The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud 467
cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
Donkey vote (Score:4, Insightful)
Was he listed under "A" or "G"? Were the other candidates listed around "Z", "Q" and "U"?
10% chance? (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
Poor research (Score:5, Insightful)
The P value of this test is 0.1, pretty much all research I read demands a P value of 0.05 to justify a hypothesis. How many elections are there in the USA every year? By this standard even if all of them were not tampered with and totally legitimate 1/10th of them would be found to have been tampered with. That's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation.
Basically, bullshit, either do better research to get a lower P value or stop drawing such spurious conclusions.
Re:If you are going to cheat, at least be smart... (Score:5, Insightful)
People do weird things some times. Why did Nixon commit felonies in the 1972 race against McGovern (and thereby destroy his Presidency) when it was obvious to almost everyone that McGovern had no chance of winning anyways?
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway. Ok if we are going to be throwing conspiracy theories around, how do you know that this is not a scheme by the Democrats to create a scandal that they could blame on the Republicans?
Re:Voting machine = Perpetual Motion machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're picking unremarkable campaigns at random out of a hat, then yes, this result signifies nothing.
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
To put it another way: if the guy next to you at the blackjack table gets two blackjacks in a row, you shouldn't be alarmed, that happens all the time. But if the guy is also winking at the dealer and has a suspicious bulge in his sleeve, it's time to find another table.
Re:10% chance with no audit trail, NO AUDIT TRAIL! (Score:4, Insightful)
Of cause, if the other side won, it's still only 90% chance. I don't think 9 times the chance is sufficient to say that no tampering was involved.
Re:10% chance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Election process is not innocent until convicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
Re:Open Source Government - Daily voting possible? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two problems with everyday voting, you are only trying to solve one: the technology. The other problem is that to make important informed decisions every day you need to do research and think about the issues. Most of us have jobs and family to keep us busy and many of us aren't really interested in "researching and thinking". The realistic expectation is that everyday voting would lead to ultra-low participation, rampant sensationalism (as that would be the only way to make people actually vote on specific issues) and hiding important issues as "everyday stuff".
In other words you are attempting to solve a human problem with technology. It will not work.
Not "Fraud" (Score:4, Insightful)
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else. Not to mention beating 1 in 10 odds isn't that suspicious.
Re:Checksum failures... (Score:2, Insightful)
What's that old saying?...Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty good.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes no sense. Even the left-leaning fivethirtyeight blog [fivethirtyeight.com] listed the South Carolina Senate seat as safely Republican back in late April, with a 95+% chance to be won by the Republican candidate.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
According to TFA, these voting machines have a large number of problems and no audit trail. Who's to say this wasn't just a fuckup, rather than deliberate malice on anyone's part?
If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting. I don't find it odd-I know exactly how easy it is to manipulate data on a large scale, even data that's supposedly secure and tamper-resistant. It's a whole lot harder to tamper with thousands or millions of paper ballots than it is to tamper with thousands or millions of electronic records.
That doesn't mean electronics have no place. An electronically generated human-readable ballot would be fine. In that case, the speed and reduced human error of electronic voting could be realized, but the voter would still have the ability to verify their choices after printing, and if wrong, go to an election judge, say "I didn't intend to vote this way", and have their ballot scrapped and recast. Backup paper systems should always be available at every precinct in case of a total failure of the machines, electrical failure, or just people who are not comfortable using them.
Having that type of mechanism in place would prevent exactly this type of scenario. It would allow for the result either to be overturned, or to say with certainty that, while unlikely, it is indeed the outcome.
Re: Not "Fraud" (Score:3, Insightful)
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else.
Yeah... it's fraud on the part of the people who make the machines.
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they wanted to make sure anyway, seeing how it's the middle of a huge recession and all.
Re:10% chance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Significance at 10% is very significant for an election as closely monitored as first world elections are
No it isn't. If you test 10 elections you would expect one of those to fail this test *even if they are all 'good' elections*. There are more than 10 primaries aren't there? Nothing can be concluded from this result in isolation, however when taken with other *independent* evidence it can strengthen the whole case.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
What if it's actually the Republicans making a scheme to make us think that it's the Democrats trying to make us think it's the Republicans trying to make us think it's the Democrat candidate?
Re:He Won! (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be a silly scheme though considering that this is a safe Republican seat anyway.
You don't practice and hone your skills on the important 50:50 battles, you practice and hone your skills on the pointless irrelevant battles. Since this is an irrelevant battle, it doesn't matter so much whom is to blame for this individual irrelevant battle, so much as it matters that someone out there is preparing for the big one...
Re:This is GOOD NEWS! (Score:1, Insightful)
If you have proof that this was caused by broken evoting systems, why are you sitting on this information?
Re:Open Primary (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up, all signs point to this; both parties play this game every election. Heck, a good percentage of Hillary's support in 2008 [boston.com] was from Republicans voting against Obama. Democrats play the same game (remember the South Carolina Bush vs McCain primary in 2000?).
But why pull this trick in SC when the Republican seat is safe? Simple, neither side would ever pass up an opportunity to embarrass the other.
The simple explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Election process is not innocent (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you suppose we investigate suspicious elections?
On any given election day, imagine how many different elections are going on. There are over 10,000 cities in the US. In a presidential election, the ballot I see tends to have at least ten people to vote for, a mix of local, state, and federal.
Every election cycle, even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance, it's almost certain to happen multiple times each election.
We're always going to have election results that are unlikely.
So what do we do about it? Yes, I will support investigations in events like these, but at the same time, I think we need to start before the election, with the machines themselves.
Re:Rawl didn't campaign either . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Rawl at least had some name recognition.
According to a poll in late May. he apparently had a 4% name recognition. I don't think that is enough to matter.
Hanlon's Razor (Score:3, Insightful)
The ballot entries were listed in alphabetical order. Green comes before Rawls. Both were relatively unknown quantities. People are stupid.
I think, as I heard someone on NPR say this morning, people just choose the first guy on the list.
Re:Poor research (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're not going to answer the challenge, then? Because I'd like to hear it, too.
So besides the way the voters voted, what are the "other irregularities"?
This is salient.
Re:A couple of basic information pieces (Score:3, Insightful)
Possibilities off the top of my head:
1. Wealthier - they're traveling
2. Military - stationed outside the state
3. More politically motivated - they're outside their area; actually willing to go through the hassle of voting absentee
4. More likely to hit the websites up over the election?
Better possibility: Absentee ballots are often filed with the assistance of political operatives working on behalf of the candidate or party. Rawl had such assistance, Green did not.
Add that to the reports of widespread voter error in using the ballots perhaps resulting in mistaken votes cast for Green on election day and you've got a plausible explanation for the disparity. Actually, it is pretty shocking if the difference is only 11%, given the major advantage organization plays in casting absentee ballots. Given reports about Green, you would expect that anything north of 3% of the vote would be a surprising result.
The widespread ignorance of the race in the electorate at the time of the election (e.g. the party candidate having less than 5% name recognition) parallels a problem with down-card elections. We vote for our judges, but really now, who knows anything about these candidates. In most areas they are not allowed to campaign, other than putting their name on a poster. So that's all you have to go on... just a name. Yet someone wins the election every time...
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a scheme to get anyone elected, it's a scheme to screw with the Democrats by introducing racial divisiveness. Republicans appear to believe that the entire left operates on identity politics. (Vote down a woman for president? We'll collect the female vote by having one as a VP! That's not why people were for Hillary, you asshats.)
In South Carolina, as is pointed out,t he scheme is usually done by throwing a clearly unqualified black guy in the Democratic primary when there's no serious black candidate, so that when some qualified white person wins, hopefully some whispering about racism will show up and some black people, at least, stay home. This doesn't work very well, because Democrats are usually voting the issues, and the Republicans have just mistaken it for race, but surely it works a tiny amount, and all it takes is a filing fee.
However, this time, the guy won, which is utterly surreal.
And, yes, voting fraud doesn't explain it, because if the Republicans can defraud elections, they sure as hell wouldn't have done it here, in such an obvious manner, when they'd have their candidate win no matter what.
And there's absolutely no reason for the Democrats to do it.
No one can figure this one out.
Re:He Won! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
It is amazing how often people find that odd. But don't just tell them you're against it...tell them pretty much the entire industry is against them, because computers do exactly what you tell them to do, including lie, and then they can lie about being told to lie.
People need to hear this more from people they regard as knowledgeable about computers. Over and over. Computers lie if told to do so. This is not detectable because they'll just lie about their lying to the people checking them.
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a pretty dumb idea in a primary anyway.
Are people really going to all the trouble to go vote in a primary, and then just randomly picking people?
Re:The simple explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
In a PRIMARY, you generally have people who actually care about the outcome going out to vote. The people who would just pick the first person on the list are the ones who stay home and don't vote at all in the primary.
Re:This exact same tactic has been used before in (Score:4, Insightful)
So, you're saying that Democrats in SC are so racists that their whole party platform can be brought down by having someone running that is ostensibly on the same side but of a different heritage?
Damn. Just, damn.
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Insightful)
And no, this isn't a "Bush didn't really win" post, but just pointing out that if election issues were something that would rile up the people, they missed their chance. Instead, I think both parties accept vote fraud because they both do it when they can, and they don't want anything resembling vote reform to go through because it would probably have lots of people press for things like instant runoff and such that will only benefit the 3rd parties. So both parties will bitch and moan until the vote is certified, then they shut the hell up. At least that's what they've always done so far, and probably because they want security and confidence in the government, even if the other guy gets his 4 years, because they know they'll be back.
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Insightful)
I also wouldn't put it passed the Republican party in SC to want to insure that DeMint beats down a black Democratic candidate by a very large margin. That would give him plenty of angles to spin this as an anti-Obama victory.
You're insane, you know that? The Republicans spin the loss of a black Democrat candidate as an "anti-Obama victory", and all it does is charge up the racist black vote that turned up for Obama last time around based on nothing but skin color.
Re:This exact same tactic has been used before in (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, no, it didn't work. Read the post.
Republicans have a theory that black people vote for black Democrats over white Democrats, no matter how incompetent they are, or how much they are 'real' Democrats. Ergo, they think if they run incompetent black people as Democrats, they will split the vote. Or at the very least, have some black people, disgusted at the primary outcome, not vote in the general election.
They also think the same thing about women. (Re: Sarah Palin and the whole PUMA thing they invented and pushed in the media)
This doesn't really work that well. It does work a little, though, and it just costs a filing fee.
And it lets the Republicans have better stats. Sure, they don't elect black guys in their primaries much, but, statistically, neither do the Democrats. (Because half of them are Republican plants.)
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Insightful)
With all due respect - what the f@@k are you talking about? I don't know where to begin... "law that is generally only used for people"? Because no one has ever abused a good-intentioned law far beyond the scope it was intended? I am a little to lazy to look things up, but check "war on drugs", "patriot act" etc to see that laws are generally used in the most convenient rather than intended way.
And then I don't care if he showed someone (college student, mind you - not a 5 year girl) the most violent bestiality video ever. If there is a law on the books that says showing violent porn to an adult can send you to prison for 5 years (!) - then the law is clearly wrong. There is just no other interpretation. If this has to be against the law (when adults are involved?) then something like community service or fines would be a lot more appropriate.
With that said - he sounds like a bad candidate :)
Interesting how these stories come up (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems like we only hear about election fraud when the Democrat National Committee gets a result they don't like.
But in this current political climate, what's so hard to believe about an unknown outsider at the top of the ballot winning?
The only ones who can't believe it are the ones heavily invested in forcing the outcome to what we're led to believe is the "predictable" outcome.
Why is the filing fee so high? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems quite undemocratic that the fee is so high that you'd *have* to have external support just to throw your name into a hat.