Documenting the Difficulties with Electronic Voting

[peristaltor]

In the last post I made on this forum, I pointed out a recent hardware hack to electronic voting machines here in the United States. As usual, people pointed out that this was an anomaly, that this could not happen in the Real World™, that it is just as important as Acorn (that one stumped me), et cetera ad infinitum ad naseumI say "as usual"

Comments

[stewstewstewdio]

I say "as usual" above because a common tactic to dismissing one's rhetorical opponents is to simply demand documentation and then attempt to find a chink in the specific document that one can later use to dismiss the entire contents of the supporting evidence.

Yup. That's all it took. Next. A lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda. But not the actual occurence and evidence for your claims. all conjecture and conspiracy theory and no real evidence.

[stewstewstewdio]

This.

Uh oh. We agreed on something. I feel Armageddon coming.

[underlankers]

If the three of us agree on something then most assuredly Armageddon should be nigh. I'll bring the popcorn.

[mrbogey]

The more troubling thing is the bad use of statistics to try and build a narrative.

Statistical anomalies don't work by building them backwards.

Let me type 5 random numbers. 1, 45, 10, 12, 84. What are the odds I would write those five numbers? One in a billion! And yet there they are. Conspiracy!

Taking raw numbers from a machine and saying, "it favored someone. Conspiracy!" is just not good statistics. You'd have to show an atypical result by using what the predictive result would normally have been. Comparing general absentee ballots to touch-screen ballots is literally apples to oranges as there's no correlation between the two.

[peristaltor]

Not for all elections, all the time. The Snohomish County investigation found ample discrepancies between absentee and electronic.

[notmrgarrison]

I skimmed through this, it seemed like every case had the republicans fixing the machines, which makes the whole thing not believable.

There is a high correlation between the problem machines - as reported by KING5 news - and the Republican percentages the machines reported.

Unless there was a strong independent, then there's just as well a high correlation with the Democrat percentages.

[peristaltor]

. . . it seemed like every case had the republicans fixing the machines, which makes the whole thing not believable.

Out of curiosity, why?

[notmrgarrison]

Highly partisan, sounds like people were looking for it, the chances that only one side would do it, many times, seems about zero.

[peristaltor]

Interesting. So, if it isn't bi-partisan, it's a conspiracy theory?

Okay. Interesting.

[kylinrouge]

When you're in the conspiracy line of thinking, everything becomes evidence for something.

[htpcl]

I think this warrants a Dailyquote.

[lafinjack]

And disproof of a conspiracy just means the conspiracy is that much deeper.

[policraticus]

Election tampering is troubling, but I have a tough time getting worried about something that requires that much Byzantine conspiracy in order to effect such a modest result. Cook County Cemeteries voted overwhelmingly for JFK by in 1960, and their wasn't an electronic vote in sight. Now that was election tampering.

[telemann]

Urban myth. Some naughty things happened, but not enough documented proof shows any thing would have changed, and if anything, some Chicago precincts gave Nixon more votes than he should have received.

Three days after the election, GOP party Chairman Sen. Thruston Morton launched bids for recounts and investigations in 11 states-an action that Democratic Sen. Henry Jackson attacked as a "fishing expedition." Eight days later, close Nixon aides, including Bob Finch and Len Hall, sent agents to conduct "field checks" in eight of those states. Peter Flanigan, another aide, encouraged the creation of a Nixon Recount Committee in Chicago. All the while, everyone claimed that Nixon knew nothing of these efforts-an implausible assertion that could only have been designed to help Nixon dodge the dreaded "sore loser" label

[telemann]

The GOP's failure to prove fraud doesn't mean, of course, that the election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable. But what's typically left out of the legend is that multiple election boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or federal judges. Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961. And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a 1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever fraud existed wasn't substantial enough to alter the election).

[underlankers]

The most clear-cut case of election fraud in US history was the "election" of Rutherfraud B. Hayes. That was some pretty naked power-dealing and there's really no indication who won that election given the practices of the time. And as far as I know there was almost no electronics in the modern sense of the term in 1877.....