Media Curmudgeon

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January 15, 2008

Guest Blogger Responds With Conspiracy Theory

Guest blogger Greg Todd writes:

"You like to stir up controversy! I guess that's one function of media.

The numbers are actually pretty interesting. The polls in this case were way off. It's not as if there was a margin of error they fell outside of. This is not "inexplicable," it is just unusual. And note, importantly, that the polls were "consistent" with the results in the hand-count districts, while dramatically inconsistent with the Diebold optical scan machine districts -- and again curiously, "uniformly" inconsistent: a neat 7% reversal. There's a good deal on this at Bradblog.com, as I'm sure you know.

Some other interesting facts. Someone (the Washington Post?) did some research on the NH primary elections in 2000 and 2004, when these same Diebold machines were in place, and found the same skew. The Post concluded, without reflection, that this showed the Diebold districts just "vote that way." Maybe so. But that same skew away from the paper districts is an interesting fact -- that there is the same pattern of voting, with essentially the same reversals of margins -- why should that be? Was the difference between Gore and Bradley the "same" difference as between Hillary and Obama? From a statistical point of view, it's curious. Does "curious" mean the results were rigged? Not at all! But why are the pundits so sure -- without ever once having had an audit -- that the results are accurate? How do they "know" the results are right? I worked at Price Waterhouse for two years. There are such things as audits.

And there are some other issues.

The Diebold machines are easy to hack into. The machines were accessed throughout the day by the LHS techs, who swapped memory cards on the scanners.

As you know, all election districts in NH that use Diebold scanners contract with one company, LHS. The principal owner of LHS turns out to have 12-month suspended sentence felony conviction for sale of controlled narcotic substances, dating,I believe, from the late 90s. Did New Hampshire do a criminal background check? Don't know. Does this mean he should not be running the state-wide voting system? Not necessarily. We don't know what the drugs were - pot vs. heroin would make a difference in my mind. Should we guess it was coke? But he was convicted for selling, not using. Does that make a difference?

I know what you're saying: "Who CARES?! The American public doesn't CARE, because they know that the machines do not lie".

There is a minority of people, however, who view this as an opportunity to test the integrity of the optical-scan systems.

The optical scanning systems permit, in theory, the exact tabluation of paper ballots actually filled in by people against the machine tally. If there are miscounts, we can find that out. Let's see if that system really works.

A serious problem arises, however, because, unaccountably (it seems to me the most basic violation of audit controls), the paper ballots in New Hampshire's scanner districts are left in the custody of the same people that run the machines. What was New Hampshire thinking? Or -- were they thinking? The prior drug felony makes one wonder.

So, contrary to your point, this seems to me an EXCELLENT test case for the optical scanners. We here have a situation of a possibly dodgy guy owning a company, which controls all the machines and all the ballots. We have anamalous results, both between scanner vs. hand-count districts, and scanner district results vs. (wide margin differences) polls. IF we can satisfy ourselves that the ballots have not been tampered with -- and because of New Hampshire's lack of custody controls maybe that's an issue -- then you could recount a batch of randomly selected election districts, counting each ballot cast in each district. Or you could manually count ALL the scanner election districts. It is just NOT a lot of votes to count.

How long would it take? A week? It's a minimal investment of time, but the integrity of the results -- or the uncovering of flaws -- can be determined now, early in the process.

But for some reason, the mainstream media -- afraid perhaps they will be made fun of by Fox and Matt Drudge --- are just peeing in their pants to show how much they trust in, and rely on, these election results, absolutely, and without a shadow of a doubt! There has never BEEN a test case of optical scanner counts in the wild (so far as I know), and all the pundits KNOW that the counts are good!

As you know, I have no interest in Obama vs. Hillary. I am glad Kucinich has asked for a recount, since I just want Americans to be working with voting systems they CAN rely on and which they BELIEVE they can rely on. I think many Americans are just past wanting to worry -- so they say, "I just won't"!

p.s. Matt Drudge and his friends have many mainstream media people thinking that election fraud is just a paranoid fantasy by leftists and kooks. The media should be cautious here. Check this out:

On December 6th, 2004 , The BRAD BLOG published a sworn affidavit [PDF] by Florida software programmer Clint Curtis. In his affidavit and videotaped sworn testimony presented before members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, Curtis claims to have been asked by U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) to design a "vote-rigging software prototype". This request took place in October 2000 during a meeting at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida.

Curtis, a life-long Republican up until then, had been a programmer at YEI, which had several top-secret clearance contracts with the state, NASA and other government agencies. Curtis' understanding at the time was that the prototype he was being asked to create (built to the very precise specifications of Feeney) was to address Feeney’s concerns that the Democrats might attempt to electronically rig the election and Feeney wanted to know what to look out for in that event. After informing YEI CEO Mrs. Li-Woan Yang that he would not be able to hide the vote-flipping routines in the software source-code as Feeney had requested, Curtis testified that Mrs. Yang informed him that the program was needed to "rig the vote in South Florida ".

At the time of the alleged meeting, Feeney was the incoming Speaker of the Florida House, and also a registered lobbyist and the general corporate counsel for YEI. Previously, he had been the running mate of Jeb Bush during his 1994 unsuccessful first bid for Florida Governor. In November 2000, Feeney gained national notoriety after declaring open defiance of the Florida Supreme Court by vowing to choose Presidential electors for George W. Bush regardless of whether a court-ordered recount showed that Gore won Florida . He eventually ascended to the U.S. Congress and today sits on the House Judiciary Committee. Although he was outspent two to one by his Democratic opponent in 2002, Feeney beat him handily at the polls and then ran unopposed for the same seat in 2004.

Posted by Charles Warner at January 15, 2008 01:37 PM

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