Reply #16: Critique of PD article [View All]

How does the PD reconcile these two statements:

"Voting book problems in the 17 precincts in question were easy to detect because the results for the third-party candidates were so atypical. Any mixed-book problems that may have scored extra votes for Kerry or President Bush are more difficult to detect because deviations from likely voter behavior are less obvious."

"But the numbers appear small and the incidents relatively few."

By their own admission they can't detect all the incidents, just the ones that raise a Badnarik/Peroutka red flag. So how do they conclude that the numbers are small?

Even as it is, probably thousands of misvotes are represented by the Badnarik/Peroutka cases. In the single-precinct polling places (where no mix-up was possible), Badnarik/Peroutka garnered 0.39% of the vote. In the multiple-precinct polling places, they got 0.57%. So 0.18% of the vote, or 1,200 votes were mis-cast.

Further, as the PD acknowledges, there are mixups that would not affect the third-party totals.

Some precincts are so heavily Kerry that Bush votes mapped to Badnarik/Peroutka would not be noticeable. Thus, for example, 100 Kerry votes could go to Bush, 5 Bush votes to Badnarik, and nothing would look particularly out of line.

Another possibility is, say, Kerry votes going to Bush and Bush votes going to Disqualified. Disqualified votes show up as undervotes and are not in the PD analysis.

All told. perhaps several thousand ballots at least in Cuyahoga County were switched.

The, "what, me worry?" tone is astounding. Here we see a system that has no checks against simply moving a stack of cards from one pile to another, causing erroneous (possibly maliciously so) results, and there is no call to immediately recount all cards based on their precinct stamps?