[Mb-civic] Voting Glitches Haunt Statistician

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0305-23.htm

Published on Saturday, March 5, 2005 by the Madison Capital Times / 
Wisconsin

Voting Glitches Haunt Statistician
by Rob Zaleski
 

Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it."

He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that 
occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be 
around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more 
enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around.

"I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they 
wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 
election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this 
week.

Well, sorry guys, but he can't.

There were, Joiner says, too many things that occurred on Nov. 2 that "still 
don't smell right." He can't just pretend everything is rosy, he says, when he 
reads that Steven Freeman, a respected University of Pennsylvania professor, 
says the odds of the exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and 
Pennsylvania all being so far off were about 662,000 to 1.

And since no one in the mainstream media has yet to provide a plausible 
explanation for such discrepancies - "investigative reporting essentially is just 
dead in this country," he groans - Joiner and many of his colleagues are going 
to continue to speak out and demand that government leaders provide some 
answers.

So that, at the very least, we don't find ourselves in the same situation in 2008.

But if the irregularities are as suspicious and troubling as he claims, why aren't 
John Kerry and other top Democrats making similar demands?

"Boy, I wish I knew," says Joiner, who was a volunteer observer for the Ohio 
recount in early December. Because you can sure as heck bet that 
Republicans would be screaming and demanding an investigation if Kerry had 
won under similar circumstances, he says.

"I think the Democrats read the tea leaves and think that people don't want to 
make a big fuss over this stuff. They'd just rather be quitters and move on."

Joiner knows full well some people will roll their eyes while reading this and 
dismiss him as yet another shoot-from-the-hip conspiracy nut.

Not quite.

In fact, he's among a group of prominent statisticians and academicians who 
contributed to a recent study that refutes a report by exit pollsters Edison and 
Mitofsky that exit poll errors on Nov. 2 were responsible for the unprecedented 
5.5 percent discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results.

The study, done on behalf of US Count Votes, a volunteer scientific research 
project, not only disagrees with the Edison/Mitofsky findings but concludes that 
"the possibility that the overall vote was substantially corrupted must be taken 
seriously" and urges a thorough investigation.

Does Joiner personally believe the election was stolen?

"I don't know, that's a very tough question," he says. "But it's not clear to me 
that it wasn't, so it's a question of where the burden of proof is."

At the same time, Joiner says, he does believe the country's making a big 
mistake by relying so heavily on electronic voting machines.

"It's just too easy to hack those machines," he says. "And if they are hacked, 
how would we ever know?"

Joiner, incidentally, isn't the least bit surprised that the study - which was 
released Jan. 28 - has been virtually ignored by the media. Neither is Bruce 
O'Dell, vice president of US Count Votes.

"I think the mainstream media - like most Americans brought up to be proud of 
our Democratic traditions - simply assume that elections are honestly counted 
in the United States," O'Dell says. "They discount anecdotal reports of election 
irregularities and refuse to believe that systematic corruption could occur - 
even though serious, systematic vulnerabilities both in voting equipment and in 
counting procedures have been well-documented."

He notes that when reports of widespread voting problems occurred in Ukraine 
last year, both local and international observers quickly concluded the election 
had been stolen.

"But when precisely the same scenario occurred here, not only were 
mainstream journalists not alarmed, they quickly labeled those who questioned 
the results as conspiracy theorists."

O'Dell says US Count Votes wants to develop "a single database of nation-
wide precinct-level election results, along with matching U.S. Census 
demographic information and the type of voting equipment in use."

Its ultimate goal "is to be able to gather and analyze data as it comes in on 
election night, and to spot vote counting problems in time for candidates to 
request an investigation or recount - before they concede."

And it hopes to have such a system in place by 2006.

Kjell Doksum, another UW-Madison statistician, says that if US Count Votes 
accomplishes just one thing, it's that there's a "paper trail" for every vote cast 
in 2008.

"This is easy to achieve," he suggested in an e-mail.

"Start a rumor that the Democrats have the world's best hackers and are going 
to fix the machines the next time."

Copyright © 2005, Capital Newspapers.

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