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| (CT) 9/08 - State: UCONN Statistical ... |
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Hugh W. Busey
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hbusey
Post Number: 9
Registered: 7-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 12:43 pm: | 
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Would someone kindly read and respond to the first two paragraphs of the Summary section?
My initial response was "You've got to be kidding me!" Am I misreading it or what?
http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/Reports_files/Audit07-h-080410.pdf
Hugh |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 9660
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 1:16 pm: |
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Hugh, feel free to offer your own commentary. Don't be shy, now.
Summary
The University of Connecticut Voting Technology Research (VoTeR) Center received the data gathered in the post-election audit performed in the State of Connecticut following the November 2007 election. The audits of the randomly selected 10% of the districts were conducted in November and December of 2007, and the returns were conveyed by the Office of the Secretary of the State (SOTS) to the VoTeR Center on January 8, 2008. The audit data received by the Center contains 958 records, where each record represents information about a given candidate. Specifically, each record contains the following significant information: date, district, machine seal number, office, candidate, machine counted total, undisputed hand counted total, questionable hand counted total, overall hand counted total, that is, the sum of undisputed and questionable ballots. This report contains several statistical analyses of the audit returns and recommendations. Among the 958 records received by the Center, 175 records (18.3%) were incomplete, unusable, or obviously incorrect. Another 111 records (11.6%) contained usable, but incomplete data, or minor arithmetic errors. Thus about 70% of the audit records were complete and contained no obvious errors. While some problematic records were clearly due to human error (e.g., in addition), the large number of incorrect and/or incomplete audit returns suggests that auditors found the instructions to be ambiguous or insufficiently specific. Thus one immediate recommendation is to revise and improve the instructions and the audit procedures, and to refine the definitions of the data to be reported. The statistical analysis in this report deals with the 783 records that are sufficiently complete to perform the analysis.
Version 0.1 of this report, issued on January 30, 2008, identified 44 records with discrepancies of 8 (eight) or more between the machine-counted totals and hand-counted audit returns, although in all such cases the discrepancies did not come close to affecting the outcome of the election. Subsequently, SOTS personnel performed a review of these returns, which in some cases required second hand counting of the ballots. As the result, the discrepancies were substantially reduced or eliminated. The results from the re-audit were communicated to the Center on March 20, 2008. This reconciliation focused on the differences between the machine-counted totals and hand-counted totals. The number of questionable ballots was not separately identified in 41 out of 44 revised records. Consequently this revised report has two parts. In the first part it deals with 742 records (739 from the original data plus 3 from the re-audit) for which we repeat the analysis as done in the version 0.1 of the report. In the second part we present simplified analysis for the 41 remaining records from the re-audit.
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Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 5258
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 1:18 pm: |
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And what about the last sentence in the 3rd paragraph?! (That actual discrepancies were three times the amount reported.) |
Hugh W. Busey
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Hbusey
Post Number: 10
Registered: 7-2007
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 2:58 pm: |
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Is Prof. Shvartsman saying that 30% of the 958 reports UCONN received for auditing contained errors that made them unusable in the audit? My Lord, what were we paying for? How much confidence can we have in the rest of the audit? In the election for that matter?
We citizens have some serious questions to ask!
Hugh |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 9662
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 - 6:15 pm: |
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I'm sure those numbers are correct. Along the "my lord what are we paying for" line, citizen reconciliations of the county clerk documents and voting machine poll tapes, tabulations etc, ballot reconciliations often come up with 70 percent of the forms not in order, missing, don't add up, etc. Mind you, the county clerks usually handle multi-million-dollar budgets and sometimes their title is "county auditor".
You are exactly right in your framing of the issue.
See information that precedes this post, contributed by Connecticut citizens Hugh Busey and Christine Reid.
Impact on 2008 Election - Affects 2008 Diebold/Premier-counted elections in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut, demonstrates systemic failures in memory card integrity and chain of custody procedures.
See also: Missing Connecticut Audit Report - http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/134/77988.html
And the CT memory card report showing unexamined duplicate cards and "junk data" found on LHS Associates-programmed memory cards:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/134/77978.html
What you can do about it:
BEFORE THE ELECTION
1) Push for immediate implementation of the Humboldt County, California "Transparency Project"
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/76827.html
for November 2008 in the five states mentioned above; all memory cards in above states are programmed by a single vendor, LHS Associates.
2) Seek citizen inspections and full freedom of information access to all election-related records from LHS Associates, located in Methuen, Massachusetts. LHS election sales director and a key person on the LHS management team is Ken Hajjar, a convicted narcotics trafficker.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/71236.html
3) In the weeks before the election: Computer guys: Set up your own time-slice results auditing system using the Web Snapshot strategies found in the Black Box Voting Tool Kit 2008, page 48 (pg 24 in PDF browser).
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf
Internet searchers: Find and post links to the all live results-reporting sites for Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont. These are needed for the computer folks doing the Web Snapshot actions. Post the links in the appropriate geographic section of the Black Box Voting Forums. First preference to government sites, if/when you don't find those, locate media sites.
4) APPLY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CONNECTICUT AUDITS, and tell the truth about missing checks and balances
DURING THE ELECTION Observe and report memory card substitutions, voting machine substitutions, election-day service calls, and any presence of convicted narcotics trafficker/LHS sales team Kenneth Hajjar in any polling place or local elections office.
ELECTION NIGHT: Computer guys: Capture Web snapshot information, save it into databases (MS Access or Filemaker or other large-capacity database; it will max out Excel spreadsheets). SAVE the information for at least 90 days. Upload the information in text delimited form here at Black Box Voting - find appropriate state and location, use "upload" feature when posting a message as a registered user.
AFTER THE ELECTION Hopefully you have pre-arranged it, so you can PARTICIPATE in any audits for any state using LHS Associates to program the memory cards.
PUSH TO BAN THE COUNTING OF VOTES IN SECRET through meaningful reforms which provide truly public controls. Eliminate all forms of "Trust Me" elections. |
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