PowerPoint Presentations, Spreadsheets, and a Database are linked in the article.
Excerpts and Conclusions:
In a subset of 166,953 votes, one of every 34 Ohio voters, the Kerry-Bush margin shifts six percent when the population is sorted by outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.
In a subset of 47,404 votes, the Kerry-Bush margin shifts 6.3% when the population is sorted by outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.
Sorting the same population by vote-switching probability distinguishes a 6.3% difference in Kerry margins. This result infers about three percent of Kerry votes were switched to Bush. Random cross-voting can NOT explain the disparities revealed by comparison of distinct cross-vote probability subsets. Fraudulent Kerry-Bush vote-switching cannot be ruled out.
Conclusions
The 2004 Ohio Presidential voting results do not accurately reflect voter intentions. In Cuyahoga County, the election was flawed and the design appears to have been manipulated. At locations with several ballot orders in use, many votes were cast by voters crossing precincts, hence counted other than as intended. At precincts with the highest Kerry support, the percentage of uncounted votes is inexplicably high. The obvious inference--intentional manipulation produced concentrated undercounting, cross-voting, and vote-switching in areas of highest Kerry support--cannot be ignored in the face of the evidence and statistics. The possibility that ballots were switched to different precincts, post-voting to effect vote-switching, must be considered in a complete chain of custody context.
Many individual ballots resulted in a vote-switch, a two-vote margin difference from the intended result. Switched-votes cast for Kerry and counted for Bush had twice the impact as their actual occurrence, by each subtracting one from Kerry and adding one to Bush. Bush and Kerry votes also went uncounted as non-votes or were miscounted as minor candidate votes. A high percentage of all Cuyahoga County votes were cast at locations with multiple ballot orders. The manner in which precincts and ballot orders were combined increased the probability of a Kerry cross-vote being recorded as a Bush vote. Quantitative analyses of candidate votes and of non-vote percentages evidence the cross-voting and the patterns of cross-voting and vote-switching.
Sorting locations and precincts to their specific cross-voting probability subsets reveals intended voting patterns and the degree of cross-voting. The combinations of ballot orders and precincts at polling locations enables quantitative analysis of cross-voting and vote-switching. The complexity of the election's organization--the great number of combinations of ballot orders and locations--also makes the task of determining the number of cross-votes laborious and complex. While that process is not concluded herein, the procedures so far taken in this study define the process. This process may be more easily applied to other Ohio counties given less-complex ballot order combinations.
Any official inquiry into the 2004 irregularities needs to be independent of political interests, and monitored by political interests. The fact that the irregularities discussed herein are known and have been reported to multiple jurisdictions and law enforcement entities, and yet no official inquiry into the election has occurred, illustrates the broader failure of the current election process and judicial system to respond to election fraud and irregularities or to hold officials accountable for their actions. Polling places should never have been arranged such as in Ohio, with multiple ballot orders and separate casting and counting devices. Measures are required to prevent the possibility of similar future flawed election designs. To this end, control of elections should be removed from competing political interests and actors to politically-independent processes, with at the least, independent and political oversight of elections.
Many more conclusions remain to be made as study and analysis continues. The 2004 Ohio election ballots must be preserved to allow further investigations. If this study illustrates anything, hopefully it is the degree to which this problem has not yet been fully considered, and the complete failure of officials to respond. During an era of new voting system technologies and reforms, careful consideration of past errors may prove useful in avoiding their repetition and in preventing future abuses of process and power.
The 2004 Ohio Presidential election remains to be fully investigated. The blatant evidence of irregularities and unfairness of organization continues to be ignored by most jurisdictional authorities informed of the evidence. I thank those few authorities pursuing this matter further.
http://www.jqjacobs.net
Anthropologist and Educator.
More at http://www.jqjacobs.net
This study showed how ballots for each precinct, by law, are printed by rotating the order of the candidates so no candidate is always first on the ballot.
It is therefore essential that ballots cards are used with the machines that correspond to the same order for that precinct.
The study investigates what happened when ballot cards meant for one precinct were switched, punched by machines set up for a different order.
The results showed that Kerry votes switching to Bush occurred more often then Bush votes going to Kerry, suggesting these cross-precinct votes were not random mistakes.
Also, the minor candidates recieved inordinately high vote tallies in precincts Kerry was favored in, as did "disqualified", the unused ballot choice.
It short, mistakes happen, but should happen both ways equally. When they don't it suggests foul play. The Ohio officials charged with watching that ballot/precinct crossover did not happen should be called in for hearings immediately.
by
Gustav Wynn (58 articles, 38 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 275 comments)
on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 11:33:51 AM
Your summary, "Something's rotten in Ohio" obfuscates the alarming aspect of the article and my findings.
YES, it is "essential that ballots cards are used with the machines that correspond to the same order for that precinct."
MOST IMPORTANTLY, the ballots must remain in the correct precinct during the entire chain of custody. Vote-switching is possible by simply moving ballots from one precinct pile to the next. Ohio punch cards had no precinct labels, as if designed for fraud.
IN FACT, wrong-precinct voting is not the simple pattern in the data.
Your statement "It short, mistakes happen..." is an obfuscation, even if well-meaning. I too, began from that viewpoint, and further study revealed that the irregularities can NOT be explained away as mistakes.
While the article is narrowly focused on a specific analysis, we also know, from observers of the Ohio recount, that ballots were pre-sorted into series of Bush and Kerry votes, the exact pattern to be expected if ballots were switched from one precoinct to another to alter the outcome. My findings of 6% disparities in several subsets fits this possibility, and ballots pre-sorted by votes could be expected if fraudulent vote-switching occurred.
An obfuscating factor of the Cuyahoga County vote is the complexity of the arrangement of locations and precincts. The incredible imbalances in that arrangement may be explained as evidence of premeditation of vote-switching, as intended to obfuscate the fraud.
The Bush-Kerry vote-switching disparities were fully hidden until I developed the methodology of cross-vote outcome probability sorting. Without that method, all we would know and see today is the third-party cross-voting. With that method, we also see that the third-party cross-voting is very concentrated at locations where votes cannot be switched from Kerry to Bush! At locations where Kerry-Bush vote-switching is possible, the third-party cross-voting is negligible, a very significant disparity also.
JQ
by
James Q. Jacobs (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 8 comments)
on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 12:39:14 PM
This is a PC I'm on and unexpliciable things happen all the time. I don't know why and niether do the IT experts. The whole computer voting programs should be stopped and the old system of counting ballots reinstated. I don't trust the Corps. anyway and manipulation is more rampant than anyone probably knows. The last two Presidential Races have had more issues than can be acceptable in these Republican controlled times. Don't trust any of the politicians and that is why we need more oversite of election results.
by
woody (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments)
on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 5:38:24 PM
3 comments
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