{"id":595,"date":"2008-02-11T12:03:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T12:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/02\/11\/washington-state-and-gop-vote-counting-fraud\/"},"modified":"2008-02-11T12:03:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T12:03:00","slug":"washington-state-and-gop-vote-counting-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/11\/washington-state-and-gop-vote-counting-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington State and GOP Vote Counting Fraud?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been getting a lot of mail from people asking for my take on
\nthe news about the Washington GOP primary.<\/a> Most have wanted me to
\ndebunk rumours about vote fixing there, the way that I tried to debunk the
\nrumours about the Democratic votes back in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

Well, sorry to disappoint those of you who were hoping for a nice debunking
\nof the idea of fraud, but to me, something sure looks fishy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For those who haven’t been following: over the weekend,
\nRepublicans had primaries and\/or caucuus in three states. In the first
\ntwo – Kansas and Louisiana – McCain got beaten, badly,<\/a> by Mike
\nHuckabee. Meanwhile, in Washington, the early vote counts showed
\nHuckabee leading there, as well. As more votes came in, McCain took a
\nvery<\/em> narrow lead. Then suddenly, when they got to 87% of
\nvoting precincts reporting, with McCain leading by an extremely slim
\nmargin – under 2% – the Washington state party suddenly stopped
\ncounting votes<\/em>, and declared McCain the winner.<\/a><\/p>\n

The state party has been making the argument that McCain won –
\nthat with that number of votes counted, statisticaly, there was no way
\nthat Huckabee could make up the difference, and so they could fairly
\ndeclare the winner. Their “methodology” for this conclusion was: “Let’s take every county where Huckabee is beating McCain, and double the margin of victory. Then let’s take every county where McCain is winning, and half that margin of victory. Even if you assume that, Sen. McCain still holds on.” <\/p>\n

As statistical methodology goes, that’s absolute garbage. But worse, it’s
\nclearly a lie – because despite claiming to have done that analysis, the officials in the state party admit that they have no idea what parts of the state weren’t fully
\ncounted<\/em>. No clue, not about counties, voting precincts, nothing. But they want you to believe that they did this “careful” analysis on a county-by-county basis.<\/p>\n

The argument from the state party is pure, utter rubbish. And
\nbased on all of the information I can find, it seems quite clear that
\nthe state party decided that they wanted McCain to win, and they
\nhalted the vote count when they did in order to ensure that their preferred
\ncandidate won. It’s fraud, plain and simple, beyond any reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying that McCain lost<\/em> the election. I don’t
\nknow if he would have won or not. But the fact is – in a large diverse
\nstate, with 87% of the vote counted, a 1.8% margin between winner and
\nloser, there’s simply no way to say “Statistically, we know<\/em>
\nwhat the result would have been”. Why not?<\/p>\n

If we look at the results as they came in during the day, we can
\nsee that Huckabee showed a lead early; quite a significant lead in
\nsome parts of the state – at one point when results were coming in,
\nthe counts had Huckabee leading by about 5%. As more votes came in,
\nthat shifted in McCains favor, and when the count stopped, McCain was
\nahead by 1.8 percent. That 1.8% margin between Huckabee and McCain
\nworks out to a total of only 242 votes. With 13% of the vote remaining
\nto be counted – and when we don’t know anything about the demographics
\nor voting histories of the districts which aren’t included in the
\nreported counts – there is simple no way that we can rule out the
\npossibility that the remaining 13% of the vote would have produced an
\nexcess 243 votes for Huckabee.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a quick look at the arithmetic of it. Assume that the
\nreported percentages accurately represent the percentage of voters in
\nthe unreported discricts – so that the counted votes – the 13,475
\nvotes counted – represent 87% of the republican voters. Then the
\nexpected total republican electorate would be about 15,500 voters –
\nleaving about 2,000 votes left uncounted. For those votes to swing the
\nelection to Huckabee, he would have needed to win roughly 1,135 votes
\n– that is, to win the uncounted districts by about 6%.<\/p>\n

Is it likely<\/em> that Huckabee won the remaining districts by
\n6%? Not particularly. Is it possible<\/em> that he won them by 6%?
\nAbsolutely. <\/p>\n

Now, normally, I’m very hostile to the idea of conspiracies in
\nthings like this. As you saw in my look at the Democrats in New
\nHampshire, I’m much more likely to believe that the McCain won fair
\nand square – that it would be extremely surprising to see Huckabee win
\nby a sizeable margin in the small portion of the state left to
\nvote.<\/p>\n

But it’s clearly possible mathematically, and the behavior of the
\nRepublican party officials in charge of the count have been completely
\ninexplicable. I can’t imagine any good reason to suddenly stop the
\nvote count at 87% with a narrow margin. The answers from the people in
\ncharge have been ridiculous at best – the state party chair, Luke
\nEsser, said that he halted the count and declared a winner because:
\n“…it was an exciting and historic day for the state and I thought if
\nI was confident about what the outcome would be I should share that
\nwith the people who had gone out to their caucuses.” He’s admitted
\nthat he probably shouldn’t have stopped the count, but in his defense,
\nhe asserted that it was “statistically impossible” for Huckabee to
\nhave caught up and overtaken McCain. But when probed further, he
\nadmitted that he knew nothing about the uncounted votes – not even
\nwhich areas of the state included the precincts whose votes weren’t fully
\ncounted.<\/p>\n

And further: when the Huckabee folks started pushing for a
\ncomplete vote count, the republican state chair reluctantly agreed to
\ncount the rest of the votes, some time over the next few days. But when
\nthe Huckabee folks asked if they could have representatives present to observe
\nthe count, he threw a tantrum and hung up the phone on them.<\/p>\n

When the person in charge of an election stops counting<\/em>
\nvotes, refuses to explain why he stopped the count, demonstrates
\nprofound ignorance of the factors that could have affected things, and
\nthrows tantrums over stakeholders asking to observe the full
\ncount… Well, something is seriously wrong. Most likely, it’s just
\npure simple incompetence – he’s an idiot, and he did something idiotic
\nfor stupid reasons, and he’s pissed off that his stupidity is being so
\nvividly demonstrated in the national press. But there’s no excuse for
\nordering a stop to the vote count. No excuse at all. In a democracy,
\nyou’re supposed to count every<\/em> vote. Not “every vote until
\nyou’re pretty sure that you know who won”, but every<\/em>
\nvote. And to stop counting votes so early – with roughly one out of
\nevery 8 votes uncounted – is simply insane. Put that together with
\nsome of the bizzare behavior on the part of the state party
\nrepresentatives, and it creates a very strong appearance that
\nsomething is up. (Note: I originally had a typo in the above; when I changed
\nfrom “X%” to “1 in X”, I accidentally didn’t change the X – so this originally read “1 in 12 votes uncounted. In fact, it’s slightly more than 1 in 8.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Then, we add in the latest information: as of this morning, the
\nstate is reporting an additional 5% the votes have been counted, with the
\nmargin narrowing from approximately 2% separating McCain and Huckabee
\ndown to approximately 1%.<\/p>\n

So – I absolutely wouldn’t rule out the possibility of
\nfraud. There’s no mathematical reason Huckabee couldn’t have won, and
\nthere’s no reasonable explanation for the insane behaviour of the
\nparty officials in charge of the vote. Something fishy sure seems to
\nbe going on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been getting a lot of mail from people asking for my take on the news about the Washington GOP primary. Most have wanted me to debunk rumours about vote fixing there, the way that I tried to debunk the rumours about the Democratic votes back in New Hampshire. Well, sorry to disappoint those of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-statistics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-9B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}