Yes, there are many claims one can debunk. But the truth of the matter is that no one knows if the reported final results are accurate or not because of the error-prone, easy to hack, used with no citizen oversight machines most of our votes are "counted" on.

Hand counted paper ballots, please. I'd like to live in a democracy.

Oh, THAT, David? Now you're asking too much!

David, I agree that there are issues with touch screen voting and with many other aspects of our electoral system. My article is not intended to dismiss legitimate concerns regarding voting machines and voting irregularities nor to dismiss real instances of fraud. What it is intended to do is put to rest unsubtantiated charges of a vast conspiracy of fraud that Barack Obama and the Democrats stole the election from Mitt Romney. The evidence does not support that grandiose conspiracy.

Thanks, Keith. I know. You did a good job on that. And I didn't feel that you were being dismissive of the parts of the problem your piece didn't get to.

But I did feel the need to keep reminding that there IS a simple, obvious and mostly ignored solution. And the simple solution mentioned would act as a natural inhibitor to wild unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. That's one of the key inherent beauties of a simple transparent system.

Canadians and Germans(to name two countries that hand count paper ballots) never have to bother with conspiracy theories post-election.

Everyone in those countries has good reason to believe the results. I'd love to experience that here.

For what it's worth, David Lasagna, our electoral viruses are spreading over into Canada. I'm being interviewed for a Canadian news report/documentary tomorrow on exactly that.

I agree wholeheartedly David. Incidentally, I should point out (although its probably not obvious) that my response was not so much directed at your response (although your response provided me with a rationale to clarify my ideas) as it was mostly for the benefit of people reading the thread who might incorrectly interpret your repsponse as a criticism of the article. I recognized it as a "friendly amendment" to what I had written.

For what it's worth, David Lasagna, our electoral viruses are spreading over into Canada. I'm being interviewed for a Canadian news report/documentary tomorrow on exactly that.

because...if you can't "affect" election outcomes you can't fix elections. if you cant fix elections you can't install reps who will choose bank deregulation over the peoples best interest. the canadian banks emerged reletively unscathed thanks MAINLY to there NOT DE-REGULATING! unlike us banks.

Excellent article!

Isn't it amazing that Reich wingers actually commit flat out blatant Election Fraud in 2004 and nothing is ever mentioned.
Now that Obama wins twice solely because of Anonymous stopping Rove from doing it again and stealing this election, the Reich wingers are spewing "voter fraud" which anyone sane knows perfectly well would be absolutely impossible on any level to win multiple states by 100s of 1000s of "fraudulent votes". LOL
These idiots are totally insane.
THEY commit voter and election fraud, were miraculously thwarted this time and then they shout voter fraud. This does hold true to their MO though, blame the democrats for exactly what it THEY do.

Brad do you have more info on your interview in Canada. When it will be or was aired and is it with CBC?

I see that the Election Commissioner is not going to investigate, Front Porch Strategies (OH), Matthew Parker for making calls and actually going to homes with Conservative MP's.
http://creekside1.blogsp...-republican-edition.html

While I think this article performs a useful service, I think that the goal of election integrity advocates should be to do what we can to make this a "teachable moment" for conservatives. Part of the response can be what this article does, but the whole truth is that their concerns are NOT ENTIRELY unfounded. The election system is opaque and vulnerable to manipulation --- and they are right to be distrustful and there are reforms that could make it harder for machine error or hacking to rig an election. Let's suggest a bipartisan embrace.

P.S. I think the "explanation" for Myth #2 above is woefully inadequate. First, while that explanation is "correct" as far as it goes, the problem itself is laughable: that voting software can't handle two page ballots. Moreover, that was far from the only problem in that local election. The machine "recounts" came up with very different results than the original reported count, with a margin of error higher that 10%. The official explanation was that originally some precincts were counted twice in the tally and others not at all. A stack of ballots were uncovered that were never run through machines at all. Can't we have bipartisan agreement that such things are UNACCEPTABLE.

In short, I believe the form of our response to the right wing conspiracists should not be "you are wrong, shut up" but rather "your specific allegation seems off base, but you are right that there are a lot of problems with how elections are run that need to be addressed --- welcome to the discussion."

Randy, I agree with a lot of what you said, and am interested in doing more research on the flaws of the electronic voting systems and other problems in the way our elections are conducted. I also want to address the real instances of fraud, whether it be the guy in Virginia who unlawfully dumped early votes so they could not be recorded, or individuals trying to cast multiple ballots. I agree that our electoral process has issues and that especially in very tight elections (which the presidential race was not), the level of confidence we can have in the outcome, becomes questionable. The voter fraud issue is multi-faceted and can be addressed from several angles. This particular piece was directed at Republicans who believe Romney won if not for fraud. It is one of many areas that deserves attention, but not necessarily the most important one, and certainly not the only one.

Let's look at part of "Myth #4", where a precinct had 606 votes for Obama and 3 votes for Romney. I believe it's reasonable to find that suspicious. It's also plausible given that polls had Obama 98% to 0% over Romney, with a 3% margin of error.

But unless the actual votes were cast on paper ballots, and unless those ballots were actually counted by human beings --- and I am betting that at least one and possibly both of those conditions were not met --- we cannot "prove" the result was legitimate or illegitimate. It's completely "faith-based" as Brad says it. So if we make assertions that there was no fraud, without concrete evidence, then how is that better than those who cry foul?

The best that we can say in most cases is that contrary to assertions, there is no more (or less) likelihood of fraud in this case than in any other randomly chosen local result around the country. By which we mean, they may all be accurate, they may all be riddled with errors, we just don't know --- because only machines, known to be error-prone and hackable, "counted" the votes and reported the results.

Oklahoma is one of the 17 states that uses paper ballots (optical scan). While I find it disturbing that key swing states Like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado and Florida use electronic voting...the 17 states (including Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan) that use paper ballots do not appear to show numbers that are appreciably better for Obama than those in electronic voting states. For this reason, insofar as electronic voting is inaccurate it is hard to discern that in this election it was decisively to the advantage of either candidate.

If electronic voting was somehow the reason for Obama's victory, we would not expect him to have done well in paper ballot swing states like Iowa, NH and Michigan, but he did. This isn't to suggest there aren't electronic voting problems, but its does suggest a concerted conspiracy by one side to game the system is not empirically evident based on numbers.

I agree with the first three premises, but number 4 is deeply flawed. The existence of such deep statistical improbabilities in more than one location is more an indication of fraud in more than one location than a justification for statistical improbabilities. Kim Jong doesn't even get 100% of the vote.

I understand what you are saying Mitch, but if you look at precincts around the country, they seem to follow something close to a "normal distribution". That is to say that precints that went 95% or greater for Obama tend to be similar urban predominately African-American precincts (remember Romney only got 6% of the black vote nationally, but that perecenate is even lower in urban precincts), and the precincts he scored 100% of the vote in have a history of delivering at or near 100%, historically. Romney cleared 95% in King County Texas and 90% in several similar counties. Given that the white vote split 59-39 instead of 93-6, a 100% Romney precinct woudl be more statistiaclly improbable than a 100% Obama precinct, yet several precincts in Utah, Idaho and Oklahoma did go 100% for Romney. Given that even large precincts are fairly small (400-500 people), the odds of some precincts going 100% for a candidate among a demographic group that favors that candidate 97-3 or 96-4, one would expect in a normal distribution if there were thousands of precints in the country that matched that demographic, a few dozen of them might go 100% or 99% for the winning candidate.

Randy D said @ 11:

I think the "explanation" for Myth #2 above is woefully inadequate. First, while that explanation is "correct" as far as it goes, the problem itself is laughable: that voting software can't handle two page ballots.

Well, to be clear here, the software can "handle" it, it's just the reporting software offers misleading terminology when there are two page ballots. It regards each of those pages as a "card" and then reports the number of "cards" cast. Finally, it then reports the number of cards versus the number of voters as as a percentage that is clearly higher than 100%. The folks using that number to suggest a rigged election or impossible number have every right to complain that the Diebold GEMS software which reports it that was is crap (it is!), but it is certainly not evidence of a stolen election in and of itself. So I'd disagree that explaining that point is a "woefully inadequate" explanation of that particular myth.

Moreover, that was far from the only problem in that local election. The machine "recounts" came up with very different results than the original reported count, with a margin of error higher that 10%. The official explanation was that originally some precincts were counted twice in the tally and others not at all. A stack of ballots were uncovered that were never run through machines at all. Can't we have bipartisan agreement that such things are UNACCEPTABLE.

I'm certainly happy to agree to that! As you know, I reported in great detail on all of the above here as it was found to have applied to the FL-18 West/Murphy race. But that, is by no means, evidence of "Obama having stolen the election with voter fraud" as is being charged by some on the right, and as Keith is debunking with this article.

In short, I believe the form of our response to the right wing conspiracists should not be "you are wrong, shut up" but rather "your specific allegation seems off base, but you are right that there are a lot of problems with how elections are run that need to be addressed --- welcome to the discussion."

I concur. And I think the last graf of the article above does largely that (minus the "welcome to the discussion" part, which Keith, himself, hasn't really been a part of until now, so he gets pass!)

GWN @ 10 asked:

Brad do you have more info on your interview in Canada. When it will be or was aired and is it with CBC?

Actually, not sure who the journalists are with, now that you mention it! (They may have told me in one of our correspondences, but I've forgotten and would have to go back and check.)

Essentially, though, they are working on the piece for print, and then hope to get commissioned to cover it for broadcast as well, based on the print article. My interview with them on Sunday was to be for the print version of their story, but their equipment crapped out and so we'll be rescheduling.

It does have to do with enroaching U.S. tactics into Canadian elections, however, including the robocall problem that has now cropped up up there (you're welcome!) and other related dirty tricks and sleazy U.S. election practices.

Keith said @ 16:

Oklahoma is one of the 17 states that uses paper ballots (optical scan). While I find it disturbing that key swing states Like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado and Florida use electronic voting...the 17 states (including Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan) that use paper ballots do not appear to show numbers that are appreciably better for Obama than those in electronic voting states.

Be careful there, Keith. Not sure where you pulled that "17 states" stat from, but it's not accurate. Or, at least, it's misleading. Among the states you mention, only PA and VA use almost entirely 100% unverifiable DRE (Direct Recording Electronic, usually touch-screen) voting systems. (Other states that still, shamefully, force all or most of their voters to vote on such systems include NJ, MD, DE, IN, TN, SC, GA, LA, UT, NV and TX.)

Both CO and OH, which you specify as using e-voting, use a mix of DREs and paper ballot op-scan, while Florida has banned DREs entirely, other than for optional use by disabled voters (to meet accessibility requirements of the horrible federal Help America Vote Act of 2002).

So there are more than just 17 states that now use paper ballots. A majority of them do so in either all or some of their counties. (See Verified Voting's excellent Verifier database for a better picture of who uses what, down to the county and/or municipal level where appropriate.)

In any case, however, even the states which do not use DREs still use electronic tabulators to tally almost all of those paper ballots, and Randy is right in that we don't know, in almost all of those cases, whether they have tabulated them correctly or not, since almost none of the states bother to verify the accuracy of the tallies of any of those optical-scan systems.

Still, your point in the article is correct, that there is a) no evidence of massive or system voter fraud, b) no evidence to suggest that Obama won by any type of fraud, c) even if the easily disproven claims you highlighted were true (and you've provided compelling evidence in each case that they are not) it still wouldn't represent nearly enough fraud to have flipped the election in Romney's favor, save for a whole lot more evidence, and evidence that isn't as easily disproven as the points you covered were.

I should add that Randy's point is also correct that the evidence suggesting that Obama won is largely unverified. That said, it would be very difficult to game that many votes in that many states and counties without someone, somewhere, coming forward with actual evidence of manipulation somewhere that couldn't be as easily explained away as were the most popular RW myths thoroughly debunked by the article above.

Well I have to admit that when I posted the seventeen states, that was off a list of states that supposedly use exclusively paper ballots, so I didn't mean to imply that the states like OH and FL that are not in that 17, use exclusively (or even mostly) electronic voting. I should also add that I did not thoroughly research and double check that list of seventeen states, but took them from a single website. Were I to write an article I would have done more cross-referencing, but with limited time, I was trying to make a specific point about the apparent lack of statistical evidence that paper ballots were any less favorable to Obama than electronic ones. However, insofar as that may have created confusion about each state's method of voting I apologize. I certainly want to make sure that in my haste to post, that I do not myself perpetuate any voting myths

No worries, Keith! As you may have already noticed, it can be a tough house around here. That's what makes it fun tho! Welcome to The BRAD BLOG! Hope we haven't scared ya off!

The Philly explanation does even touch all the fraud that happened in Philly. Why wont any one mention the 70 republicans observers thrown out of the poll. People should be in jail and yet all is quiet. You throw observers out for one purpose only only so you can cheat no other reason. Also the key not Romney did get any votes but Obama got almost as many votes in Philly yet was down by 10% in the rest of the STATE

Thanks Brad re: "do you have more info on your interview in Canada." I will keep an eye out for the article.

Stephen,

I think throwing observors out is something that should be looked at. However, given Obama's margin of victory in Pennsylvania it would be hard to argue that fraud carried the state, since Obama's margin was greater than 5 pts and over 300,000 votes in the state.

It is true that outside of Philadelphia Obama lost, but it wasn't by 10 points. If you subtract Philadelphia county, Romney carried the rest of the state 2,583,949 votes to 2,401,434 (these are based on Dave Leip's Politcial Atlas county totals and may not reflect exact finalized totals with provisionals but they should be close) or a margin of 51.0-47.4 percent (3.6 points not 10 pts). Obama's 85.3-14.0 margin in Philadelphia might seem suspicious but it isn't that much different than his 83-16 margin 2008, Kerry's 80-19 margin in 2004 or Gore's 80-18 margin in 2000.

Put another way, for Romney to carry the state he would have needed 309,824 more votes in Philadelphia or alternatively he would have had to take 154,912 additional votes and subtract 154,912 from Obama in order to achieve a tie in Pennsylvania. This would mean Romney would have needed a total of 251,379 votes from Philadelphia in order to carry the state. However, in five consecutive elections NO GOP candidate has ever carried over 20 percent in the city nor in the last five elections has any GOP candidate ever exceeded 131,000 votes in Philadelphia County.

This is not to excuse any fraud that may have occurred, but it is statistically improbable, that fraud in Philadelphia changed the outcome of the state given that the satte was not especially close. Simply put, had Romney actually had a 10 point lead in other parts of the state, he would indeed ahve been in a position to win, but since he only carried the remainder of the state by 3.6 pts, he simply did not have enough support to offset the state's largest and most urban county.

Brad, Your site is top notch and has some of the best readers and commenters anywhere. Add to that the fact that I can admit when I make a mistake and on top of that I have a tough skin anyway, and it means you probably won't be able to run me off

Stephen said @ 22:

Why wont any one mention the 70 republicans observers thrown out of the poll. People should be in jail and yet all is quiet. You throw observers out for one purpose only only so you can cheat no other reason.

Well, actually, there are other reasons for barring observers. For example, the Republican group True the Vote's observers were barred from observing at all of the polls in Franklin County, OH (by the bi-partisan election commission there) after it had been determined that the group forged the signatures of those supposedly signed up to observe.

In Philadelphia, among the few actual news reports on the matter you reference, this one from UPI notes Democrats claiming "the issue revolved around credentialing and said they were trying to ensure that the inspectors had valid certificates."

Nonetheless, it seems it's almost impossible to find any details on this story, other than blog items that link to a Fox "News" report citing an unnamed Republican official, and a statement released by the PA GOP claiming that, somehow, "the Obama campaign" was behind whatever happened here.

The Patch reported it this way:

But the same story goes on to cite a Republican candidate telling a very different story about what allegedly happened:

In any case, it was apparently settled very early in the morning on Election Day, and then all that was left was for the many reports throughout the day about voters being inappropriately turned away in Philadelphia for lack of a Photo ID (the law requiring Photo ID in this election was struck down a George W. Bush-appointed judge and voters should not have needed one to vote) and many longtime voters were reported to be missing from the rolls when they showed up to vote for some still unexplained reason. They were forced to vote by provisional ballot instead.

For the record, while I looked at a dozen or more stories on your claim about the 70 GOP poll inspectors, none actually offered evidence to support that claim, or even included a copy of the judge's supposed orders to let the GOP inspectors back in. Worse, some of those stories claimed that it was meant to allow Democrats to "stuff the ballot box", even though Philadelphia (unfortunately) has no ballot boxes. They use 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems. If the Democrats in Philly wanted to "stuff the ballot box", they could have done so with a million GOP monitors on hand and it never would have been seen by anybody.

Other than that, you do realize that even if Pennsylvania had gone for Romney (and it hasn't gone for any Republican since 1988), Obama still received far more than enough Electoral Votes to be named the winner, right?

Keith Brekhus said @ 25:

it means you probably won't be able to run me off

Thank God! I'm exhausted! So, tag you're it!

(And, amusingly, it looks like I was also replying to Stephen just as you were. Two completely different responses to the same comment, though I suspect either one of them would likely have led to Stephen never commenting here again. I hope he proves me wrong! But I ain't holding my breath.)

I do agree that we can pretty well debunk "voter fraud" (multiple individual cases of fraud) and thank Keith for his work in doing so. The right wing doesn't understand the distinction between that and "election fraud" (wholesale manipulation of vote totals by hacking or ballot stuffing). This leads to some silly argument, such as the Philadelphia 100% Obama example. Such a result could NOT come about through VOTER fraud, as that can only ADD votes, not make Romney votes disappear. The only possibilities are that no one there voted for Romney, or that there was ELECTION fraud (Romney votes were flipped to Obama). But the right doesn't go there, because their hobby horse is "voter fraud" (which is code for the right to suppress minority votes).

But we might have a profitable discussion about how election fraud is theoretically possible. We can also look at REAL (though circumstantial) evidence, such as exit polls and demographic comparison.

And we should agree that WHENEVER citizens are suspicious, for any reason, our democracy should be transparent and accountable, and they should have an opportunity to count the votes. Publicly, by hand, in front of cameras, preceeded by a robust chain of custody. Such a request is not unreasonable or too costly --- it is the just price of real democracy.

I agree with Randy that "election fraud" is more plausible than "voting fraud" using the distinctions as he has defined them. Probably the strongest argument against election fruad in Philadelphia right now is that to my knowledge no Republican voters has come forward to say he(or she) voted for Romney in one of the questionable precincts.

Of course, I understand most voters probably don't check precinct results, so a voter might not know he or she was in one of those "zero votes for Romney" precincts. However, if a significant number of Republicans voted in those precincts, you would think that somebody might well come forward and say his or her vote wasn't counted. (Now if just one or two people came forward I wouldn't be sure that was legitimate or if they were just seeking their 15 minutes of fame, but if a dozen of more people came forward that would be more compelling). However, to date we haven't heard of anybody in any of the precincts in the nation where Romney got zero votes come forward and say "Hey I don't think my vote was counted...I live here in this precinct where Romeny got zero votes". If I was a Republican who really believed their was massive election fraud I would be seeking these people out.

The problem is however, is that they might be searching for the urban equivalent of bigfoot...a creature that only exists in legends and in the dark reaches of their imaginations. To people who have never lived in an inner city monolithically Democratic precinct, the idea of a candidate pitching a shutout might seem incomprehensible, but I once lived in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and the whole time I was there, I am not sure I ever met a Republican who lived in that neighborhood.

UPDATE: Not only are Republicans crying (literally) "voter fraud" but over 50% of them blame ACORN, a group their leaders witch-hunted out of existence several years ago! So it seems Keith's bigfoot analogy (#29) is about right.

the only defense against Truth are lies, that fill the news media and official websites as the news media try to convolute the internet, with the likes of zuckerberg, and gatses, buffetses, who simply don't have the moxy to prevent Truth from getting through, criminality in government and the commercial community like free trade, federal reserve board, their political puppetry, are drawing closer to their own end times. too stupid to see it coming they are.

would the United States of OBmerica put a south chicago, disbarred lawyer, illegal immigrant faggot in power without election fraud ? ? ?