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Kansas Secretary of State Blocks Release of Voting Machine Tapes
PvtVoid writes: Wichita State University statistician Beth Clarkson has filed a lawsuit under Kansas' open records law to force the state to release paper tape records from voting machines, to be used as data in her research on statistical anomalies in voting patterns in the state. Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate 'a statistically significant' pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct. The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling. Secretary of State Kris Kobach argued that the records sought by Clarkson are not subject to the Kansas open records act, and that their disclosure is prohibited by Kansas statute.
"Each person’s vote in the 2013 election takes up about 27½ inches of the electronic machine’s paper trail. Each roll from the 2014 election is 385 feet long, and stored in 42 boxes that are not segregated by precinct or voting district."
Definitely not as easy as making a photo copy. Maybe they could let her pay to hire someone to sort through, find the right roll (without damaging anything), then carefully unroll and photograph it for later study before re-rolling it?
One issue of course would be that the voting registry (which is public already and contains who voted and is time stamped, so also in what order) could very easily be used to guesstimate matching up specific people with specific votes, as the roll is going to be in chronological order as well. I'm not totally familiar with Kansas law, but there's a good chance they're legally supposed to have a secret ballot.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Who's funding Clarkson's lawsuits?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If the machines are faulty you will need to prove that. Go... do so. However the records are probably off limits. Which is going to make your job extremely hard to do. But if someone can write an emulator I think someone can reverse engineer one of these boxes easily enough.
Which is real convenient here. I don't buy it at all. It's three years after the elections in question and it'll be even later than that by the time any access is obtained, if ever. That's a ridiculous delay for any sort of vote coercion to occur.
I think there's a reasonable case here for illegal vote manipulation and that this illegal activity is just as bad as vote coercion.
Is that actually the case? I thought a big purpose was to avoid voter intimidation by non-governmental vigilantes who oppose a particular candidate.
In which case it also wouldn't prove anything at all, like whether your vote was fraudulent or not.
The point of this investigation is not to determine who voted for whom, which is, in fact, illegal. The point of this investigation is to determine whether, in aggregate, there are discrepancies between voting results and other recognized demographic trends.
If it turns out that a neighborhood of poor black people voted 80% Republican, it doesn't necessarily mean fraud. Maybe the neighborhood got very gentrified between when the demographics were reported and the election. Maybe the particular candidate had a specific message that appealed well to that exact neighborhood. Maybe his opponent's ex-wife lived in the area. Discrepancies between expected population trends and observed population trends are interesting.
Is that actually the case? I thought a big purpose was to avoid voter intimidation by non-governmental vigilantes who oppose a particular candidate.
Absolutely! Your reason also holds true, but it comes in a distant second.
We tend to minimize the "Uncle Sam knows who you voted for" angle precisely because we don't live in a country where we routinely round up people who voted for the "wrong" candidate to torture or execute or "reeducate" them.
By contrast, consider (whatever your stance on the post-9/11 Iraq war) that Saddam Hussein routinely won reelection by an almost unanimous vote for precisely that reason.