Statistician investigating vote-count anomalies that appear to favor Pubs over Dems

[KingOrfeo]

And Establishment Pubs over Tea Partiers. She is suing for access to the paper tapes from Kansas voting machines.

Beth Clarkson, chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, filed the open records lawsuit in Sedgwick County District Court as part of her personal quest to find the answer to an unexplained pattern that transcends elections and states. The lawsuit was amended Wednesday to name Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.

Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, said she has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate “a statistically significant” pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct.

While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.

“This is not just an anomaly that occurred in one place,” Clarkson said. “It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly in elections across the United States.”

The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling, she said.

“I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pattern is there and one way to establish that it is or is not election fraud is to go and do a physical audit of paper records of voting machines,” she said.

Clarkson wants the hard copies to check the error rate on electronic voting machines that were used in a voting station in Sedgwick County to establish a statistical model.

 

[KingOrfeo]

BTW -- for some reason BlackBoxVoting.org has not been updated since 2014 and BlackBoxVoting.com has not been updated since 2010 -- have people been losing interest?

 

[FGB]

Yeah.

Republicans use verifiable LIVE voters!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Yeah.

Republicans use verifiable LIVE voters!

Well, I dunno about that. Not all of those who show up at the Tea Party rallies appear to be alive.

 

[someoneyouknow]

What's always amazing is for the all the talk about supposed voter fraud and the new for voter ID, the Republicans stand fast at every attempt to require a verifiable voting process. By that I mean, a way to make absolutely sure every vote is counted and correctly entered.

This is especially noticeable where Republicans are hellbent on instituting electronic voting, then fight tooth and nail to prevent any form of paper trail or auditing to verify the machine is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Apparently it's too difficult for the same people who make ATMs, which spit out a receipt of your transaction, or who make cash registers capable of recording the 30-60 items you buy at a grocery store, to do the same thing for a voting machine. It appears beyond their technological capabilities.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I suppose anything is possible. Somehow I doubt it's a cheat and is probably some odd group of people though that just aren't generally recognized as people. That sounds a lot more likely than Republicans start cheating at 500 votes.

And I'm not accusing them of playing fair. I just don't buy this story.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I suppose anything is possible. Somehow I doubt it's a cheat and is probably some odd group of people though that just aren't generally recognized as people. That sounds a lot more likely than Republicans start cheating at 500 votes.

And I'm not accusing them of playing fair. I just don't buy this story.

Clarkson certainly appears open to alternate explanations.

The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling, she said.

“I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pattern is there and one way to establish that it is or is not election fraud is to go and do a physical audit of paper records of voting machines,” she said.

In most states elections are administered by county-level elected officials over whom even the secretaries of state have little authority. This "hyperfederalized" system is very definitely a problem for democracy (see The Voting Wars, by Richard Hasen), but it would also pose a problem for anyone trying to game the system nationwide or statewide.

 

[DooleyDarter]

The democratic mantra: vote early, vote often

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

The democratic mantra: vote early, vote often

Unsubstantiated Republican bullshit.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"Vote often" is innocuous anyway; it could mean simply "Vote in every election," and what American could object to that?