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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.
Maybe. Did you read TFA? They did respond, they just didn't give her what she wants, which they say would be really hard to produce. Yes, they could be full of shit, but that's not a foregone conclusion. Need more data.
"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.
So, if the government stores information in an inconvenient format, that makes it exempt from freedom of information requests?
Pathetic.
Yeah, when it's _us_ they're talking about it's all, "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about".
When it's _them_? That's a different story....
No sig today...
There's a HUUUUUUUGE difference between the state asking for location data on a private citizen, and citizens asking to audit the state. The state exists to do the citizens' will and for the citizens benefit. A state's rights are granted to it BY the citizens, not the other way around.
That said, data should be anonymized if it isn't already. When I vote, my ballot doesn't have any identifying information on it, so releasing records exactly as they were captured wouldn't tell you anything about me at all.
If it's legally impossible to request a review of them, why bother with creating and storing the paper tapes in the first place?
Which leads, I guess, to the next question. If it's legally impossible to review an election, why bother holding them in the first place?
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.
http://www.hdnews.net/opinion/...
There’s an important reason why neither I, nor Sedgwick County officials, can hand over any ballots to the WSU employee — because it’s a crime to do so. Under K.S.A. 25-2422, it’s a felony to “disclos(e) or expos(e) the contents of any ballot” after the election contest period has ended, even if the names of voters are redacted. Another Kansas law, K.S.A. 25-3107(a), specifically prohibits county election officials from unsealing the containers in which ballots are kept after an election. Only under a judicial order, when the outcome of a specific race has been contested, can those containers be unsealed.
That is in the Secretary of State's own words. He'd be committing a crime... It's illegal....
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