Why? Why would Anonymous release evidence against Rove?

[D23MIURG23]

216. Thanks for posting that.

It does appear that there were weird things happening in the Republican primaries based on the analysis at your link. The problem I have though is that a case of this kind involves making the argument "there was an electoral anomaly, therefore the cause of the anomaly had to be vote flipping". It is possible to posit explanations for anomalies other than fraud.

I also wouldn't immediately assume that the share of the vote going to Romney would be independent of precinct size. If there were more large precincts in cities, and Romney was more popular among urban republicans, then that kind of dependance might be observed. The more striking piece of data in those articles was the optical vs touchscreen comparison, where touchscreen showed the trend and optical did not. If that were true across the board then there would be a compelling case that some failure (but not necessarily fraud) was occurring. The clearest example of this in the article is a comparison of Outagamie and Milwaukee counties, however Outagamie county is not densely urbanized, so the cited trend might legitimately occur in the later county without happening in the former.

A line of direct evidence, namely one rooted in a whistleblower testimony, conspiratorial communication or a leaked code for undermining a central tabulator tally would provide a compelling case that this phenomenon was in fact vote flipping. This is precisely what has been missing from the vote flipping allegations. It would also be nice to see the people who wrote the article above considering alternate hypotheses for these anomalies, and discussing why they should be dismissed.