Kathy Dopp writes:

Thanks to Rady Ananda for writing this article on the phenomenon of the lack of primary elections in some counties. 

~ The TX vote counts seem to be correct in most counties because not all counties in TX hold primary elections for both political parties. (So we can trust the Texas primary results as much as we can trust the accuracy of any State's vote counts which are not subjected to post-election manual independent audits, and lack publicly verifiable ballot reconciliation and security procedures.) 

~ There is, however, an interesting pattern in the Texas Democratic primary which is open to voters of both political parties in Texas. In the 21 counties where there was no Republican primary, the vote shares for Clinton and Obama were: 

~ Clinton 69.4% Obama 24.6% 

~ as opposed to Clinton and Obama vote shares in the other counties which had both Republican and Democratic primaries: 

~ Clinton 49.7% Obama 48.7% 

~ This is a huge margin swing of 43.8%! This leads one to suspect that Republican cross-over voters "may" have had a large hand in determining the Democratic nominee in Texas. 

~ The only way to know for sure would be to go through the poll books to see how many registered Republicans voted in the Democratic primary election. 

~ The practice of voting in the opposing party's primary is legal and would be what strategic voters would do if there were an open primary, especially if there were no primary in one's own political party, or the primary in one's own political party were not competitive.

~ For example, because McCain was expected to win the Republican primary, it would be expected that many Republicans would cross over to the Democratic primary and vote for the candidate whom they felt had the least chance of winning in the opposing party's primary election. 

~ (Richard Hayes Phillips) quotes Texas attorney David Rogers.   

"With no county chairman, there is no one to organize or run a primary."  Rogers explained that while ballots, voting machines, and election workers are all paid for by the state government, the local parties at the county level have to bear the costs of administration and accounting; and they have to find someone to do the paperwork, and somewhere to store the paper. 

~ "The costs in time and money to the parties aren't much, but they aren't nothing." 

~ Ananda quotes Populist Texas attorney, David Van Os:  

"Armstong, Hansford, and Roberts are the 3 counties in Texas that as of now don't have Democratic county chairs. They are all in the upper Panhandle. So they didn't have Democratic primaries because there was nobody to hold one. In general elections the Democratic vote typically ranges from about 12% to about 22% in those counties....  

~ “There is an even greater number of rural West Texas and rural South Texas counties that don't have Republican county chairs, with some of them being Democratic ... and others being Republican counties in national and statewide elections." 

~ Here's a list of GOP county chairs, so you can see that of the 21 counties not holding Republican primaries, 18 of them do not have any Republican party chairs. 

~ Thanks to Charlie Strauss and a person from Texas for alerting me to this CBS News article. The following article appeared a couple of days prior to the primaries: Excerpt: 

"But as Tuesday's primary and caucus nears, with a decision on the Democratic nominee hanging in the balance, 21 Texas counties won't even be holding primaries. 

~ “Despite Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama barnstorming the state, three rural Panhandle counties will net them zero votes. 

~ “The Democrats aren't holding a primary in the sparsely-populated counties because there's no one to run an election there.

~ Because Texas has both a primary and a caucus, if only registered Democrats attend the Democratic caucuses, this could explain why Obama won the Texas Democratic caucuses, but lost the Democratic open primary election.

~ It could also explain why the number of voters in the Republican primaries were less than half the number in the Democratic primary.  

~ However, again, it would take examining the poll books and adding up the number of registered Republicans and Democrats who voted in each county. A large job. 

~ Texas is an unusual state in that the party primaries are not conducted state-wide. 

#### 

Kathy’s work can be accessed at: http://utahcountvotes.org and http://electionmathematics.org and http://electionarchive.org

by Rady Ananda (72 articles, 201 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 535 comments) on Friday, March 7, 2008 at 7:09:37 PM
 

Kathy's most important point

I know all these numbers can make most folks' heads spin, so lemme draw your attention to one piece of what she writes:

"There is, however, an interesting pattern in the Texas Democratic primary which is open to voters of both political parties in Texas. In the 21 counties where there was no Republican primary, the vote shares for Clinton and Obama were: 

Clinton 69.4% Obama 24.6% 

as opposed to Clinton and Obama vote shares in the other counties which had both Republican and Democratic primaries: 

Clinton 49.7% Obama 48.7% 

This is a huge margin swing of 43.8%! This leads one to suspect that Republican cross-over voters "may" have had a large hand in determining the Democratic nominee in Texas."

Kathy reiterates my point that the pollbooks should be examined. 

by Rady Ananda (72 articles, 201 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 535 comments) on Friday, March 7, 2008 at 9:36:39 PM
 

"Crossovers"

In Van Zandt County, East Texas, there were a number of known Republican's, who can't stand Hillary, who none the less exercised their "right" to vote in the Democratic Primary.

I almost got one elected as a Delegate for Hillary. (He is still mad about that) But he was one of the few Republican's who bothered to show up at the Caucus, which might account for the difference in Caucus voting and Primary voting totals.

Then Dallas County had one Precinct Chair who ran out of the building with the ballots, saying that she had to take them home and "correct" them. Police finally seized the ballots. But did they get all of them?

It is never easy being a Democrat in Van Zandt County. But Shrub has made it easier for us. Still, this long time Democrat can't feel proud of what the Democrat Party has morphed into. Especially the leadership. Especially them. 

by txfarmer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 9 comments) on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 9:03:55 AM
 

VIDEO and news reports on stolen caucus sheets

A CNN video report suggests Obama supporters stole the caucus sheets that supported Clinton, and a precinct captain tried to drive off with sheets that supported Obama.

The Dallas News reports  the story a little differently:  Sandra Crenshaw - a Clinton supporter in charge of that precinct's caucus - left with all the sheets and - because she was being followed by Obama supporters - drove to a police substation.

The matter is supposedly being investigated by the Democratic Party.

by Rady Ananda (72 articles, 201 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 535 comments) on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 12:23:58 PM
 

Remember the software code

Great work Kathy and Rady-   We discovered a vote flip incident in Texas- see

Bev Harris Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 7069 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 18 (A keeper?)

Posted on Monday, November 12, 2007 - 8:07 pm:        Appreciation to San Mateo Calif. citizen Brent Turner for his contributions to this story When Wharton County, Texas citizen Jim Welch voted last Tuesday, he watched in disbelief as the voting machine changed the vote he'd entered a few moments earlier. The machine was an ES&S iVotronic touch-screen, the same model recently subjected to a blistering Dan Rather investigative report, but what Welch witnessed does not seem explainable as a manufacturing defect or screen calibration problem like those exposed in Rather's report. The case has earmarks that may indicate election fraud. "Vote-flipping" on touch-screens has been documented before. Manufacturers claim votes show up for a different choice than that chosen by the voter sometimes, explaining that this is due to miscalibration of the computer's touch-screen. Miscalibration somehow never seems to happen when you use the airport touchscreens, hopping to "2" bags when you press "1" bag, but according to voting machine vendors it is not uncommon when casting votes. A touch on one part of the machine can register on a different part of the machine due to screen miscalibrations, but this doesn't seem to explain what Welch saw. What Welch witnessed was votes that registered CORRECTLY when he touched the screen, switching later to a different vote choice, when he was almost finished voting the full page. Welch was stunned to see a correctly marked vote take on a life of its own, hopping over to a different spot while he voted on other items. He called an elections worker over to show him the problem. The elections worker helped him re-vote the ballot, and both men watched as the vote registered correctly, but later spontaneously altered to shift to another ballot choice. What is especially interesting about this report is this: The iVotronic voting machines display sets of ballot questions on several different screens, called "pages." If a voting machine alters the vote after a voter has progressed to a later page, the voter won't witness the movement of the vote from one selection to another. Even if voters take the extra time to page back through every ballot screen in the election, they may not catch the error – and even if they catch the error, both voters and poll workers may attribute it to voter error. Since the vote may be designed to change AFTER the page is turned, even paging back to "check" does not stop the vote from morphing back to an incorrect selection once the voter leaves the page. What Welch saw was not a screen calibration problem because it registered on the screen correctly. It was not "voter error" because he literally watched the vote re-write itself to another selection, not once, but twice. The election worker called the Wharton County elections office. Welch was astute enough to see that the suggested solution was not responsive to the real issue: "You may continue on with this ballot if you like," said the elections worker after conferring with Wharton County elections personnel, "Or I can void this and you can start over." This is a machine that had already demonstrated it can't be trusted. This is a machine that would fail the much-touted "Logic & Accuracy" testing purported to prove voting machines don't cheat. This is a machine that would not have passed certification tests had it performed this way for the test labs. This is a machine that has no business counting votes at all. And because the iVotronic voting systems are centrally programmed, and the programming defines how the machine counts its votes, this is a machine that has single-handedly cast doubt on every other iVotronic voting machine in Wharton County. Jim Welch spoke with Wharton County Clerk Judy Owens about the matter, and she provided answers that were even more unrelated to the problem: "You can go back and check your vote before casting it," she pointed out, referring to the voter's ability to page back one by one to review each panel. But if the machine can alter a vote – especially if the timing is such that this happens after you have moved to a new page – what good will that do? "We can print each vote out," she said, but Welch astutely questioned how and when votes can be printed, They aren't printed at the same time as the voter votes, and the printouts simply re-create what the computer program records, so what good is that? Remember, you cannot have election system security without getting into the source code issues-    please assist us in cleaning up th electronic systems-  Support open source systems with complete paper ballots-  Best-  Brent Turner

by Brent Turner (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 55 comments) on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 12:14:26 PM
 

ah, the machines

thanks for posting this, Brent. 

Isn''t some group organizing an action to isolate those machines that switch votes?  Treat it like a crime scene - isolate the machine and bring in computer experts to examine the software, firmware and hardware.  I think it's an Ohio action sponsored thru EDA.

Well, of course, software-driven devices have no place in public elections, since they require the public to trust what experts say... ergo, my position is for voters to mark their own paper ballots, and have those ballots counted by hand at the precinct on election night before all who wish to observe.

No software.  Period.

by Rady Ananda (72 articles, 201 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 535 comments) on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 12:52:43 PM