New paper ballot optical-scan computer tabulator systems used to tally millions of votes in New York — as well as “swing states” such as Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin — do not tally votes correctly. That stunning admission comes courtesy of a new report released by the private company which manufactures, sells, services and programs the systems which are now believed to have mistallied tens of thousands of ballots in New York in 2010.
The votes of more than ten million voters could be affected by a newly revealed failure in the voting systems set for use in those four states in this year’s Presidential election, and in more than 50 different jurisdictions in Wisconsin during next month’s historic recall elections.
Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the largest e-voting machine company in the U.S. and the maker of the paper ballot op-scan tally systems in question, have confirmed that their systems may overheat when used over several hours (for example, during an election!), and that they then may mistally and/or incorrectly discard anywhere from 30% to 70% of votes scanned by the machines.
The only way to know that a hand-marked paper ballot had been mistallied by the system would be to examine the ballots by hand to assure that the computer had read and recorded the voters’ selections correctly.
The New York Daily News editorial board — which has been persistently forcing the issue on state Election Officials who initially ignored massive mistallies discovered in the South Bronx during the state’s 2010 election — reports on ES&S’ confirmation of the latest failure in a story headlined “We told you so: Newfangled voting machine screwed up”. Their article today begins this way…
In fact, they can screw up voter tallies to a fare-thee-well even after technicians carefully calibrate and test them.
So state and city election officials have discovered, along with the machine’s manufacturer, thanks to insistent prodding by this page.
Earlier this year, the newspaper discovered — through public records requests for the paper ballots in a single precinct in the South Bronx — that the ES&S model DS200 op-scan system had failed to count some 70% of paper ballots correctly in the 2010 primary election. In that November’s general election, some 54% of the ballots were mistallied at the same precinct.
The result, as confirmed by ES&S, tens of thousands of perfectly valid votes may have gone uncounted, while thousands of “phantom votes” in races that voters hadn’t intended to vote in at all were counted as valid votes.
The Daily News characterizes the initial response by election officials in NY, after the paper had discovered the massive failures, as “a statement of severe psychological denial.”
All of the above likely sounds very familiar to long-time readers of The BRAD BLOG, where we are considering changing the name of our news site to “We Told You So: Newfangled Voting Machines Screw Up,” as a tip of the hat to the NY Daily News, and to better reflect a great deal of our nearly 10 years worth of content here.
Unfortunately, the latest example of secret vote-tallying computers made by private companies failing to accurate tally our once-public elections, is not only affecting New York. Moreover, the failure isn’t isolated to the ES&S model DS200 paper ballot optical-scan system. As we’ve reported here for years, and on a number of recent occasions over just the past few months, similar failures have been discovered in other states and on other similarly designed paper ballot optical-scan systems.
If you think that simply because you are not forced to vote on a 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting machine that your ballot will be counted and counted accurately this year, think again…
ES&S Confirms Latest DS200 Failure
New York’s public radio station, WNYC has also been reporting the problem discovered in the Empire State. They describe, (rather conservatively, based on the numbers reported via the Daily News‘ study of actual ballots in the South Bronx) that “overheating” of the op-scan computers “may have caused upwards of 30 percent of the votes in a South Bronx voting precinct to go uncounted.
That amounts to “tens of thousands of votes in the 2010 elections…uncounted because electronic voting machines counted more than one vote in a race,” says WNYC.
ES&S has now confirmed that the failure occurred, and has been able to replicate the “overheating” problem when the systems have been on for several hours in a row. According to the company’s report, “After lunch almost every ballot was read incorrectly, in all orientations, even ballots that had read correctly just before lunch.”
The “overheating” failure led to thousands of properly cast votes being tallied as “overvotes”. An overvote occurs when a voter selects more than one candidate in a particular race, where only a single candidate can be selected. If more than one candidate is chosen in such races, the vote is ignored entirely as “invalid.”
In the case of the overheating ES&S DS200 machines, non-existent “phantom” votes (or more than one “phantom” vote) were added by the op-scanner to races on the ballot, resulting in the initial correct vote being disregarded as “invalid.” In other cases, where a voter had chosen to not vote in a particular race on purpose, the machine added a phantom selection, and then tallied it as if the voter had voted in that race after all.
So, for example, in New York’s 2010 election, if a voter had properly voted for Democrat Andrew Cuomo in the gubernatorial contest, the machine might have seen another non-existent, or “phantom” mark for Republican Carl Palladino on that ballot in the same race. If so, it would have been seen as an overvote, and neither selection would be tallied. The voter would have been disenfranchised and never even knew it.
In other cases, a voter might have chosen to vote for nobody at all in that race, but the DS200 added a vote for Palladino or Cuomo or one of the other five long-shot candidates in the contest and then counted the vote as valid in a race the voter had specifically chosen not to vote in.
Again, these failures would only be discovered by a hand-count of the paper ballots otherwise tallied by the machines. In this case, it was nearly two years following the 2010 election, after a public records request to hand-count the paper ballots, before the tens of thousands of incorrectly tallied votes came to light.
The failure had not been discovered during pre-election testing of the new op-scan computers in New York City, because the machines, reportedly, had not yet heated up enough to lead to the failure.
The Daily News reports the initial attempts by election officials to determine the cause of the massive failures this way:
The machine passed.
The state Board of Elections then stepped in to investigate. Technicians calibrated the machine and ran ballots through. The device did fine. But later on, after a few hours had passed, it began to fail with an error rate of close to 100%.
ES&S then ran its own tests and concluded that if a machine is not cleaned correctly, it will lose its calibration once the device warms up to working temperature. Test it while cool, and the count will be perfect; test it warm, and the count will be nonsense.
That ES&S suggests the problem is related to a system “not cleaned correctly,” seems to strain credulity. New York was the last state in the union to “upgrade” to electronic voting systems in 2010 in response to the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. They had just started using their new op-scan systems for the first time in 2010, when they failed.
Previously-known ES&S DS200 Failures
The massive failure is not the only one to affect the company’s DS200 paper ballot optical-scanners, even though the systems are currently set for use this November (and on June 5th in Wisconsin’s recall elections), by more than 12 million registered voters, according to VerifiedVoting.org’s database.
Over 4 million registered voters in FL, more than 6.5 million in NY, over 1 million in OH, and voters in more than 50 WI municipalities (Verified Voting’s database does not include registered voter numbers for WI) are set to have their votes tallied — accurately or otherwise — by the failed ES&S DS200 this year.
But the “overheating” problem is not the only known flaw to plague this particular failed system.
As we reported last December, in a first-of-its-kind report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal agency tasked with certification testing for electronic voting systems at the federal level issued a warning that the DS200 may freeze up during elections; fail to log system events correctly; and either misread ballots or lose votes entirely.
It was the first time that the EAC — the wholly compromised and frequently-failed federal agency formed by 2002’s HAVA — bothered to issue a “Formal Investigation Report” for any system that it had previously certified for federal use. Naturally, they stopped short of decertifying the systems, as they agency has largely become a tool of the e-voting industry.
The EAC’s investigation came about after yet another newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer in that case, reported that some 10% of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)’s ES&S precinct based optical-scan systems had failed during pre-election tests in 2010.
The failed (but, at the time, new) paper ballot op-scan systems had been purchased as a replacement for the 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen systems used previously in Ohio’s largest county, after a massive analysis of all of the state’s e-voting systems, overseen by former Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner (D), revealed serious security issues and other major flaws in the touch-screen voting machines used there and in many other states.
In USA Today’s report on the EAC’s confirmation of DS200 failures last December, the paper quoted Cleveland-Marshall College of Law professor and e-voting expert Candice Hoke explaining her concerns about the disturbing system logging failures.
“If someone were to hack into the machine,” Hoke warned, “if the logging is not secure and doesn’t protect it from rollbacks, that would allow someone to tamper with it and leave no trace.”
In short, these machines may fail on their own, or someone can cause them to fail and then hide the evidence of the manipulation.
As DeForest Soaries, the George W. Bush-appointed first chair of the U.S. EAC said when he resigned in 2005 after determining that White House and Congressional efforts to reform elections in the wake of the 2000 Presidential debacle were “a charade” and “a travesty”, the electoral system in use in this nation is “ripe for stealing elections and for fraud.”
That was true in 2005, and it remains equally so as we barrel towards the 2012 Presidential election.
Not Just the DS200 — and Not Just ES&S’ Systems
The DS200 is one of ES&S’ newer paper ballot op-scan systems. Their older systems, such as the M-100, used in dozens of states, are similarly flawed.
Back in 2008, for example, The BRAD BLOG wrote about the M-100s when Oakland County, MI was trying to get help from the EAC concerning that particular precinct-based op-scanner after pre-election testing had “yielded different results each time” the “same ballots were run through the same machines.”
According to the letter [PDF] sent to the EAC by Oakland County election officials at the time…
ES&S determined that the primary issue was dust and debris build-up on the sensors inside the M-100.
…
Unfortunately, [local clerks] are prohibited from performing any maintenance/cleaning on the machines as it voids the warranties. ES&S has not performed any preventative maintenance under the state contract, since the machines were delivered three years ago.
The ES&S M-100s, according to VerifiedVoting.org, are set for use this year by more than 31 million registered voters in more than 700 counties in 32 different states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Wyoming.
And, of course, it’s not only optical-scan system made by ES&S that produce flawed results and tallies that are not confirmed as accurate by anyone before they are announced to the world.
After the discovery in 2008 that Diebold’s op-scan machines, like ES&S’, were failing to tally ballots properly — they were found to have actually been dropping entire decks of ballots fed into the machines without notice to the system operator — an investigation by California Sec. of State Debra Bowen (D) led to the admission by Diebold that their systems also failed to log events properly, allowing activity log files to be deleted entirely, without a trace of the system manipulation being left behind. That disastrous failure was found to have affected all of Diebold’s voting systems, both touch-screen and optical-scan.
Many of those flawed systems, with gaping security holes, are still in use today. Diebold-manufactured electronic voting and tabulation systems are used in almost 1,500 voting jurisdictions in dozens of states by almost 50 million registered voters.
And, while many voters believe a paper ballot is all they need to assure that results will be accurately tabulated and reported — versus touch-screen systems which are, indeed, 100% unverifiable — they couldn’t be more wrong. Need further proof? Keep in mind what happened earlier this year in Palm Beach County, FL.
As we initially reported in March, paper ballot optical-scan systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems produced inaccurate results in a number of races during a municipal election there.
The Sequoia computer tabulators named losing candidates as “winners” in several different races.
Fortunately, the failure was noticed by the local Supervisor of Elections when a state-mandated post-election spot-check of 2% of the paper ballots (which is not done at all in many states) revealed that the races had been reported inaccurately by the Sequoia central tabulator system known as WinEDS.
A subsequent 100% hand-count of paper ballots was needed to accurately determine the actual winning candidates in those contests.
Dominion Voting, which now sells, services and programs Sequoia Voting Systems e-voting computers, admitted that the programming flaw that caused the mistallied races exists in every version of their WinEDS software, though the company’s President subsequently attempted to tell a differing story to state officials.
The Sequoia WinEDS system is currently in use in 285 jurisdictions in 17 states, where it’s set to tally the votes — either accurately or inaccurately — for some 25 million registered voters this year in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
After the Sequoia system failures came to light in Palm Beach County — along with Dominion/Sequoia’s attempts at covering them up — Susan Bucher, their Supervisor of Elections, told The BRAD BLOG that she’d be delighted to switch to a different system made by a different manufacturer, “but they all have similar problems, as I’ve come to understand it.”
Bucher understands it correctly.
All computer voting systems have similar flaws that are often only revealed, if ever, via a hand-count of paper ballots. Unfortunately, very few jurisdictions in the U.S. are smart enough (and respectful of their voters enough) to count any of their ballots by hand at all.
If that’s how the U.S. counted votes in the first place — publicly hand-counting hand-marked paper ballots on Election Night, at the precinct, with results reported then and there, before ballots are moved anywhere, as per “Democracy’s Gold Standard” — confidence in reported election results might not continue to wane as it has over recent years. And, perhaps, in the bargain, the U.S. might one day become the “world’s greatest democracy” as it has long pretended to be.
So, the question I pose to you Brad, as the person who has been in the forefront of this battle for what seems like forever, is this:
Given the massive amount of easily available proof that is now available of the total uselessness and failure of electronic vote counting devices, and the simultaneous total lack of investigation by the US Justice Department (they have a Voting Rights Division, don’t they?)…
Is our Justice Department INCOMPETENT or IMPLICITLY IN SUPPORT, as being UNAWARE of this situation now seems impossible at this point?
This article is nonsense and typical BS from reporters who should know better, but who are technically moribund. Computers don’t just fail. There is no CALIBRATION or HEAT problem. This is the same RED-HERRING crap which has been used over and over again and always fool the sheeple. IT’S NOT CODING ERROR. ITS MALICIOUS CODING. Parse the propaganda:
“The state Board of Elections then stepped in to investigate. Technicians calibrated the machine and ran ballots through. The device did fine. But later on, after a few hours had passed, it began to fail with an error rate of close to 100%.
ES&S then ran its own tests and concluded that if a machine is not cleaned correctly, it will lose its calibration once the device warms up to working temperature. Test it while cool, and the count will be perfect; test it warm, and the count will be nonsense”.
NO, THE EXPLANATION IS NONSENSE!
They used the same “overheating” canard in Ohio 2004 and 2006. It worked then, it works now and will work in the future. BECAUSE NO ONE CALLS THEM OUT ON THE BS. THEY SEND COMPUTERS TO MARS THAT WORK JUST FINE, BUT THEY CAN’T GET THEM TO WORK HERE? THE SHEEPLE WHO BELIEVE THAT CRAP SHOULD JUST AS WELL LIVE ON MARS.
Is there any hope? I doubt it. Too many people are either ignorant, misinformed or just plain stupid. The mainstream reporters are either stupid or driven by corrupt management to parrot the lies of criminal voting machine manufacturers and the politicians who protect them.
Brad, you keep using the word “failure” when in fact it seems the machines are working exactly as intended…
I agree – computers that compute incorrectly when hot is ridiculous. If they fail when presented with large amounts of input they are just designed wrong and the supplier should be sued into oblivion.
If the computer is too hot it will turn off. If not a fire extinguisher is required before suing the supplier into oblivion.
This article doesn’t explain how the election results are fixed to at least shave 5% off Democrat’s totals, which is all that is usually required to steal elections. Therefore Republicans should also be publicly outraged over defective ballot counters. Hmmmm….
Just a thought……As we move into mail-in ballots, the repubs want to shut down the Post Office. Voter ID is being used as a voter suppression tool. Big Money has bought the best way to subvert our Democracy (beyond purchasing politicians), they seem to own all of these voting machines. Why can’t the Feds use their power to nationalize voting machine manufacturing? Oversight? I really object to being disenfranchised by a small group opposed to me exercising my rights as I should. Maybe this is the one area we should harken back to the 19th century practice of public counting of all ballots.
With each passing day, it gets more difficult to accept incompetence as an explanation for these situations.
At a minimum, New York State should sue ES&S. The damages should be enough to put them out of business.
But really, there should be criminal fraud charges against the executives of ES&S and against any New York State official who was aware that the machines could fail in normal use and took no preventive action.
I’m still amazed that California never sued Diebold, even after the flaws in their machines were revealed.
Thank you Brad.
Responding to the claims that computers don’t overheat:
1) they shouldn’t, if designed well, but it depends on whether your goal is the public good or maximizing profit. (Which is it private corporations are best at?)
2) As I read it, the claim is not that the COMPUTER is overheating (or becoming dirty), but rather the sensor which sends info to the computer.
3) I don’t really see this as a way to deliberately swing an election. It doesn’t fit that narrative. It does destroy the myth that these machines are accurate in the absence of manipulation.
Richard Charnin @2–
Please read articles before big anger spews. Brad wrote–
Brad’s article here(and the quote above) seems completely consistent with your assertion of deliberate manipulation of the machines as the cause of the counting errors. But his article has the added benefit(which is lacking in your comment) of positing that the problems of mistallied votes could also be caused by simple malfunction of poorly designed machines. You don’t seem to allow for that possibility. This strikes me as odd. I have heard these machines described again and again by computer experts as junk. I see no reason to think computer malfunction by poorly made machines is an impossibility.
But junk or no, Brad’s article here, as per usual, is comprehensive, clear, and again urges a return to Democracy’s Gold Standard of publicly counted, verified, and posted hand counted paper ballots. Your angry criticism of the article as nonsense and BS seems inappropriate and non-sensical to me.
ps.–I don’t know how you could have failed to notice this, but calling people “ignorant, misinformed, or just plain stupid” is not a terribly effective strategy for getting anyone to want to listen to you.
Randy D,
Without commenting on whether defective equipment is a way to swing an election, let me frame the following hypothetical and follow it with a question:
(1) election officials at sites A-K ensure that machines are shut down when they hear of spurious overvotes; there are enough machines that there is no substantial delay.
(2) election officials at sites L-Z ignore reports of spurious overvotes, so half the votes submitted there don’t count.
Would you rather vote at site D, site P, or would you rather contact the Department of Justice?
Richard #2 and Irwin #4,
You both seem to think that it is impossible for a computer to malfunction due to overheating. Your proof text is that we send computers to Mars. Well, you are correct. But it is very cold on Mars.
I assume you really meant to say that if we are smart enough to send a computer to Mars then we are smart enough to make a computer count votes on Earth. If that is what you were thinking then I will agree–we are.
But, it is a fact that computers can and do fail if they overheat. When designed properly for the environmental conditions to be experienced, they should work. If they are not properly engineered, they can fail.
As you are reading this post…ask yourself, “What is that whirr in the background?” It is the fan in your computer. Why is it there? To keep your computer from overheating!
Richard Charnin @2 wrote:
But see, Overheating as a cause of computer crashes.
As David Lasagna @9 wrote, quoting Brad’s article, “these machines may fail on their own, or someone can cause them to fail and then hide the evidence of the manipulation.”
If you have direct, scientific evidence that, in this instance, someone purposely caused the ES&S DS200 system failure described in this article, by all means, present the evidence for all to see and review.
If you lack such evidence, your comment amounts to nothing more than unverifiable opinion.
EC #12
Read my post again. I was careful not to draw any conclusions about the ES&S DS200.
Lasagna @9 is correct.
The Helium article is correct.
Here is what Irwin said:
“I agree – computers that compute incorrectly when hot is ridiculous.”
He is incorrect.
You read too much into my post.
I simply wanted to clear up some errors about how computers work…or sometimes don’t work.
Perhaps American election officials should look at the Russian vote scanners. We see them on TV and they seem to work perfectly.
The fallback is to have all votes counted by hand and forget machines: works well in Australia. Perhaps the US should copy.
View Election Integrity: Where It Isn't, Who Can Help, HCPB Locations, Potential Failures in a larger mapDavey Crockett @13-
As I read Ernie @12 he was responding to Mr. Charnin @2.
Ernest Canning: You really accept this canard?
“ES&S then ran its own tests and concluded that if a machine is not cleaned correctly, it will lose its calibration once the device warms up to working temperature. Test it while cool, and the count will be perfect; test it warm, and the count will be nonsense”.
So how do you explain the fact that 95% of vote-switching incidents always favor the GOP? Is that due to overheating?
From my website: http://richardcharnin.com/
Election forecasters, academics, political scientists and main stream media pundits never discuss or analyze the statistical evidence that proves election fraud is systemic – beyond a reasonable doubt. This site contains a compilation of presidential, congressional and senate election analyses based on pre-election polls, unadjusted exit polls and associated True Vote Models. Those who never discuss or analyze Election Fraud should focus on the factual statistical data and run the models. If anyone wants to refute the analytical evidence, they are encouraged to do so in a response. Election forecasters, academics and political scientists are welcome to peer review the content.
The bedrock of the evidence derives from this undisputed fact: Final national and state exit polls are always forced to match the recorded vote – even if doing so requires an impossible turnout of prior election voters and implausible vote shares. All demographic categories are adjusted to conform to the recorded vote. To use these forced final exit polls as the basis for election research is unscientific and irresponsible. The research is based on the bogus premise that the recorded vote is sacrosanct and represents how people actually voted. Nothing can be further from the truth.
It is often stated that exit polls were very accurate in elections prior to 2004, but have deviated sharply from the vote since. The statement is a misconception; it is based on a comparison of FINAL exit polls in elections prior to 2004 and PRELIMINARY exit polls since. It’s apples and oranges. But FINAL exit polls published in the media have always been FORCED to match the RECORDED vote. That’s why they APPEAR to have been accurate.
The RECORDED vote has deviated sharply from the TRUE VOTE in EVERY election since 1968. Yes, it is true: UNADJUSTED exit polls have ALWAYS been accurate. They closely matched the True Vote in 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. FINAL exit polls have exactly matched the fraudulent RECORDED vote because they have been forced to do so.
It is a documented fact that millions of votes are uncounted in every election. The Census Bureau indicates that since 1968, approximately 80 million more votes were cast than recorded. And these are just the uncounted votes. What about the votes switched on unverifiable voting machines and central tabulators? But vote miscounts are only part of the story. The True Vote analysis does not include the millions of potential voters who were illegally disenfranchised and never got to vote.
My book, Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes, and the National Exit Poll, is a detailed analysis which proves that the recorded vote is always different from the True Vote. Unlike the misinformation spread in the media, voting machine “glitches†are not due to machine failures. It’s the fault of the humans who program them.
In the 1968-2008 Presidential elections, the Republicans won the recorded vote by a 49-45% margin. The Recursive National True Vote Model indicates that the Democrats actually won by 49-45%.
In the 1988-2008 elections, the Democrats won the average of the unadjusted state exit polls 51.6-41.8%. The 3% exit poll margin of error was exceeded in 148 state elections, of which 138 shifted to the Republican. The proof is in the 1988-2008 Unadjusted State Exit Polls Statistical Reference.
In 1988, Bush defeated Dukakis by 7 million recorded votes. But 11 million ballots uncounted. Approximately 75% of uncounted votes are Democratic. It was a very close election. Dukakis won the unadjusted exit polls in 24 battleground states by 51-47% . He won the unadjusted National Exit Poll by 50-49%. In 1992, the Collier brothers wrote “Votescamâ€, a classic expose which provided evidence that Bush Sr. stole the election by rigging the voting machines.
In 1992, Clinton defeated Bush by 5.8 million recorded votes (43.0-37.5%), but once again, nearly 10 million were uncounted. In order to match the recorded vote, the National Exit Poll was forced to match the recorded vote with an impossible 119% turnout of living 1988 Bush voters in 1992. The unadjusted state exit polls had Clinton winning an 18 million vote landslide (48-32%). The True Vote Model indicates that Clinton won by 50-31% with 19% voting for third party candidate Ross Perot.
In 2000, Al Gore won the unadjusted state exit polls (58,000 respondents) by 50.8-44.4%, a 6 million vote margin compared to the 540,000 recorded. There were nearly 6 million uncounted votes. But the Supreme Court awarded the election to Bush (271-267 EV) when they stopped the recount in Florida – where 185,000 ballots were uncounted. The following states flipped from Gore in the exit poll to Bush in the recorded vote: AL AR AZ CO FL GA MO NC TN TX VA. Gore would have won the election if he captured just one of the states. Democracy died in this election.
In July 2004 I began posting weekly 2004 Election Model projections based on the state and national polls. The model was the first to use Monte Carlo Simulation and sensitivity analysis to calculate the probability of winning the electoral vote. The final projection had Kerry winning 337 electoral votes and 51.8% of the two-party vote, closely matching the unadjusted exit polls.
The Final 2004 National Exit Poll was mathematically impossible since it indicated that there were 52.6 million returning Bush 2000 voters – but he had just 50.5 million recorded votes. Only 48 million were alive in 2004. Approximately 46 million voted, therefore the Final overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 6-7 million. The Final NEP implied that there was an impossible 110% turnout of living 2000 Bush voters in 2004. The post-election True Vote Model calculated a feasible turnout of living 2000 voters based on Census total votes cast (recorded plus net uncounted), a 1.25% annual mortality rate and 98% Gore/Bush voter turnout. It determined that Kerry won by 67-57 million and had 379 EV.
But there was much further confirmation of a Kerry landslide. Consider Final NEP adjustments made to Bush’s approval rating and Party–ID crosstabs.
Bush had a 48% national approval rating in the final 11 pre-election polls. But the Final NEP indicated that he had a 53% rating – even though he had just 50% in the unadjusted state exit poll weighted aggregate. Given the 3% differential between the Final NEP and state exit poll approval ratings, let’s deduct 3% from his 48% pre-election approval, giving him a 45% vote share. That is a virtual match to the True Vote Model (which Kerry won by 53.5-45.5%). The exit pollsters inflated Bush’s final pre-election 48% average rating by 5% in the Final NEP order to force a match to the recorded vote – and perpetuate the fraud. Kerry’s 51.7% unadjusted state exit poll aggregate understated his True Vote Model share. There was a near-perfect 0.99 correlation ratio between Bush‘s state approval and unadjusted exit poll share.
The unadjusted state exit poll aggregate Democratic/Republican Party ID split was 38.8-35.1%. As they did in all demographic crosstabs, the pollsters had to force the Final National Exit Poll to match the recorded vote; they needed to specify a bogus 37-37% split. The correlation between state Republican Party ID and the Bush unadjusted shares was a near-perfect 0.93.
This chart displays the state unadjusted Bush exit poll share, approval ratings and Party-ID.
The Final 2006 National Exit Poll indicated that the Democrats had a 52-46% vote share. The Generic Poll Trend Forecasting Model projected that the Democrats would capture 56.43% of the vote. It was within 0.06% of the unadjusted exit poll.
In the 2008 Primaries, Obama did significantly better than his recorded vote.
The 2008 Election Model projection exactly matched Obama’s 365 electoral votes and was within 0.2% of his 52.9% share (a 9.5 million margin). But the model understated his True Vote. The forecast was based on final likely voter (LV) polls that had Obama leading by 7%. The registered voter (RV) polls had him up by 13% – before undecided voter allocation. The landslide was denied.
The Final 2008 National Exit Poll was forced to match the recorded vote by indicating an impossible 103% turnout of living Bush 2004 voters and 12 million more returning Bush than Kerry voters. Given Kerry’s 5% unadjusted 2004 exit poll and 8% True Vote margin, one would expect 7 million more returning Kerry than Bush voters – a 19 million discrepancy from the Final 2008 NEP. Another anomaly: The Final 2008 NEP indicated there were 5 million returning third party voters – but only 1.2 million were recorded in 2004. Either the 2008 NEP or the 2004 recorded third-party vote share (or both) was wrong. The True Vote Model determined that Obama won by over 22 million votes with 420 EV. His 58% share was within 0.1% of the unadjusted state exit poll aggregate (83,000 respondents).
In the 2010 Midterms, the statistical evidence indicates that many elections for House, Senate and Governor were stolen. The Wisconsin True Vote Model contains worksheets for Senate, Governor, Supreme Court and Recall elections. A serious analyst can run them and see why it is likely that they were stolen.
Diebold – A partial list of Documented Failures
http://www.votersunite.org/info/Dieboldinthenews.pdf
How many of the following incidents were due to overheating?
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=213871652418127849844.0004ae346721b24ca2b3f&msa=0&ll=41.14557,-73.468323&spn=1.412609,2.024231&iwloc=0004b9f363ed6abc5ae0f
It’s funny. I never heard of a bank discouraging clients from making withdrawals or deposits in July or August.
Diebold (now Premier) makes ATM machines that work just fine in warm or cold weather, and they give you a receipt.
Richard Charnin @17 wrote:
I neither accepted nor rejected it, Richard.
I agree with you that the models you’ve developed provide significant circumstantial evidence that suggests the ES&S failures were “intended.” But that is not the same as your blanket overstatement “computers just don’t fail.”
The fact is that errors of design can produce system failures.
It is one thing for you to present statistical evidence that implicates malicious intent. Quite another to make what amount to blanket allegations without hard-and-fast evidence.
Finally, whether the “failure” is intended or the product of defective systems is really not the critical issue. The mere “potential” for insider manipulation should be enough to scrap all e-voting systems and replace them with Democracy’s Gold Standard — hand marked paper ballots, publicly hand counted at each precinct on Election Night.
People who vote are idiots. People who vote on these machines deserve whatever they get.
Richard Charnin said @ 19:
It seems you failed to note the comments above concerning the fact that the issue, at least as ES&S claims, is not a computer software failure, per se, but a hardware failure in the optical-scan sensor when it becomes overheated. While I can’t confirm the science of their explanation, it certainly sounds plausible.
Comparing these crappy, cheapest-possible systems made by ES&S with ATMs made by Diebold which have been hardened to withstand all sorts of outdoor elements as well as intrusion attempts (remember, they store thousands and thousands of dollars of cash in them), is silly. They are two different types of systems entirely and made as cheaply as possible in the case of voting systems. Feel free to review the stunning Dan Rather expose on the shitty (non-existent) quality control used on ES&S touch-screens as made in a Filipino sweatshop if you need a reminder.
What you seem to be suggesting above is that there are not computer malfunctions or programming bugs, but only holes used to steal elections. While, as a former computer programmer I can assure you that you are wrong about bugs (they occur ALL the time, no matter what, even in programs not meant to tally elections), your suggestion that each of hundreds of security holes, poor designs and software bugs discovered by independent testers in states across the country from CA to OH to FL to NJ to CO, etc. are all designed, on purpose, to steal election is…with out evidence to support it.
Simply because you believe almost all elections are being stolen, doesn’t mean they are. Simply because they can be stolen, doesn’t mean they are. Simply because there are failures in hardware and software design that could be manipulated in order to steal elections, doesn’t mean there exists evidence that happened in cases like NY, short of evidence to demonstrate as much.
You can keep shouting “FRAUD” in a crowded election, but unless you have evidence to prove that allegation, don’t expect folks to give your allegations much credence. And, by the way, the more you shout that, without evidence, the harder it is for folks like us who actually think evidence is necessary before accusing someone of “fraud”, to get much credence either, even when we do have actual evidence for such charges.
P.S. As I’m sure you know, Richard, having studied and writing about elections for so many years, nobody should ever leave a polling place with a “receipt” revealing how they voted — as you seemed to clumsily suggest in your comment.
I am a New Yorker who voted in the 2010 election on one of the DS200 systems.
When I read the following paragraph in the report above, my immediate reaction was, “…Wait, that doesn’t sound right.”
That’s not how those machines work. After scanning the ballot, a giant, full-screen confirmation message is displayed, reporting any scanning issues (blank ballots, overvotes), or reporting that the ballot scanned with no errors. The user is then presented with the option to record their vote as scanned, or bail and return the ballot so they can make corrections. If they choose to register their vote, the ballot is not re-scanned, the previous scan is simply recorded as official. So I simply don’t understand how the scenario presented above would be possible — the machines would have to be recording the results of the scanning process differently than they report to the user. That’s not how computers work, not through any sort of mechanical or programmer error. That would require machines deliberately programmed to defraud, which is an assertion even more dire than what’s being claimed here. Surely it’s not being suggested (by the non-tin-foil-hatters) that the machines are programmed to intentionally and maliciously deceive the voter, and tamper with their vote?
Brad Friedman @22:
“It seems you failed to note the comments above concerning the fact that the issue, at least as ES&S claims, is not a computer software failure, per se, but a hardware failure in the optical-scan sensor when it becomes overheated. While I can’t confirm the science of their explanation, it certainly sounds plausible.”
Brad, that sounds plausible to you? You cannot confirm the “science” of their explanation. The question is: Can they?
How much more evidence do you need after all these years to know that the voting machine manufacturers lie about everything.
And their explanation sounds “plausible” to you?
When have they ever tolsd the truthabout anything?
Just what is the temperature at which the system would fail?
And their explanation sounds “plausible” to you?
When was the last time your computer overheated?
And their explanation sounds “plausible” to you?
How many days during the year do you have your machine running? I am on every day for an average of 15-18 hours. That’s over 5000 hours a year.
It never overheats.
How many hours is the voting machine plugged in during the course of a year? And you believe their claim that it overheats in a few hours?
Does their explanation still sound “plausible” to you?
They also say that when it is “cool” the system performs “perfectly”.
That is a lie. We know that the voting machines miscount and switch votes on regular basis.
Does their explanation still sound “plausible” to you?
Frank @23 wrote:
“So I simply don’t understand how the scenario presented above would be possible — the machines would have to be recording the results of the scanning process differently than they report to the user. That’s not how computers work, not through any sort of mechanical or programmer error. That would require machines deliberately programmed to defraud, which is an assertion even more dire than what’s being claimed here. Surely it’s not being suggested (by the non-tin-foil-hatters) that the machines are programmed to intentionally and maliciously deceive the voter, and tamper with their vote?”
Frank, you have obviously never written a program.
Have you ever heard of the Hursti Hack?
Watch how the voting machine can switch votes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDKE28stsZ8
Yes, Frank, voting machines can be programmed to miscount votes – even while reporting to the voter “proof” of how they voted.
WHAT YOU SEE ON PAPER OR ON THE SCREEN DOES NOT PROVE THAT THE VOTE IS RECORDED AS CAST INSIDE THE IS THE CENTRAL TABULATOR WHERE THE VOTES ARE COUNTED.
In other words, the screen can show you voted for A externally but the computer records it B.
The only tin-foil is the garbage that the voting machines report.
Richard Charnin @ 25:
Yes, my computer (and yours) overheats all the time (unless you have a Mac). You know that little fan that kicks in? That’s because the machine has gotten too hot. Hopefully the fan cools it down. It doesn’t always.
Nonetheless, I didn’t say I believed their claim, and noted that I could not vouch for their science, having not seen the testing myself. I said it’s a plausible explanation (cheap computer hardware overheating, causing the optical reader to misread when/if parts expand due to the heat, etc.) Remember, these shitty machines do not read ballots accurately if they are cut an 8th of an inch too large, or if reflective or red ink is used instead of black, etc.
They are crap. So, yes, they fail. Is that what happened here? If so, is it due to the reason they claim? I can’t know, but am willing to take them at their word long enough to warn anybody else who uses those same machines that they should not.
Do you have a problem with that?
As to your contention that each of the hundreds of bugs and flaws and security holes and known failures of these machines are actually there in order so that elections can be stolen by them, well, so far you’ve offered even less evidence to back up that contention than ES&s has offered to explain why their shitty machines mistabulated thousands of valid votes.
(BTW, can bad guys take advantage of the various bugs and flaws and security holes in these machines? Of course they can, which is why I’ve spent about a decade here pointing out how foolish and disrespectful to the voters in a democracy that it is to use them!)
Frank @ 23 said:
Right. Either that, or they offered an overvote warning that was unclear, ignored or not understood (or that a voter simply didn’t have time to deal with.)
Actually, it’s absolutely “how computers work”. What is shown to you on the screen needn’t have anything at all to do with what is recorded internally. It’s a point I’ve been trying to drill home for folks who are unfortunately enough to have to use 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems for years. The same is true on an op-scan system which uses a computer monitor to tell you what’s going on on your ballots while it’s scanned.
That said, I am aware of no evidence at this time to suggest the massive failure was meant to deliberately defraud (well, perhaps to defraud the county and state who thought they were getting good equipment for their money, but not to defraud the election.) It may have been a way to defraud an election, but I’m aware of no such evidence to support that contention at this time (though obviously Richard Charnin feels strongly otherwise.)
Many non-tin-foil-hatters have indeed suggested that over the years. And there is a good deal of evidence to show that if the type of design and programming here wasn’t used to to allow tampering, it certainly allows for that, very easily, nonetheless.
Did that happen here? Obviously, we don’t know. The evidence does not yet suggest as much. But to pretend that the machines are not easily tampered in order to deceive the voter, would be silly — at least if you’ve come to learn anything about these horrible systems.
Brad Friedman and Ernest Canning are two of the best activists in the world fighting for fair elections. I have the greatest respect for both; we know each other very well. I have posted on Bradblog since 2005.
Our disagreements are minor. We agree that our elections are a fraud. We agree that the ballots should be hand-counted.
We only differ in our approach. My focus has been on proving election fraud mathematically – beyond a reasonable doubt. I have accomplished that.
Brad and Ernest are more conservative. They are very careful not to make absolute statements without absolute “proof”.
My frustration should be apparent in my tone. I have lost patience. We need to call a spade a spade.
We have been lied to and ignored by the pollsters and the media and the election officials and the politicians and the voting machine manufacturers over and over again. There is no reason to believe anything they say any longer since they have never attempted to expose the systemic election fraud that has turned our called democracy into a cruel hoax.
I just cannot accept the constant bS from the voting machine manufacturers every time their systems are caught miscounting the votes.
It’s always a “glitch” or a “mechanical failure” or an operator “error” or a “miscalibration” or a programming “error”.
BUT IT’S NEVER DUE TO MALICIOUS CODING.
______________________________________________
Consider this:
The Election 2004 Incident Database shows that Kerry votes were flipped to Bush votes in 86 of 88 vote switching incidents.
The probability P that at least 86 of 88 votes would flip to Bush is ONE IN SEVENTY-NINE BILLION TRILLION.
Here is the proof:
Let P be the probability that 86 or 87 or 88 votes flip to Bush.
P = Prob(86)+ Prob (87)+ Prob(88)
Prob(86)= 1.23689E-23 = BINOMDIST(86,88,0.5,FALSE)
Prob(87)= 2.84343E-25 = BINOMDIST(87,88,0.5,FALSE)
Prob(88)= 3.23117E-27 = BINOMDIST(88,88,0.5,FALSE)
P = Prob (86 or 87 or 88)= 0.00000000000000000000001266
or 1 in 79,010,724,999,066,700,000,000
How do you express a number that large?
Is there anything comparable, anywhere?
Are there that many stars in the universe?
Are there that many grains of sand on the Earth?
How long would it take to flip that many coins?
If you flip one coin every second, that’s 3600 in an hour, 86,400 in a day, 31,536,000 in a year.
It would take 2,505,413,654,206,830 (2505 trillion) years!
To put it in perspective, the universe is is “only” 14 billion years old.
Richard Charnin @ 28:
Well, since you ask….
~7.9 × 10^22
Yes; see below.
~3.0 × 10^23, per one recent study (Dokkum, 2010) — an order of magnitude greater than your probability figure.
I’ve read that it’s probably between 10^20 and 10^24, so yes, there could well be that many.
Or about 4.32 × 10^23 microseconds!
Anyhow, that’s some very impressive and compelling analysis you’ve done on the election results, from what little of it I’ve read thus far, and I look forward to reading more.