Voting

I went with the_archange1 to see Uncounted a couple nights ago. The thesis of the movie is that modern electronic voting machines are not only open to hacking, but there is extremely strong evidence that voter fraud has been committed in several elections including the 2004 Bush/Kerry presidential election.

Honestly, when are conspiracy theories ever true? Their case looked pretty solid though.

One of the more interesting statistics were anomalies in undervoting. An undervote is when a voter comes to the poll, votes in some races, but expresses no preference in others. This makes sense at times. Yesterday I could easily not have had an opinion on who the Democrat candidate for city council should be.

In presidential elections there tends to be an undervote of 1-3%. In New Mexico in 2004 in certain Native American and Hispanic precincts there were undervotes of up to 80%. 4 out of 5 people went to the poll and just didn’t have an opinion on who the President should be. It’s particularly interesting that it happened in Democratic strongholds.

There was also an analysis of a comparison between the exit polls and the actual results. I’m actually in a stats class right now and I have a newfound respect for the degree to which studies and statistical analysis have a serious mathematical basis. The issue wasn’t simply that the polling data disagreed with the result. There could have been some unseen factor to push error beyond any previous amount of error they’ve seen. It was that over and over the errors favored Bush.

There’s quite a bit more about things like the suspicious proportioning of voting machines that had primarily low-income minorities standing in line to vote in Ohio for up to 12 hours. I’d highly recommend watching the movie if you have a chance.

If you happen to live in Tennessee, you can support SB1363/HB1256 which would remove Tennessee from the 12 states that allow voting machines with no paper trail whatsoever. (With no paper trail the vote count is whatever the machine tells you it is and there is no method for verification. If nothing else, anyone who has dealt with a computer should know better than to do this. Absolutely no programmer writes bug-free code all the time.)

Even if you don’t think there’s been a conspiracy, there’s no reason not to prevent one in the future.