"2004 Presidential Election – Compendium of Attempts to Dismiss Vote Fraud

[papau]

Release: "2004 Presidential Election – Compendium of Attempts to Dismiss Vote Fraud"
By: National Election Data Archive (http://ElectionArchive.org)
Contact: Kathy Dopp, [e-mail], 435-608-1382

The National Election Data Archvie publicly released a paper "2004 Presidential Election – Compendium of Attempts to Dismiss Vote Fraud" which solidly rebuts, in 6 short pages, the academic arguments which claim to have shown that there is no vote fraud/miscounts in U.S. elections.

The short compendium of academic attempts to dismiss vote fraud includes claims made by the Democratic National Committee and pollster Warren Mitofsky among others:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/IncorrectElectionDataAnalysis-06.pdf

Every argument that Mitofsky, Election Science Institute, the Democratic National Committee, and others have made which purports that there is no evidence of vote miscount in U.S. elections is refuted in a page or less in this short compendium by the National Election Data Archive's volunteer statisticians and mathematicians.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/IncorrectElectionDataAnalysis-06.pdf


150 copies of this compendium were prepared for and handed out at the May 17 - 21st AAPOR conference in Montreal, in particular during a session on "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?".

Warren Mitofsky is very well respected within AAPOR due to his past work and leadership. Consequently Mitofsky's postion, that exit poll discrepancies were caused by partisan response bias rather than vote miscounts is given great weight within AAPOR. However, the National Election Data Archive, describes recent Mitofsky analyses which were presented by Mitofsky and Fritz Scheuren at recent ASA.org and AAPOR.org conferences, as "sophistry" rather than mathematically valid analyses.

The National Election Data Archive points out that the National Election Pool (NEP) and Mitofsky have not yet released any exit poll data or analysis publicly that supports this response bias hypothesis. Yet all the data regarding pollster
conditions which Mitofsky claims they analyzed would not pose any risk to voter confidentiality to release.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/IncorrectElectionDataAnalysis-06.pdf


The National Election Data Archive invites everyone to read its concise paper which solidly rebuts all the arguments made to date which claim to demonstrate a lack of evidence of vote fraud in U.S. elections.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/IncorrectElectionDataAnalysis-06.pdf

Kathy Dopp, President of the National Election Data Archive says that "I find it harder every day to see why anyone imagines that the U.S. vote counts are accurate when only a few states conduct any random independent audits of vote counts to check accuracy and when every county in America without exception releases its vote count data in a manner that covers up the evidence of tampering! (See
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/Audits_Monitoring.pdf and recent articles in the New York Times and Newsweek regarding evidence that touchscreen voting machines are wide-open to electronic tampering.)

The creation of a National Election Data Archive is vital if we are to restore "one person, one vote" in America.

In the only two states where detailed vote count data were obtained following the November 2004 election (Washington and New Mexico), steps have since been taken to eliminate the use of unauditable electronic voting systems and to require voter verifiable paper ballots as a result of the obvious evidence of vote tampering that the detailed vote count data provided. (See History of the Academic Debate: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf)

The National Election Data Archive, an underfunded nonprofit organization, is looking for help to obtain funding to pay for programming staff to complete its national election data archive in time for the November 2006 elections. NEDA also needs volunteers from every state to help obtain the detailed vote count data via open records requests, and we need volunteer(s) immediately to write the open records request letters specific to every state's open records laws.

NEDA is a 501(c)(3) that depends on donations: http://electionarchive.org/fairelection/donate.html

Volunteers may sign up to obtain the data for their own county or state: http://electionarchive.org/fairelection/statesubscribe.html

Volunteers are also needed to complete open records requests letters for each state (yours):
http://electionarchive.net/public/ucv_select_info.php

The national election data archive is a tool which there is no question can be built and used to ensure that correctly elected candidates are sworn into office. To make it happen in time for November, 2006, we need funding
now. Just $4,000/month would enable us to complete a public Internet archival tool!

Best Regards and Thanks again to donors to the National Election Data Archive who made it possible for us to attend the Montreal AAPOR conference and to Steve Freeman and Ron Baiman for volunteering for America to present papers at the Montreal AAPOR conference and for doing such a great job.

--
----
Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections

[OnTheOtherHand]

1. fact check

Footnote 1 on page 1 offers a purported quotation attributed to "Liddle and Lindeman" and, more specifically, to a page on my website. However, the "quotation" actually does not appear there. I thought it might turn up in one of my critiques of Dopp, but it doesn't. It doesn't appear anywhere in the Google database, either. I do not know whether Dopp is actually quoting anybody here, but she certainly isn't quoting the source she attributes.

Sorry, I expected to make it past footnote 1.

[papau]

2. I read the "quote" as a paraphrase and the ESI method correctly

described -

am I missing something - beyond the improper use of quotes in her footnote?

[Febble]

4. Well, the thing is, papau

she attributes a sentence to both Lindeman and to myself (Elizabeth Liddle) and cites a Lindeman source only. That sentence does not appear in the cited Lindeman source, and neither Lindeman nor myself are aware of ever having written that sentence. If Kathy can find where I have written it, I would be glad to know, because it would clearly have been an error, and I would like to have the opportunity of correcting it. My belief, however, is that Kathy has misunderstood the hypothesis, and has paraphrased it according to her own mistaken understanding of it. This might explain her belief that she has mathematically invalidated it. As she has written it, it is indeed an untrue statement.

[Usrename]

8. I don't quite understand what you are saying.

Are you saying that you have never advanced or supported the following argument?

"If there is vote fraud, then there will be a positive correlation between Bush vote increase from 2000 to 2004 and the exit poll discrepancy."

It seems like there has been much discussion of this argument, and if it did not come from you all, do you have any idea where it did come from?

[papau]

9. Hi Feeble - I just got done writing a DU mail praising you - sort of!

I still disagree as to the shy voter explaining a great deal because the result contradicts independent exit polls done in the hispanic comunity - such polls showing no change from 2000 to 2004.

While Kathy needs to tone down her lanuage, IMHO, the math will carry its own credibility, so I am interested in your response. Just off the top of my head the stated by Dopp ESI concept sounded like what I thought I remembered it to me.

I look forward to your correction. But please remember I am only an actuary, an old actuary, so be kind and use small steps in laying out the logic in your correction!

:-)

[Febble]

14. OK!

I will try to be as clear as I can.

What would be true would be the statement:

• If vote miscounts favored either candidate, that candidate would have done better than he would otherwise have done.

That statement is so obvious, no-one would dispute it.

And we have a hypothesis:

• That the exit poll discrepancy was caused by vote miscounts.

If so, vote miscounts that caused the exit poll discrepancy would also cause Bush to do better than he would otherwise have done.

The problem is that we don't know how well he would otherwise have done i.e. in the absence of miscounts. This is where 2000 data becomes relevant to the problem.

Precinct level discrepancies in 2000 were, on average, near zero, although there was plenty of error, as in 2000, in both directions. However, in 2004 the average precinct level discrepancy was far from zero, the margin between the candidates in the exit poll at each precinct tending, on average, to favour Kerry more strongly than the margin in the precinct count. Jonathan Simon, I believe, coined the term "redshift" for this effect - the vote tended to be "redder" than the exit poll.

There was also an average "red-swing" in Bush's counted vote-share between the two elections. Precincts tended to be "redder" in the 2004 count than in the 2000 count, just as they tended to be "redder" in the 2004 count than in the exit poll.

If, therefore, some of the variance in "red-swing" was due to the same cause as some of the variance in "red-shift"- e.g. vote miscounts favouring Bush - the two phenomena will tend to be positively correlated. "Red-swing" in a fraudulent exit poll precinct will tend to have an associated with "red-shift" in the count. This will not always happen, of course. You might get some precincts in which there was fraud favoring Bush, but not enough to improve his vote-share (say it was a precinct particularly disgusted with his performance). You might also get precincts in which there was no fraud, but Bush nonetheless did better than his average swing. However, if, overall, we found that red-swing was correlated with red-shift, that would be very suggestive of fraud. It would be telling us - aha! Bush is doing best where the exit poll is most discrepant! And he does worse where the exit poll is OK! It wouldn't prove fraud but it would be strong support for the hypothesis.

However, in both Ohio, and in the nationwide sample of precincts, the two turn out NOT to be signifantly correlated. This does not rule out fraud. The fraudsters might have got lucky, and happened to have executed their fraud where Bush was doing badly relative to his average anyway. Or they might have been extremely clever and done that on purpose. Or they might have executed exactly the same amount of fraud everywhere so that it had no variance. For various reasons I think these scenarios are unlikely, but they are theoretically possible.

Or, as I said, they might just have got lucky. In Ohio this certainly can't be ruled out, because the study does not have very much statistical power. All we can say is that the failure to find a correlation between redshift and redswing does not support the conclusion that a shared variable - fraud - was responsible for both. It might have done. And in any case there are many forms of fraud that might not have shown up in those 49 exit poll precincts.

However, in the nationwide sample there are so many precincts (1250) that the probability that more than a tiny proportion of variance in "redshift" is accounted for by variance in "redswing" - ie. that the two phenomena shared a common cause, fraud, is very small. Which still leaves open the possibility that some of the redshift was caused by fraud, perhaps in precincts where it also occurred in 2000, and also the possibility that some clever means of calibrating fraud precisely to the expected level of Bush's performance was used. However, in the modelling exercises that OTOH and I have done, we have not been able to find anyway that this could have happened on a substantial scale unless the fraudsters were either extremely lucky (i.e extremly low probability), or had control of a vast majority of precinct counts, which for various technical reasons, also seems implausible (tabulator control won't work as most of these data are from the precinct counts).

My own view of Kathy's take on these analyses is that she has misunderstood the nature of the hypotheses and the nature of the conclusions drawn. The fact that she misquotes both suggests this. She seems angry that Lindeman and I object to her paraphrases, presumably because she cannot see that her paraphrases and our actual statements are crucially different. However, they are!


(Edited to correct error)

[Usrename]

18. I don't see the difference.

If, therefore, some of the variance in "red-swing" was due to the same cause as some of the variance in "red-shift"- e.g. vote miscounts favouring Bush - the two phenomena will tend to be positively correlated.

"If there is vote fraud, then there will be a positive correlation between Bush vote increase from 2000 to 2004 and the exit poll discrepancy."

[Febble]

19. Well there isn't much

but it is crucial.

If there is vote fraud (substantial, of a type to show up in exit polls) then it is likely that there will be a positive correlation between etc etc.

Kathy omits the qualifiers, and interprets it as a claim of necessity - that vote fraud MUST cause a positive correlation. This is not the case, as she herself demonstrates. But it is not the claim that anyone has actually made. Whether a correlation results from fraud will depend not only on whether there was fraud, but how it was distributed, and what else caused variance in either variable - redshift or redswing. However, if you have enough statistical power, you can put an upper limit on the amount of variance likely to be shared between the two variables, and therefore an upper limit on the extent to which fraud is likely to be a common explanatory variable. For the Ohio data, this upper limit is considerable. For the nationwide dataset it is very low. But in neither case can fraud be ruled out, as Kathy claims we claim it is ruled out; her mathematical proof is thus irrelevant to the hypothesis, which, to repeat, is not a claim of necessity as she states it.

However, the finding from the nationwide dataset implies that either fraud is very unlikely as a common cause, or that fraud was specifically targetted in ways that also strain credulity, despite considerable effort spent trying to devise ways in which it could be done. But I remain open to offers.

But I am getting very angry at Kathy Dopp's incessant public charges that I am an incompetent liar, when the lies she accuses me of are not statements that I have actually made, and when it appears to me that it is her own misunderstanding of the nature of statistical inference that underlies her conviction that the analysis is invalid. The fact that she appears incapable of telling the difference between a verbatim quotation and one she has made up says to me something about her own competence. I wish, at the very least, that she would make more liberal use of cut-and-paste.

[OnTheOtherHand]

5. actually, all three quotations are wrong

I don't think I've ever seen that before. The first quotation is almost correct, but misattributed to the wrong source. The quotation at the end of that paragraph, and the quotation in the footnote, are not quotations. Three misquotations in the first paragraph (two sentences plus a one-sentence footnote) -- I have never seen that before.

This is a fairly large problem in itself, but it also creates confusion for anyone attempting to evaluate ESI's argument. The argument is about expectations, or probabilities. Dopp seems to want to transmogrify it into a claim of necessity -- IF fraud, THEN positive correlation -- so that she can claim that a single counterexample refutes the argument.

This isn't just poor paraphrase (disguised as quotation), but poor argumentation. If one could actually simply dismiss and ignore any inferential argument by coming up with a single counterexample -- or even countably infinite examples -- then there would be no exit poll debate. There are countably infinite examples where exit polls yield mean WPEs favoring Kerry* in the absence of vote miscount!! And there are countably infinite examples of positive, negative, and zero correlations between vote share and red shift, in the presence or absence of vote miscount. (Dopp strangely claims on p. 5 that "Baiman and Dopp never did any of the 'vote share/red shift analysis' Lindeman refers to," but a glance at pages 9 and 13 of their Ohio paper at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf shows otherwise.)

*(ETA: I meant "favoring Kerry" in the sense that Kerry would do better in the exit polls than in the official count. But I could just as well have meant the opposite, and the statement would still be true. If we're just making numbers up, then there can be countably infinite examples of just about anything.)

[papau]

10. OK-but isn't it if fraud, then more likely than not a positive correlation

I have not attempted to review the presentation, and would rely on your explanation. So what is the likely result if fraud and why, and has anyone shown the calculated expectation to be different from the expectation put forward. Kathy obviously thinks she has.

Are the corrections to her demonstration such that they change the result? Is her procedure incorrect to demonstrates what she wants to demonstrate, and if so she should have set up the procedure/example(s) how?

[OnTheOtherHand]

16. see Febble's response above

Kathy actually doesn't seem to have given any consideration to what the expectation should be. She seems to think that simply showing that fraud doesn't have to induce a positive correlation between swing and red shift ends the argument.

If so, then all arguments end, since fraud doesn't have to induce red shift at all, nor does red shift have to evince fraud.

Realistically, it seems that in order to reconcile massive and widespread vote miscount with a swing/red shift correlation near zero, either (1) the vote miscount must be rather evenly distributed across almost all precincts, or (2) the miscount must be rather precisely targeted toward precincts where Bush otherwise would have done worst relative to 2000 so that the "real" swing and "fraud" swing cancel out, at least on average. I'm not sure one could even plausibly posit enough "real" swing in the data set to make (2) mathematically viable, and neither (1) nor (2) seems to accord with other things we know about the election.

[Febble]

13. Clarification from Kathy

In reference to this thread, on a site to which I will not link, Kathy posts:

OntheOtherHand, here is your own paper where you made the statement that you now deny you made:

http://members.verizon.net/~mtlinde/doppresponse.p...

where you state:

“ESI argued that if exit poll error evinced vote shifting, one would expect exit poll error to be correlated with the change in vote share between 2000 and 2004. That is, where Bush did better in the 2004 vote count than in the exit poll, Bush would on average do better, compared to 2000, than in precincts where the exit polls actually overstated Bush’s 2004 vote share.”

Kathy's response to that paper of yours is here:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-pol...

Please OntheOtherHand, let us tell DUers the true facts.

In her footnote to page one of the document linked in the OP, Kathy states:

{...}and rephrased by Liddle and Lindeman: "If there is vote fraud, then there will be a positive correlation between Bush vote increase from 2000 to 2004 and the exit poll discrepancy."
http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/slides.html

she thus mis-cites the source (different document), mis-attributes it (to Lindeman and Liddle, not to Lindeman) and misquotes it anyway.

She has, in fact, "paraphrased" Lindeman's paraphrase of ESI, expressed it as a quotation (i.e used quotation marks), and misunderstood it.

The statement as she misquotes in the OP link is not a true statement, and would indeed be refuted by a single counter example. The sentence she correctly quotes above from Lindeman is a true statement. Expectations can be thwarted in statistics, which is why we deal in probabilities not certainties.

I suggest that until Kathy learns to correctly attribute quotations, and indeed to correctly quote other writers at all, she refrains from calling those she misquotes "liars". I also suggest acquires a basic understanding of the nature of statistical inference.

[OnTheOtherHand]

15. ah, with "clarifications" like that...

never mind.

Unfinished business: in Montreal, Kathy accused me of a misrepresentation. Specifically, she denied my assertion that I had already pointed out, to her and to her co-author Ron Baiman, the evidence for non-response bias in Cincinnati 4-M. I believe she said that it was the first she had "heard of" this information, which is presumably literally true, since I provided it in DU posts. Moreover, I believe I said that I had provided the information in early 2006, which was true but possibly misleading, since I first did so in November 2005. Here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=399398&mesg_id=399403
The first smoking-gun paper came out on November 2, 2005, Febble and I subjected it to bracing critique in the thread linked above, and Kathy accused us (well, me at least) of "fabricating." (Kathy has elsewhere accused Febble of much worse; it's simply hard to tell whom that particular word was addressed to.) Then, when she finally realized that we were right, she withdrew the paper, criticizing her co-author, but never apologizing for her attacks on us. I do not know whether she ever read the post I linked to above, but certainly it wasn't hidden. Ron Baiman also participated in this thread.

(Please understand that I am taking no credit for discovering the evidence about Cincinnati 4-M. On the contrary, it owes to impressive original research by DUers, including but not limited to minvis, skids, liam_laddie, and kiwi_expat.)

When the second version of the paper came out in January 2006, I made the same point again, in virtually the same language:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=409512&mesg_id=409520
The deleted response at #13 appears to have been from Kathy herself (note Febble's response). Again, Ron Baiman also participated in this thread.

So, I was genuinely startled when Kathy publicly alleged that I had misrepresented the record on this point. I am less startled that she ignored Cincinnati 4-M in her latest document, and in fact ignores most of my paper. Kathy has demonstrated a knack for screening out discrepant data.

[katinmn]

20. Misrepresented Lindeman's quote? How so?

She used a direct quote:

http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/slides.html

"the failure of Bush to do better in red-shift precincts than blue-shift precincts is a conundrum for analysts who see strong evidence of fraud in the exit polls. If fraud lurks in these scatterplots, it is very well disguised."

and again:

"fraud can be disguised to "fool" the correlational test if both these conditions obtain. But if the scope of possible fraud is limited to, say, 80% of precincts (or many fewer), or fraud cannot be focused in precincts that would otherwise have negative swing, then fraud -- on a scale that would influence the national popular vote by multiple percentage points -- becomes increasingly hard to disguise."

[Febble]

21. And both the quotations you cite

are correct, although I do not find them in Kathy's document.

What are in her document are sentences, placed in quotation marks, that do not appear in the source , or any source, she cites. So yes, placing text in quotation marks and attributing it to the wrong author, the wrong source, in the wrong words, is mispresenting quotations.

Kathy has herself written an inordinate number of words, many of them abusive, posted in public, about the analyses Lindeman refers to, about the ESI work, and about my work, and her rationale appears to be based on a misreading of the analyses in question, a misreading that extends misquotation of the sources in question. She claims to have demonstrated mathematically that the hypotheses tested are invalid. If you are going to demonstrate, using math logic, that a statement is invalid, the precise formulation of the statement matters. Kathy misstated it, and while she correctly demonstrated that what she mis-stated was invalid, the hypothesis that was in fact tested was not invalid. This has been pointed out to Kathy on many occasions. She continues to mis-state the hypothesis, to mis-state the conclusions, and from those misstatement to argue not only that both are invalid, but that I myself am a liar. They are indeed invalid as she states them. But they are neither the hypothesis nor the conclusion that anyone, AFAIK has made.

The fact that she does not appear to understand the difference between a verbatim quotation and a paraphrase may shed some light on the reasons why she also cannot apparently understand the difference between the statement she correctly, but irrelevantly critiques, and the statements the authors she cites have made.

[OnTheOtherHand]

22. indeed, Dopp blatantly ignored those quotations

Those quotations assume that it indeed is possible for vote miscount not to induce a correlation between swing and red shift, and go on to consider how, specifically, it might be possible. That line of reasoning is continued in my responses to Dopp on my working papers page.

If I might risk extending the "smoking gun" metaphor, the lack of correlation is crudely analogous to an autopsy that finds no bullet hole. And Dopp's response is like the argument that the autopsy is Mathematically Invalid Bunk because it is possible to kill someone with a gun without leaving a bullet hole. Yes, it is possible, but how specifically might one do it, and what is the supporting evidence? An attempt to answer those questions could actually be useful. Absent any attempt to answer those questions, the response seems like a weak excuse to ignore discrepant data.

And then if one manufactures 'quotations' that purport to be from the autopsy, but aren't, then one has wandered pretty darn far outside the realm of scientific best practice.

And if one denounces the people who worked on the autopsy report, offering unsubstantiated allegations of deceit and subornation (I could document this with a link to an external site, but I will not)... well, then one tends to incur the prejudicial disregard of competent professionals.

As Bruce O'Dell warned Dopp over a year ago, "You only lose your credibility once." But not only Dopp's credibility is at stake. When she flames out, she undermines the entire election integrity movement. Her antics may feel heroic, but they look awful, even to a lot of people who are predisposed to agree with her conclusions (and even more who would support her recommendations). You needn't take my word for it: that psychodrama has played out right here on DU.

[ladjf]

3. Our elections must be monitored by legitimate agencies both

from within the U.S. and International. If the Republicans are rigging the voting, then there is no reason to object to valid monitoring. (You know, "If you don't have anything to hide, it's OK for your phone to be tapped".) But, it's not OK to make sure the elections are honest.

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. yes, there is no reason to object to valid monitoring, period

I agree with many of NEDA's recommendations for the future. It's their analysis of the past that I criticize.

[Stevepol]

7. What NEDA and Dopp are doing is absolutely essential.

Just as democracy is not possible where the vote counting is done in secret by extreme partisans of one side using machines that are demonstrably insecure and open to easy rigging and fraudulent programming and where the results are almost never audited to verify the accuracy of the count, so it's not possible to redress any of this if the information about the exit polls, which at present are about the only way to authenticate the alleged vote count, is kept secret.

Secrecy at any level of public governance and especially with regard to the vote is the kiss of death for democracy. This is where we are right now and the NEDA and all organizations that are attempting to right the ship deserve our support, especially our financial support.

I hope more DU-ers will help support NEDA and its efforts to make the facts available and to analyze those facts rationally and fairly.

[Febble]

17. Rationally and fairly

I hope more DU-ers will help support NEDA and its efforts to make the facts available and to analyze those facts rationally and fairly.

I have to take issue with the suggestion that Kathy Dopp is either rational or fair. The document linked to in the OP strongly suggests that she is neither.

I have no objection to rational and fair debate as to whether my own conclusions from my own analyses are correct. They may be flawed. But they are rational and they are fair. Kathy's critiques of them are not.

Moreover, NEDA/USCV is an organisation that once fielded a substantial team of reputable analysts who displayed both competence and integrity. One was its vice-president. Others included both Mark Lindeman and myself, and both of us contributed to the work of NEDA/USCV. My own work remains linked on the site. However, once those analysts began to come to conclusions other than those endorsed by Kathy Dopp, they were rapidly ejected and, indeed publicly abused. I know of others who have quietly withdrawn. I suggest anyone who considers donating to NEDA/USCV also considers whether there are not better and more effective electoral reform organisations who would be worthier recipients of their hard-earned cash.

Science involves fitting models to data, not data to models. NEDA/USCV appears to me to have become an organisation that rejects data that fails to fit their model, instead of rejecting models that fail to fit the data. It has therefore sacrificed its claim to do science. If it wishes to regain a reputation for scientific integrity I suggest it starts by ensuring that its publications conform to basic standards of academic practice regarding attribution and referencing. It might also want to consider publishing its analyses in peer-reviewed journals.

I agree with the core mission of USCV/NEDA and its commitment to fair elections. I do not consider that at present its mission is best served by its current approach to data analysis, or indeed, to public relations.

(Edited to correct egregious error)

[eridani]

11. Let me put in a word for David Dill here

"It is not enough that elections are accurate. We have to KNOW that they are accurate, and we don't."

I don't blame people for worrying all this secondary evidence like a dog with a bone, because that's all the owners of the PROPRIETARY software will let us have. However, we badly need to switch memes here. Instead of arguing about whether 2004 was stolen, we should be shouting from the rooftops "Why should we believe ANY election results, ever?" Demand that everything having to do with vote tabulation be done in the full glare of public view.

I don't know what the stats mean, but I do know that they are secondary evidence, and the real question should be WHY IN GODDAM HELL ISN'T THE PRIMARY EVIDENCE POSTED IN EVERY POSSIBLE PUBLIC VENUE??

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

12. another wise person pointed out - its like money

Compare voting to cash management in stores -

In stores, managers don't rely on the cash register tapes alone as the
official account of the financial transactions for the day.

The managers empty the tills (cash drawers)and at the end of the day,
(or periodically throughout).

After these pickups, or at the end of the day,
they count the cash,coins, checks, credit card slips, etc and total it up.
The totals must match the figures on the register's journal tape.

If the money doesn't match the journal tape, then the management searches
for a reason. The management often re-counts the money if there is no
simple problem that caused the error.

i.e the money has been stolen, or the cashier screwed up,a check is stuck under the
drawer, the counter forgot to count something, or counted something twice, they over
charged or undercharged a customer, etc.

If voting were treated like cash management -
then poll workers would be counting the actual votes by hand,
and comparing those totals to the machine count.
If the two figures did not match, then poll judges would have
to review the process or investigate to account for the difference.

Like with cash, there would be recounts.