CORRECTION: ODDS OF A FAIR VOTE IN COSHOCTON CTY

[TruthIsAll]

This is a correction to my previous post. I thought it deserved its own thread.

I incorrectly used the 2% MOE as input to the normal distribution function. I should have used the standard deviation = MOE/1.96 = .01

= NORMDIST(0.493,0.57, 0.01, TRUE)

It makes quite a difference.
The odds are much more unlikely than 1 in 17,000. Read on.

Here is the orginal post:
Keith Olbermann mentioned something in his earlier blog
yesterday about Coshocton County, which was the ONLY county
to do a full 100% recount.

KO said that the county picked up an additional 1000 votes, going from about 16,000 to 17,000. Of the 1000 new votes, Keith said they were "evenly split" between Bush and Kerry.

The county originally went 57%-42% for Bush.
The additional 1000 votes were split about 50%-50%.
To be exact, the Bush margin DECLINED by 15 votes in the 1000 added by the recount.

Bush's margin should have INCREASED by 150, based on the 57-42% split.

But instead, it DECLINED by 15. So we can assume Kerry got 508, Bush 493, ignoring 3rd party votes.

***************** VERY STRANGE, VERY STRANGE ************

Assuming that Bush had a 57-42% lead, here are the odds that Kerry would get 508 of the additional 1000, assuming a 2.0% MOE (very reasonable assumption, since these are actual votes):

Here is the calculation:

Assuming a 3% MOE, the odds are:
********* 1 out of 4 MILLION ! *******************

Assuming a 2% MOE the odds are:
********* 1 out of 44 TRILLION ! *******************

Here are the odds for various assumed MOE's:

MOE Prob Odds: 1 out of
5.0% 0.00127 787
4.5% 0.00040 2,509
4.0% 0.00008 12,396
3.5% 0.00001 123,531
3.0% 2.44E-07 4,085,186
2.5% 7.88E-10 1,267,605,172

2.0% 2.265E-14 44,152,937,523,240

= NORMDIST(0.493,0.57,0.01,TRUE)

[euler]

1. This would be more interesting if you had...

...precinct data. Did every precinct break 57%-42% for Bush ? In my county, some precincts went Kerry, some Bush and some split. Your analysis only makes sense to me if the 1000 extra votes are evenly distributed among all precincts in the county. Are they ? Otherwise, it's possible that the 1000 votes came from precincts that, in the aggregate, broke 50%-50% between Bush and Kerry.

[TruthIsAll]

3. That's true. But since I don't have the info, I can make that assumption.

But the point is:

WHY WERE THEY NOT COUNTED IN THE FIRST PLACE?

WHY DO ALL THE ANOMALIES, IRREGULARITIES, GLICHES ALWAYS WORK OUT IN BUSH'S FAVOR?

THAT IS THE QUESTION YOU SHOULD BE ASKING.

1 OUT OF 1000 OR 1,000,000, OR 1,000,000,000...

THEM'S ALL STEEP ODDS.

[TruthIsAll]

8. Correction #2: I have just been told my numbers are slightly off.

Of 1083 new votes:
Bush 549 50.69%
Kerry 534 49.31%

MOE Prob Odds: 1 out of
5.0% 0.00669 149
4.50% 0.00299 334
4.0% 0.00099 1,006
3.50% 0.00021 4,878
3.0% 0.00002 53,342
2.5% 0.00000 2,650,283

2.0% 0.00000 3,183,186,719
Prob =NORMDIST(0.5069,0.57,.01,TRUE)

[bleever]

2. Fraud in sheep's clothing. Small changes in totals,

no harm here. K picks up a few votes on *. New votes pretty evenly split.

NOT!!!!

Start with the initial results: 57% to 42% is not what we call a landslide; it's far beyond that. It's a monumental margin. Not anywhere close to being close. A 15% spread between candidates!

So newly discovered votes will fall into pretty much the same percentages, give or take. 16,000 is a very big sample, so random chance tells us the new votes will be pretty close to 57/42.

Instead, it's 49/51. Practically impossible, statistically.

And the total newly found votes turn out to be 5.1% of Shrub's final total, but 7.0% of Kerry's. Extrapolating this in the most general way across the state cuts *'s margin in half, to about 68,000 votes.

But the real point here is that Kerry votes were much more likely to get lost, and if found to seem insignificant, while in the grand scheme making all the difference.

And this was where we got the full hand recount, i.e., the areas with the LEAST likely fraud.

Great work, TIA.

:yourock:

[TruthIsAll]

4. You keep telling me more, more...so I won't stop..until Jan. 7

if then.

[bleever]

7. More, more, more.

And if * takes the throne again, we'll be the termites eating it away, because we know it was stolen, and worth no more than sawdust.

:thumbsup:

[IStriker]

5. I don't understand. Why are we "assuming" things? Why aren't the...

actual numbers available since the recount is finished? Can someone explain?

[berniew1]

6. More fraud documented in Ohio; links

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1046

and
http://northnet.org/minstrel/alpage.htm

[fearnobush]

9. TIA - WTF is up with Olbermann!!! Take a county with 16,000 votes

do a recount and opps... sorry folks, we forget to count 1000 votes out of 17,000 total cast. The county originally went 57%-42% for Bush yet Kerry picks up 15 votes when Bush ought to pick up much more over Kerry's total.

If we take a look at the Washington recount. All but 1 of the states 39 counties show a relative proportion of gained votes to the percentage of votes cast to either Gregoire or Rossi.

I think you may want to check out that recount data from WA

<http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount_resultsbycounty.aspx>

If one county out of 39 is anomalous in WA. Then I would suspect that the only county in Ohio that was hand counted is not the only anomaly out of the 88 total counties.

Also, why is a 16,000 vote county in Ohio missing 1000 votes, when in WA, the million vote county, King - has only 537 added to it's total?

[bleever]

10. We can rule out county-wide random vote loss.

The question is, if a large chunk of the lost votes were concentrated in a area with high Kerry support...

Why?

And for the folks who claim that scenario as an explanation, where are the other instances where big chunks were lost from * strongholds?

And where are all the people saying, "Hey, wait, I tried to vote for * and it changed it to Kerry!" Haven't heard any of those. Not one.

And where are the republicans coming forward to say they had to wait for more than an hour or two to vote? Sure, there were some lines in * strongholds, but nothing of the magnitude of what happened in Democratic strongholds.

Jeez, I just want some evidence that this wasn't BLINDINGLY one-sided, but the Sayers of Nay just aren't bringing anything to the table.

Except Nay.



:shrug:

[dogindia]

11. yes. yes. yes. kick.

[KaliTracy]

12. NPR Pam Fessler went to Youngstown

after 1000s of people wrote NPR about her "Voting Myths" segment and told her to do some real reporting. She interviewed someone who verifiably had vote change from Kerry to Bush, because he reported it to the Poll person - I think the poll person was interviewed, too -- it was on Morning edition, the Friday after the election. I'm not sure if anyone went to Broward county.

Problem is, if a person didn't complain about it, it wasn't recorded as a "glitch" -- so there were only about 80 or so "glitches" reported this way....

on edit -- she also interviewed someone from the machine company (I think??) and maybe a BOE director....