2012 Roundup

[RottingCorpse]

Watching the debate last night reminded me why I've done my best to ignore this election.

How ever, Mitt's "binder full of women" comment has gone viral:

http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/

[nacho]

Ugh.

[RottingCorpse]

The binder shit is fucking funny.

[nacho]

I found his claim that the US is "on the road to Greece" the funniest comment of the evening. And the fact that Obama nodded happily to that and had no rebuttal.

[monkey!]

I think the states has been on the road to Greece since they began naming so many towns after Greek places, and deriving many sodality structures from the Greek alphabet.

[nacho]

Must be cocktail time in Paris!

[monkey!]

It's always cocktail time in Paris.

[RottingCorpse]

http://rsnorg.org/news-section2/318-66/14223-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections-part-i

Retired NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Elections Part I

By Denis Campbell, LA Progressive

28 October 12

Why is Mitt Romney so confident? In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It's a math problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.

This goes well beyond Romney's investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold's close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate's son Tagg Romney) there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes.

A retired NSA analyst has spent several sleepless nights applying a simple formula to past election results across Arizona. His results showed across-the-board systemic election fraud on a coordinated and massive scale. But the analysis indicated that this only happens in larger precincts because anomalies in small precincts can be more easily detected.

"Easy to Cheat"

Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a 2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts. Said Duniho, "It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can't see what is going on in the machine."

When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to  20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.

Since sifting through and decoding massive amounts of data was his work for decades on behalf of the National Security Agency, he wanted to understand why this was ONLY happening in large precincts.

Nose Counting

The idea of examining large precinct results came via a link to a report written by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Choquette became curious about South Carolina primary results in the February Republican contest. There a poll observer noted an unusually big gain of votes for Mitt Romney in larger precincts than in smaller ones. Choquette wanted to know why?

He examined and applied all of the normal statistical markers to see where a variance might occur: income level, population density, race, urban vs. rural, even party registration numbers. He found no correlation to explain why Romney votes trended upward while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward -yet only in large precincts.

Choquette then looked at all 50 states and found roughly a 10% switch in votes from GOP to Democrat everywhere except Utah, where the presumption was, as it was Mitt's religious home state and very conservative, there was no chance of Romney losing.

Choquette even saw in Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and its suburbs, that in 2008 Romney used this technique against John McCain. But McCain beat him by too much for a 10% fraud gain to matter. McCain tried to do the same thing in the general election to President Obama but 9 million votes nationally were too many to make up.

Examining every county across America was too massive an undertaking for any one person so he included a simple set of instructions and encouraged others to do the same with raw vote totals in their county/state.

        Download the text files of all raw actual vote results by precinct from the Secretary of State's Office.

        Arrange them in precinct order.

        Put in all of the candidate totals for each precinct.

        Sort the data by total vote smallest on the top.

Now here it gets a bit dense: He needed to add columns that show cumulative totals by candidate then compare them by candidate to establish trend lines.

That reveals trends should remain statistically constant throughout an election.

Stealing Votes

But as the spreadsheet shows, the larger the precinct, the numbers start to change dramatically.

"If percentages did not change from one precinct to the next, we would see a flat line, but what we are seeing is sloped lines downward for Democrats and upward for Republicans (or, in the case of the Presidential primary, upward for Romney and downward for his opponents), said Duniho."

In every election contest, the trend lines dramatically crossed for no apparent reason. It was revealed that votes were being systemically bled off for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and then being credited to Mitt Romney.

Once Duniho completed the spreadsheet, he pumped in actual vote totals from other Arizona election contests.

He looked at every 2010 race in Arizona from Governor Brewer to Senator McCain and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The trends lines all did the exact same thing. Someone had manipulated the election outcome, most likely one person inserting a programme inside the system's central computer… that flipped votes.

The results were astounding.

They showed that Governor Brewer actually lost her election and Gabby Gifford's razor thin less than 1% point re-election victory over Tea Party Conservative Jesse Kelly was closer to a 20 point victory for her.

Duniho added, "We need to have strong hand count audits to confirm the integrity of these elections. This means comparing hand counts with official reports of the election."

Ohio Precedent

This isn't the first time Republicans have been charged with vote theft. It happened in the 2004 presidential election, in Ohio and Florida. In Ohio, GOP consultant Michael Connell claimed that the vote count computer program he had created for the state had a trap door that shifted Democratic votes to the GOP.

He was subpoenaed as a witness in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and lawyers for the plaintiff asked the Dept. of Justice to provide him with security because there were two threats made against Connell's life by people associated with Karl Rove. But in Dec. 2008, before the trial began, Connell was killed in a plane crash outside Akron Ohio.

There were problems in Florida, as well.

A study by the Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley found that anomalies between Florida counties using touch-screen voting and those using other methods could not be explained statistically. Noting the higher-than-expected votes for Bush in three large Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, Michael Hout, a Berkeley professor who did the study said there were strong suspicions of vote-rigging.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," Hout said. "The study shows that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."

Don't Trust, Verify

Indeed the only way to 100% verify this election fraud would be through handcounts of ballots by precinct, matching those results to the reported totals. But as was mentioned earlier, a group in Pima County has been trying unsuccessfully to get access to ballots to conduct such a count for almost five years since anomalies first surfaced in voting machines in 2006.

Is there a judge in Arizona likely to suddenly reverse past trends and allow access to conduct such a handcount of ballots 12 days before a national election? And if not, why not? Maybe someone needs to commission the Anonymous hacker group to re-level the playing field because the courts are not going to do it.

The results of Duniho's analysis can only happen if votes are being stolen, and the only way that's possible is if the computerised machines are programmed to steal them. Welcome to Zimbabwe.

More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots thinking their vote will be fairly counted. It should be. Yet the crooks know they can safely flip up to 10% of votes without consequence. Anything more than that is statistically suspect.

President Obama won by such a huge margin in 2008 that even with this anomaly built into the system, he cruised to victory. This year the election is much closer. Can American democracy afford yet another election crisis placing three of the four last national Presidential election results in question or worse: The outcome was stolen, the outcome a victim of election theft?

Don't Take Our Word

Use the spreadsheet above to do the maths in your own state, county or precinct. The results are compelling. Then demand that the Justice Department stop this insane view that results need to be reported by 11 pm for the television networks. Demand hand ballot counts!

We use paper ballots in the UK and results do not even begin to trickle in until 3 am. The final outcome can take up to three days to finalise. But voters in Britain know the count is accurate because every ballot is transparently hand-counted. When I read this article that Serbia, Belarus and Kazakhstan were sending election monitors to watch the US Election?, I knew we'd jumped the shark.

We are already being victimized by vote fraud on a scale that, in another country, would lead to calls for international election monitors. It is time for Americans to stop being victims of ghosts in the machine.

[Reginald McGraw]

So if Romney doesn't win it's because this article was published, and if he does it's because not enough people saw it, right?

[nacho]

But what's in Al Capone's vault?

[RottingCorpse]

I posted this less because of my liberal leanings than that I do believe the election should be a fair fight from a vote counting perspective.

[monkey!]

Democracy, yeah!

[Reginald McGraw]

I posted this less because of my liberal leanings than that I do believe the election should be a fair fight from a vote counting perspective.

I think we all believe that, but this article seems very sketchy on details...and heavy on the conspiracy.

[RottingCorpse]

We've all lamented about how polarized the U.S. has become and how destructive it is in the long run. This election shouldn't be nearly as close as it is because let's be honest, Mitt Romney is about as good a candidate as John Kerry was.

This article give me hope though.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/people-who-cant-do-math-are-so-mad-nate-silver/58460/

People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver

 The New York Times' Nate Silver has created a model to predict the outcome of the presidential election that's watched by just about every pundit, and yet Silver's model refuses to perfectly reflect the conventional wisdom spouted by just about every pundit. The pundits do not like this! Silver's FiveThirtyEight model uses math to show that President Obama has a 74.6 percent chance of beating Mitt Romney, even though Romney has unmeasurable things like "momentum" as well as newspaper endorsements, plus a lead in several national polls. Obama's chances remain high, Silver explains, because he has a significant lead in enough swing states to win the needed 270 electoral college votes. The latest pundit outraged that Silver's model doesn't feel right is MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who ranted Monday morning:

    "Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president's going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6 percent -- they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning.

    .... Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue [that] they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days, because they're jokes."

Scarborough is very committed to defending what feels true to him, even when it's not true. In June, he railed that The New York Times kept writing stories making fun of Romney for being rich, but it never made fun of John Kerry and his ice chalet in 2004. When confronted with the fact that he was completely wrong -- The Times covered that ice chalet plenty, it turns out -- Scarborough stuck with his analysis, saying "the general impressions of people like myself … does count in the perspective that active news consumers have."

Now Scarborough wants his general impression of the polls to count, too. He isn't the only Silver-basher who is unable to use numbers to explain why the forecaster is so wrong. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote a couple weeks ago that despite Silver's model showing a likely Obama victory, "my guess is that, right now, it’s probably a 50-50 proposition." The National Review's Josh Jordan's critique is more related to numbers than feelings, saying Silver's polling average is different than the Real Clear Politics average, because Silver weighs polls, while RCP averages them equally. But Silver does this because some pollsters have a better track record than others, and some have a clear partisan tilt, left or right. If his weighting is wrong, we'll know next week. Update: Politico contributes its own math-free critique: "For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging."

Perhaps the most telling critique of Silver's model comes from the people most deeply invested in it being wrong. Romney aides "laugh and roll their eyes when reporters tease them with mentions of the model," BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins reports. One adviser, though, offers an analysis more closely tied to real data, saying, in Coppins' paraphrase, "FiveThirtyEight could well give them a better chance of victory as the swing state polls tighten in the final days of the race." In other words, if the state polls change, so will Silver's model. Which is pretty much what Silver himself would say.

[Reginald McGraw]

I agree with the stat guy. I don't see any way Romney can win.

Could he be close in the popular vote? Yes. Could he win the electoral vote? It's not even really close. If Romney wins Florida (he may) and Ohio (he won't), big electoral hauls, he will still likely lose the election.

I like to go here:
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/ecalculator?hpt=po_c1#?battleground

You can play with different scenarios and predict a winner.

So it looks like Obama's ahead, but it's still undecided, right?

Now I add in this different CNN page:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/10/politics/poll.of.polls/index.html?hpt=po_r1

So yeah, not sure how accurate these polls are, but they update them and give you a little picture of how things are going in all those yellow undecided states from the first page.

You can see that Obama has a lead, sometimes sizable in every single one except Florida.

Why aren't they showing that on their big electoral map? Because they'd have to predict that Obama will win...almost a week before the election!! Can't lose all those page views between now and then!

So yeah, Obama wins.