment. Why did the deep South vote Democrat for so long? Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
The Deep South voting bloc cares little about niceties like the Constitution if it gets in the way of them having power. They are a cohesive and crafty bunch of politicians. They are more akin to fascists than anything else.
Best regards.