Vote notes

(Incidentally, I tried to publish a vote fraud update a couple of days ago, but the cyber gods decided to kill it before delivery.)

Explaining the exits: A Kos diarist named Elizabeth Liddle, who writes under the nick "Febble," is a Scottish psychology specialist who, although initially a supporter of the fraud thesis, claims to have come up with a computational model which explains away the exit poll disparity. She offers her study as a response to the US Count Votes analysis, which is finally starting to acquire some attention.

I have not yet truly studied her paper -- and to be frank, from the looks of the thing, I'm not sure whether I would understand the math even after a close reading. However, a skimming indicates that she has not yet addressed what seems, to me, to be the most damning argument: The exit polls asked whether the responders had voted for Bush or Gore in 2000. Even though Gore won the popular vote, the 2004 exit polls indicated a strong pro-Bush 2000 tilt. This oddity provides us with prima facie evidence that the exit pollsters favored Bush, not Kerry.

This anomaly demolishes Mitofsky's beloved "reluctant Bush responder" thesis, which is, in the end, Liddle's bottom line. Everything comes down to this:

While we cannot measure the completion rate by Democratic and Republican voters, hypothetical completion rates of 56% among Kerry voters and 50% among Bush voters overall would account for the entire Within Precinct Error that we observed in 2004."

And if we accept malign elves as a hypothetical, then we can ascribe the disparity to their mischievous handiwork.

As one observer noted, a proper hypothesis should be (if it can be) put to the test. The "2000 question" provides one way to test the presumed 56%-50% response differential -- and that test does not support Liddle or Mitofsky. Once we toss out the "chatty Dem/tight-lipped Rep" scenario -- a scenario which, I might add, does not conform with real-life experience -- what have we left?

On Democratic Underground, "Truth Is All" provides a dizzying number of links which refute both Liddle and the "reluctant responder" hypothesis. Many of these links lead back to TIA's own writings, of which perhaps the most immediately relevant is this:

How can Mitofsky push a "Reluctant Bush Responder" theory, especially when analysis of the data in his own report AND THE NATIONAL EXIT POLL reveals just the opposite?

According the USCountVote.com, Bush responders in Republican precincts were MORE inclined to speak to the exit pollsters.

I do not question Liddle's expertise or sincerity. But this is an issue she must address.

Sequoia: A good article on Paul Lehto's lawsuit against Sequoia appears in Real Change News, a journal largely devoted to advocacy for the homeless.

In what's being hailed as a simple but brilliant argument that could serve as a national model for legal action, Gordon's lawsuit, which was filed in King County, argues that it's unconstitutional to outsource voting to a company that keeps the process secret the way Sequoia and other makers of electronic voting equipment do.

Makers of touch-screen voting machines claim their software is a "trade secret" to protect. In the contract between Sequoia and Snohomish County, which purchased 1,000 machines for $5 million in 2002, the county auditor even agreed to defend California-based Sequoia from any subpoenas seeking information that, with any other voting method, are a matter of public record under the state Constitution, the Open Meetings Act, and the Public Disclosure Act.

Gordon, a Bellevue tort attorney known for his work in civil rights and labor cases, says that particular paragraph of the Sequoia contract that will go down in infamy as an "unholy alliance between government and a private corporation."

"We think there's a problem with a county entering into a contract with a private company which has the effect of letting the private company conduct elections."
As a result, Gordon, Lehto and a second plaintiff, John Wells, are asking the court to void Sequoia's contract and make the company give back Snohomish County's $5 million.

"A contract between two parties can't take away the rights of a third party, and that's what's happened in this case" and across the nation, says Ellen Theisen, executive director of Port Ludlow-based Voters Unite, a one-year-old voter advocacy organization. "It's taken away rights of citizens to an observable election."

Lehto will be appearing with Bev Harris at Seattle's College Club on May 4. Although I've had my problems with Harris, I urge anyone in that area to attend. (And maybe someone can ask Bev about those election tapes she picked up in Florida.)

Why hide it? The major voting machine companies all claim that their software is a trade secret. Why the secrecy? Australian law insists on open software. Insisting on transparency has not caused that nation to fall into the sea -- in fact, their elections have fewer problems.

Given the incestuous linkages between the major voting machine companies, secrecy has little purpose. It's not as though these guys are competing with each other. I advise the reader to check out this Democratic Underground page.

Fitrakis says it all. Sorry I didn't mention this earlier: Bob Fitrakis has a killer article on Blackwell's perfidy in Ohio. The most noteworthy section:

The Free Press is printing for the first time a hand-drawn map from an employee of the Warren County government. The employee, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, communicated to the Free Press thoughts on what happened on Election Day in the county that received national attention by declaring a "homeland security alert" while the votes were being counted.

With the media and independent election observers "walled off," as the Cincinnati Enquirer described, the employee claims that "some ballot boxes were taken to the holding area" where they were not monitored by election officials. The Warren County employee referred to the person supervising the unauthorized warehouse as a "Republican Party hack."

The employee is concerned that it would have been easy to "stuff" the ballot boxes or that "signatures could have been forged in the unauthorized holding area."

The anonymous employee told the Free Press that testimony would be provided if subpoenaed. A list of questions that remain unanswered in Warren County was also supplied: Which precinct ballot boxes were taken to the unauthorized holding area? Were officials from the Board of Elections present in the holding area? When were the ballots taken from the holding area to the check-in tent that was erected temporarily to count ballots? If Warren County was under a state of emergency, then why weren't any metal detectors engaged? The FBI has denied that there was any homeland security threat on Election Day.

Koehler: The Chicago Tribune (a notoriously reactionary paper) refused to run columnist Bob Koehler's powerhouse piece on vote fraud (available on the web -- here.) But the paper did see fit to print a piece which attempts to debunk Koehler. The article, by Don Wycliff, does not even begin to address the many outrages detailed by John Conyers' committee.

Josh Mittledorff, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a column on the Nashville conference that deserves your attention:

I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who spent months with colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and "consecutive number registers" from Brakey's Tucson home precinct.

They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct and found: 12 innocent and unsuspecting voters who had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. Twenty-two "undervotes" where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush.

The "Republican" and "Democratic" co-directors of the polling place were a local fundamentalist preacher and his wife. Thirty-nine of their parishioners from another precinct had cast provisional ballots, which were (illegally) converted to regular ballots and passed through, all 39 for Bush.

I met Richard Hayes Phillips, a geologist from New Hampshire who was invited to Ohio to study the integrity of the vote, and realized that a complete inventory of lost and miscounted votes was needed. To date, Phillips has analyzed 15 of Ohio's 88 counties, and by his most conservative estimate has found 101,000 uncounted Kerry votes - 136,000 is the margin by which Bush officially defeated Kerry.