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Statistical Tools For Detecting Electoral Fraud
RockDoctor writes "A recent paper published in PNAS describes statistical techniques for clearly displaying the presence of two types of electoral fraud (PDF) — 'incremental fraud' (stuffing of ballot boxes containing genuine votes with ballots for the winning party) and 'extreme fraud' (reporting completely contrived numbers, typically 100% turnout for a vote-counting region, with 100% voting for the winning party). While the techniques would require skill with statistical software to apply in real time, the graphs produced in the paper provide tools for the interested non-statistician to monitor an election 'live.' Examples are discussed with both 'normal' elections, fraud by the techniques mentioned, and cases of genuine voter inhomogeneity. Other types of fraud, such as gerrymandering and inhibiting the registration of minority voters, are not considered."
We can't have that. Who do we call to get this outlawed?
Your post is proof that you did not even look at the first figure from TFA. The irregularities are very clear in all of the figures.
Gerrymandering can be used for good too such as creating voting districts consisting of mostly Blacks or other minorities so they can elect a (favored minority) representative
Whether or not this is ever "good" is debatable, to say the least.
I live in a so-called "majority-minority" district which was considered a lock for a minority candidate since its creation. The incumbent has done such a poor job that he came fairly close to losing the election in 2010. The response? They adjusted the lines to pull extra minorities into his district to ensure that would never happen again.
The message there was clear: your vote counts for nothing. The representative has already been chosen by those who set up the districts.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Let's be clear... it is, in fact, fraud. It is not, however, illegal. There are plenty of hateful and immoral things, especially when it comes to elections, that are not illegal. Gerrymandering is clearly one of them. If anything proves beyond a doubt that your vote doesn't really count for anything and our elections are rigged, it's Gerrymandering. It's also, ironically, the reason Ron Paul is losing his district.
If there is a minority (ethnic or otherwise) with interests differing from that of the majority, that minority may be underrepresented in representative systems. If the minority happens to be geographically localized, drawing electoral boundaries appropriately can restore them to a proportionate amount of political power.
The OP possibly could have chosen his words better, but I don't think he meant any harm.
His buddies must have included the entire Minnesota Supreme Court, since it was their unanimous decision that rejected his opponent's appeal. But don't let facts stop you from your right-wing conspiracy theories.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
So what? A technique doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful. Which is fortunate, because few techniques are.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It was a violation of "equal protection under the law" because different ballots were treated differently by different voting districts. Just so happened that disqualified ballots from liberal districts were treated a lot more leniently than disqualified ballots from conservative districts.
This is all well documented. The Minnesota Supreme Court refused to intervene because they were using a high malice standard.
That doesn't make what happened right, and I highly doubt that a fair recount would have resulted in the election of Franken.
The problem with that argument is that it is not-so-subtly segregationist - let the minority have their own small ghetto where they run things, but keep them out of our (much bigger) turf where we do as we want. SAR had a similar arrangement with bantustans during apartheid.
Thing is, if you have an ethnic minority with interests profoundly different from the majority, that's already the sign of a very fundamental flaw in that society, which is not going to be fixed by token gestures
So what? A technique doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful. Which is fortunate, because few techniques are.
How is this useful?
Interesting perhaps, but not useful. The party that WON using any detectible vote fraud will not let you change anything, certainly not the outcome and probably not even vote methodology, or credential checking in future elections. In fact they probably won't give you access to voting detail numbers at all once it becomes common knowledge that such analysis is possible.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The minority should not need a voice to speak for them in the first place. They should be citizens just like any others, with same rights and needs as far as their interaction with the government goes. If they're not, that in itself is segregationalist - it's creating a division along ethnic (or other similarly decorative) lines where none should rationally exist. It only happens when either the government is deliberately discriminating against them (in which case a single representative is not going to do anything useful, and is little more than token gesture), or because that group of people is intentionally segregating themselves from the rest of society, excluding outsiders from their power structure - which is a bad thing and should not be encouraged.
There's 4 million people likely to vote Democrat that don't have the Government issued ID card in Pennsylvania alone, a capacity of 100,000 ID cards a month.
It's October, so you go figure whether they can get an ID card in time to cope with this law change!
Republicans 1% are scum for undermining democracy like that. How are Koch brothers any better than Putin's backers?
Aside: Personally, I think the photo ID thing is a fine thing
I don't:
1. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. The folks that have been pushing photo ID have been able to come up with approximately 10 cases of somebody pretending to be somebody else and casting a vote at the polls, having a significant impact on a grand total of 0 elections. If you want to cast fraudulent ballots, it's far easier to do so using absentee ballots.
2. If you require would-be voters to pay for their IDs, then this is a poll tax, which was ruled unconstitutional decades ago. If you don't, then this is an unnecessary (see point 1) expense, both for the government budget (and ultimately the people who pay taxes) and for the individuals who have to go get a free photo ID (which is only free if you don't count the transportation to the place to get it and the time to wait for it).
3. The party that pushed through these bills stated quite explicitly their purpose, namely to prevent people likely to vote for the other major party from voting. To quote a state government representative, "Voter ID, which is gonna allow ______________ to win the state of Pennsylvania, done". (I'm leaving the party name blank here to protect the guilty). Acts of these sorts are an anathema to democratic governance.
I am officially gone from
Didn't even read TFSummary.
Statistics isn't about being 100%. That's the whole point of trends and probabilities. If there's around 65% voter turnout in an area, within a certain deviation, and one polling station has an 80% voter turnout, that's an anomaly. Usually anything more than 2 standard deviations out is an anomaly, statistically speaking. Nothing implies this is 100% election fraud, or even election fraud at all. It just means something different is happening there.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Well the Republican house leader from Pennsylvania can help you out there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o32tF-S6K60
Even the Republican House Leader admits the law was intended to let Mitt Romney win Pen State.
They made a list of specific forms of ID that are valid and ones that are not. That list gives a heavily weighted bias to Republicans. So 15 million people need a new government ID in Republican states, those people are mostly Democrat and unaligned voters. They'll have to get this Id from governments under GOP control that haven't invested in the capacity to issue all of those IDs until after the elections.
That's enough to probably win Pen State for Mitt Romney. They know it, that's what it was intended to do. Yet the claim is of 'buses' moving fake voters from state to state. When they've investigated that claim, it's been found to be completely bogus. Misregistrations being so far below statistical significance as to be one of the more ludicrous claim Fox has made.
Very simple.
The purpose of an election is to determine will of the majority (or at least plurality) of the voting public.
If Alice and Bob are running against each other, and an illegal immigrant casts a ballot for Alice, then the election is biased 1 vote towards her.
But in the same scenario, if one person who was planning to vote for Bob gives up due to long lines, then the election is also biased by 1 vote towards Alice.
The two situations have roughly the same impact, and there's no rational reason to worry about one over the other. So, if you want voter ID laws, you must prove that the number of false ballots that such laws stop exceeds the number of valid ballots that are also stopped.
So where is your evidence of widespread voter fraud? You don't have any, because it doesn't even make sense to commit that style of fraud. If you wanted to steal an election, you would bribe a few dozen people to stuff ballot boxes, not a few hundred thousand to cast false ballots. There's simply no way a conspiracy of such tremendous size could be kept secret.
1) Think about this for a second. If you want to commit a felony, would you rather commit the felony in person where you can be caught, or would you rather commit it anonymously via absentee ballot?
For example, the special election of Bill Stinson in 1993 in PA was overturned because the election was stolen...with absentee ballots.
2a) You know that "free" ID you were supposed to get? Take PA, where the law was passed in the past seven months (March 2012). That "free" photo ID did not exist until late August! Up until then, they were requiring everyone to get the standard photo ID - the one that costs money and requires a higher burden of proof. Imagine your surprise when you go to PennDOT and try to get your "free" photo ID, after you manage to get a ride there (did you know that something like six counties in PA have no PennDOT facility, and another 13-ish counties have one facility open one day a week?)...only to discover that you actually do need to pay for your ID.
2b) What you need an ID for in modern society is a red herring when it comes to voting. Almost 20% of the registered voters in Philadelphia do not have a state-issued ID! Regardless of this fact, how do you define a "significant" amount of people without ID? If this law ends up preventing more legitimate votes than preventing fraudulent votes, is that significant enough for you?
3) I think you're mistaken when you think "no one" is trying to prevent real people from voting. You know that firm that the Republicans are disowning lately, Strategic Allied Consulting? The owner back in 2004 was caught throwing away registrations from voters who registered Democrat. The GOP knows that in-person voter ID is practically nonexistent, and that elections are really stolen with absentee ballots or just by manipulating the voting machines, like these eight people in Clay County, Kentucky, including a judge.
Voter fraud is real, but in-person voter fraud is very rare (see 1 for why). So if the GOP is really interested in honest elections, why are they focusing on the rarest form of fraud? None of these ID laws would stop any of the documented instances of voter fraud that I have mentioned in this post - at least one of which resulted in an actual stolen election.
:(){
Disclaimer: I haven't read TFA - my PDF-reader locks up on this document for some reason.
There is one kind of fraud that can never be detected by any means, and that it to alter each vote as they are placed, i.e. identical in every way to the voter having cast his vote elsewhere. Electronic voting machines are perfect for this. A similar technique would be to point a gun at some of the voters head and make them vote a certain way.
"Suffing the ballot boxes" - reminds me of that Blackadder episode with the "rotten borough" with just one voter: Baldrick of course. When he has cast his vote the result is announced: A completely new candidate wins with over 1.000 write-in votes, and one invalid vote (Baldricks obviously) is disregarded. That was clearly a perfectly fine election with no statistical anormalies.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Because every time you mention Democrats or Republicans in a thread like this, it tends to deteriorate into an argument about which party cheats the most, drawing attention away from the real issue being discussed.
In the USA, the state declares fraud on YOU.
Does getting the ID require that a person provide any documents that they must pay for? How hard is it for poor people to get those for free, and how much extra work do they need to do to prove they're poor enough to qualify for the free ID or ancillary documentation? Does it require that they go to a particular place during working hours to obtain it and if so does it compensate poor people for their time and travel expenses, as well as contact their employer to ensure that they are not penalized for taking that time? Does it require that they actually have a home address/proof of address in order to obtain one, and if so, how are homeless people handled? How are voters informed of the need for an ID in order to vote, and does it take into account language issues, homelessness issues, and any other obstacle to being informed that disproportionately affects poor people and minorities?
Those are very, very real problems for people who are already on the margins, and those issues act as a massive disincentive for those people to get an ID and the people behind those laws know it.
For you and me, getting an ID is nothing more than hopping in the car, going to the DMV, paying pocket change to get the ID and then being on our merry way. Our employers won't fire us for needing a couple of hours to run that errand. For someone who is on the margin, though, it can be a goddamn epic adventure through bureaucracy that ultimately is confusing, frustrating and ultimately may end in failure and come at a cost far higher than you are aware of.
I do research with participants who are below the poverty line, and believe me, the hoops my participants have to jump through and the extra effort they have to go through to even get to the point where they can jump through those hoops is staggering.
Further, the problem that voter IDs are intended to prevent is not, in fact, a problem: retail voter fraud of the sort IDs would theoretically address is pretty much nonexistent, and is completely dwarfed by wholesale vote manipulation that is either intentional or accidental.
Finally, many voter ID laws allow some forms of ID but not others, and the allowed types of IDs in those states overwhelmingly are owned by people who tend to vote more conservatively, while the disallowed ones tend to belong to people who would skew more towards the liberal demographic.
It's a bullshit issue, it costs way more money to implement than the "problem" it solves costs society and it is intended to limit turnout of those people who most need representation in our society. Anyone who is a fan of voter ID laws is, to be charitable, misinformed at best and actively seeking to disenfranchise others at worst, and they are encouraging costly government intervention where none is needed.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.