General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The reality about "vote flipping" machines in NC and elsewhere [View all]Sancho
(9,069 posts)I'm a social scientist, not a programer. Here's an example of typical problems in Florida that some attribute to hacking the DRE's or tabulators. In this case, the ballot design was on a DRE. The authors don't really know what happened in 2006, but the claim the wrong person "won". In 2008 and 2010, we saw some similar patterns in several Florida districts that were not accounted for...and attempts to get data or programs from the DREs in court were not successful. My only explanation is a program (likely based on a prediction of registered voters or some formula) that avoids obvious detection by switching or causing an undervote on some DRE's in selected precincts. Random machine errors (such as a single machine with a screen alignment problem) would not account for a geographical undervote across several precincts as part of a district. Ballot design would also be a uniform error across the district. Meanwhile, a single race as inconsistent within a precinct seems strange. I can't think of any explanation other than a local manipulation that targets a given race in some precincts on DRE's. We don't see the weird stuff except on DRE's, so that's a given.
Florida 2006: Can Statistics Tell Us Who Won Congressional District-13?, (2008), Chance Magazine, Vol. 21, No.2. (American Statistical Association).
"for Jennings than for Buchanan in Sarasota County. The higher
observed undervote among presumed Democrats means our
previous confi dence interval calculation was conservative;
the conclusion that Jennings was the real winner in CD-13
becomes even surer.
The study by Frisina uses two methods to analyze the
CD-13 undervote. Both infer undervoters choices from their
votes for other candidates. One uses precinct-level data from
Sarasota County. The other involves matching Sarasota voters
with counterparts in Charlotte County. Both show that
Jennings was almost certainly the preferred choice among the
majority of CD-13 voters.
These different estimates may seem confusing. However,
the key point is that all plausible models of what the lost votes
would have been point to the same conclusion. Furthermore,
the more carefully we examine the data, the more support we
see for that conclusion. While poor ballot design may or may
not fully account for the Sarasota undervote, it is clear that
those missing votes switched the outcome of the congressional
race from Jennings to Buchanan."