Funnyman gets \"funny\" votes...

[Nightshade]

Minnesota Ripe for Election Fraud

Monday, November 10, 2008

By John R. Lott Jr.

Minnesota is becoming to 2008 politics what Florida was in 2000 or Washington State in 2004 -- a real mess. The outcome will determine whether Democrats get 58 members of the U.S. Senate, giving them an effective filibuster-proof vote on many issues.

When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.

Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large.

Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further.

Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race.

The Associated Press piece with the title “Most Minn. Senate ‘undervotes’ are from Obama turf” misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed \"An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications.\"

Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn’t recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn’t mark clearly. Or if voters “overvoted” and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters’ intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted.

But voters also have the right not to vote in particular races. In this election, 0.4 percent of Minnesotans didn’t want to vote for president. The number for the Senate race was only slightly higher at 0.8 percent. For congressional and state House races, the rates were 3 and 3.5 percent.

This pattern of fewer people voting in less important elections has been observed as long as people have studied elections. There are always at least a few people who don’t vote for even the most closely contested races at the top of the ballot and fewer people follow and vote for races the farther down the ballot that you go. But this is not evidence of mistakes, quite the contrary.

With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election.

To many, it just seems like too much of a coincidence that Minnesota's one tight race just happens to be the race with the most \"corrected\" votes by far. But the real travesty will be to start letting election officials divine voter's intent. If you want to discourage people from voting, election fraud is one sure way of doing it.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,449334,00.html

[Suncho]

It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

Well duh.

With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election.

There's a difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud. ACORN had problems with voter registration fraud.

[Nightshade]

So registration fraud was never going to be used to cast fraudulent votes? Why break into a jewelry store if not to steal jewels?

[Pandora]

Registration fraud is used to make money, not to affect the election.

Two things you don't seem to know, Thunderbunny:

- ACORNs' workers were paid by the number of voters they registered. So, to get more money out of ACORN, these workers filled out registration cards by themselves, or urged people to fill them out with fake names even though these persons already had registered. In other words, these workers are DEFRAUDING ACORN for money, rather than ACORN committing voter fraud. It should therefore not be surprising that 99% of these instances of registration fraud were flagged by ACORN itself, rather than whistle blowers, etc.

- ACORN is required BY LAW to hand in ALL voter registration cards, even those they deem suspicious. So, what they do is hand them in in different stacks. One for the ok registrations, and one for those they think are fraudulent. Again, ACORN scaremongers don't tell you that --- they just say \"30% of registrations were fraudulent!!! Voter fraud!!! Voter fraud!!!\" but ignore that ACORN had already put them onto the \"probably fake\" stack.

[Will Robinson]

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

It could be a really really unusual circumstance that the people in charge of the ballots/machines/counting procedures were just extremely tired in only 3 out of 4130 precincts and the voters all across the state seemed to have a much lower rate of screwing up the ballots than the voters in those 3 precincts, maybe they were the only extremely tired voters and for some reason they seemed to only screw up when they wanted to vote for Franken but not screw up on the other votes they cast much more efficiently on the same ballot....
Yea, that would explain it.

Or, by having a list of the fictional registered voters who were on the rolls who didn't show up to vote, democrat hacks were able to cast some extra ballots for Franken when there wasn't anyone around to stop them.
That would explain it too.

There would be no paper trail unless you go through the whole stack and match them all up and then follow up on the registration to see if that person really exists and if it turns out to be some bum who's address is sleeps under the bridge and was registered to vote by ACORN in exchange for cigarettes who's to say if he really made it back to town to vote that day.

I know you guys put a lot of faith in the rules but we all bought beer with fake ID's too!
I think if the shoe was on the other foot and Coleman was to win under the same circumstances you would be singing a different song!

[Pandora]

It could be a really really unusual circumstance that the people in charge of the ballots/machines/counting procedures were just extremely tired in only 3 out of 4130 precincts and the voters all across the state seemed to have a much lower rate of screwing up the ballots than the voters in those 3 precincts, maybe they were the only extremely tired voters and for some reason they seemed to only screw up when they wanted to vote for Franken but not screw up on the other votes they cast much more efficiently on the same ballot.... Yea, that would explain it.

no, the whole thing can be explained by two factors:
(a) they were one of the few districts which had damaged voting machines that dropped a lot of votes
(b) it is a heavily democratic district

If these two factors come together, then the majority of the dropped votes will - when recounted - benefit the democrat candidate. Simple statistics, no fraud involved.

so: (b) is a given, because it is actually said so in Thunderbunny's link. What about (a)? See this here

The recount of the Minnesota Senate race could hinge on optical ballot scanners, machines with a history of errors that were put into place by former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006. Minnesota’s ballot scanning machines, manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), were the same machines that a Michigan election official discovered last week don’t always tabulate ballots correctly

There you have it.

[Pandora]

by the way, note that - in a heavily democratic district - ANY problem that affects the counting of votes will lead to a stronger loss of votes for the democratic than the republican candidate, it does not need to be the voting machines. Conversely, however, any recount of such problematic votes will get the votes back to him.

[woodchip]

Curious tho how it is a democratically controlled precinct that the suspect recount is going on. One precinct out of 4000 with such a large error is just not statistically probable. One would think such a error would be in a republican controlled precinct or that the errors would have occurred in a much larger number of precincts across the board. As to:

\"The recount of the Minnesota Senate race could hinge on optical ballot scanners, machines with a history of errors that were put into place by former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006. Minnesota’s ballot scanning machines, manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), were the same machines that a Michigan election official discovered last week don’t always tabulate ballots correctly \"

Again you would expect the errors to show more evenly across all the precincts and just 3 of them.

\"The Associated Press piece with the title “Most Minn. Senate ‘undervotes’ are from Obama turf” misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed \"An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications.\"

Now why would someone smart enough to vote for Obama, not be smart enough to vote for Franken? What are the recounters going to do, now put a mark on Frankens box because they assume the voter, if he voted for Obama, also meant to vote for Franken? Or has the term \"a well informed electorate\" now gone out the window to be replaced by voting officials voting for you?

[Spidey]

The idea of Al Franken being in the Senate, makes me nauseous!

[Suncho]

Curious tho how it is a democratically controlled precinct that the suspect recount is going on.

To be fair, democratic precincts typically have higher populations, which means more voters, which means more can go wrong.

I'm not saying there isn't anything fishy going on (there almost always is at some level), but let's at least use the actual facts and combine them with a little bit of common sense.

[woodchip]

Curious tho how it is a democratically controlled precinct that the suspect recount is going on.

To be fair, democratic precincts typically have higher populations, which means more voters, which means more can go wrong.

I'm not saying there isn't anything fishy going on (there almost always is at some level), but let's at least use the actual facts and combine them with a little bit of common sense.

Gotta be careful here Bud before making assumptions:

Quote
"Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote."

So I looked up the population of the town:

"Total population: 3,356 (Urban population: 3,105 (all inside urban clusters), Rural population: 251 (all nonfarm))"

http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses ... esota.html

Now, does it not strike you as odd that a town with 3,356 people, not voters, but residents...magically comes up with another 250 votes? Tell me there is not something going on here.


Adding this link to show there are only about 2430
registered voters in Two Harbor:

http://electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/ ... CtyNm=LAKE

[Will Robinson]

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

So these broken machines only screwed up on the Franken vs Coleman race but not once in any of the other races? That's kind of extremely, slightly insanely, odd...or convenient....

[Pandora]

OMG, i just realized that the piece Thunderbunny linked to is by John Lott, one of the most unreliable sources ever when it comes to statistics. He's been caught so often playing fast and loose with data that I won't believe anything he says, until there is a verification by a reliable source.

I would have loved to verify his data, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So I had a closer look at his claims that I could verify. Here are a few things from the article where he's either unaware or doesn't tell you everything he knows:

Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race.

He's not correct. In Minnesota, the voting machines only inform voters of an overvote, but DO NOT alert the voter in case of an undervote --- which happens, for instance, when they don't correctly read the mark the voter made. Note also, that most undervotes usually come from minorities that typically vote democrat, and that the most undervotes happened in democratic districts, then its no wonder that most newly added votes count for Franken.

Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn’t recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn’t mark clearly. Or if voters “overvoted” and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters’ intentions.

Yes, there is a role for "divining voters' intent" --- it's the law, and there are clear guidelines for it. They are there to make sure that every voter's vote is counted, even in the face of machine error. But I am sure that for a Republican writer this doesn't sound quite right, particularly in a democratic district.

So, given these "errors" color me sceptical with regard to the rest of the article as well.

[Pandora]

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

I'm reading the article much more closely now that I know its written by Lott. He is such an a$$. In your link, note that he says there are no changes in "the vote TOTAL" --- this means only that there were no added votes, but it does NOT mean that there were no changes in the balance between the candidates. Nice one, overlooked that the first time.

So where do these added votes come from? Turns out Lott's sinister going-ons are just delays, so that a whole district did not manage to hand in their votes in time, but did so later. This is why Duluth recorded a difference in their vote TOTAL and not the other districts.

In Duluth, troubles at Precinct 14 in the Endion neighborhood kept the city from reporting results from all 36 precincts. The county requires that the city present all precincts at once for a single, total number, Tynjala said. “We didn’t get that until almost 1 a.m., from the city. That’s not unusual; maybe a little later than usual,’’ he said. Duluth City Clerk Jeff Cox said Precinct 14 was inundated with hundreds of same-day registrations, which slowed the counting process..

Does this still sound so fishy to you, Will?

edit: I really wish people would do their homework themselves and not believe everything just because it includes the keywords "democrats" "ACORN" and "voter fraud".

[Spidey]

Pandora…were you around in 2000?

[Pandora]

yes. why?
edit: what do you mean? the DBB? (yes), the US (no)

[Pandora]

Adding this link to show there are only about 2430
registered voters in Two Harbor:

http://electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/ ... CtyNm=LAKE

So we know that all of these 2430 votes were turned in too late. Lets do the math: We know it's a heavily democratic district. So a probable distribution might be:
50% democrats
40% republican
10% other/not voted
With 2430 votes total, this would be more or less exactly 250 votes for Franken. Sounds about right to me.

[Will Robinson]

....
Does this still sound so fishy to you, Will?....

Precinct 14 was inundated with hundreds of same-day registrations, which slowed the counting process.

Yea a disproportionate number of same day registrations does make me wonder since, as we have already discussed before, an unusual influx of same day registrations is usually caused by someone busing in a bunch of guys who slept in their own piss the night before under an overpass and they'll vote for whoever the guy who hands out the cigarettes tells them too....

I could be wrong obviously but I think this race is going to expose the voter fraud you think can't happen.

[Pandora]

I'm happy to eat crow if it turns out you're right.

edit: by the way, I don't believe it can't happen. I just think it's awfully hard to do on any meaningful scale, and impossible to keep secret for long. And because, over all these years, people have not found *any* direct evidence for it at all, I believe that possible perpetrators steer clear of it as well. I believe that one should be much more wary of tactics like voter suppression and enforcing stricter rules about which votes count in the other party's districts --- these methods change votes in the order of 1000s, much more than would be achievable with even a monumental operation involving fake registrations and fake IDs.

[woodchip]

Adding this link to show there are only about 2430
registered voters in Two Harbor:

http://electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/ ... CtyNm=LAKE

So we know that all of these 2430 votes were turned in too late. Lets do the math: We know it's a heavily democratic district. So a probable distribution might be:
50% democrats
40% republican
10% other/not voted
With 2430 votes total, this would be more or less exactly 250 votes for Franken. Sounds about right to me.

Not following your train of thought. What does turning in the count late have to do with finding another 246 votes for Franken? In a small town like that it seems odd that "100's" of same day registrations occurred as small towns usually have most of the people registered to vote already. Even still, considering there were only about 2400 votes cast, tabulating the votes just is not that big a chore. To have 10% of the votes miscounted/not counted seems to be a bit far fetched especially when you do not see the same errors in any of the other small towns.

[Spidey]

What I mean is…did you complain about all the crap regarding Bush stealing the election?

[Pandora]

No, I didn't, Spidey.

[Pandora]

Not following your train of thought. What does turning in the count late have to do with finding another 246 votes for Franken? In a small town like that it seems odd that "100's" of same day registrations occurred as small towns usually have most of the people registered to vote already. Even still, considering there were only about 2400 votes cast, tabulating the votes just is not that big a chore. To have 10% of the votes miscounted/not counted seems to be a bit far fetched especially when you do not see the same errors in any of the other small towns.

You didn't read what I posted above, i guess? It wasn't that 246 votes for Franken were "miscounted" or "found" in Duluth --- this is just the spin John Lott puts on it. What actually happened was that Duluth did not turn in any votes AT ALL at first, because there were delays. Then, the next day, they handed in all of their 2500 votes altogether. The sudden 246 vote gain for Franken just reflects that of these 2400 votes more were for Franken than for Coleman (around 10% more, which seems adequate for a "heavily democatic district").

[Pandora]

Yea a disproportionate number of same day registrations does make me wonder since, as we have already discussed before, an unusual influx of same day registrations is usually caused by someone busing in a bunch of guys who slept in their own piss the night before under an overpass and they'll vote for whoever the guy who hands out the cigarettes tells them too....

Just to make this clear. As far as I know, same-day registrations are exactly the OPPOSITE of what ACORN does. They collect registration cards of new voters and hand them in BEFORE the actual vote. They don't bring people to the ballots. The whole idea is that people who have already registered with the nice ACORN people don't need to do so at the polls, which makes it less effort for them to vote, but also speeds up the voting process.

So, if there were delays because of same-day registrations its not because ACORN brought those people in, but rather because these people did NOT register with ACORN in advance.

[Spidey]

Didn’t think so.

[Pandora]

Not sure if we're talking cross purposes here. What I meant was that I was not one of the people accusing Bush of stealing the election. But I also didn't argue with those who were accusing him --- I simply wasn't that interested back then.