Vote fraud: Shoe's on the other foot

Here's a fascinating turn of events. Republicans in Washington state have argued that the Democrats perpetrated vote fraud during the razor-thin governor's election, which was decided in the Democratic candidate's favor by absentee ballots. Republican lawyers have even made that argument in court.

As we all know, if a Democrat had brought exactly the same arguments into a courtroom, GOP propagandists have guffawed and made ever-so-clever references to tin foil hats and black helicopters. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, the only person laughing at the current shenanigans is Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times.

What he has to say about the Republicans sounds -- irony of ironies! -- awfully similar to the things said about Democratic activists who have alleged vote fraud:

After coming into court and saying government officials perpetrated "sinister fraud" to steal the 2004 governor's election, Republicans have finished backing up that claim in the trial in Wenatchee. Their fraud claim, supposedly based on statistical science, wouldn't earn a passing grade on the 10th-grade WASL.

More:

The GOP presented data showing discrepancies in absentee-ballot counts from 11 King County precincts.

In some precincts, the county tallied more mail-in ballots than there were voters recorded as having voted by mail. In others, the opposite occurred: The county recorded more voters than ballots.

The proof that ballots were fabricated for Democrats, the GOP says, is that four of the five precincts with the most excess mail-in ballots backed Democrat Christine Gregoire. And the proof that ballots were misplaced or destroyed to harm Republicans is that four of the six precincts in which the most mail-in votes can't be accounted for backed Republican Dino Rossi.

"This is a pattern, and there can be no explanation for it other than somebody was manipulating the ballot box," Foreman said.

The obvious question arises: How the hell can any Republican claim that this matter rates as a serious concern, when the illegalities and irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere were so much more outrageous?

Westneat offers a non-conspiratorial explanation for the King County questions:

These are mail-in ballots. They did not pass through the chaotic polling places. They were handled and counted at central King County facilities.

If you were working at one of these county facilities and you wanted to fabricate or destroy ballots to aid Gregoire, what difference would it make how the voters in the rest of that precinct had voted?

Suppose you wanted to pick 10 Rossi votes off the mail-in ballot pile and shred them. You could just as logically pick from a precinct in which the votes were split 50-50 between the candidates. Or 60-40. Or 40-60.

(Rossi was the Republican candidate; Gregoire's the Democrat.) More telling still:

Even if you go down the GOP's rabbit hole, the rest of the data -- the part they didn't share in court -- don't support their own theory. For example, there were 703 King County precincts in which there were more absentee voters than ballots, not just six. The GOP said in court that ballots were undercounted mostly in precincts that backed Rossi, but 500 of these 703 precincts -- 71 percent -- actually backed Gregoire.

But this tale takes us into stranger realms than this columnist comprehends. Paul Leto (and I apologize again for misspelling this man's name in previous posts) has offered a compelling argument that the paper ballots -- the write-in ballots, the provisionals -- were actually more accurate than the computer-controlled votes. In other words, the Democrat should have won handily, not by a thin margin.

There was a mysterious pattern of voting machine "repairs" in nearly every precinct.

Moreover, Sequoia, the machine supplier, had made an inexplicable demand of the poll workers. Instructions specified that the power cords for these machines had to be "daisy-chained."

Imagine sitting in a room filled with dozens of computers -- which, coincidentally, happens to be the situation I find myself in right now. All the computers plug individually into power strips. There is no earthly reason -- no above-board reason -- to plug one computer into another into another into another. In other words, there's no technical or ethical reason to "daisy chain" the machines.

So what might be the underhanded reason for such an arrangement? Few understand that power cords can act as a networking device. Like the traditional modem-and-phone-line arrangement, power lines can allow computers to communicate with each other -- in fact, some countries have considered delivering internet services in precisely this fashion. Of course, the computer needs to be properly configured. We all know that Sequoia is famously secretive about the actual layout of their machines.

Thus, a machine in any given precinct could easily receive new programming during repairs. That modified machine could go on to "infect" all the other machines in that precinct, just as a virus replicates in cyberspace.

During these all-too-convenient repairs, new programming might shift x number of votes from one candidate to the other. That shift would occur not just in that one voting booth, but precinct-wide.

The plan is devious and nearly fool-proof. But do we have evidence that such chicanery actually occurred?

Yes. We have the clear pattern of discrepancy between the compu-vote and the non-computer vote. Paper votes (absentees and provisionals) are the only thing keeping the system tied to reality. The discrepancy between the two voting systems cannot grow beyond a certain margin, or even the dullest of the dullards will grow suspicious.

And that, my friends, is why Republican lawyers are working overtime to discredit the paper ballot in Washington State.

Leto:

A new report found that problems of switched votes or machines freezing up occurred at more than 50 Washington polling places. Voters reported that touch screens would appear pre-voted, or would select the Republican box when the Democratic candidateÂ’s box was pressed. Countywide, there were 19 formally reported instances of machine switching, each favoring the Republican.

Two-thirds of Snohomish County voted with paper absentee and provisional ballots, favoring Gregoire by 2,000 votes (97,044 to 95,228). The remaining one-third, voting electronically, favored Rossi by an 8,000-vote advantage (50,400 to 42,145). The chances of this anomaly as a result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch screen is one in one trillion.

The precincts with voting machines requiring repairs within two weeks of Election Day Rossi hada touchh screen advantage in 56 out of 58 (96.6%). The average margin for Rossi at these polling places were 11.58% more favorable than the absentee votes, and averaged 10.8% more than Gregoire on Election Day.

However, among 90 precincts with no reported machine problems 44 had touch screen vote counts more favorable to Rossi than paper ballots, while 46 had a touch screen favored Gregoire. This raises serious questions as to whether the machines requiring repairs were tampered with toimproperly assignn votes and/or undervotes to the Republican candidate ("switched" against voters' intent).

Snohomish County had the highest Election Day increase in vote for Rossi relative to absentee voters, while other nearby counties had either smaller increases or actually favored the Democrat Gregoire.

More than 100,000 electronic votes were never recounted in Washington. More than 2.7 million paper votes statewide were recounted by optical-reader machine and by hand. But the 106,000 touch-screen ballots -- constituting almost 4 percent of the state vote -- were simply re-totaled without review and added in. The validity of many of those touch-screen votes suggest that Gregoire should have beaten Republican Dino Rossi in the initial tally.

That's from the summary of Leto's work. For the full report -- which deserves far more attention than it has heretofore received -- see here.