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

Poor research

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Poor research

[goodmanj]

If you're picking unremarkable campaigns at random out of a hat, then yes, this result signifies nothing.

But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.

To put it another way: if the guy next to you at the blackjack table gets two blackjacks in a row, you shouldn't be alarmed, that happens all the time. But if the guy is also winking at the dealer and has a suspicious bulge in his sleeve, it's time to find another table.

Re:He Won!

[clarkkent09]

The people who are alleging fraud are claiming that this is a scheme to ensure that the Republican incumbent is re-elected.

It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway. Ok if we are going to be throwing conspiracy theories around, how do you know that this is not a scheme by the Democrats to create a scandal that they could blame on the Republicans?

Election process is not innocent until convicted

[Geof]

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.

Re:A couple of basic information pieces

[noidentity]

It's worth noting that in some precincts, Mr. Greene received more votes than were cast. As in, he got 115% of the votes.

I can't believe you're being so negative about such a high voter turnout.

Re:He Won!

[laughingcoyote]

According to TFA, these voting machines have a large number of problems and no audit trail. Who's to say this wasn't just a fuckup, rather than deliberate malice on anyone's part?

If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting. I don't find it odd-I know exactly how easy it is to manipulate data on a large scale, even data that's supposedly secure and tamper-resistant. It's a whole lot harder to tamper with thousands or millions of paper ballots than it is to tamper with thousands or millions of electronic records.

That doesn't mean electronics have no place. An electronically generated human-readable ballot would be fine. In that case, the speed and reduced human error of electronic voting could be realized, but the voter would still have the ability to verify their choices after printing, and if wrong, go to an election judge, say "I didn't intend to vote this way", and have their ballot scrapped and recast. Backup paper systems should always be available at every precinct in case of a total failure of the machines, electrical failure, or just people who are not comfortable using them.

Having that type of mechanism in place would prevent exactly this type of scenario. It would allow for the result either to be overturned, or to say with certainty that, while unlikely, it is indeed the outcome.

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:He Won!

[selven]

What if it's actually the Republicans making a scheme to make us think that it's the Democrats trying to make us think it's the Republicans trying to make us think it's the Democrat candidate?

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.

The simple explanation

[Perl-Pusher]

His name was the first one on the ballot. Many people just pick the top one. No scandal, human nature, get over it.

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.

Re:He Won!

[DavidTC]

I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.

It is amazing how often people find that odd. But don't just tell them you're against it...tell them pretty much the entire industry is against them, because computers do exactly what you tell them to do, including lie, and then they can lie about being told to lie.

People need to hear this more from people they regard as knowledgeable about computers. Over and over. Computers lie if told to do so. This is not detectable because they'll just lie about their lying to the people checking them.