Re: Fwd: GOP vote fraud front group dies

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 06:40:59AM -0600, Ralph Shnelvar wrote:
> Friends:
> 
> I find this gleeful Republican-bashing rather distasteful and
> counterproductive.
> 
> Let us address, though, the issue of voter fraud.
> 
> This group wants fair, honest, and open elections because we fear the
> possibility fraud in the electronics.
> 
> Whether fraud actually exists in electronic voting, the issue is that it
> could.  Many of us programmers and technologists understand how easy it is
> to bury fraud into the programming or into the hardware.
> 
> Thus most of us want either hand-counted paper ballots or open software.
> I'm on the side of hand-counted paper ballots.
> 
> On the other side is the issue of voter fraud at the individual level.  If
> there is no checking of registration, etc., how long will it be before
> people cheat?  Is that what we want?
> 
> 
> I have the following story.  In (roughly) 2003, I worked a campaign down in
> Colorado Springs in which I went door-to-door precinct-by-precinct working
> off of a list of registered voters.  I was to give a packet of information
> to the Republican registered voters.  (I was promoting a Republican
> candidate.)
> 
> About 5% of the addresses on that list didn't exist.

1) 
Voter rolls are 'data' in the sense of the word that is used in
scientific research. Error rates in collecting scientific data are
well known to be very high, unless there is a serious and sustained
effort to check, and correct, the data. For voter rolls this is not
done. 5% is pretty good for unchecked raw data. Banks do better than
5%, but only with a lot of checking, and with a strictly limited set
of formats for the data.

2)
USPS employees are 'professionals' at the somewhat under-rated job of
finding the correct place to deliver the mail. It would be interesting
to know what they would have found, given the same address list.

3) 
Most voting districts are unbalanced, toward one party or another. A
5% 'error' has often not been enough to cause the election of the
candidate who actually got fewer votes. The fact of this unbalance has
been used as an excuse to doing a sloppy job of data collection in the
past. What has changed recently to make elections so much more closely
balanced? It is easy to invent theories, but the fact is, we have a 
history of sloppy data collection. It will be hard to tease any useful
insights out of the data that we have.

> 
> You can name your culprit.  The local Republican machine?  The local
> Democrats who wanted to screw with Republican politics?
> 

Mostly, I think there has not been a culprit, but there has been a lot
of sloppiness and happy talk about our elections expressint the 'will
of the people'. Well, yes, if that will is to have elections that only
the winning politician can love.


-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx