A Familiar Face from a Nearby Planet in Cyberspace...

[anaxarchos]

A Familiar Face from a Nearby Planet in Cyberspace Chimes in:

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=120&topic_id=33


What?

[BrklynLiberal]

1. HEY!!!!!

[NoBushSpokenHere]

2. Thanks for posting - recommended n/t

[knowbody0]

3. recommended with a big sigh

[autorank]

4. Nice work Anax. You're a man of rare taste, and not just in avatars...

Who is that Hugh Heffner?

[Bill Bored]

5. Wasn't he that exit poll guy?

Or am I experiencing some false memories about that! ;)

[anaxarchos]

6. It's John Brown... and his body is moldering in the grave...

(probably completely moldered by now)

... BUT, his truth is marching on.

[Bill Bored]

7. Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job!

Exit Poll True Believers work 24 x 7, just like FEMA directors!

[autorank]

8. Yawn...so original...

...always something different, and gracious too.

[anaxarchos]

9. No, that's a different Brown...

This is Frederick Douglass' speech on John Brown, (May 30, 1881):

(Start Quote)

The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.

"When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone – the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union – and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the century.

(End Quote)

See what I mean?

Different guy...

[autorank]

10. Just one more reason for pride in my adopted state...Virginia...

Birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, The Anti-Slavery Movement, and, well, The Internet...common good for the Commonwealth.

[Usrename]

14. Those are the nuclear powerplants of freedom and liberty.

God (doG) bless Virginia!

[Bill Bored]

24. I know, he was an abolitionist.

But what about Election Reform?

[anaxarchos]

25. Abolition WAS "election reform".... n/t

[Bill Bored]

27. Well Election Reform might have been a by product of abolition.

Too bad that doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to these exit polls.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad TIA has found a place to express himself. I just think there is much more important work to be done.

I'm appalled that, for example, it took USCV over 8 months to figure out and publish the correct way to calculate the amount of random auditing necessary to detect election fraud! And where was TIA and the rest of the so-called QUANTS on this one? I'll tell you where they were, they were right here arguing about the frickin' exit polls!

Talk about spinning one's wheels!

Meanwhile, frickin' LAWS were being written by well-intentioned legislators that codified random auditing requirements in an unscientific way that could allow future vote rigging to take place due to inadequate auditing! And how are we supposed to find out about that when it happens? MORE frickin' exit polls?

Give me a break!

You see how effective that strategy has been in the 2004 decision. It's time to stop spinning our wheels and do something else!

What we need is REAL ELECTION REFORM! Anything that diverts our attention from that is a waste of time.

Here again is Kathy Dopp's excellent random auditing paper:

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/Paper_Audits.pdf

But again, WHY DID IT TAKE ALMOST A YEAR to write it?
Was she too busy arguing with Mitofsky and his supporters about his bloody exit polls?
Do you understand the significance of this?

This paper should have been on the web last year BEFORE the election -- NOT July 31, 2005!

Now, how do we explain this to our legislators, BoEs, voters and candidates? That's what the "QUANTS" should be working on now -- not this useless, incessant rehashing of the exit polls.

(I hope I've made myself clear.)

BTW, how did that San Diego parallel election thing go? Did those exit polls match the vote count?

[Febble]

28. Be fair, Bill!

USCV did lots of good work in that time, most of it nothing to do with the exit polls. Heck I did some of it.

And Kathy amassed a fantastic amount of data, and spent enormous amounts of energy chivvying us into dealing with it.

I happen to agree with you that the exit polls are a dud, but it's not the only stuff they did.

And no, the San Diego parallel election thing didn't match the vote count.

But I completely agree with you that good, enforceable laws are what are needed now.

[Bill Bored]

29. You're right. I do like that NM undervote paper you guys did.

Maybe USCV should hire an image consultant or something! On DU all anyone talked about was the exit poll stuff. I guess I got to get out more.

But the random auditing thing was long overdue. ESI is another group that should have come up with that and they haven't. Now they're doing make believe e-voting machine evaluations.

Kathy's auditing paper should be the basis for auditing and recount laws all over the country, yet it's still not widely understood. While it may be obvious to a true quant, the rest of us barely comprehend it. I'm somewhere in between but I think it's extremely important and should not be taken for granted.

Now try explaining it to an election lawyer or a legislator, or worse, an exit poll true believer, and you'll really see the depth of the problem and why I get so upset about it.

[autorank]

31. Random auditing is necessary so is public attention.

Bill, I'll tell you the main reason USCV didn't get the paper out in time, money. With all the deep pocket liberals out there throwing money at MoveOn.Org, ANSWER, etc. not one damn one of them gave USCV a big chunk of change. USCV doesn't need a genius at public relations to get the money. They're known and their work is clear. I don't know what Kathy's done for fund raising but I'm sure that there must have been contact with the large funders. Where were the liberal or liberal fellow travelers (e.g. Ford) when she asked? Apparently too busy funding other projects, some of which IMHO were undeserving. Kathy said she needs $20K a month to do her job and has $1.8K or something like that. That's the problem. If I had the money, I'd write the check tomorrow, as would you. We don't. Others do. They didn't.

In all the time I've seen you complain about exit polls, I have not seen a message like the one above, which has some logic to it had a request been made to TIA etc. to do this sort of work. I'm not aware that the request was made? I'm also not aware of any entreaties from USCV to TIA.

He's one person. And there are a few who engage in the debate in his behalf. The value of the debate is public attention. If you go over to GD, GD Politics, or anywhere around the net with active sites, the exit poll analysis is what grabs a great deal of attention. You can't get people to do all the other things, most importantly the nuts and bolts of election reform without support and that requires something to grab the people. I don't for the life of me see how TIA and a few others pushing the obvious exit poll problems (they're good enough for the Ukraine, etc...and no I don't want a response challenging exit polls or a debate on it). We don't know who the users are other than their DU name and we don't know what they do in their respective areas or states.

Why don't you call a truce on TIA bashing. You obviously value his talents, hence the desire to see him contribute to the audit work. At the same time, there would have been more than enough contributions had there been a vehicle to fund it, and TIA's work had nothing to do with that. In fact, I'd say that any chance for real election reform rests, in some major part, on exit poll work. That, in no way stopped the other work needed. TIA, Anaxarchos, eomer, and the few other mathematicians who have dealt with exit polls were not the only people who could have done the work, nor do we know if they were even asked.

Lets give it a rest and figure out how to get a break in the stupid CM (corporate media) to tell the full story of voter suppression, lousy machines, bought-and-sold BoE's and their employees, crooked corporations (some of them foreign) owning our votes and keeping them secret for "proprietary" reasons (interesting "proprietary"--"property", they own our votes as things stand now, crazy). Until the story is told, and I don't care what it takes (e.g., the recent BradBlog article on Diebold), we're nowhere. As long as we disparage each other, it's that much harder to tell the story without being mocked.

[Bill Bored]

33. I've asked on DU a number of times.

That doesn't mean everyone reads every thread or has the interest or competence to respond. But the question of how much auditing is necessary has been asked a number of times here in vain.

But we need a 3-pronged strategy:

1. We need an independent way to audit the machines. Paper is as good as any and perhaps better than most.

2. We need a way to audit that paper. This is either going to be done randomly until we reach the point that based on the parameters in Kathy's spreadsheet, it's no longer mathematically possible for the reported outcome of the race to be incorrect, or we must hand count every piece of paper produced. I've seen the latter discussed here but I haven't seen it put into law anywhere. If it is, fine, but I haven't seen it in the US. The former solution lacked the mathematical procedure to get it done, until now, but I doubt producing that cost more than a few hours of time (unlike the exit poll debates) and certainly not $20K a month!

3. Finally, we need laws to ensure that the necessary auditing in item 2 above actually takes place, especially if the initial random audit comes out clean, but the reported margin of the election is close enough to be wrong. If there is no legal way to challenge results based on statistics, whether they are based on exit polls or not, the elections will not be challenged. So creating a huge data archive, as some have suggested, is putting the cart before the horse, IMHO. Using the technique in Kathy's paper, just one spreadsheet per race is enough to calculate whether a recount or additional auditing is needed or not in any jurisdiction, provided there is an initial random audit.

Now I don't see how exit polls have anything to do with any of this really. In Ohio, a switch of only 5 votes per precinct on average would have been enough to change the outcome. That cannot be detected by exit polls. They are blunt instruments. Sledge hammers. If we're going to stop election fraud, what we need are tweezers and some inductive reasoning!

The exit poll discrepancy did not correlate well with machine type either. So we cherry pick the evidence or draw the conclusion that votes were switched on the "central tabulators." Terrific! Well we just need to compare precinct totals to tabulator totals then, don't we? So who's got that covered? We should have been doing this all along. There ought to be a law in fact! It's called a precinct canvass. So what do we have to do to make it happen in every jurisdiction in the country? More exit polls? Third base maybe? Who's on second again? I don't know.

It might be useful to compare and contrast our NEP exit polls to those in Ukraine or Germany to see why they may or may not be useful. But I haven't seen that done here either. All I read is that exit polls are good enough for them so they should be good enough for us because all exit polls must be created equal.

The Bushies will say we're using exit polls over there so we don't have to use them here! But I digress.

Finally, even if this exit poll argument is useful to raise the consciousness of those who might help fix the system, as you suggest, it's not working because there are still a shit load of people who don't think the election was stolen because they think it could NOT have been stolen, regardless of what the exit polls say. This is because the whole exit poll argument ignores (and I'd argue diverts our attention from) the methodology of how the fraud could have been perpetrated.

I just think it's time we focused on something else, but carry on.

[Febble]

34. Custody of ballots

between election and recount - and particularly between random selection and recount - is also vital.

If election officials know that discrepancies in the random recount will lead to a full recount there will be a strong incentive to make the recount match original total, if only to save hassle.

Randomness is not enough. Secure custody of the ballots between election and recount is also essential - one virtue of random audits is its unpredictability, but if the ballots are insecure between random selection and recount you might as well not have random selection.

[autorank]

35. Points one through three are great points.

Are you participating with USCV or other groups to get this in there? Obviously you've thought a great deal about it. You want to write up a position paper and get it out there? That would be great and I'd support and help with that if you'd like.

The "recounts" in Ohio were truly pathetic, a travesty. There should be a basis for challenge of lousy recounts or inadequate laws on the table and what you're talking about could for that basis.

My only problem is that I'm tired of hearing you gripe about people doing exit poll analysis. The only reason I mention that on this thread is that it shows up whenever anybody mentions the word, even now that there's very little talk of this. You're not going to convince them or me that it's useless and it just comes off as an attack whenever it appears. It detracts from your points, which I think are very good. And it's offensive.

[Stevepol]

36. If I understand it right, a 5% audit should do the trick. Here's how

I think it would work, anybody out there who knows better correct me if I'm wrong.

(1) The figures are reported, a final tally made of the votes.

(2) At the same time randomly selected precincts (5% of the total) are audited to make sure the totals in these randomly selected precincts match the reported vote. Of course, nobody should know what precincts will be selected beforehand.

(3) If there is a difference of even one or two votes in any of these pre-selected precincts (there should be a perfect or near-perfect match), then 10-15% more precincts should be audited and if ANY of these don't match precisely, then the whole election is recounted.

In OH, as I understand it, the 3% audit showed Kerry gaining about 300 votes, in other words, a difference of 300 votes from the reported totals. If that amount is extrapolated for the whole state, that would not have been enough to swing the election (supposedly, tho of course Blackwell and his minions chose the precincts to audit and refused to do it randomly), but it should have been enough to have a wider audit or a complete recount. These machines should be perfectly accurate, just like the ATM machines or the computers in the bank that keep track of our money. Even a few pennies off and somebody owes somebody an explanation, either that or sue the ATM company.

Am I wrong about this?

[mirandapriestly]

11. I never understood his posts

but I loved them anyway

[FULL_METAL_HAT]

12. Remember 170 votes for the last TIA thread! ;)

So good to see our friend is back and atom!

{B^> FMH

[autorank]

20. Hi Hat, that was quite a gathering, wasn't it?

[FULL_METAL_HAT]

26. Its a real testament!

I think a special effort to "mirror" TIA's new work here should be a priority.

Perhaps one of the upsides to the situation is since he won't be able to respond to disruptors, we all can be more vigilant on alerting on disruptors, and either TIA or someone here can be focused on making the presentation a little more understandable by joe six-click and everyone who sadly fears the math that constitutes the basis for the analyses.

I nominate you for a TIA ambassador to the 'DUN'. Considering the roughshod treatment TIA got, I'd say acting a little like Bolton if need be would be okay :)

{B^) FMH

[Usrename]

13. This is a great post.

I will refuse to be discredited or marginalized for observing the TRUTH.

[meganmonkey]

15. Excellent

I miss him so....

[mopinko]

16. kick

[garybeck]

17. also here

http://solarbus.org/forum

[bleever]

23. Thanks, gary.

Count me in.

:thumbsup:

[glitch]

18. Yay!! Can't keep a good man down! Thanks for posting. nt

[bobbieinok]

19. thanks

[FogerRox]

22. I'll be over shortly

I'd like to suggest--

http://www.realrepublic.com/forum/index.php

[bleever]

21. Yay! The music never stopped!

Thanks, anaxarchos!

Big time!

:thumbsup:

[AgadorSparticus]

30. nice! the more the merrier.

:kick:

[MaryBear]

32. thx for the link!

[Melissa G]

37. kick