[EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines

[Kathy Dopp]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:09 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm

> Won't the people, as a last stop, keep fraud from being too blatant? You
> don't need scientific methods to know that something's up if a state was
> 80-20 Democratic one cycle and then suddenly becomes 80-20 Republican (or
> vice versa) the next. Fraudsters could swing 45-55 results, but it doesn't
> completely demolish democracy, since the >60% (or whatever margin) results
> would presumably be left alone.

Excellent point Kristofer. Absolutely you are correct. It would be
immediately obvious if a fraudster stole 100% of the available target
votes or even 50%, so all our calculations for determining the sample
size for post-election audits assume that a vote fraudster would steal
at most, say 20% of available target votes, and then allow the
candidate to add atleast one auditable vote count to the audit that
may appear to look suspicious, or provides for calculations to
determine any suspicious-looking auditable vote counts.

In practice, when we analyze the available exit poll data that we can
obtain (in Ohio 2004 presidential election some data was made
available and state-wide data in the recent 2008 primary elections),
it looks like the exit poll discrepancies can be explained by vote
shifts from one candidate to another of under about 15% of the margin
amounts.

Audit amounts need to be based on the reported unofficial margins and
the error bounds in the auditable vote counts and the total number of
auditable vote counts.  The concepts are explained in the first few
pages of this doc in lay person's terms as much as possible:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudits-PPMEB.pdf


>
> Fraud corrupts results, but it seems to me that fortunately we have some
> room to implement improvements that get us closer to verifiability without
> having the fraud that exists plunge the society directly into dictatorship.

That is the hope, IF we can get  our elected officials to agree to
implement the improvements. However, it appears that most officials
who get elected see nothing wrong with a system that elected
themselves (It must not be broken, it elected ME.)

>
> New voting methods and improved fraud detection could also strengthen the
> prospects of each other. If you have an election method that supports
> multiple parties (since the dominant parties can't rig all the elections
> everywhere), then instead of only one other party, you have n-1 parties
> actively interested in keeping an eye on what rigging attempts do occur, and
> a lesser chance of entrenched forces colluding to "ignore each other's
> attempts", since collusion among multiple entities become much harder as the
> number of entities grow.

I do not believe that the number of parties in power has any effect on
whether or not publicly verifiable routine measures are in place to
detect and correct vote miscount are effective or not. However, the
voting method could effect how difficult or easy costly or not it is
to implement routine measures that detect or correct vote miscount.
For instance, the IRV counting method could make it much more
difficult and costly to implement measures to routinely detect and
correct errors, whereas other voting methods may not make routine
error detection and correction more difficult and so may make publicly
verifiable election outcome accuracy much easier to achieve.  The
practical effects of the various voting methods on election
administration and in particular on as yet unimplemented but necessary
routine measures to detect and correct vote miscount, must be
considered when deciding on which voting method to promote.

Cheers,

Kathy Dopp

The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author
Kathy Dopp's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a
Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in
exit poll discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at

P.O. Box 680192
Park City, UT 84068
phone 435-658-4657

http://utahcountvotes.org
http://electionmathematics.org
http://electionarchive.org

How to Audit Election Outcome Accuracy
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/legislative/VoteCountAuditBillRequest.pdf

History of Confidence Election Auditing Development & Overview of
Election Auditing Fundamentals
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/History-of-Election-Auditing-Development.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf