Vote fraud: Europe takes note (Plus: More furor over the "Reluctant Bush Responder")

International observers have taken a look at our system of elections, and they do not like what they see. The Nation offers a precis of a new report by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The actual report is here. (And it was damned hard to find!) Here's part of what The Nation has to say about it:

One would have thought the voter reform movement in this country would jump at the chance to see the United States judged by the same criteria as Ukraine, Georgia or Kyrgyzstan--especially since the report finds it badly wanting. Here, in black and white, is authoritative proof that the disenfranchisement of ex-felons, the uneven rules applied to provisional balloting, the unreliability of voter registration procedures and the dual role of election supervisors who also help run partisan political campaigns are not merely objectionable but also violate international norms to which the United States, as a participating member of the fifty-five-nation OSCE, is a leading signatory.

More:

OSCE sources complain that US officials made "inappropriate" phone calls in the run-up to the report's publication, in the hope that its conclusions would not come down too hard on the dysfunctions of its electoral system. Russia and the other former Soviet republics, meanwhile, have accused both the United States and the OSCE itself of a glaring double standard--making no bones about criticizing the conduct of their elections (in Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and, most recently, Kyrgyzstan) while skirting over the inadequacies of voting in the world's sole remaining superpower.

Unfortunately, the report doesn't have all the meat one might have hoped for. European nations, fearful of annoying the United States, did not send a full contingent of monitors -- something badly needed. Instead, the OSCE made do with a "targeted observation mission," which got only a part of the picture in certain swing states. But even that attenuated glance revealed sinister happenings.

(Why on earth does Europe continue to be cowed by Bush? We have no industry and we live on borrowed money. Why should the creditor fear the debtor?)

In the gentlest of language, the OSCE points to many of the problems we've been screaming about for months. Among their recommendations:

1. The American government should shun election machine vendors with "conflicts of interest." (That means you, Mr. Ahmanson!)

2. Independent testing of voting machines -- which would require open software.

3. Permanent paper records (and let's have no tripe about storage problems).

4. A sensible, across-the board policy on re-enfranchising criminals who have paid their debts to society ("...federal and state laws should ensure that the principle of proportionality between offense and sanction is upheld").

These ideas strike me as a good start. But just a start.

Dopp v. Febble: Kathy Dopp has briefly responded to the paper Elizabeth Liddle ("Febble"), who argued that the "reluctant Bush responder" (RBR) hypothesis is consistent with the exit poll data. (My own term -- "chatty Dem" -- almost caught on, but has now given way to stuffier nomenclature.)

Liddle was kind enough to respond at length to my own piece; you can find both my words and hers here. I remain a bit bothered that she refused to address my main point: The same exit polls that supposedly over-sampled the Kerry voters also reported a heavy Bush vote in the "Who did you vote for in 2000?" question.

There's also the unsettling matter of the exit polls that worked just fine in the case of the senatorial contest, but not in the presidential race. I'd like an explanation that goes beyond vague mumblings about "statistical noise."

One could mention a couple of other factors, but the 2000 question remains the most troubling. Some wags have even begun to muse about "reluctant Gore responders."

Ms. Liddle, put away the graphing calculator for just a minute. Let us reason together. Let us conjure up a plausible real-world scenario. Just a hypothesis. Nobody's asking you to prove it. Just as Einstein could conduct "thought experiments" involving elevators in space, can we not construct a thought experiment which would account for the both the "reluctant Bush responder" hypothesis and the "reluctant Gore responder" data?

If you can't think of a sensible explanatory scenario, try your hand at a silly one. Hell, I don't care if you bring in Martians or gnomes. I just want to know how a poll beset by "RBR" syndrome could offer such a Bush-friendly response to the 2000 question. That's not too much to ask for, is it?

Here is part of what Kathy Dopp had to say:

Bruce O'Dell, VP of US Count Votes, has created a simulation model of Lizzie's algorithm. It indicates that her model requires a "participation by partisanship" profile that is totally inconsistent with E/M's empirical data.

Lizzie's model requires greater exit poll participation in High-Kerry precincts than in High-Bush precincts. E/M's data shows quite the contrary.

If you reproduce Lizzie's results, and delve down into the data, you face a fundamental contradiction with E/M's "participation rate by precinct" empirical data.

Lizzie (and E/M's) "uniform response bias" hypothesis simply does not fit the facts. Period. There is simply no way to reconcile a "uniform response bias" hypothesis with E/M's "participation rates by partisanship" data.

US Count Votes will eventually publish the raw data and my simulator source code, to allow anyone to confirm my assertions.

I urge readers to scroll down and read Liddle's responses, which don't really address the above comments. (Not that we can fairly ask her to respond to raw data as yet unpublished.) One of her posts includes the following:

Collecting data is difficult, and at bottom, the polls are a sample and the count isn't - or shouldn't be. Any sample is prone to both sampling error and sampling bias. Vote counts, sadly, may also be prone to "sampling bias" aka fraud.

But whereas we know that the polls were a sample, and prone to all the ills that samples are heir to, we don't know that the vote count was.

But here we get down to the old, old conundrum -- one raised by myself and others the night of the election: Exit poll after exit poll keeps going wrong in one direction only. State after state. Vote after vote. Year after year. 2000, 2002, 2004. Always, the Republicans are "under-represented" by pollsters. The skew never goes in the other direction.

You don't need to be a statistician to recognize that something must be amiss if the coin keeps coming up tails.

One final observation about this "Reluctant Bush Responder" postulate: The very wording indicates how bizarre the whole concept really is. Emboldened by years of thuggish radio propagandists, most Republicans now scream their opinions with all the subtlety of a Heavy Metal concert. In many social settings, Democrats are the ones cowed into quiesence.

Greg Palast claims that his team "is embarking on a whole new round of investigations on the solid evidence that - gasp! - George Bush did NOT win the last election."

He's also asking for money. I think the idea is that if we pay him, he'll give us the evidence. Well...Palast is a good reporter, and I suppose worthy of a donation.