Are We a Democracy? Vote Counting in the United States Saturday, February 17 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Rockridge Library 5366 College Avenue (at Manila) Oakland, CA 94618 www.OaklandLibrary.org/Branches/rockridge.htm * (See map below) Speaking will be:
Dr. Steven Freeman "Mass Scale Election Fraud in Recent U.S. Federal Elections" University of Pennsylvania Co-author, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?** http://www.AppliedResearch.us/sf/
Dr. David Griscom "Forensic Examination of Public Documents Relating to Voting at a Tucson Precinct on 2 November 2004: Proof of Poll-Worker Fraud" Fellow of the American Physical Society, formerly of the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington http://www.OpEdnews.com/author/author1826.html
An audience question and answer session will follow the presentations.
Overview:
The past few years have seen major changes in the way U.S. votes are cast and counted. In particular, the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 spurred states and counties into a $3.8 billion rush to near-universal computerized voting. When hundreds of thousands of mostly elderly, volunteer pollworkers encounter hundreds of thousands of electronic voting machines running secret software that few understand and none can examine, what assurance do any of us have that our votes are recorded and counted honestly when it's the control of the U.S. government that's at stake?
Drawing on exit poll evidence, Steven Freeman will demonstrate how official explanations for the election results we've been getting in recent years just don't add up. Josh Mitteldorf, a specialist in mathematical modeling, will review polling data from the 2006 Congressional election, asking what these might reveal about the honesty of the vote count.
What is required to verify our electoral process--and how do we know what we think we know about reported election results? Stephanie Singer is working to have raw election data made readily available for public inspection, and with Campaign Scientific has expanded public access rights in Pennsyvlania.
Election Defense Alliance conducted a telephone poll with national scope the night of the 2006 election, and Election Integrity conducted an exit poll covering three Congressional districts in Pennsylvania. Data from these polls is publicly available, because it comes from a community that believes in transparency. Meanwhile, the National Election Pool conducted a poll sponsored by the major media, with much larger scope and a larger budget, but withheld raw data, so researchers must extrapolate from the data the NEP chose to release.
Even if we win the battle to ban paperless DREs, how will we know that other kinds of electronic votes are being counted honestly? David Griscom will describe how corrupt Arizona pollworkers applied a complex, manual fraud technique to falsify optical scan ballots in the presidential election of 2004--in which optical scan systems counted about 60% of the national vote.
Official prescriptions for electoral security always seem to rule out direct oversight by the voters themselves. What kind of reforms can citizens realistically expect to implement against the resistance of e-voting vendors, election adminstrators, and the major political parties? Paul Lehto, election law attorney, researcher, and founder of Verifiable Democracy, will contrast the values and standards of democracy as established by the Founders of the American Republic, with the conditions presently governing our election systems, citing election fraud cases he is litigating in Washington state, Kentucky, and San Diego, California, that illustrate an emerging, disturbing picture of a post-democratic America.
OHIO 2004: 6.15% Kerry-Bush vote-switch found in probability
Jan. 27, 2007, this was reported online:
Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1 of every 34 Ohio votes), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15% when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.
The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal in both subsets.
Read the revised article with graphs of new findings:
The 2004 Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis
How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes
