So, what do you have to do to validate an election with a secret ballot? The answer is have an election where there is no secret ballot. It's a parallel election with a non-secret ballot, and all of its vulnerability comes from the fact that it's voluntary and parallel and all of its strengths come from the fact that it's non-secret and witnessed. Cut out the middleman, get rid of the secret ballot, then we can have verifiable or legitimately challenged elections.

by brantl (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 23 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 5, 2008 at 11:27:20 AM

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You are right Brantl--BUT, and it's a big but, it seems that the secret ballot is about as entrenched as the electoral college, or, heaven help us, the right to own a gun. I am so fed up with machine tampering and other forms of election fraud, I personally would give up my secret ballot. Others come back and tell me that people get killed for voting the wrong way, or bashed by their spouses ( we had  two women who signed affidavits but said the really hoped their husbands wouldn't find out.), or paid for their vote, or fired. I think if we run an exit poll in Ohio I am going to recommend that we ASK for their signatures but not push it. They pushed it in FL. I haven't heard the comparisons to the official results yet.

by MJ Creech (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 24 comments) on Thursday, Feb 7, 2008 at 9:56:37 PM

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Sounds like a good job being very well done. As you say, it's particularly important that you don’t release the exit poll data before the official precinct results are made public. However, even with all the care you are taking, there is still a chance that your efforts can be subverted and nullified.

Even without knowledge of your results, the following course of action was still available to ballot riggers, albeit it is tricky and time consuming: They  could 1. Do some sleuthing to discover exactly which precincts were subjected to citizen exit polling, and 2. undo any ballot rigging which took place in those specific areas, while compensating if necessary by increasing the amount of rigging elsewhere. This would be more difficult than just tweaking official figures to match yours, because it would require knowledge of exactly what rigging had taken place. Still it would be feasible, if the same people were both doing the rigging and producing the results.

How could you counter this? One way is to hold back not just your results, but also even the identity of the areas you polled. You probably can't stop potential riggers from learning this information, but at least don't make it easy for them. Make any potential covering of tracks by riggers a time-consuming affair. Another approach is to count all the people who exit the polling area having voted, whether you poll them or not. This count should match the official count, and is a good way of detecting both ballot-stuffing and ballot-losing, unless the number of stuffed ballots is carefully made equal to the number of lost ballots. This seriously constrains the options of any potential riggers. In an area where there's only one or two volunteers, not enough to do a meaningful amount of polling, maybe have them just count the voters. Since this can be done discreetly, from a distance, there's no signs to tip off potential ballot-fixers that their total is being checked. Thirdly, where there are significant delays in the official results, demand explanations for the delays, and subject any explanations given to a very thorough examination. The longer the delay, the harder it will be for ballot stuffers to come up with a plausible explanation other than the truth. Point out that the law requiring results to be posted at the end of election day is actually a law and not an outmoded quaint suggestion; and the reason it is a law is precisely because it helps stop any "post-adjustment" of the official results. The mere fact of delay has to call the validity of the election into question.

by Martin Gradwell (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments) on Thursday, Feb 7, 2008 at 6:48:32 PM

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Yes, good understanding of the process. I think like this also. In Ohio when we did parallel elections ( a lot of work, BTW) we kept the location (only one location unfortunately, but sometimes multi-precincts) secret except to the citizen workers and then phoned them the night before. Once in Warren County--where they had the phony Homeland Security threat in 04-- I told the BOE the morning of the election that we were doing a parallel election in a certain precinct  and oddly enough that turned out to be the  precinct in the Congressional District where the Dem challenger Paul Hackett beat the Repub.--oh what's her name?-- by the greatest margin. (she "won" overall, due to the last precincts coming in, after a machine failure.) Our sample matched pretty well our precinct official results. Maybe just coincidence, but I think that exit polling might also make the riggers sweat a little, or scramble to change strategies. It's not perfect. BUT the more exit polling we do the better the proof of fraud. I think we could blast the internet with, "Citizen exit polling all across the country shows reversal of official election results." I think that might shake em up a bit.

 Mark Adams' strategy was to get more total votes for a particular candidate, say Ron Paul, than the official vote shows. This would mean you need almost all of the Ron Paul voters to sign affidavits--they might be able to do this! The idea is that Ron Paul votes would have been switched to another candidate. We think that happened in Ohio with third party votes.

by MJ Creech (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 24 comments) on Thursday, Feb 7, 2008 at 10:22:08 PM

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Jean Schmidt 'WON" against Paul Hackett--the precinct in Warren where we did the parallel election had more votes percentage wise for Hackett than any other precinct in the whole county. Could be just coincidence, but they KNEW we  were there as of that morning. Sheesh--am I conspiracy theorist to suggest that someone somewhere is monitoring machine rigging even the day of elections and changing it as needed to make their candidate win by a believable margin? Yeah , maybe I am!

For those interested I am submitting a new article comparing EPing by citizens to EPing by the so-called professionals.  THere is a website I am using called www.projectvotecount.com    People can sign up to do exit polling there.

by MJ Creech (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 24 comments) on Monday, Feb 11, 2008 at 1:27:21 PM

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Project Vote Count’s citizens’ exit polls are easy for the election officials to see. We are right next to the exit from the polling place. The powers that be have to decide between cheating and getting caught or not cheating.

Of course, if the powers that be could tweak their secret vote counting programs to adjust on election day so that the cheating could be turned off at the precincts where we are conducting exit polls, then they would deprive us of direct evidence of cheating at that precinct, but we would have statistical evidence showing cheating. This is similar to the obvious differences between results in the hand counted precincts and the machine counted precincts in New Hampshire. It doesn’t take a statistician to see that something fishy has happened. See for yourself at http://checkthevotes.com/primary_dem_New_Hampshire-summary

To help make sure that the votes are counted accurately in Texas and in Ohio, take action and sign up with Project Vote Count today at www.ProjectVoteCount.com If you live in another state, send us an email if you want us to help you make sure that the votes are counted accurately there.

For more election news that you didn’t hear about from the corporate media cartel or all of those organizations which claim that they are looking out for your rights while taking your money and doing nothing, see Project Vote Count’s Election News http://www.projectvotecount.com/ElectionNews.aspx

To see the Zogby poll and other important information about voting, go to Project Vote Count’s FAQ page http://www.projectvotecount.com/faq.aspx

by Mark Adams (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 312 comments [39 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Feb 16, 2008 at 11:27:54 AM

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