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Well, that explains it, doesn't it?

Posted by francois at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Would that be the smoking gun?

Lots of work going on in the background. Statistics may be the one tool that bring us the proof, if that election has been rigged. In Florida, people have uncovered a disturbing bias between the use of optical ballot scanners and results favoring Bush.

The orginal figure and full discussion is here. What is plotted here is the % registration difference, i.e. relative to the political affiliation of the voters (Dem vs Rep) vs the % voting difference, relative to the actual voting numbers. Explicitely,

%Votes Difference = (Republican Votes – Democratic Votes) / Total Votes * 100%


%Party Registration Difference = (Republican Registration – Democratic Registration) / Total Registration * 100%

The blue points plot E-touch screens results, and they follow the expected trend: a good correlation with a slope of one. The red points are for Opt-scan precincts, and there the behavior is radically different! An inexplicable bias. Again, this page (other data here) present the analysis in greater details and split the sample to look at tendencies with other variables (like county size).

Posted by francois at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The web is abuzz these days about potential irregularities and electoral fraud (and here, and here, and here, here, and here).

Let me summarize what I gathered in the past 2 days:

1. 30 to 56% (I have found both numbers) of the voters in the US voted through an e-voting machine. The law apparently varies from county to county (another aberration when considering that the outcome is national), so some counties provide paper copies, but as I understand most don't.
2. These e-voting machines are made by private parties (ES&S and Diebold). They are black boxes, use proprietary software, so are under total control of...the people? No, a few individuals in a couple of big corporations. Even if none of the fraud claim is true, there's already a big problem right there. One of the founding principle of the democratic process is to have transparent elections. That's a major failure of democracy to have surrendered this transparency to a bunch of private individuals.
3. One of the most troubling factor is the unusual wide gap between the exit polls and the actual counts. Apparently the exit polls are usually very close from the actual results, at the point that there are used as an indicator of electoral fraud. Several articles report that there is a surprising correlation between a disparity in the exit poll vs actual counting results and the use of no-paper-trail e-voting machine. Look at the following figure (click on it to enlarge). This is a subset of the discrepancy between exit polls and machine tally for states using paper ballots and states using e-voting:
   
   Now, I'm a scientist, and although this sure looks fishy, these are only a few examples, 9 to be precise, out of 50 states. I have not found an extensive list nor a statistical analysis of this. If you pick them up carefully out of the 50 states, may be you can pull up something that looks like a tendency while it is nothing else than 3 sigma events. I'd dearly like to see this analysis done seriously on all states, or do it myself if I had all the data.
4. People with responsibilities in the political system are asking questions.

I don't know yet what to believe. Basically, I have a hard time to understand how such electoral fraud could be covered up. I would naively assume that, even though the control is relinquished to these few e-voting machine companies, you still need to involve a lot of people to pull up something this big. How could this stay secret? That's my basic question and primary reluctance to believe what sounds like nothing else that a conspiracy theory, but it's still very troubling. Any comment appreciated (if anyone ever read this!).

Update 1: Here is an interesting story from another angle, but that also underlines the worries we can have about the whole thing.

Update 2: Am I dreaming?? For computer savy people, you can have a look at this paper. It's a very thorough analysis of what kind of hacks one version of the Diebold machines are prone to. I can't believe it. They are prone to "man-in-the-middle" attacks, they actually run a Windows CE OS (!), and could eventually be tampered with by Voters, Poll workers, Internet providers, OS developper and, of course, Voting device developper. I don't have a formal software engineer education, but I write a lot of software (C, interpreted languages), and I know enough to know that (1) no software can be deemed bugless, (2) increasing the complexity of the software increases the chance for bugs exponentially and (3) using high levels tools (in that case, C++ and using an OS to run the software) also increases the chance of bugs or tampering. I can understand why most computer scientists are worried about the whole e-voting issue.

Posted by francois at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Manhattan, the Kerry/Bush balance was 82% to 17%.
In the Queens, it was 71 to 28.
In the Bronx, 82 to 17.

What happened? They are the ones that have been hit by terrorism.

I'm sure the so-called core of America, Jesusland, is going to say "They are cowards", but are they? No. They are just people with a lot more opening to the outside world, Europe in particular, that understand that the response to terror by this administration has not been adequate (and that's an understatement).

Posted by francois at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't believe it. I just got spammed on this blog. A kind of spam I didn't know existed, but that has obviously been around for some time, based on the features you find on blog engines config tools.

Anyway, Spam is everywhere: I receive spam email of course, as anyone does, but now we also have spam telephone calls (including political), serving a recorded message to you or your answering machine, spam blog comments, spam pop-up windows when browsing the web (blocking pop-up windows is the easy way out though), ...

The point is, I can't understand the motivation of these people. First I don't read their shit, and second, the subliminal snapshot I get of the product logo their represent will make me hate it forever. I am sure Spam has the opposite effect of what it's intended to do on a large fraction of the population: Because it's Spam, people will not buy it.

Freaking corporations.

So, all this to say that I have had to turn on some filtering on this blog. You'll have to enter your typekey to comment here, or wait that I clear the comment next time I log in.

Update: I just received 4 spam comments in the last 15mn. I have to turn off unregistered user comments for now, I don't want to have to go through 100 junk comments to filter out everyday.

Update2: Some relevant info about blog spam can be found here.

Update 3: Yeehaa! Just got ahold of this. There's some hope now.

Posted by francois at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Shame on you, America.

Posted by francois at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)