No Vote Fraud Here. Move Along, Comrades…
From LP blog
2004 Libertarian Recount Conclusion
There have been several recent media reports about the somewhat exciting conclusion of recount operations in Ohio.
Richard Winger of Ballot Access News wrapped it all up quite well:After the November 2004 election, the presidential nominees of the Green Party and the Libertarian Party jointly requested a recount of the presidential vote in New Mexico and in Ohio.
Both states had relatively nominal fees for requesting a recount. But elections officials in both states were determined to thwart the requests. In New Mexico, the state retroactively increased the fee ten-fold and a lower court said that was OK. The two candidates couldn’t afford the $1,400,000 new fee for the recount, so they dropped their request, and the voting-counting machines were then reprogrammed so that any recount would be impossible. Later, on May 16, 2006, the New Mexico Supreme Court said the two candidates should have received the recount they had requested after all, but, of course, by then it was too late.
In Ohio, the recount supposedly went ahead. Under the law, a few precincts were supposedly to be randomly chosen. A hand count of these randomly-chosen precincts was then to be compared with the machine total. If they matched, no further recount in that county was needed. On January 24, a jury convicted two Ohio elections officials of rigging the recount. Instead of randomly choosing precincts, they first identified a few precincts in which the hand-count and the machine-count matched. Then they claimed that those precincts had been the randomly-chosen ones; and since totals matched, no further recount of other precincts was needed. As in New Mexico, it is too late to do anything about it.
Posted by Stephen Gordon at January 26, 2007 10:06 AM
January 28, 2007 at 2:11 am
Diebold: One Vulnerability After Another
Will these guys ever get a clue about security? The cheap locks that protect Diebold voting machines — easily picked, by the way — all open to the same key. Diebold put a photo of the key on their web page. So naturally an enterprising tinkerer took that photo, bought some key blanks from the hardware store, and proceeded to home-make keys that would open Diebold voting machines.
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.676
February 1, 2007 at 3:42 am
OHIO 2004: 6.15% Kerry-Bush vote-switch found in probability study
Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1/34th of the Ohio vote), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15% when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.
The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal in both subsets.
Read the revised article with graphs of new findings:
The 2004 Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis
How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html