- I met with the Vote in the Sunshine crew on the morning
of the Straw Poll in Ames. They were told by the Iowa GOP that there
would be a total of 60 shiny new Diebold Accuvote Optical Scan machines
deployed in 3 separate locations. As the Des Moines Register stated on
August 10:
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- "Employees of the Story County elections office
will oversee the casting of ballots at 60 machines at three buildings
on the Iowa State University campus."
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- I helped with vote verification in the morning and walked
around the venue during the afternoon. There was no shortage of voters
queuing up to vote from my observations, with long lines snaking around
the three voting locations, especially in the early voting.
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- As to the voting machine 'malfunctions', the Des Moines
Register said this:
- "Voting machine difficulties delayed the announcement
of the vote totals. About 1,500 ballots needed to be recounted, said Mary
Tiffany, a spokeswoman for Republican Party of Iowa.
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- Two machines caused the problem, said State Auditor David
Vaudt. "What likely happened is someone submitted their ballot too
quickly after the other," he said. The ballots from those machines
were hand counted, then re-fed into the system to recalculate the vote.
A campaign poll-watcher said in one instance, a black box contained 500
paper ballots but the machine's memory said it had scanned in 498."
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- Because of the heat most folks were at least trying to
get in the shortest lines they could find, and it did not appear that
any of the 3 locations were underutilized.
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- FUZZY MATH #1
- So we know from the state Auditor that one 'problem'
machine contained 500 votes. Assuming most machines contained a similar
pattern of use, then they should also contain about the same number of
votes. 60 (machines) x 500 = 30,000 votes. That is more than TWICE as
many as the official count. Based on a total vote count of 14,301, if
all machines were used about equally, then the average number of votes
per machine SHOULD have been 238 {14,301 (total votes) / 60 (machines)
= 238 votes per machine}. What are the odds that one of the machines
that 'malfunctioned' and actually gave up an audited vote tally would
contain TWICE as many votes as the 'average' machine? But it gets worse
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- FUZZY MATH #2
- State Auditor David Vaudt (who unofficially certified
the vote count) said that there were only 2 machines out of the 60 that
were inconsistent (paper printout vs. electronic tabulation) and needed
to be recounted. Mary Tiffany of the Iowa GOP said that a total of approximately
1500 votes were re-fed into the Diebold machines.
- Since we know that there were only two machines that
were a problem and one of them contained 500 votes, then the second machine
must have contained about 1000 ballots, which is more than FOUR TIMES
what the 'average' machine should contain based on a total vote of 14,301.
It seems more likely that there were actually 3 problem machines, and
the true average per machine was about 500 votes, which would have resulted
in a total vote of about 30,000 which is twice the official total vote
count.
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- Also note that 26,000 tickets were said to have been
sold, so we are asked to believe that only about half those people voted.
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- MORE UNUSUAL NUMBERS
- The day before the election the Iowa GOP stated on their
web site that they expected to raise $1.2 million in ticket sales, which
is 34,000+ tickets. This number jives much more closely with the fact
that the single audited machine (that we know of) contained 500 ballots.
The vast majority of tickets are pre-sold. Yet, on the day of the event
they said they had only sold about 26,000 tickets. How did they manage
to grossly overestimate the tickets to be sold (8000+ off) within 24 hours
of the event?
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- The evening before the Straw Poll, a local TV news show
carried a story that the expected attendance for the next day had just
been increased from a maximum of 40,000 up to 45,000 - 50,000. Yet,
according to the Iowa GOP, the very next day only 30,000 to 33,000 showed
up.
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- It is interesting to note that the Iowa GOP had an online
straw poll on their very own website (www.iowagop.net). Here are the
results as captured mid-day on August 9th:
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- The Diebold optical scan machines can be rigged in so
many different ways, it makes your head spin. This straw poll was owned
end-to-end by the Iowa GOP, but for a detailed 'how-to' on rigging your
own straw poll using AccuVote Optical Scan voting terminals, read this
document: http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/OS-Report_files/uconn- report-os.pdf
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- Under scrutiny, the Iowa Straw Poll seems to suffer from
fuzzy math.
- Anybody who assumes the final vote count was accurate
suffers from fuzzy thinking
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- - A Reader
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