Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is fighting to prevent access to voting machine records by a Wichita State University statistician.
Yesterday, a court filing by the SoS argued that, 1) the Kansas open records act doesn't apply, 2) they are prohibited from disclosure by statue, 3) the SoS is not the custodian, it's the county, and, in an earlier filing, 4) it's hard to copy the records.
Surprisingly, discussion around the original suit in March/April seems to be close to nil, even on DailyKos. Combined with other questions that have arisen, and concrete cases of insecure voting machines, I hope pressure can be raised to ensure disclosure is required.
Back in March or April, the chief statistician of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University filed suit to gain access to paper tape records generated by voting machines in Kansas. More details below, but the only Kossack responses I could find were 1) leviabowles who noted the story and concluded,
Essentially, I believe that other underlying demographic factors are likely to blame, and it is somewhat reckless to mention the word fraud publicly at this point.
and 2) melcat
diaried about it back in July, adding references to other cases of questionable voting machine results, including statements by Diebold officials, Volusia County FL, blackboxvoting.org, and reporting that thebradblog has followed. Note: as pointed out in the comments, there have been many others who have diaried about this case. Apologies to those I've not mentioned.
Perhaps the caution expressed by leviabowles is warranted, and detailed reasons are given in the analysis link provided in the post.
A bit of context: The WSU statistician, Beth Clarkson, was motivated to check the records based on a pattern observed by "a small group of internet analysts" back in 2012. Two of the analysts, Francois Choquette and James Johnson, published the results as evidence of election manipulation in the 2012 Republican primaries and the 2008 presidential election.
Their findings (warning pdf) didn't seem to get much airing, perhaps due to their credentials as "internet analysts". Clarkson "couldn’t believe their findings" and set about double-checking their methods and results. Having satisfied herself that the methodology was sound, she analyzed returns from other elections and found the same pattern observed by Choquette and Johnson. The pattern described is an inflation in one candidate's proportion of the vote correlated to voting district size, with Romney benefiting in the 2012 primaries and McCain benefiting in 2008.
I am no expert in statistics. I understand concerns with the rigor of the analysis. However, access to the paper trail, the right to audit election results, shouldn't be in question.
I'll leave you with Clarkson's words,
I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pattern is there and one way to establish that it is or is not election fraud is to go and do a physical audit of paper records of voting machines.
9:58 AM PT: Pam has added some great references in the comments below:
- Find out what type of voting machines are used in your district at http://verifiedvoting.org/....
- Learn more about audits and recounts at http://ceimn.org and https://www.verifiedvoting.org/...