Vote-Switching On The Stolen Election Refrain

Rush Limbaugh's first post-Obama program was a bit of a treat to hear. He of course said that this was a defeat for the forces of moderation and that conservatives can now "cleanse" themselves. I'm so glad to hear that he's gotten the message. But there was another part. He seemed to call into question the validity of early voting (heaven forbid we ever make it easier to exercise the franchise) and then he raised the spectre of the election being stolen. I expected this to be about ACORN, but no, he was talking about computerized voting. Now, never mind the fact that every documented instance of vote-flipping has gone from Democrats to Republicans, not the other way around. But he had this bug in his head that the election had to be the result of theft.

He's not alone and he probably co-wrote this memo:

Forensicon, Inc., a Chicago-based computer forensics company, was contacted last Thursday by a security firm lining up vendors to assist the Republican National Committee with consulting related to potential allegations of computerized voter fraud. It has been widely reported that electronic voting machines in many states are vulnerable to hacking by anyone with the right equipment and a few minutes' access to the voting machine.

Yesterday, noted Chicago resident Oprah Winfrey attempted to cast her vote for her candidate, but the vote failed to register correctly.

It has been widely reported that electronic voting machines in many states are vulnerable to hacking by anyone with the right equipment and a few minutes' access to the voting machine with a handheld computing device. The lack of printed voting receipts in many of these systems leaves the election ballots in many areas vulnerable to rampant fraud and abuse.

"If the election returns vary significantly from the polled numbers in any precincts that proves crucial to the election outcome, I expect that a legal struggle over the validity of the election results will ensue," said Forensicon's President, Lee Neubecker.

Now, as it turns out, there is a role for election protection to play in ensuring that the vote is safe and secure. Only it's mainly been administered from the left, and to great effect. Yesterday problems were identified, registered and fixed in extremely short order, thanks to a dedicated team of election protection officials. But that's not what the Republicans are going for here. Their goal is to delegitimize the vote.

And I really don't think it'll work, particularly with an election outcome this resounding. It'll be consigned to the furthest reaches of the zombiesphere, but I don't think it'll be a factor. Because they can't answer a simple question - how would you improve voting? Because that's not what they want to do.

That said, if the Republicans would like to sign on to a paper ballot-only bill, I could dig one up for them.

The Point Is To Delegitimize The Election

TPM Muckraker has a good rundown of the various voter suppression schemes that Republicans have attempted thus far this election season. Fortunately, most of them have failed to this point. Despite pressure from George W. Bush, the Justice Department has decided not to step in and challenge over 200,000 voter registration forms in Ohio that have not been checked against federal documents (in which case something as small as a typo could disqualify a voter). In Pennsylvania, a favorable ruling forces election officials to supply paper ballots to voters if half of the voting machines in a precinct malfunction on Election Day. Without this measure, long lines would have surely deterred people from voting.

And there are many more wins too, some through the courts, some through elections officials who stand up for justice. But as Zachary Roth notes, that's not quite the point from the Republican perspective.

Of course, the whole point of the voter-suppression game is to throw up as many gambits as possible, and hope that just a few succeed. And there's no way to measure the effect that even the unsuccessful ploys have in generating cynicism about the process itself, and thereby reducing turnout, to Republicans' advantage. So in a close election, it's still possible that voter suppression could make the difference -- as it may well have done in 2000.

But it's worth noting that -- thanks largely to Democratic control of the secretary of state's offices in some key states; the skepticism with which many courts have looked on efforts to put obstacles in the way of voting; and the role of voting-rights groups and the press in exposing the bankruptcy of Republican claims -- the nationwide GOP voter-suppression effort appears to have been far less successful than the party might have hoped.

It's true that we've done a better job ferreting this out this year. But Roth, while correct that suppression is often an end in itself, fails to capture the other element of this - the goal to delegitimize the election and create a "big lie" that a potential Obama victory is fraudulent. This will become accepted dogma on the right and will be returned to again and again to sap away at his public support. And if public confidence in elections becomes brittle, they become easier to steal - not to mention that more people become alienated from the process, leading to the very suppression that the GOP seeks.

Always Left To Right

Obama is kicking tail in early voting, clearly because they're making it a priority and they have better ground organizing. This will mean that McCain will have to swamp the polls on Election Day, and every vote you already have before then is a win. The question is whether or not we will have those votes.

Yet again, voting problems in WV. Early voters in West Virginia have reported vote switching on electronic machines. Both counties where problems have occurred have Republicans in charge of voting, along with our GOP secretary of state.

The first was a report from multiple voters in Jackson County, one of the few GOP-leaning counties in WV:

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney...the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

The second occurred over the weekend, for voters in Putnam County, WV:

"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.

"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way."

Funny how every single one of these stories I've heard results in the votes switching from Democrats to Republicans. Never the other way around.

Yep, just funny how that goes.

Double Bubble Trouble Update

Thought I'd explain some things about the Double Bubble Trouble that has led to the potential disenfranchisement of a bunch of DTS voters in LA County. BradBlog has a good summary but here's the context.

There are 700,000-some DTS voters, but they didn't all vote in the primary. LA County registered 46% voter turnout yesterday, and my guess is that DTS voters are less likely to come to the polls. Let's say 40% of them voted; that'd be 280,000 voters. And it's completely unclear how many of them neglected to fill out that extra bubble that said "Democratic."

I can say this: based on the current vote count, the most likely scenario is that it will not result in changing one single solitary delegate. Maybe if a bunch of DTS voters in CA-31 or CA-36 went for Obama it'd shift something, but it's unlikely.

That's not a reason not to fight for every vote, however, and there are efforts afoot to do that, and it will be done, and those votes will eventually be counted, and this will be fixed for the future, as long as we keep talking about this and keep identifying the problem.

This is not a partisan issue, it's a voting rights issue. And ballot design should be certified by the Secretary of State's office as surely as type of machine. This was not a coordinated attempt to disenfranchise but a massive error going back 3 cycles.

We need a competent registrar of voters in LA County, too.

The Alphabetical-Order Theory Of Politics

This is kind of appalling and it's hard to argue with it:

Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that there was always a big primacy effect  big-name, big-vote-getting candidates got 3 percent or more votes more when listed first on the ballot than when listed last.

Until this year, New Hampshire rotated candidate name order from precinct to precinct, which allowed us to do that analysis.

This year, the secretary of state changed the procedure so the names were alphabetical starting with a randomly selected letter, in all precincts.

The randomly selected letter this year was Z.

As a result, Joe Biden was first on every ballot, Hillary Clinton was near the top of the list (and the first serious contender listed) and Barack Obama was close to last of the 21 candidates listed.

Thus, I'll bet that Clinton got at least 3 percent more votes than Obama simply because she was listed close to the top.

At some point you just have to give up, and say that if people are that conditioned to pick the choice that appears at the top of the ballot, they get the democracy they deserve. But this speaks to the larger point of our broken elections, with its frozen servers, paper jams, hackable machines, and little in the way of backups or verifiable recount-ready systems. We need to radically rethink how we organize our elections.

One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”

This is a long and extremely stomach-turning article, which suggests that there is a tenuous nature to this democracy that we must consider. Mail it to all of your friends.

Two Million For That!

Here are the results of the Ames Straw Poll, and I have to say, for $2 million dollars or so and against practically no competition, I'd say Mitt Romney didn't have the kind of victory he sought.

1. Mitt Romney 4,516 31.6%
2. Mike Huckabee 2,587 18.1%
3. Sam Brownback 2,192 15.3%
4. Tom Tancredo 1,960 13.7%
5. Ron Paul 1,305 9.1%
6. Tommy Thompson 1,039 7.3%
7. Fred Thompson 203 1.4%
8. Rudy Giuliani 183 1.3%
9. Duncan Hunter 174 1.2%
10. John McCain 101 0.7%
11. John Cox 41 0.3%

Quick thoughts here. Romney paid two million dollars for 4,600 or so supporters; that's a little pathetic. Huckabee ended up coming out of this looking the best. Tommy Thompson said he needed to be in first place to continue. I'm expecting the press conference in Madison any minute now. Frankly, Duncan Hunter couldn't even beat guys who weren't competing in Ames, so he might want to consider taking a hike as well.

And I think John Cox those 41 votes off his music video.

UPDATE: Oh, and there were major voting machine problems. Thank you, Diebold!