That vote percentage swap is crazy! It's certainly indicative that something is amiss, although I'm not sure how indicative it is of fraud, simply because it's hard to imagine why a fraudster would do it that way. (Much more sensible to simply swap the individual votes in the Diebold districts, not bothering to calculate percentages or create a suspicious coincidence.) But what other explanation is there?
I get most of my news analysis from Counterpunch (not because it's the best but because I'm not motivated to spend the time looking for something better); here are a couple of interesting articles from there:
Still, I understand Obama's hesitation, but it deserved more attention than his staff gave it (which was none by the sound of it). In the big picture, this is a little bigger than a candidate, after all. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Drew wrote in part:
In the big picture, this is a little bigger than a candidate, after all.
Now, when have you ever known a campaign to put the big picture ahead of the individual candidate? (Well, except for the Kucinich campaign, of course.) ^_^
That vote percentage swap is crazy! It's certainly indicative that something is amiss, although I'm not sure how indicative it is of fraud, simply because it's hard to imagine why a fraudster would do it that way. (Much more sensible to simply swap the individual votes in the Diebold districts, not bothering to calculate percentages or create a suspicious coincidence.)
Just as an aside, if I may (I get the feeling what I'm about to write has been written several times already, but I barely survived college statistics and pretty much shut down when I see the phrase "statistically significant," so, apologies to anyone who's said this before). If this turns out to be fraud, whoever did it wanted it to be discovered. It's too perfect. Those numbers in the quotes from Brad Blog and Election Defense Alliance, the hand-counted and machine-counted ballots are mirror images?
That's too perfect and if you want to commit fraud, you don't make it so tidy like that unless you're either stupid or you want people to take notice. "Bait" comes to mind. I agree there could have been fraud on the part of people who want HRC to win because they think she'd lose to an R, but it also could have been someone who wanted to make her look like a fool or someone who wanted to see Dems run around, just to see us react and possibly create more discord between the various candidate camps. I don't think I'm adding any great revelation and the numbers could turn out to have a perfectly logical, non-fraud explanation-- but maybe instead of election manipulation, someone's trying to get a rise out of us.
There is also the distant possibility that it could be someone trying to show how optical scan can be manipulated, although this was a really bad time to do it.
This is the only one of these options that makes sense. Every time you do something like this you provide more data to prove that something has happened, and once this is proved then the whole scheme goes out of the window, (Plus it ends up with past results being looked at more closely). If this is happening surely this is the last thing you'd want to happen. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
If this is happening surely this is the last thing you'd want to happen.
Huh? I'm not quite sure how to interpret that. :)
In terms of what makes sense, reasons for fraud don't necessarily have to be logical. It's quite possible (again, if it's fraud) that someone did this just to mess with the Dems.
You know, as I think more and more about it, I keep coming back to how glaring this is-- really, if someone's going to commit fraud, they'd want to hide it well, not have numbers that make others stop and stare, unless they want people to stop and stare. This may be one of those "agree to disagree" things. :)
Maybe New Hampshire just won the lottery, or something.
The probability of the hand count being exactly the most likely value assuming the vote percentages of the machine count are "correct" is smaller than 1 in 250 given the sample size. Now, if you run 50 primary contests, what is the likelihood that at least one will be this "lucky"? Actually 1 in 6.
So something of this sort should be expected to happen ever 24 years :-)
[there are several assumptions in this which overestimate the probability of occurrence. For example: assuming the "correct" probabilities are the hand-counted ones and the machine-counted ones are the ones drawn randomly from the distribution, this is less likely than 1 in 500 and assuming 50 primaries every 4 years it would be a 44-year event]. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
