New Exit Polling system automated fail safes never kicked in!

[SoCalDemocrat]

I found this in cache. Original story was deleted. It says the new polling consortium had automated checks in place to spit out warnings if the exit polls didn't match the results!

So what happened yesterday? Discrepancies in EVoting states were outside of the expected margin of error. Why didn't the fail safe systems kick in? Why didn't the media report the discrepancy and investigate it?

Instead of warning the public of possible irregularities, the Bush Administration condemned the exit polls and the news consortium modified its exit poll data during the wee hours of the morning so it would conform to the then known actual results!

"Precautions are being taken to guard against human error as well. Using past elections as a guide, the AP's computer system is designed to spit out a warning if figures are entered that are significantly at odds with expected patterns - just to make sure the numbers are rechecked."

-----------------

Networks to test new exit polling system

By DAVID BAUDER
AP TELEVISION WRITER

NEW YORK -- Determined to avoid a repeat of high-profile failures in 2000 and 2002, television networks will rely on new systems on Nov. 2 to help project election winners and analyze why voters made their choices. And they have turned to The Associated Press to count the vote for them.

The six news organizations that have formed the National Election Pool - ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the AP - say they're confident things will go better this time, based on test runs and the experience of people involved.

Still, the TV networks said they would be careful projecting winners after prematurely declaring Florida, and the 2000 election, for George W. Bush. (The AP did not declare Bush the winner on election night). The election wasn't ultimately determined for weeks after vote recounts and court fights.

"We're just going to really, really be cautious," said Marty Ryan, Fox News Channel's executive producer for political coverage. "When we think we have it, we'll wait a few minutes and look again. Then we'll wait a few minutes and look again."

The networks blamed Voter News Service, the company they had formed to count votes and conduct exit polls, for faulty data that led to the wrong calls in 2000. VNS tried to rebuild its system, but it broke down on election night 2002 and failed to provide usable exit polling information. VNS was then disbanded.



This time, the news organizations contracted with two veteran polling companies - Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research - to conduct exit polls. They agreed that the AP - which has been tallying votes in elections since 1848 - would be their sole source for vote counts, and the news cooperative has significantly beefed up its system in response.

Each of the organizations will use data provided by NEP to make its own projections election night. The organizations also have promised, for the first time in a presidential election, not to call states that span two time zones until all of the polling places have closed.

One flaw exposed in 2000 - the failure of VNS to account for the increased use of absentee ballots - has been corrected, said Linda Mason of CBS News, an NEP spokeswoman. Telephone surveys of people voting by absentee ballots will be conducted in 13 states this year, instead of just three.

Mason said two other technical adjustments were made to increase reliability: NEP will conduct exit polling in more voter precincts and have access to a greater number of past vote counts to use on a comparison basis.

"The things that clearly went wrong four years ago, it's hard to imagine them going wrong again with what they've done with this system," said David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief.

Both the exit polls and vote counts worked with no serious problems during the 2004 primaries and in stress tests, network officials said. Full dress rehearsals will be conducted on Oct. 23 and 30.

Several networks promised to do a better job explaining to viewers how they make projections and even to assign correspondents to their decision desks. ABC has increased training given to its election night team, and CNN is hiring its own statistical analysts to pore over data.

"Every election is different," said Bill Wheatley, NBC News vice president. "In this one, we're cognizant of the fact that additional absentee ballots are being cast, registration levels are up and there may be additional disputes over the reliability of voting machines. We'll factor all of these into our deliberations."

Four years ago, the networks relied on VNS for its count of the actual votes and used the AP's vote-counting as a backup. Now, the AP will go it alone.

The AP will have stringers calling in results from each of the nation's 4,600 counties. Hundreds of people will be assigned to input the information into computers, and others will monitor the systems to guard against problems. In all, a total of about 5,500 people will be working on AP's vote count on election night.

"We have real confidence in the reliability of the AP's vote count," said Kathleen Carroll, AP senior vice president and executive editor. "We also have enormous confidence in the journalists in the field and the bureau chiefs who will be using the data and their experience when they call winners in the race."

The AP relied on that experience on election night 2000 to resist calling the election for Bush, despite enormous pressure after the networks had made their projections.

Most of the AP election night staff has done the job before, said Tom Jory, the cooperative's director of elections tabulations. The AP also has built in new system redundancies to protect against computer or telephone system failures, he said.

Precautions are being taken to guard against human error as well. Using past elections as a guide, the AP's computer system is designed to spit out a warning if figures are entered that are significantly at odds with expected patterns - just to make sure the numbers are rechecked.

"The AP has a long history of doing these things in general," said Dan Merkle, ABC News decision desk director. "With these other improvements, we feel very confident in the AP."

[SoCalDemocrat]

1. Here are the screen shots again

of the exit polling data being modified late last night (about 1:30am CST).

BEFORE:


AFTER:

[Milo_Bloom]

12. PROOF the second numbers are BULL!!!

If look at the two sceens, the sample size changed from 1963 to 2020. Well, they will try to argue that they FOUND more responses and added them into the sample, thereby better reflecting the actual responses. But, no... the math doesn't work.

Here is a quick analysis!

The first sample was 1963 (53% women, 47% men) Means the sample was 1040.39 women and 922.61 men. Since they didn't poll people's parts, we can round the numbers and presume 1040 women responded and 923 men. Of those we get the following from the first sample

51% of men voted for Kerry = 923 * .51 = 470.73 men or 471 men said they voted for Kerry.

53% of women voted for Kerry = 1040 * .53 = 551.2 or 551 women said they voted for Kerry.

NOW, let's look at the second sample

This sample was 2020 (53% women, 47% men) This means the sample was 1070.60 women & 949.4 men. Again, they didn't poll body parts so we get 1071 women and 949 men.

47% of men voted for Kerry = 949 * .47 = 446.03 men or 446 men said they voted for Kerry.

50% of women voted for Kerry = 1071 * .50 = 535.5 women or 535 women said they voted for Kerry.


Do you see the problem?

In Sample #1 1022 people said they voted for Kerry.

In Sample #2 only 981 people said they voted for Kerry.

HOWEVER, there was only one set of exit poll data, so WHERE DID THIS SECOND SAMPLE COME FROM????????

[Clovis Sangrail]

13. hmmmm... something's wrong

According to those poll screen captures, Kerry's total votes went DOWN after more people were polled.

1963 respondents
Kerry Votes
M: 470.53
F: 551.40

2020 respondents
Kerry Votes
M: 446.21
F: 535.1

What are the possible explanations for this?
(aside from CNN cooking the numbers)

[SoCalDemocrat]

14. I think they're covering their butts

They took so much heat in 2000 for their poll results that they have a motive to try and make their results match. It may be as simple as that. Doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory that they're covering up for Diebold.

Of course, that also does not explain the big discrepancies in the polling results vs. the actual results where Bush was up 5% in many cases in EVoting states w/o paper audit trails.

We need to demand accountability now!

[RT Atlanta]

2. How do we fight this?

Thanks for your hard work SoCal - what can we do to bring this to see light of day?

[SoCalDemocrat]

3. Keep digging

We need the raw exit polling data taken on election day.

We also need the 2002 election data by precinct showing how many persons voted, what the exit polls showed, and the actual results.

Aside from finding more sources, email the news networks and ask them to investigate. Why didn't they keep their pledge to America that they made after 2000? Why were the irregularities covered up instead of reported?

Contact groups that can help us, like the DNC, MoveOn, BlackBoxVoting, etc.

Contact the ACLU and ask them to obtain the exit poll data and help us investigate.

[SoCalDemocrat]

4. VNS had astronomical success with exit poll predictions

VNS was extremely accurate in its predictions. It hit a snag in 2000 in the Florida election. I'm doubting now that the problem was VNS and the exit polls. It was the Electronic Voting systems.

---

http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/election/2002/problems/vns-finch.asp

According to Marjorie Connelly, VNS's track record has been reliable overall. "They have astronomical numbers of races they have called, and you could count the reversals on one hand -- Florida was one of them," said Connelly, "When they make a bad call, they reverse it very quickly."

[SoCalDemocrat]

5. Black Box Voting

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm

"DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
- Washington Post Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22

Yes. Something very strange happened in Volusia County on election night November 2000, the night that first Gore won Florida, then Bush, and then as everybody can so well remember there was a tie.

Something strange indeed. But what exactly? In the above report ( click for full version), written days after the election, hotshot Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank goes on to attribute the strange 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia's precinct 216 to an apparently innocent cause.

"…. faulty 'memory cards' in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed," he wrote.

But thanks to recent investigations into Black Box Voting by Washington State writer Bev Harris we now know this explanation is not correct. In fact it is not even in the ballpark.

According to recently discovered internal Diebold Election Systems memos, Global Election Systems' (which was later purchased by Diebold) own technical staff were also stumped by the events in Volusia County/

In Chapter 11 of her new book "Black Box Voting In the 21st Century" released early today in .PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at Scoop Ms Harris observes.


"If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears."
Working in parallel with Ms Harris Scoop has also been inquiring into the events on election night in Volusia county. Much of the material that follows is similar to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her book.

The starting point in this shocking discovery about election 2000 came in a series of internal Diebold ES technical support memos.

The following is an abbreviated version of the exchange concerning the peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of research the exchange is included in full as an Appendix to this report (APPENDIX TWO). The discussion took place in early 2001 as an audit was underway in Volusia county into the events.

[SoCalDemocrat]

6. VNS called it correctly in 2000 Florida election

VNS was right. The X factor was the Diebold EVoting machines.

---

7:40 PM: The VNS computation shows a "call" status in the Florida Presidential race. This status means that statistically Gore is leading, but the Decision Team needs to check more data.

What we know from the memos can be summarised as follows:

- Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny's precinct 216, the second one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It automatically replaced the first card's results and reduced Gore's total by 16,022 votes and added several thousand votes to Bush plus a variety of minor candidates;
- Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors, indicating (contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;
- After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the mistake was rectified;
- The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by chance.);
- According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card being corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less than 60,000 to 1;
- The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a reasonable possibility that the second card was part of deliberate conspiracy to rig the election results.

[SoCalDemocrat]

7. 2000 all over again

"Unwilling to take the television networks reports at face value, one of Gore’s campaign staffers did a little investigating and discovered that the networks erred in stating that 50,000 votes from Volusia county were cast for Bush. Turns out that Gore was ahead by 13,000 votes in Volusia and trailing Bush by 6,000 votes overall. Something was wrong in Volusia it would be revealed later.

[Straight Shooter]

8. It was all FAIL and no SAFE

bush steals the oval office with the same cloud of fraud hanging over his head.

New bumper sticker: Not my president, AGAIN

[SoCalDemocrat]

9. More on Florida

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-09.htm


Florida law requires a manual recount in any race with a victory margin of one-quarter of 1 percent or less. In April, Hood issued an order prohibiting manual recounts on touch screens. The rule was struck down after the ACLU suit. On Oct. 15, exasperated officials issued new guidelines for recounting virtual votes.

The rules require election administrators to install updated software that can search electronic ballot records and tally the number of ballots in which not every race was voted on.

County election supervisors must print out — like a cash register tally of a day's sales — a detailed record of all incomplete ballots to see if they match the number of incomplete ballots the computer said existed when polls closed.

If the numbers don't match, supervisors will recount up to two more times.

It's unclear what would happen if thousands of votes went missing, but election officials insist the safeguards are adequate — for the initial counts and for recounts.

"These systems go through rigorous tests, and before each and every election they are checked again," said Hood spokeswoman Alia Faraj. "When the tests are completed, they're sealed and secured, and the seal is only broken on election day. The systems are working the way they're supposed to."

[SoCalDemocrat]

10. More EVoting woes

---
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65388,00.html?tw=wn_story_top5

Early voting and touch-screen equipment were introduced in Florida after the 2000 election, in which this crucial state decided the result by only 537 votes and introduced topics such as butterfly ballots and hanging chads to the national debate. The early voting continues at a limited number of sites in each county until Election Day, when regular polling places will be open.

Protesters gathered outside the Duval County election supervisor's office Monday because the county, the state's most populous, had only one voting site. A city attorney said it said it was too late to open new sites, even though the city council had committed more money to the idea.

Broward County had 14 voting sites but several of them had trouble linking polling station laptop computers with the supervisor's office, said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood. The computers are used to confirm voter eligibility. Workers used paper lists and called the supervisor's office in Fort Lauderdale to verify eligibility, Nash said.

[SoCalDemocrat]

11. GOP blocked lawsuit to exampine EVoting machines

The GOP has never been big on transparency. Still I feel it is our right as citizens to review these machines and ensure that everything is above board.

Why would the GOP want to prevent their being examined for potential voting fraud?

#1 The DNC is not allowed to inspect the machines.

#2 The DNC is not allowed to know how the votes are counted.

------------------------

The Neocon election rigging juggernaut lurches forward unstoppable in the guise of so-called election reform. Three Republican dominated corporations now control over 80% of the vote count in the United States: Sequoia Voting Systems Inc; Electronic Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S); and Diebold" Inc. As this transition has taken place, a pattern of election upsets which overwhelmingly favor Republican candidates is emerging. These are only test runs in preparation for the 2004 presidential selection. The Neocons have determined that elections can be manipulated easily with the new touch screen voting systems and when accompanied by a media pounding of lies the public will accept the rigged election results as fact. The greatest advantage of the new touch screen voting scam is the removal of a paper trail and the blockage of access to the inner workings of the software.

When a voter touches the screen to select a candidate there is no confirmation that the machine has actually registered the correct selection. In the old punch-card and fill-in-the-circle paper systems, voters could see their choice marked on the ballot. In the event of any confusion or question, a record of the vote existed and a recount was possible. Since the new electronic systems leave no paper trail there can be no recount and the results must be accepted as fact. Attempts to examine the code used by the machines in Florida were blocked in the courts by the GOP citing, "proprietary/trade secrecy" protections under a law, which made it impossible for the DNC to ascertain how the machines tabulated votes.