The elephant in the living room: Vote fraud

Feds approve new Voting machine that prints paper receipts! Sounds great, eh? Here's the catch: The machines are provided by a company called Populex -- and initial signs indicate that this group may be partisan.

The advisory board is headed by Frank Carlucci. Yes, this is the same spooky fellow known for his links to the Carlyle group and to Iran/contra.

I've been trying to learn more about the president of Populex, Sanford Morganstein. So far, I've found that he is the man who popularized the phone tree ("Press 1 for...) -- a fact which some may consider sufficient grounds for hatred. In the past, Morganstein worked for Rockwell Communications, ITT and RCA.

Several other bigwigs in this company appear to be Republicans. They also list Democrat Tony Coelho on their board of advisors.

Obviously, a paper recipt helps quell some fears. And the description of the system given here makes a good initial impression:

Unlike most other touch screen systems that risk losing votes, the Populex system doesn't collect and store votes electronically in the voting computer.

Instead, Populex prints an official ballot, equipped with a bar code that is scanned to reliably record and count the votes. This paper ballot is the official ballot that's counted on Election Day and also the audit trail needed for recounts. Additionally, Populex's technology helps prevent voters from making errors and provides several opportunities for them to verify their selections.

"If the Populex voting system was used during the 2004 election in Florida and Ohio, the resulting conspiracy theories would not exist," said Morganstein.

Those theories won't go away until one simple question receives an answer: Does the Populex system still allow one to rig the game?

The current debacle in Ohio suggests a few simple methods: Make sure the margin of victory is not so narrow as to mandate a recount. Blackwell-esque dawdling can stave off any recount demanded by a minority party until the state's electors have cast their votes. Since the recount will no doubt follow the "three percent" rule (or some similar regulation), chances are very small that the full paper trail will ever see the light of day. Should that unlikely event occur, old-fashioned ballot stuffing can bring the paper result within spitting range of the computer tally.

Even so, the Populex system does seem to represent a step in the right direction. I remain very troubled by the presence of Carlucci -- he's not just any Republican. If Morganstein wants to deep-six "conspiracy theories," he should dissociate himself from Carlucci, who is a lint trap for such theories.

Readers should recall that Athan Gibbs invented the TruVote system, a similar voting machine that offered a paper receipt. Gibbs died in an accident some consider mysterious.

Clinton Curtis. I missed the Mark Levine interview with this famed "vote fraud" whistleblower, but an archive of the broadcast should soon appear here or here.

What are the odds? That is the very question discussed on the Democratic Underground here:

Get ready. Grab your chair. Hold your hat.

Here are the odds that 16 out of 51 states would move beyond the MOE in favor of Bush, again using the Binomial Distribution. But this time with .025 (rather than .05) as the probability that a given state would move beyond the MOE to Bush:

The probability P is: P =1-BINOMDIST(16,51,0.025,TRUE)

P = 0.0000000000004996%

The odds are 1/P or 1 out of 200.159 TRILLION that these changes could have occurred due to chance alone.

ONE out of 4.5 BILLION?
ONE out of 200 TRILLION?

There is NO practical difference.
But the second one is MATHEMATICALLY CORRECT.

For a more technical discussion, go here and check out responses 15 and 16.

A conservative on vote fraud. Edgar J. Steele is not a writer I admire. He's a right-winger considered by many to be an anti-Semite. So imagine my surprise to discover that Steele has cobbled together a persuasive report on vote tampering. The closing words deserve quotation:

Look - the people apparently disenfranchised this time around primarily are those with whom I generally disagree, but it is the fundamental unfairness of what has taken place that most offends me, not to mention the path down which America now treads. If I really believed this election showed the true color of conservatism, I would join the liberals in a heartbeat and replace my "Nuke the Whales" bumper sticker with one that says "Save the Baby Seals."

If this is what it means to be conservative today, I want to be liberal.

And I'd feel a lot better about the ascendence of the right if more conservatives echoed Steele's call for a fair playing field.

By the way -- his page displays yet another photo of W giving the middle-finger salute. Good lord! Our president acts like a kid. As if his boorish behavior at the opening of the Clinton library did not provide sufficient proof of the man's innate puerility....

Cheat sheet. You may have already read William Rivers Pitt's December 15 expose of the increasingly-dubious recount occurring in Ohio. Take particular note of this bit:

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.

That lovely piece of advice came by way of that infamous Triad tech -- the one who claimed that the computers lost data due to battery failure.