BAD COUNTS CERTIFIED in Cuyahoga County OH

[k8conant]

I had seen some of these results before but figured they would be corrected before the certified count, but these bad counts have been certified.

These are the first 2 cases I noted in Cuyahoga County that had weird results like 44 votes for Bednarik in CLEVELAND 3B and 72 votes for Peroutka in CLEVELAND 3I. I found that these results occurred where 2 or more precincts shared a polling place.
There is the distinct possibilty that ballots were run through the wrong tabulator. For example, in the first pair of precincts below if a ballot from 3B were run through 3I's counter Kerry votes would go to Peroutka and Bush votes would be disqualified.

Research by k8conant
My full spreadsheet for the Cuyahoga precincts where I found discrepancies is at:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~kconant/CuyahogaVoteSwitch.xls
Ballots are found at:
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/boe/ballots/ballots.htm
Election results are at: http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/boe/results/history/2004/EL52.TXT
Poll maps and info are at: http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/boe/pollmaps/poll.htm

• Precinct..................Badnarik..Bush..Kerry..Disqualified..Peroutka.
  
• 1702 CLEVELAND 3B.......44......18......471......0.............1.......BALLOT= 1.Kerry.2.Disqualified.3.Peroutka.4.Badnarik.5.Bush
  
• 1709 CLEVELAND 3I.........1......13......467......0............72......BALLOT= 1.Peroutka.2.Badnarik.3.Bush.4.Kerry.5.Disqualified
  
  
• 1806 CLEVELAND 4F........0.......20......299......0..........215.....BALLOT= 1.Kerry.2.Disqualified.3.Peroutka.4.Badnarik.5.Bush
  
• 1814 CLEVELAND 4N.....164......12......334......0...........10......BALLOT= 1.Badnarik.2.Bush.3.Kerry.4.Disqualified.5.Peroutka

:tinfoilhat:


There also may have been problems that don't show in the totals:

as in, Bush votes to Kerry and Kerry to Disqualified (which apparently wasn't even tallied at all)

The problem is just much more obvious when Badnarik or Peroutka get a whole chunk of votes.

[jamboi]

1. Good catch! n/t

[Quakerfriend]

5. Nice find!!

[Verve]

2. Green Party needs to be alerted to this before the recount!

Here's another thread talking about the possibility of votes being run through the wrong tabulator.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x123298

[proudtobeadem]

3. This is crazy, I don't undestand why they had to

rotate the cadidate's positionson the ballots from precinct to precinct. I wonder who's bright idea this was?

[k8conant]

7. They rotate ballot position throughout Ohio

Supposed to make things more equitable, it seems :evilfrown:

[jmknapp]

4. Do the Cuyahoga Shuffle

Here's a spreadsheet streamlined for figuring out ballot shuffling errors. It has the precinct name, ballot order and votes totals for each candidate, along with spoiled vote total:

http://copperas.com/cuyahoga/cuyahogashuffle.zip (zipped Excel File)

It's easy. It's fun. It's like shooting fish in the Cuyahoga River--if there are any.

Joe

[k8conant]

6. That Shuffle is good

That's a lot like what I was doing. Then I looked for funny vote totals. Of course it's pretty hard to tell where else things got shuffled. It appears to me that the Disqualified tally doesn't exist: otherwise, one would think there'd be a stray vote in there once in a while, especially with the switching. That's just a black hole then.

[jmknapp]

12. Spotting shuffles

It's easiest to spot the shuffles when the third party vote totals are out of whack, but it's possible I think to infer a lot from the undervote total. Votes might fall into a black hole when they map to "Disqualified," but they leave a trace in the undervote column.

Here's an interesting one.

The Royal Redeemer Lutheran Church in Royalton hosted five precincts, 3A, 3B, 5A, 5C, 5D and 5E.

Precinct 3A showed a high number of votes (38) for Peroutka, and also a moderately high (6) total for Badnarik.

Here are the ballot orders:

pbBKd 3A
bBKdp 3B
bBKdp 5A
KdpbB 5C
dpbBK 5D
pbBKd 5E

p=Peroutka, b=Badnarik, B=Bush, K=Kerry, d=Disqualified

Some ballots from another precinct got mixed in with those for 3A. The question is which precinct. Since so many (38) showed up as Peroutka votes, looking down the leftmost ("p" column), it can be seen that they must be Kerry votes from 5C. Any Bush votes moved from 5C to 3A would map to Disqualified ("d") and show up as undervotes.

Here are the totals for the two precincts:

pct K B b p
3A 200 246 6 38 undervotes: 34
5C 177 237 0 0 undervotes: 2

So a rough guess is that 72 votes were switched from 5C to 3A, 38 of which were Kerry votes (showing up as Peroutka votes in 3A) and 34 of which were Bush votes (mapping to Disqualified and showing up as undervotes).

So the proper totals would have been on the order of:

3A 200 246 6 0
5C 215 271 0 0

So this particular mixup would have cost Kerry two votes margin, and inflated the Peroutka and undervote totals. Statewide there were 92,000 undervotes.

This is somewhat an estimate though, since it can't be known for sure how many Badnarik/Peroutka/Undervotes there would have been without the mixup.

As for the six Badnarik votes, there is evidence of other mixups in these precincts, notably misplaced ballots from 5A mapping Kerry votes to Bush votes and Bush votes to Badnarik votes.

[Celebration]

8. Disqualified?

In your spreadsheet there are no disqualified votes. Shouldn't there be some if ballots were mixed up?

[jmknapp]

9. The DQ totals were evidently zeroed out

...by the tabulating software.

[k8conant]

10. I think JMKNAPP is right about the zeroes n/t

[trudyco]

11. Is it possible they got the wrong voter guide?

Instead of putting the ballots through the wrong tabulator, is it possible they put up the wrong line up in the voter guide. That way the voter, unaware, punches the wrong hole for their precinct. Only maybe the voter guide they meant to have would have given many of those votes to Bush and instead they accidently gave it to the third party (put the wrong fake voter guide up?).

Did anybody here vote in those precincts? I'd be curious to know what somebody who voted there would have said the order of the presidential candidates was supposed to be.

trudyco

[skids]

13. We need to check the Republican countryside too (here's why)

Even in small counties like Pickaway there are shared polling places. (I've been doing an analysis of that county for some of the Ohio people, that's why I happen to know.) Pickaway doesn't use punchcards, and there are no 3rd-party irregularities. However, a LOT of the country counties do use punchcards.

The reason why it is vitally important that we look at those is because those are the places where Republican shared polling places exist. If we find that more Kerry-damaging combinations were present in democratic shared precincts than in Republican ones, we have evidence of *intentional* ballot order manipulation.

(on edit I meant to say: more Kerry-damaging combinations were present in democratic shared precincts than Bush-damaging combinations in Republican ones.)

[trudyco]

14. Still wondering if there was a way they permanently switched

Maybe swapping voter guides or what if they wrote the precinct number with a pen that disappears after a couple of hours.

Isn't that something the Ukraine found? I didn't realize the precinct number was WRITTEN on the ballot, as opposed to being preprinted. Is this true? If so, then the election workers would know nothing, the voter would no nothing. Later the insider could rewrite the precinct number - now the fraud is undetectable in a handcount. You'd have to compare pollbooks and maybe handwriting of precinct numbers.

I'm not explaining this very well
trudyco

The frustrating thing with recounts is that assumes that it is only human/machine error that causes problems and the recount might catch them. But what if there is suspicion of fraud? Grr.

[KaliTracy]

15. Voter Guide

On a punch card machine -- the voter guide is attached somehow to the machine -- there usually is only one or two choices to make per page, and when you look down to vote, there is a red circle to guide your pointer per choice. That's not to say that something couldn't be manipulated, only that it would be harder to do.

Things happen because the card isn't placed in the machine correctly, or other user error -- which is why elections are seen to usually have some margin of "error" -- however the scope and depth of the anomalies, and the fact that 95+% (if not more) of them favored * then something needs to be looked at.