Vote Rigging in Kansas

Secretary of State Kris Kobach claims his voter suppression is necessary because of massive voter fraud, but the evidence for the claim is practically nonexistent. At the same time, there is overwhelming evidence that wholesale rigging of electronic voting machines has been taking place for many years now, skewing results nearly always in one direction.

As concerned Republican technology expert Chuck Herrin put it: "It takes a long time to change 10,000 ballots by hand. It takes three seconds to change 10,000 votes on a computer."

Voting should be private, but counting the votes should be open and observable and subject to legitimate checks like statistical audits so the voter can trust the results.

....The preceding is a recent letter to the editor of the WICHITA EAGLE

By the way, as an aside, I think DU-ers should start writing letters to the editor all over the country on the theme of VERIFYING THE VOTE. And there's a method developed by a number of statisticians that could do it effectively and on the cheap. It's reasonable and should appeal to voters of both parties. Jon Simon's book CODE RED explains it. It's called an RLA (risk-limiting audit). He claims it is perhaps the best way at the moment to limit the risk of election rigging. He explains: "RLAs are not state-wide or jurisdiction-wide random samples; they are full counts of randomly counted precincts, which work fine as long as the selection process is real-time and not telegraphed in advance." (footnote, p.82)

Here's his conclusion about the method: "I was initially an RLA skeptic but, upon examining its workings critically and carefully, I have come to recognize both the soundness of its theory and the practicality of its execution. It focuses specifically on what matters bout elections: outcomes that reflect the collective majority/plurality intent of the electorate. And it applies basic logic and very simple statistics (it's reducible to a single page with two columns: first-count margin and %-to-be-audited) to protect those outcomes. It also has a fighting chance of broad, even universal, adoption if election integrity advocates can get behind it and work WITH election administrators to make sure the protocols are sound in design and execution." (pp 82-83)