Merkins 2012

[Erik]

Irreligious wrote

To my recollection, he was always anti-abortion, and virulently so.

One of the things that made me start to wonder about him was a persistent refusal to answer the question of whether abortion was OK in the case of rape.

[Kate]

Hmm.

[Davin]

Anyway, how about that Rick Perry?

[Kate]

[Smellyoldgit]

Stolen, faceplaced & prolly going viral!

[ubs]

Victus wrote

All of the policies above are or were supported by large segments of the population at the time they were enacted.

I wanted to get back to this. My position is going to be that one recent and fraudulent election, for which no protective nor corrective measures were taken demonstrates that we don't live in a democracy. It may not always be neccessary to rig the results, but the very fact that it can be done is enough.

I bring you, the Florida 2004 election fraud.

In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.
More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility. .
Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held."

Do you defend the results of the 2004 US Presidential Election as valid?

[Victus]

ubs wrote

I wanted to get back to this. My position is going to be that one recent and fraudulent election, for which no protective nor corrective measures were taken demonstrates that we don't live in a democracy.

Given all the recounts, it seems hard to defend the suggestion of a lack of 'protective measures'.

ubs wrote

It may not always be neccessary to rig the results, but the very fact that it can be done is enough.

I bring you, the Florida 2004 election fraud.

Point-by-point:

Fraud Essay wrote

In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points.

Which means that he gained vote share among non-Republicans in those specific counties, but not in the state as a whole. Or more academically, global trends do not necessitate local trend compliance; that Bush lost vote share among non-Republicans in Florida as a whole doesn't mean he couldn't have gained it (even to a huge degree) in at least some counties. This becomes more likely among less populated counties.

For this line of argument to carry weight, you would need to show that the degree of variation was somehow biased in Bush's favor to some statistically significant degree.

I just quickly ran the numbers to generate these graphs:

The first is a scatterpoint showing Bush's vote share by country in 2000 (election1) and 2004 (election2), colored by which party won the county in 2000...



If the vote were systematically biased in 2004 and not 2000 (the author of the essay uses 2000 data as a reference point, so I assume that's OK), then there should be a bunch of Republican outliers above the 95% confidence interval, but there's only one (or two if you count the one on the line), both being relatively low-population counties.

The second is a histogram of the difference in Bush's vote shares in counties from 2000 and 2004 (2000-2004, negative scores indicate gains for Bush over time)...



If 2004 (and not 2000) were systematically biased in favor of Bush, the distribution should lean to the left, but its normal (see black reference line) - skewness is non-significant (< 2x standard error of skewness).

Basically, the data looks a lot like Bush became linearly more popular in Florida between 2000 and 2004, with no particularly obvious deviation from that trend.

Fraud Essay wrote

We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote.

And we should only expect them to be the same in so far as absentee voters can be considered a random sample of voters as a whole. Empirically, this assumption is probably unjustified.

Fraud Essay wrote

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.

According to the Cuyahoga County voter registration webpage, as of November 2nd, 2004, there were just over one million registered voters. According to Wikipedia, on election day (November 2nd, 2004) there were 673,766 votes from Cuyahoga County - a ~67% turnout, compared to 60.7% nationally.

I'm not sure where your guy is getting his data, but I can't back it up based on what I'm finding independently.

Fraud Essay wrote

More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004.

Exit polls, like any sample, make some assumptions. In this case, the two important assumptions are 1) sampling error and 2) stratification/weighting.

For the first, you're assuming that the people agreeing to being interviewed after voting are representative of voters as a whole. For the second, you're assuming that the number of people agreeing to be interviewed accurately reflects the total number of voters at a given precinct. In so far as these assumptions are false, exit polls will be prone to giving you information inconsistent with actual voting patterns.

Fraud Essay wrote

However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count.

[url=http://www.electionmathematics.org/em-exitpolls/EvaluationJan192005.pdf]Statistical breakdown of why this claim is (probably) wrong.[url]

Fraud Essay wrote

According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility.

Assumes the above is true, which I don't think it is.

Fraud Essay wrote

Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held."

I can't find any data on specific voting methods to go over, but the fact that 83% of the variability 2004 votes is attributable to how counties voted in 2000 (see first graph) means that there isn't much room left over for other factors to explain why the vote tallies for counties. As I said above, there's only one real outlier, and its not a particularly densely-populated county.

ubs wrote

Do you defend the results of the 2004 US Presidential Election as valid?

I don't see any compelling evidence that they were invalid, given the above.

[ubs]

Victus wrote

Given all the recounts, it seems hard to defend the suggestion of a lack of 'protective measures'.

For me a protective measure would involve moving the evaluation outside of the kangaroo court where it occurred. I believe we have Bush to thank for eliminating foreign election evaluation.

I'm going to have to do this in salvos. Let's start with the low hanging fruit.

Victus wrote

Statistical breakdown of why this claim is (probably) wrong.

This is an electronic voting system manufacturers study on how honest and awesome electronic voting machines are.

Here is another study done by UC Santa Barbara that demonstrates students hacking voting machines and then sets out to establish standards for electronic voting machines that would make them reliable. Currently there are no electronic voting machine manufacturers that meet the standards set out by the UCSB study. Nor are there likely to be given that there one customer is the state.

Victus wrote

Assumes the above is true, which I don't think it is.

Well, here is a testimony that's more than two years old of a programmer that was hired to write election rigging software by a Congressman in 2001. The testimony itself is at least two years old, so you've likely seen it, but just in case...

How to control the vote in Florida

Victus wrote

I don't see any compelling evidence that they were invalid, given the above.

Given that you believe that we have a democracy but that the voters are deeply flawed do you vote (I'm just curious)?

[Kate]

Not in the US, he doesn't.

[Victus]

ubs wrote

For me a protective measure would involve moving the evaluation outside of the kangaroo court where it occurred.

The, uh, courts, you mean?

ubs wrote

I believe we have Bush to thank for eliminating foreign election evaluation.

Can you point to some specific legislation or an executive order to that effect?

ubs wrote

I'm going to have to do this in salvos. Let's start with the low hanging fruit.

This is an electronic voting system manufacturers study on how honest and awesome electronic voting machines are.

Did you want to dispute any of the claims or statistics in the report?

ubs wrote

Well, here is a testimony that's more than two years old of a programmer that was hired to write election rigging software by a Congressman in 2001. The testimony itself is at least two years old, so you've likely seen it, but just in case...

My main takeaway from the video is that fraud would be provable if it happened, but it hasn't been proven.

ubs wrote

Given that you believe that we have a democracy but that the voters are deeply flawed do you vote (I'm just curious)?

As a general rule, I don't vote. For me to consider spending the time to vote, the policy differences between the candidates have to be pretty vast and the margins very close. Since neither of those things are true very often, I usually consider my individual vote to be basically worthless, less than the value of my time doing something else, like practicing the harmonica.

[Irreligious]

ubs wrote

Well, here is a testimony that's more than two years old of a programmer that was hired to write election rigging software by a Congressman in 2001. The testimony itself is at least two years old, so you've likely seen it, but just in case...

Wow. This is some very provocative testimony from Mr. Clinton Eugene Curtis, a computer programmer from Tallahasse, Fla.

I'm not doubting the ability of a software programmer to tamper with electronic election results. It certainly seems plausible that it could be done, but I do have to wonder how much of Mr. Curtis' testimony has been corroborated by other sources, say other computer programmers who could back up Mr. Curtis' claim that election results could be manipulated in the way he described.

It appears that former U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney-- who Mr. Curtis alleges approached Yang Enterprises to design a computer program to falsify touch-screen voting results in Palm Beach County-- does have an unsavory record as an, ahem, public servant. However, I couldn't find anything definitive to back up Mr. Curtis' claim that this was, indeed, one of Mr. Feeney's dishonorable and illegal acts.

Also, Mr. Curtis makes no mention in the testimony from this clip (apparently offered in 2009 before the House Ethics Committee) that he ran against Mr. Feeney in 2006 for Florida's 24th District Congressional seat. Or, maybe he did, and I just missed it.

[ubs]

Victus wrote

The, uh, courts, you mean?

They are after all a political body whose members have a vested interest in the results.

Victus wrote

Can you point to some specific legislation or an executive order to that effect?

No, the invitation for foreign observers must come from the executive. They never received the invitation in 2000. Then Bush invited them in 2004, but in Florida they got some grief from local power. Wikileaks links to an article that has been removed. The article is/was entitled "International Monitoring of US Election Called 'Frightening'"

Victus wrote

Did you want to dispute any of the claims or statistics in the report?

Yes. I concede your point on comparing it the results to one year, but would like to revisit that comparison.

Victus wrote

My main takeaway from the video is that fraud would be provable if it happened, but it hasn't been proven.

Most evidence is circumstantial. They were shopping for programmers. We know from UCSB that the machines are hack-able, so they were successful. We know that they haven't been fixed. It would be unreasonable for you to require convictions as proof because if true, those elected would be highly unmotivated to change anything. We are left to evaluate the evidence on our own.

Victus wrote

As a general rule, I don't vote. For me to consider spending the time to vote, the policy differences between the candidates have to be pretty vast and the margins very close. Since neither of those things are true very often, I usually consider my individual vote to be basically worthless, less than the value of my time doing something else, like practicing the harmonica.

I vote, but have always felt like a rube doing so. I don't think we've ever had an anti war candidate in my lifetime and since we have one now, I will likely register republican and see if I can't help save a life. I fully expect to lose and that the final choices will be Romney and Obama, in which case I will forgo voting in favor of soldering my arduino (and then coding it to play the harmonica)

[Kate]

Play the harmonica???

Sigh. Seems like a waste.

[ubs]

Or maybe code it to robo call messages espousing the virtues of anonymous debate.

[Smellyoldgit]

There's nothing wrong with a harmonica that a bucket of water, a hammer and a kick in the bollocks couldn't sort out.