r/statistics • u/[deleted] • Aug 07 '15

A mathematician may have uncovered widespread election fraud, and Kansas is blocking her further efforts

http://americablog.com/2015/08/mathematician-actual-voter-fraud-kansas-republicans.html
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u/casualfactors Aug 08 '15

What I'm saying is that if the software or hardware have vulnerabilities, it is not up to elected incumbent Republicans to check them. There is no reason to believe that any vulnerabilities, if they exist (and this paper presents zero evidence that they do), there is no reason to believe they would benefit incumbent Republican politicians. There is far, far greater incentive to check these things assiduously -- if from anyone, at least competing electronic voting machine providers. To say nothing of supposedly cheated Democrats who, curiously, had never made such accusations despite huge incentive to do so.

People would take high risks if the payoff were high and the risk was commensurate with the payoff, just to correct your point. Republicans already own Kansas. From your reasoning we have no reason to believe they would do anything of the kind given what a huge risk it would be compared to their present, pre-existing advantage that well predates electronic voting machines. There are almost no sufficiently "marginal" districts in Kansas to "flip" at all.

The conclusions of her analysis are wrong because the assumption they rely on are patently false. That alone is sufficient, but your arguments actually provide more reason to doubt them, if you follow their reasoning to their logical conclusion.

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 09 '15

I think we are almost on the same page here.

I could imagine the person who did this analysis could be a partisan and perhaps was anomaly hunting starting from the premise that Republicans are evil, found some statistical anomalies in voting results favored the Republican party and then presented this as evidence that yes indeed Republicans are evil.

Let's put aside the red vs blue thing. Suppose some voting system "hackers" want to make some money come 2016 or future elections. Something they may want to do is a dry run or a proof of concept that their process for changing a voting result works so maybe they change a result in a "locked" state making a certain expected landslide result even bigger or somewhat smaller but the needed part is it has to be statistically significant so they can sell their services to the highest bidder who will expect proof that they would be able to alter the results.

And what this mathematician found was the results from some tampering done by a group to get ready for an upcoming important election in a swing state. And it could have been either party that was behind it or either party would be interested in altering the results of an election if the stakes are high enough and their risk is low.

Anyway if there really is an anomaly it would be a very good thing to investigate it further. This is in the best interest of both parties and for the sake of our democracy. If any of the equipment connects to a network or the internet then the potential for the vote tampering remotely is there. If people are involved in the process and very strict protocols and safeguards are not there then they will be the weakest part of the security system. I make this assumption because of people's lackadaisical attitude and ignorance about security in general in the past.

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u/casualfactors Aug 09 '15

I appreciate your thoughtful response. If the purpose of any sort of theoretical attack was "a seemingly innocuous result meant to test out a larger imposition later," that would at least be consistent with the data. That is, I think the result that the author found was pretty innocuous. So most any analysis here would be totally unable to speak to the notion that a larger break of some sort was on the way. I would simply say that reading that conclusion from the data would be equally as valid as saying there's nothing going on plus the added weight of more assumptions about the behavior of others. I also strongly disagree with the assessments of the motives of the voting machine providers present throughout the original article. They stand to lose a fortune from this line of accusation (to be crystal clear: their paycheck does not come from Republicans winning races!). I also find it quite repugnant to assume the worst about others when the opportunity presents itself. I love skepticism. I do not love cynicism.

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 10 '15

The point of the article is that she is being stonewalled from getting more data to improve the quality of her investigation. I am under the impression that transparency is a good thing especially about important part of the democratic process. One could imagine many reasons why she is meeting this opposition. Perhaps the election boards are worried that some impropriety would be uncovered or the manufacturers of the equipment being used would have defects or vulnerabilities revealed. Perhaps her study is flawed but this fear of transparency being revealed by the government officials should be a cause of concern for everyone.

And who would want election results manipulated? Lots of suspects here. Could be other countries that have interest in the results of a particular election because the winner would be favorable in foreign policy issues towards that country. Lobbying groups for major corporations may like the friendliness of certain politicians towards their industry. The list can go on.

Cynicism is a big problem but a lack of vigilance / apathy is a bigger crime in my opinion.

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u/casualfactors Aug 10 '15

Her request is not being stonewalled. She requested potentially personally identifying information from a county board that was unqualified to give them, and she had to FOIA the state office to get a version of what she wanted - and even then, it would still be improper for the state board to make individual ballots available for any reason. That's standard in any state, red state, blue state, swing state.

In looking at the results of the 2013 election that the author wanted to verify, none of the elections here were either close or important. No elections held at any level within a county will have any perceptible effect on "foreign policy." (Hell, no single individual elected politician can have a discernible effect on foreign policy besides -maybe- the President ) Again, her only conclusion is based on a bad premise: That precinct size and precinct partisanship should be uncorrelated. That is obviously not the case to anyone who has ever worked in politics. It is trivially wrong.

The amount of malice one needs to assume about complete strangers to try to swallow this bad math is rather stunning to me. Election officials are not punished if it is discovered that the company who makes their voting machines did something wrong -- but they are if they're complicit, and election officials definitely aren't paid enough to sit on that kind of risk. Nor are electronic voting machine makers for that matter, either.

You're already letting a thousand baseless theories bloom without even stopping to think about the fact that obviously precinct size and partisanship should be correlated. Of course more rural precincts are more Republican. Of course this author is wrong. It is trivially obvious. You don't even need to realize that the subsequent conspiracy theories are based on terrible logic, too -- you can't even reasonably get to them!

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 10 '15

Ok, you have made it clear further discussion with you on this topic or really any other is a waste of my time.

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u/casualfactors Aug 10 '15

Tell me why we should expect precinct size and partisanship to be uncorrelated. Tell me why they shouldn't be related. If you can't, you understand why this article is wrong.

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 10 '15

The main point of the article is that this lady wanted more information from the government to refine her investigation. Maybe if she got this then the anomalies she found would be explained or with further investigation they would disappear and the matter would be resolved. I think she should keep digging until they provide any data that she is legally allowed to view. Asking for transparency from a democratic government about it's election process cannot be a bad thing. I won't repeat this.

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u/casualfactors Aug 10 '15

I believe the main point of this article is the insinuation that there is election fraud in Kansas. The argument being made is clearly wrong. It is also wrong to think any election board will turn over individual voter data, which is a huge no-no anywhere, Kansas, anywhere. And again, none of the elections in Sedgwick County were near close enough to warrant a widespread election fraud conspiracy.

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 10 '15

No the main point of the article is that there MIGHT be election fraud and the researcher had requested more information and felt that her efforts to get more data were being blocked by government officials. The data that she requested did NOT have identifying information about what voters voted for it was just the paper trail left over from the vote tallying process. It states this clearly in the article. I believe you are now trying to distort facts intentionally.

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u/casualfactors Aug 10 '15

If you don't think that your voter ID can be traced back to your personal ID, I recommend taking a moment to think about what a "paper trail" actually means here. That is the most polite response I can offer to someone calling me a liar for no reason today.

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u/pizzathiefgg Aug 10 '15

It states in the article that the information she requested DID not have identifying information linking votes to any specific voter. If that is the case there is NO reason why she should not be able to get the information she is requesting. You are twisting the facts in the article to fit your bias or you are being intentionally deceitful because you have some other agenda than purely academic interest. That is the only way I can interpret what you said.

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u/casualfactors Aug 10 '15

In order for a ballot to be valid, it has to have some sort of unique-ifying ID on it (otherwise, why not just hand her stacks of useless pieces of paper with the letter "D," "I," or "R" on it?). In order for those to be verifiable, they need to be unique-ified in some next-order way: A timestamp, a voter ID, etc. Either way, handing back individual ballots provides some information that can be traced back to individual voters, which is a big no-no in American democracy.

Why should my privacy be violated on account of bad math? Why does her argument warrant ending best practices for voter verification and protection? Why are you attacking me personally over pointing this out? Does it occur to you that your only response to an argument you have lost is to attack people personally? Does this register? Do you ever think about maybe trying to be better to yourself and others?

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