What if we had an election without electronic voting machines?

[Stevepol]

Let's take MA. I would have thought that MA is already a state that deeply distrusts the use of voting machines but this is not so if Jon Simon's book CODE RED is right. For the special election of January of 2010 where Scott Brown was running against Martha Coakley for the open seat resulting from Ted Kennedy's death, 97% of the vote was counted in cyber space and absolutely no attempt was made to verify the vote. There was paper because MA uses opti scan machines that merely count the paper. So the paper was there. It just was never used to verify the results. There were no exit polls. No ballots were examined. No memory cards were examined (a quite possible way of rigging the machines), the code within the machines was never examined because everything is proprietary and CANNOT be examined.

Fortunately 3% of the vote, 65,000 votes in 71 communities, was counted BY HAND UNDER PUBLIC OBSERVATION. This 3% makes for a great sampling of the vote, a natural "audit" as it were.

Now it's not fair to compare such discrete segments of the vote without somehow making sure that the composition of the sample is about the same as the larger group being "audited." In this case, the two groups as measured by the previous two election cycles had almost exactly the same percentage of Democrats (31.3% GOP, 68.7 Dem). So the handcount group should provide a good audit for the later election.

The ACTUAL RESULT: "Where votes were observably counted by hand, the Democrat Martha Coakley defeated the Republican Scott Brown by a margin of 2.8%; where votes were counted unobservably and secretly by machine, Brown defeated Coakley by a margin of 5.2%"

Extrapolate to the whole country and imagine what kind of Congress and country we would have today if we had "audits" that were fair and where the results of audits led to actual recounts and the seating of the actual winners.

[Skwmom]

1. I believe optical scan machines with paper were recommended after the Gore/Bush fiasco.

Of course, many counties now use electronic voting machines with NO paper trail and NO way to verify the result.

[eniwetok]

28. optical scan: best of both worlds

I live in MA and my town uses optical scan. They are the best of both worlds... speedy tabulation plus they are verifiable. All I can add is there should be random manual recounts of perhaps 5% of the precincts to verify the electronic tabulation.

[merrily]

2. Yes, Massachusetts distrusts voting machines, which is why we went to paper ballots after 2000. Why

else would the state have changed its entire system, absent distrust of the existing one?

The Coakley Brown outcome, however, was more than consistent with what polls had been showing for a while before the election--that Coakley was going to lose to Brown by a lot. If fact, IIRC, she did better on election day than the polls had been predicting.

If Coakley had been stunned by the outcome, she probably would have challenged it. Had she done so, the ballots would have been available for a recount, as they have been starting with the 2004 Presidential, which would not have been the case with the pre-2004 system. However, there was no challenge because the only question was just how badly she was going to lose.

Anyone who believes Coakley won that election is dreaming, at best.

[Stevepol]

6. Keep in mind that polls are also suspect now

The polling companies are private businesses and if their polls indicate that the Dem is doing well and then the actual (i.e. the machine counted) results are considerably different and this happens several election cycles, that company is not going to be in business very long.

The polling companies thus came up with ways to "adjust" the polls to take account of the over-counting of Dems. The LVCM is used for this purpose now (the Likely Voter Cut-off Model). This is a percentage that is added to the Repub totals to indicate what the likely vote will "actually" be based on results in the past (i.e., the vote as counted on the machines), and supposedly representing the "fact" that certain classes of Dems polled are unlikely to vote as compared with Repubs.

I trust Simon's statistics a lot more than I do the so-called polls nowadays. "Weighting" BTW is perfectly reasonable, in fact, necessary to take account of the sample used and the larger population that is being predicted or statistically measured. But "adjusting" the polls, both the pre-election polls and the exit polls, after a sensible and reasonable "weighting," is mostly just based on the "red shift" which is present now in almost all elections in the US as a direct result I think of the use of electronic voting machines.

[merrily]

7. I understand that. However, I repeat: anyone who thought Coakley won is dreaming, at best.

[Stevepol]

11. Dream or not, you might want to check out Simon's work.

Jonathan Simon, CODE RED: COMPUTERIZED ELECTION THEFT AND THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY POST-E2014 EDITION.

The section covering the Coakley/Brown election is pp. 224-250 and it provides a complete run-down of the "results' of the election and analysis of the comparison Simon makes between the 97% machine-counted and the 3% hand-counted in front of observers.

As I said, I trust Simon's work far more than polls nowadays.

[merrily]

12. Why would I? It's moot. Besides,

I lived that campaign and that election. When she ran against Brown, she was possibly the worst candidate I've witnessed in my life--and I'm including Todd Akins. Let me give you just a tiny taste: when asked about her foreign policy expertise, she cited having visited her sister in Europe twice. And don't even get me started on Schilling.

Also, best I can tell, the DNC and every Democratic politician with a national reputation left Coakley to twist in the wind. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1280&pid=43335

On top of all that, local media was in the bag for Scott Brown, whose wife had worked at a local Boston TV station for years. The female reporter assigned to the place where Brown announced his victory literally jumped up and down during the announcement. On camera.

All those things are, to me, much more suspect than the outcome of that election, which was no surprise to anyone, and all those things are also much more relevant to future elections than whether Coakley should have demanded a recount. In any event, she didn't demand one and it's too late now.

If your point is clean elections, I'm with you. If your point is Coakley actually won, forget it.

[merrily]

17. In fairness, I have to add that Coakley was a good Attorney General and ran a

much better campaign when she ran for Governor against Baker. As a politician, she is far superior to Akin. She just ran an unbelievably lousy campaign against Brown. That may be OT, but I did not want to leave a false impression of my own view of Coakley.

[questionseverything]

20. it is not moot. it happens everywhr

http://www.sweetremedy.tv/fatallyflawed/media/RTA_Fraud_Flyer_3_7_12.pdf

maybe she was a really bad candidate, she must of been when there were 3 times as many registered dems as reps and lost

[merrily]

30. Polls were always suspect. They are designed more to shape opinion than to determine what it is.

Except for the polls whose results most likely are not made public.

[eniwetok]

29. Coakley ran a terrible campaign..

Coakley ran a terrible campaign... and if that wasn't bad enough, she went on vacation.

[merrily]

31. There were many reasons, but, IMO, this is not the time or the thread for that postmortem.

[PoliticAverse]

3. Were exit polls consistent with the reported results? n/t

[Stevepol]

8. There were none.

To quote from Siimon (p. 241), there were "no checks, audits, ballot inspections, hand tallies, exit polls, memory cards, or computer card examinations. Not a thing beyond pure faith that the corporations . . . and insiders charged with the secret, unobservable counting of 97% of the votes in MA have decided to honor the public trust at the expense of any other personal, economic, or political agenda of their own or of anyone who would seek to influence them. In an age of steroids and hGH, credit default swaps, Ponzi schemes, and massive institutional frauds coupled with hyper-partisan, true-believer politics, such 'faith' amounts to little more than rank denial."

[merrily]

18. No news organization did exit polls, but an exit poll apparently was done.

The poll, which was commissioned by “Women’s Voices, Women Vote” and conducted by Lake Research Partners (a firm headed by Martha Coakley’s pollster Celinda Lake), found that key demographic supporters of Obama (unmarried women, people of color, and younger voters) did not turn out in large numbers for Democrats. The Massachusetts turnout reflects recent trends in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/01/20/78144/exit-poll-of-mass/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/massachusetts-exit-polls_n_428655.html (no news organization did exit polling)

[questionseverything]

21. are we reading the same article?

Allen adds that just days ago the Boston Sunday Globe carried the headline, "Senate poll: Coakley up 15 points." Since the election wasn't expected to be close not long ago, some apparently thought the exit poll process wouldn't be needed.

[Stevepol]

22. Are you sure this article refers to a rigorous exit poll?

The title of the article says: "Exit Survey of MA Voters Confirms Lack of Enthusiasm Among Progressives." I don't doubt that. A later place in the article calls the "survey" a "poll," but it doesn't seem like a rigorous exit poll by a polling company. It's more of a poll conducted post-election within the Martha Coakley supporters and advisers to find out where the campaign failed.

I was quoting from Simon in CODE RED, who said no exit polls were done. That's why he decided to use the voters who had voted on paper and whose votes were counted openly and transparently (65,000 voters in 71 communities) in order to see what the likelihood of the differences between the sample and the rest of the voters would be. As Simon says, "We would expect the handcount results to fall within 1.0% of the opscan results with better than 99.9999% confidence."

Simon is at Election Defense Alliance <http://electiondefensealliance.org/> and would perhaps want to know about this poll if it indeed was a rigorous exit poll whose results are highly reliable (except for the inevitable "adjustment," of course, after the fact).

I'm not acquainted with the facts on the ground in MA during this election, but the result for the Handcount group, a 2.8% margin for Coakley, seems reasonable, even if the candidate was not a good candidate, given that the voters in MA were 68.7% Democratic. Republicans these days have no trouble whatever winning elections in places where they have the majority of voters, even if the candidate is not a good one, where their majority is far less than the almost 70% Dem majority in MA.

[merrily]

24. I knew what you were quoting from. Is Simon supposed to be infallible? Even IF the exit poll that

was done was not a "rigorous" exit poll (as opposed to a lax exit poll?), it is not accurate to say NO exit poll was done, is it?

It's more of a poll conducted post-election within the Martha Coakley supporters and advisers to find out where the campaign failed.

Where are you getting all that? That is NOT what the article to which I linked you says.

An exit survey of Massachusetts voters confirms that “decreased turnout among constituencies that historically have voted for progressive candidates,” combined with a strong Republican performance among independents, delivered Scott Brown the margins he needed to win.

The poll, which was commissioned by “Women’s Voices, Women Vote” and conducted by Lake Research Partners (a firm headed by Martha Coakley’s pollster Celinda Lake), found that key demographic supporters of Obama (unmarried women, people of color, and younger voters) did not turn out in large numbers for Democrats. The Massachusetts turnout reflects recent trends in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections.

An exit poll was commissioned by women's group and done by a professional polling company. If the poll were not deemed up to Simon's standards for whatever reason, an accurate statement by Simon would have gone something like, "The only exit poll done was (a sloppy one, or a substandard one, or whatever disparaging description one wants to insert here). So, Simon's assertion that no exit poll at all was done is inaccurate, by my standards. It is possible that this poll escaped Simon's attention, since it was not commissioned by any media. In any event, I would never have made a flat statement that no exit poll at all was conducted.

Also, I am not sure what you mean when you say the 70% Dem majority in MA. Masachusetts is indeed very blue, but over half of registered voters in Massachusetts are registered unenrolled, the Massachusetts equivalent of independent. http://www.tauntongazette.com/article/20140722/NEWS/140729362 We do elect Republican Governors regularly, but there is no denying we are very blue state. However, I am not sure where a figure like 70% Democratic comes from because it's not coming from voter registration.

I followed this campaign and election VERY closely from inside Massachusetts--inside Boston, to be precise. I would bet my life that Coakley lost BIG.

[Stevepol]

25. I appreciate your points. It does seem that Simon ignored a well-done exit poll.

However, the difference between the handcounted 3% of voters and the 97% rest of the state is still highly unlikely. Simon shows that the 97% population of voters was actually MORE likely to vote for Coakley in the previous 2006 election for Attorney General so the 97% population sample was not only equally Democratic but more sympathetic to Coakley than the 3% sample. Here's what he says about the result (p. 235):

"If the handcounted ballots had been distributed randomly throughout the Commonwealth, we would expect the handcount results to fall within 1.0% of the opscan results with better than 99.9999% confidence. The odds of an 8.0% marginal disparity would be beyond astronomical. We have further established that the handcount 'sample' is, for comparison purposes 'better' than random: that is, based on demographics and voting patterns, the handcount voters would be more likely than the opscan voters to vote for Brown. The odds therefore of an 8.0 marginal disparity in the other direction would be, and there is no better way to say this, beyond beyond astronomical. Statisticians never say 'impossible' but that is, for all earthly intents and purposes, what it is."

In the US now, I think we can agree, where the vote is either impossible to verify or almost never verified (even, as is the case in MA apparently, where there is paper to do an audit) it is still essential to democracy that in EVERY ELECTION where electronic voting machines are used, that the vote BE VERIFIED. And about the only way this can be done is through statistical tests, required audits.

Right now, here in Kansas, Beth Clarkson, a statistician at Wichita State, is trying to just gain access to the paper trail in Sedgwick County so that she can rule out machine improprieties in the odd results that came out of the most recent KS elections. She will almost certainly be denied that right by the powers that be. Because we have turned over the counting of votes to voting machines programmed by right-wingers, essentially there's no way to directly verify the vote. If we are going to use these machines, the only recourse we have to VERIFY THE VOTE is statistical tests like those Simon has gone to great pains to do.

Your efforts and those efforts of many others to throw light on our elections is much appreciated. I'm glad to share this forum with you. It's only by efforts like those you are making to come to the truth that the problems we have with the fair counting of votes in the US will ever be resolved.

[merrily]

26. As I stated upthread, if you want to discuss the importance of a clean vote, availability of

verification in the event of a recount--not just a receipt that voters leave the polls with, etc. I am right there with you. However, I think the Coakely Brown election is not the example to use to make that case. That election raised a LOT of other questions in my mind, but rigging of the vote itself was never one of them.

If the election Brown-Coakley election had been rigged, it would have been Democrats rigging it against a Democrat. The Governor was a Democrat. Most poll workers are Democrats. Most votes come out of Boston, which is a Democrsatic machines and has been for many years. For the last mayoral election, there wasn't even a Republican and a Democratic primary. There was only a uni-primary in which about 23 Democrats and one or two Republicans competed.

I have zero doubt that bad things go on with the vote. There's just too much money and power involved for everything to be Sunday School. However, I, for one, am a little worn down by Democratic politicians claiming prior elections were stolen, then doing nothing to prevent the next elections from being stolen. When Democrats start increasing penalties for messing with elections, requiring paper ballots, etc., I'll believe they want actually want clean elections. Right now, I'm only wondering why they do nothing but complain.

[tecelote]

4. Voting machines should be absolutely, and publically, verifiable.

They should not be a profit center for corporations that contribute to political candidates. In fact, they should not be profit centers.

They should simple machines, easy to understand and always have a paper trail.

This, not our electorate's choices, is a major reason for the downward spiral of our country. Not only do we get unelected government officials put in to office, the citizenry doesn't trust that their vote counts.

Democracy is dead without it.

[Stevepol]

16. It's not enough to just have a paper trail.

There needs to be an audit of the vote based on a certain percentage of the vote using randomly selected precincts. This is the only way disparities can be found. If the variance between the supposed "actual" vote and the "audited" vote in the randomly chosen precincts is beyond a certain limit (based on the margin of victory), then a much larger portion of the vote should be hand-counted. If that too shows great variance from the supposed actual vote, then the whole election should be recounted.

We must VERIFY THE VOTE!!!

It's not possible to have a democracy without verifying the vote. Only then can the voter be assured that the vote result is more or less correct.

[questionseverything]

19. there are so many ways to rig an election

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/possible-discrepancy-in-fairfax-absentee-votes-could-affect-count-in-ag-race/2013/11/07/65108ad0-4825-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html

remember this race where 3000 absentee ballots were "forgotten"?

if every step of the process is not transparent to we who are to be governed, it is not a free and fair election

[dhol82]

5. How many others have wondered why

if an ATM can connect to my private account, spit out a certain amount of money correctly (and now they have machines that can give you the bills you want, i.e. singles, fives and tens), print out a receipt and have the whole shebang verifiable, we can't have voting machines do similar?

It just bugs me that the voting machine guys say it's too complicated to give receipts and have a paper trail.

[Stevepol]

9. There is a paper trail in many cases, just no "audit"

Last edited Tue Sep 1, 2015, 08:00 AM - Edit history (1)

All it would take to have I believe much fairer results would be a legitimate "audit" of a certain percentage of the vote using randomly chosen precincts and a large enough sample to to give a 90% to 100% certainty that the result of the audit should be a truly accurate representation of the entire vote and justify the further counting of the PAPER. When the audits show a strong indication of computer fraud, the entire vote should be recounted BY HAND. If that were done everywhere in the US it would not be long I feel certain before voter fraud would be detected. The thing is, if we had required and real audits of every election, the people who are rigging the vote, almost certainly the insiders from the companies, would be far less likely to tilt the vote (especially in close elections) as is occurring now.

[billhicks76]

10. Wall St Candidates Wouldn't Win

Max Cleland would still be Senator of Georgia. And corporate Democrats probably would lose more.

[Stevepol]

14. I strongly agree with you.

The 2002 GA election (if it can be called that) was the thing that alerted me to the dangers of electronic vote counting. I'll never forget watching Sonny Perdue, the new Repub governor after he defeated the incumbent Dem Barnes (who had an 11% lead on Perdue according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll conducted before the election) by 5%. He looked stunned. He hardly knew what he was doing. It was obvious he never thought he would be in that situation.

In that election, the entire vote was counted completely in cyber space, no paper, no human eye saw any actual paper vote, no hand touched any paper. It was entirely "faith-based vote counting" on Diebold touch-screens. The programming for the machine was in all likelihood at least partly devised by a man who was convicted of embezzlement of a bank by using a sophisticated scheme that involved the malicious programming of computers. As soon as he was out of prison he began working for Global Election Systems, a company that was doing programs for elections. They were bought up by Diebold in 2002 and that summer the programs for the Diebold vote counting in GA were devised.

Max Cleland lost with a similar unbelievable vote flip. He was the one I was really pulling for because I thought he could help put a brake on Bush's rush to war in Iraq. I liked him a lot. He was also and still is a highly intelligent and capable Democrat. I've heard that he now thinks his election was stolen with the aid of the voting machines.

[ellennelle]

13. HANDS ON VOTING!!!

this has been my meme since 2000, and for all the good reasons listed here.

stevepol, absolutely YES, we need to hand count ballots that can be held in the voters' hands. period. it's done the world over, and drastically reduces problems. the counting is done publicly, with a rep from each interested party counting; they count, bundle with the tally sheet attached, and then the rest do the same (or the other does the same in our wicked 2-party system). if they don't match, then they are redone till they do.

also stevepol, yes, the polls are suspect too, for all the reasons you list, which is why we should take note of the reliable ones; 2012 was perfectly predicted by PPP and nate silver. but it's the exit polls that were so badly sullied in 2000, and i believe intentionally so, because exit polls have always been THE gold standard for checking the validity of elections the world over. just ask jimmy carter. there is in principle no need to adjust exit polls as they are not projections, but actual voters, there and on the ground. the only reason i can see is if the exit polls significantly missed the actual ratio of dems and repubs voting from what the registrations listed. but even then, why would you do that?? their votes can cross over, ferchrissake. we really need to bring exit polls back in to provide this outside check on the system; note how the rightwing press actively vilified them after 2000. which, by the by, never forget: GORE WON. once FL ballots were all counted by the news consortium, that was the result. gore made a tactical error to just beg for recounts of those select counties instead of the whole state, as that is the point on which the supremes nailed him, and Selected bush.

tho many more issues abound here (and i have not read red shift; should), i'll end with the fact that coakley lost that election to brown fair and very square. she was and is a terrible candidate, and i was baffled that she was the ma dem choice for the campaign, and even more so for this last gubernatorial. there were infinitely better candidates than she had proven herself to be, and she lived down to everyone's expectations. so, we now have another repub guv; ugh.

but yeah, this banner needs to be taken up and put before the candidates at a national level. have no idea why the dems have shied away from this, but it's like it has some kinda stank on it that completely freaks them out. barbara boxer's backing of the refutation of the OH vote in congress in 04 is the only establishment peep amongst crickets on the entire matter. because consider this, something everyone (except fox bots) knows but will not discuss publicly: the GOP has not won a general election since 1988! seriously, think about it. clinton's 2 terms, then gore beat bush, and technically speaking kerry beat bush, then obama's 2 terms.... folks, that is almost 30 years of the general population exposing their rejection of republican politicians and policies.

the GOP knows this, and has known it since FDR, which is why they are so inclined to cheat. HANDS ON VOTING reduces that opportunity.

thx for posting this.

[zeemike]

15. The only conclusion one can reach is both parties want it that way

Because both parties have been co opted by the PTB.
And they don't care if people become disillusioned and quit voteing...so much the better to rig the election in a way they want it to go and still maintain the illusion of democracy.

Yes we need a political revolution. But don't wait for our political leaders to lead it...it will have to come from the grass roots.

[GoneFishin]

23. I am convinced that both parties want it that way also. Once you accept that it is not

about Democrats vs. Republicans, but rather it is about insiders vs. outsiders, then the reason for the acceptance of the presto-chango voting machine becomes clear.

[SaveTheMackerel]

27. This is why I'm against ranked choice voting.

Systems that make counting harder or longer will just allow more fraud or distrust. I think first past the post is wrong, but we need a different method that is easy to count but allows more choices to run.

[eniwetok]

32. but...

Our single district plurality system is based on antiquated principles rejected by most advanced democracies. It simply is incapable of accurately measuring the consent of the governed. If we don't modernize our electoral system, we'll never break out of the two party trap. Even simple reforms like Instant Runoff Voting may present problems if all ballots have to be hand counted. So it's not as if saying primitive solves problems. It perpetuates an antidemocratic system.