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| 11-13-06: Sarasota! Florida! Never do... |
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| Author |
Message |
    
Bev Harris
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Site_admin
Post Number: 185
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 8 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 6:00 pm: | 
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By Bill Bucolo
It was an amazing day for voting integrity in Sarasota.
It's been a rough week for Sarasota Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent. And voting in Sarasota will never be the same again, for two reasons.
One is Kindra Muntz and the other is Susan Pynchon.
First, against all odds Kindra and her volunteers' petition-driven paper ballot initiative won easily with the voters, insuring Sarasota County citizens will henceforth have voter verified paper ballots, and no more shady events like today's goofy paperless recount attempt.
But if Kindra was the gentle wind blowing toward Sarasota's future, Susan Pynchon was "Hurricane Susan" today, leaving no doubt exactly what and where that future is, and they're still picking up after her at the Supervisor of Election's office. There's simply no other way to put it except to say that Pynchon was in the faces of the Sarasota Supervisor Of Elections and her Canvass committee from the very start this morning. They balked a little at first but when Susan quoted Florida Statutes at them they folded against every one of her objections.
So what had started out as a day of typical DRE- faith based vote recounting ended with Susan and other observers from the public standing a foot away, looking over the shoulders of Dent and her canvass committee as they obediently and loudly read out the vote counts for each precinct.
It went on for hours, with videos and cameras clicking all the while.
And it was both hilarious and shocking.
When the first under-votes were called out the room went quiet, except for the gasps.
Pronouncements like:
"Precinct 85:
Buchannan 125
Jennings 130
UNDER VOTES 175!"
One precinct after another.
18,000 undervotes. It's one thing to know about these figures, but another to hear the actual missing vote numbers -- the undervotes were like a third candidate in the race. To hear nearly as many under-votes as actual votes for either candidate really drove the point home about how ridiculous it was to claim that so many people chose not to vote in this race, but in all the others. An amazing effect.
And this was captured on video.
Voting integrity activist and budding videographer Leonard Schmeige from Pinellas County, Florida has recorded it all, and should have something up on YouTube this evening.
* * * * *
Hats off to:
Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections (SAFE)
Florida Fair Elections Coalition (Volusia County; See Susan Pynchon in the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy", showing on HBO now.
Leonard Schmiege, of Pinellas County, Florida.
Florida voting activists: Harnessing the power of many imaginations. |
Yvonne Payne
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Payneyvonne
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 9:10 pm: |
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Hacking Democracy was one of the most eloquently presented examples of government unaccountability( no pun intended) that I have ever had the privilege to view!
Yvonne Payne( Aurora, CO) |
Jim March
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jimmarch
Post Number: 142
Registered: 05-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 9:57 pm: |
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Has anybody taken steps to compare the rates of undervote in each precinct to the known GOP/Dem voting trends?
One quick way would be to make up a table showing the Dem/GOP voting patterns in, say, the Governor and Senate races, and then compare those to undervote rates (compared in each precinct).
What I'm thinking is this: right now we know that in THIS race in Sarasota County, there's a claimed lead by the Democrat. Let's assume that's accurate. Let's also assume that the REAL undervotes in this race was closer to 2,000 votes than 18,000 - there were just under 2,000 undervotes in the governor and senate races in Sarasota.
So we've got about 16,000ish improper undervotes.
By the rough math I've seen, if we assume that the 16,000 votes thrown out were completely random, and that this county has a bit of a Democratic edge, we end up with about a 1,000 vote penalty for the Democrat in the race. And since the net difference in favor of the Republican is significantly less than 1,000 votes across all four counties, we seem to have a definitely shifted race.
IF on the other hand the undervote rates are skewed in each precinct along the lines of that precinct being Republican, then fraud (or at least a fraudulent outcome) would be less likely than a randomized loss. If the undervotes seem to cluster more in Democrat-leaning precincts, fraud is MORE likely and the rate of skew against the Democrat even worse than what you'd get with randomized vote losses.
--------
Upshot: if GOP-leaning precincts were the main target of vote loss, this could actually be fraud in a pro-Democrat direction. If it's precinct-neutral, the effect will run in the GOP's favor enough to flip the outcome (and likely indicate pro-GOP fraud). If the vote loss is clustered in Democratic precincts, it looks even worse as a case of pro-GOP vote fraud.
As I write this I have NO idea what such precinct-by-precinct analysis will show, nor have I done the analysis.
I hope somebody closer to the ground in FL does though, and publishes it REGARDLESS of "who gets hurt" in which partisan direction. The PROCESS has been brutally injured, that's what we should care about.
(Message edited by jimmarch on November 13, 2006) |
Mac Hathaway
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mac_hathaway
Post Number: 60
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 4:35 am: |
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Good point, Jim.
Further on this point, from an engineering perspective, it would be good to get the vote break-down machine by machine, so that if individual machines are shown to have problems, they can be isolated for further review. Plus, it would blow the silly "they just didn't feel like voting" argument right out of the water. (If excessive undervotes appear on specific machines, how would disgruntled voters have known "which" specific machine to vote on?)
Anybody know how we can get individual machine counts? Surely it's written down somewhere, if only in the individual precincts. Did anyone collect copies of the poll tapes, or can they still? (those are machine specific, right?)
Mac |
Jim March
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Jimmarch
Post Number: 143
Registered: 05-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 8:49 am: |
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Doh! Yeah, of COURSE track it by machine.
It will be available...each box prints out a polltape. Some will be inevitably screwed up but there will be enough data to spot trends. |
Mac Hathaway
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mac_hathaway
Post Number: 61
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 9:48 am: |
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I just sent email to Bill Buculo and Susan Pynchon, asking them about this. If somebody else is already in contact with them, I'll chill and wait for the data to be posted. If not, I'll post when I get more news.
Mac |
Michael W Mather
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Gypsy
Post Number: 114
Registered: 07-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 3:39 pm: |
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"And this was captured on video. "
Is the local media interested? Have the local TV stations covered the "recount"?
.
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Bev Harris
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Site_admin
Post Number: 186
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 5:05 pm: |
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In the records request I sent to the legal team, it requested the machine-by-machine counts, in the form of a specific ES&S event log. I don't know if they requested exactly the logs I specified, but I agree that it is very important to get the machine logs for each precinct, for two reasons. First, because it will show if there is any error logged that correlates with the excessive undervotes, and next, because it will tell how many votes are on each machine.
The results tapes from each machine will tell how many votes were cast, and the number of undervotes per machine can be found from that as well. The machine event logs may or may not flag undervotes.
I am thinking I'll make a request myself for those event logs. Then we can post them here and chew on them. |
Caryl Brt
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brtova
Post Number: 6
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 5:21 pm: |
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Hi Bev,
I continue to be amazed by you.
For some reason, I have a hard time searching on UTube.org.
You said: "Voting integrity activist and budding videographer Leonard Schmeige from Pinellas County, Florida has recorded it all, and should have something up on YouTube this evening"
Can you tell me how to find this?
Thanks
brtova |
Alex Yoder
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Storm5guy
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 6:18 pm: |
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"Is the local media interested? Have the local TV stations covered the "recount"?"
Are you kidding? Every single station is up there with a constant feed going back to their stations in the Tampa market and beyond. I stopped by there today to see what it was like, and all the stations were lined up along with AP writers, and writers from the Miami Herald. Also there was a producer from FOX News, and I saw a Satellite truck, so they might have been doing some live shots, if not them, than someone else national. |
Bev Harris
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Site_admin
Post Number: 190
Registered: 10-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 7:50 pm: |
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Caryl: I have no idea. I've only been on YouTube once, and that was to laugh myself silly watching a video of something called "White Man Can Dance" or something like that, a bit done at the Apollo. Said white man caused host Steve Harvey to become speechless.
I don't even know how to find that again, much less Leonard Schmiege's video, but I hope someone will provide us with a trail of bread crumbs because Schmiege's video is a piece of history. |
Beverly Boardman
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Bbmover44
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 9:08 pm: |
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The Herald-Trib in Sarasota has posted a Precinct-by-Precinct tabulation of undervotes which go from less than 10% to 30% or more. I can count all of them and tabulate by Democratic vs. Republican wins if anyone is interested in the statistics. I have to say, though, that I am not a statistician. |
Mac Hathaway
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mac_hathaway
Post Number: 62
Registered: 08-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - 5:00 am: |
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Well, I just came from the Herald-Tribune website, and they have several interesting articles about the situation.
Here's their homepage:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
Here's an article about the possible cause of the problems:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061115/NEWS/611150751
Here's an interesting interactive map of vote counts by precinct:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?CATEGORY=Election03
I don't see a nice table of results yet, but I'm still poking around. Bev Boardman, perhaps you could call them up and have them post somewhere the complete tally by precinct, and that will make it a lot easier to analyse. If you have Dem/Rep info, certainly post that, too, if it's not too difficult.
My first impression is that every single place where undervoting was above 20%, Jennings (Dem) was ahead, and would presumably gain commensurately more votes if undervotes were eliminated. This is mostly true for 15%+ undervoting precincts, too. Perhaps elderly voters (more Dem?) were more likely to accidentally skip the race?...
The MIT guy (and several others) seem to think the problem was including two races on one screen of the ballot, causing people to overlook one or the other. Other counties which included different races on a single screen got huge undervotes in those races, as well, such as the attorney general's race in Charlotte County.
So, bad ballot design? Better than a hack, I suppose. Bad on purpose? Not inconceivable... Bad enough for a revote? We can only hope...
Here's the story: (Bev, feel free to relocate this if appropriate).
Experts see flaws in design of ballot
By MAURICE TAMMAN and MATTHEW DOIG
maurice.tamman@heraldtribune.com
matthew.doig@heraldtribune.com
On election day, voters in Sarasota and Charlotte counties went through much the same process.
They used the same type of electronic voting machines, made by the same company. In certain precincts, they voted in the same major races -- U.S. Senate, governor, U.S. House and state attorney general.
But there were subtle differences in design of the ballot from one county to the next. And as the votes were counted, those differences showed up in unexpectedly large undervotes in the U.S. House and attorney general's races, according to ballot design experts.
Sarasota recorded a massive undervote in the House District 13 race and a typical undervote in the attorney general's race. Charlotte County had a typical undervote in the District 13 race and massive undervote in the attorney general's race.
Experts say the undervotes were likely caused by badly designed ballots that led people to accidentally skip over one race as they scrolled through their computer screens.
Sarasota put the two-candidate U.S. House race on the same screen with the more prominent, six-candidate governor's race. Charlotte put the House race on its own screen but combined the attorney general and the governor's race.
State rules do not prevent county elections supervisors from combining races on the same electronic voting screen.
But MIT political science professor Stephen Ansolabehere said it's a dangerous practice: "One race, one screen is a very good rule of thumb."
The Herald-Tribune reviewed undervote counts in 10 counties that use the same computer system as Sarasota and Charlotte. When other races were paired on the screen with the governor candidates, undervotes in the other race soared, suggesting ballot design may explain why some people skipped those races.
That's not the only possible explanation for Sarasota's undervote.
Many speculate that voters opted out of the District 13 race to protest the aggressive and sometimes nasty campaign between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings. In addition, some voters say they had a hard time getting their votes to register when they touched the screen.
Unlike the attorney general race, the undervote issue could be critical in District 13 because Buchanan won by just 377 votes -- a small enough margin to be affected by undervotes.
Although she lost districtwide, Jennings won Sarasota County and therefore could have won the race if Sarasota's undervote rate had been as low as other counties in the district.
Nearly 13 percent of all ballots cast in Sarasota County did not have a vote in the District 13 race compared to less than 5 percent in other counties in the district.
"In engineering, when you have those kinds of results, you throw them out," said Ted Selker, director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. "This is a call to arms for ballot design."
Selker reviewed several ballots from Florida counties that use the same iVotronic voting machines Sarasota uses.
Among those counties, only Sarasota had high numbers of undervotes in a U.S. House race. It was the only county that paired the race with governor's race.
"Here we are in 2006 in Florida and we're in trouble again," Selker said. "We all focus on fraud. Meanwhile, we are missing millions of votes in every cycle, missed because of ballot design."
Following the controversial 2000 general election, a study found the flawed butterfly ballot design used in Palm Beach caused far more voters to completely miss races than problems with unpunched chads.
While Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent believes some voters may have accidentally missed the District 13 race, she does not believe ballot design was the primary cause of the undervotes.
The voters "are instructed on the machine; they are instructed by the poll worker: 'make sure you go through the whole ballot, check all the review screens.'
"There were thousands and thousands and thousands of people who did" vote in the race, Dent said, "and their votes were recorded. I just can not attribute it to any one thing."
Selker and other experts said Sarasota compounded problem with poor use of colors.
The county placed a teal background behind the title of each section of races, such as "CONGRESSIONAL" for U.S. Senate and U.S. House and "STATE" for races such as governor and attorney general.
As a result, the first thing voters saw on screen two was "STATE" with a bright colored background below the District 13 race. There was no colored title for the District 13 race above.
When screen two loaded, the eye naturally traveled to "STATE" and then down the screen, leading many to overlook the unadorned District 13 race, Selker said.
That's what happened to Cornell University Professor Geri Gay, an expert on human interaction with computers.
Tuesday morning, she opened an image file on her computer that showed how the Sarasota ballot appeared on voting machines. She said she didn't even see the House race until she was told to look at the top of the image.
"I thought it was just part of the header," she said. "There is needless confusion in Sarasota. The eye will go for color. That's why you use color, to orient yourself."
Derek Noll, an election clerk who worked at precinct 12 at St. Michael the Archangel Church on Siesta Key, said the color highlights confused voters.
"I believe many people overlooked the 13th race because it seemed to be an extension of the Senate race" on screen one, "if the voter were following the colored highlights," he said. "We tried to warn all voters about not missing the 13th race."
On Tuesday, Selker set up a computer with a dummy version of the Sarasota ballot at the Boston Museum of Science to test the extent of the ballot design problems.
Twenty people cast fake ballots and two people missed the District 13 race. But the experiment was hastily designed and had too few participants to draw any conclusion, Selker said.
He'll work on his methodology in the coming weeks and continue the test on the MIT campus, he said.
Selker is only testing the Sarasota race, but there are indications that combining races the way Sarasota combined the U.S. House and governor caused problems in other places, as well.
In Charlotte, Sumter and Lee counties for example, the six gubernatorial candidates appeared at the top of screen three followed by the two attorney general candidates.
In each county, the attorney general's race had an undervote rate four times the state average.
The attorney general's race in Sarasota appeared on the screen with two other races, all of which had the same number of candidates. Sarasota's undervote rate was 4.4 percent, similar to the state average.
Lee County Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington said it may have been a mistake to bundle any other race with the governor's race but said she wanted to keep the ballot short.
"People are already complaining that our ballots are too long," she said. "We had ballots that ranged from 17 to 23 screens."
The issue of protest non-votes, the kind some have suggested occurred in Sarasota, could be resolved by adding an "I don't want to vote in this election" option for every race, Ansolabehere said.
Nevada has had such an option in their ballot since 1975 and historically the state has had very low undervotes, Secretary of State Dean Heller said.In the U.S. Senate race last week, for example, 1.4 percent of voters in Nevada specifically opted for none of the candidates and only about 0.6 percent left the race blank. In Florida, 1.8 percent of voters left the Senate race blank.
Heller said the "none of the above" option allows voters to express their displeasure without skipping the race.
He said politicians don't like it because no one wants to lose to "none of the above," which has happened a number of times over the last 30 years, he said.
In those cases, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins the race.
"But it's a great way to measure the protest vote," he said. "It's a much cleaner way of measuring voter discontent."
_____
Staff writers Bob Mahlburg and Todd Ruger contributed to this story. |
Jason May
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Greymonk
Post Number: 1
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - 6:50 pm: |
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I live in Manatee county and work in Sarasota. I know a person who voted in Sarasota and swears up and down that he did not see the 13th Dist. vote the first time he went through. Says it just wasn't there. Once he went back he found it, but he made no mention of finding on the same screen as another vote. I'll have to ask about that.
He also said that the text on the summary screen to show he had not voted in that election was red but in an extremely small font, and that if he had not been reading it carefully he would never have noticed.
(Message edited by greymonk on November 15, 2006) |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 3439
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, November 16, 2006 - 5:08 am: |
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Hi Jason,
This is important information. Thanks for passing it on. Share your experiences far and wide--local media, other websites and blogs, friends and coworkers, etc.
Welcome to BBV. |
Pat Vesely
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pat_vesely
Post Number: 385
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, November 16, 2006 - 10:13 am: |
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Here's a link to an excellent video short that asks many of the right questions.
http://www.therighttocount.com/shorts
Pat A. Vesely ;-)
Paper ballots are the 'Currency of Democracy'. They've been helping to curb election fraud since 139 BCE!
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Russ Hopf
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Well_win
Post Number: 11
Registered: 03-2005
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Sunday, November 19, 2006 - 4:23 pm: |
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Since this is already in the local paper, part of our job is to get it in other forums. Here's a link to newspapers nationwide: http://newslink.org/metnews.html Some have forums, which may be the best way of getting the news out.
(Message edited by Well_Win on November 19, 2006) |
William Fitzgerald
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Bill_fitz
Post Number: 2
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - 8:58 pm: |
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Article in the Orlando Sentinel about this - Majority of undervotes came from people primarily voting Democrat.
Link to article:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-mvote2206nov22,0,3542280,print.story |
Pat Vesely
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Pat_vesely
Post Number: 406
Registered: 02-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - 11:26 pm: |
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Hi William! Welcome to Black Box Voting. Thanks for posting that article. I'm going to post a little 'teaser' here.
ELECTION 2006: SARASOTA RECOUNT
Analysis: Ballots favored Dems
Sarasota's 'undervotes' were examined in 5 state races.
Jim Stratton | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted November 22, 2006
The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.
Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.
The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and U.S. Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost -- as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains -- they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.
Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race -- intentionally or not -- there is no evidence that votes went missing.
But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.
"Wow," University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. "That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat."
David Dill, an electronic-voting expert at Stanford University, put it this way: "It seems to establish with certainty that more Democrats are represented in those undervoted ballots."
The Sentinel reviewed records of 17,846 touch-screen ballots that included no vote in the tightly contested 13th District congressional race to determine whom voters selected in other major races.
The analysis of the so-called "undervotes" examined the races for U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner.
The results showed that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican.
In the governor's race, for example, Republican Charlie Crist won handily in Sarasota, easily beating Democrat Jim Davis. But on the undervoted ballots, Davis finished ahead by almost 7 percentage points.
In the agriculture commissioner's race, Republican Charles Bronson beat Copeland by a double-digit margin among all voters. But on the undervoted ballots, Copeland won by about 3 percentage points.
<more>
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-mvote2206nov22,0,4131773.story
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Pat A. Vesely ;-)
Paper ballots are the 'Currency of Democracy'. They've been helping to curb election fraud since 139 BCE!
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