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The Frankenvote
Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:46 am
by _bcspace
Minnesota Ripe for Election FraudWhen voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.
Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.
Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.
Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.
To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.
Re: The Frankenvote
Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 6:25 pm
by _Droopy
Franken is up the the same tricks Gore deployed in Florida in 2000.
If God does not exist, all chads are permitted...
Re: The Frankenvote
Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 5:27 pm
by _Tarski
Droopy wrote:Franken is up the the same tricks Gore deployed in Florida in 2000.
If God does not exist, all chads are permitted...
Do you not know what the word "automatic" means- as in "automatic recount"?
Re: The Frankenvote
Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 5:36 pm
by _antishock8
Re: The Frankenvote
Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 9:05 pm
by _Sethbag
I've always had this niggling feeling that our election system is horribly vulnerable to fraud, if people are determined to win. When millions of votes are cast in dozens of counties, at hundreds or even thousands of locations, then literally thousands of election workers will have access to the votes at some point. When an election comes down to just a couple of hundred votes, how difficult would it be, really, to come up with a couple hundred votes for your guy?
When I was in basic training in the Army, I was put on a detail with another private to drive to a supply depot with one of my drill sergeants and help turn in all of our sleeping bags. The drill sergeant told me, before we went in to the depot, that we were missing one sleeping bag, and that somehow or other, we had to make it look as if we'd turned in the correct amount, or someone would have to fork out for it, and it was a lot of money. I was the one who counted the bags as we threw them off the truck, under the hawklike watch of the supply manager. Somehow, there was enough motion, enough bags coming off, fast enough, that at one point I simply incremented my count by 2 instead of 1, and the supply manager never noticed. We turned in the correct number of sleeping bags after all.
Now, multiply that by thousands of election workers, with votes coming from thousands of different locations, plus all the mail-in votes, the provisional votes, etc. Seriously, how difficult would it really be?
You want something to blow your mind, look at Alaska. I read yesterday that out of the entire state's votes, Ted "series of tubes" Stevens was now behind by three votes. One family gets a flat tire on the way to the polls, and the whole election result is different. Or, put differently, four election workers, out of hundreds or thousands, manage to slip in just one extra vote, and the election result is different.
Forget statistical margin of error - these razor-thin election results fall well within the "margin of mischief", where it is literally impossible to trust that things haven't been tampered with. It's simply impossible to guarantee that a result this close can't be tampered with. And this goes doubly for a "hand" recount. If anything, a "hand" recount is even worse.
