{"id":1595,"date":"2008-01-10T08:29:25","date_gmt":"2008-01-10T08:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-01-17T16:16:54","modified_gmt":"2008-01-17T16:16:54","slug":"diebold_tawana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1595","title":{"rendered":"Diebold, Tawana Brawley, and The Brad Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update:<\/b> Brad called, and disagrees with the points I’m trying to make, and was deeply unhappy both at the way I characterized him and at the fact that I hadn’t made an effort to contact him before slamming him publicly as I did. He’s wrong, I think, on the substance, and absolutely right on the style. The tone of this post is far more hostile than it should have been, and while I am ‘torqued’ at the way he’s dealing with the issue, and disagree with him pretty substantially, I want to apologize both for not letting him know I thought he was wrong and for the tone I take below.<\/b> My bad, and I thought I’d learned that lesson<\/a>. Maybe this time.<\/i><\/p>\n

I actually have met and personally like Brad of BradBlog; while I might have been on the voting machine issue early, he was tireless in raising awareness on the issue and deserves tons of credit for that.<\/p>\n

Now I kind of think he deserves a boot to the head (from the Frantics sketch, folks, calm down). He’s gone off the deep end<\/a>, suggesting that the difference between polls and results<\/a> in NH was the result of a Diebold conspiracy. No, really.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why Obama would have conceded so soon, given the virtually inexplicable turn of events in New Hampshire tonight.<\/p>\n

\nWhat’s going on here? Before proceeding, I recommend you read the third section of the post I just ran an hour or so ago, concerning the way the ballots are counted in New Hampshire, largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly controlled and programmed by a very very bad company named LHS Associates. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, to boot, one of the principals in LHS may have dealt drugs back in 1990 – 18 years ago<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Now I have no idea if LHS is a good company or a bad one (some of the things Brad points out are certainly bad, and the Diebold machines themselves aren’t good news). But it gets my back up a bit when liberals – who ought to believe in rehabilitation – suddenly drag out irrelevant 20-year old history and wave it as a bloody shirt to make an argument.<\/p>\n

There’s a better quick test, which is to look at the paper counts vs. electronic (about 25% of NH was on paper) and see if the results differed wildly. Commenter NB over at Pollster.com<\/a> did just that:<\/p>\n

Regarding the fraud hypothesis:<\/p>\n

\nOn BradBlog, they link to this page — http:\/\/ronrox.com\/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS — which has the vote totals by township, along with the voting method (electronic or paper).<\/p>\n

\nOne basic question is whether paper-voting towns produced different results from electronic-voting towns. Of course, town size correlates strongly both with voting method and the Clinton\/Obama ratio. So I took the numbers above and did basic matching using the only data I had, total votes, which I presumed correlated with town size, and thus (hopefully) with other important demographic characteristics. That is, I took the 91 towns that voted electronically and matched each one (using matchit in R) with a similarly sized paper-voting town, and then compared the vote percentages for Clinton and Obama in those two populations. The results?<\/p>\n

\n…………….Cl …. Ed .. Ob
\nElectronic…. 39.2%..17.5%..35.8%
\nPaper……… 38.5%..18.0%..36.1%<\/p>\n

\nIe, the two voting types seem to have produced nearly identical results. Of course, more demographic data to match on would be nice, but I think this puts a big burden of proof on the doubters.<\/p>\n

\nPosted by: NB | January 9, 2008 10:58 PM<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve gotta call bullshit on this one, and suggest that hysteria like this distracts from and devalues the real problems with voting security as badly as Tawana Brawley and Crystal Magnum distracted from and devalued the real problems of violence against women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brad Blog is all over the New Hampshire voting results in a marvelous, fact-free kind of way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}