This section is dedicated to reports and discussions of parallel elections and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach to independent verification of official election results, as compared to other means such as exit polling and auditing.
By Marj Creech [1]
Dec. 10, 2006
One of the things a parallel election can do that an audit, a recount , or a conventional exit poll usually does not do, is to look at whole ballots from the individual voters. Recounts, audits, and conventional exit polls usually determine total numbers of votes for a specific race, but unless the ballots are photographed or photocopied, as is being done in Ohio for the 2004 ballots, whole ballot examination is unavailable.
Why would we want whole ballot information? Two reasons would be:
1) to study voting trends, e.g., did people who voted mostly a Republican ballot vote for one Democratic candidate, and
2) to find or disprove fraud, e.g., if a candidate “down-ticket,” say for a judgeship, gets significantly more party votes than the lead candidate, say for governor, in the official results, does the sample of ballots disprove or support this anomaly?
Another example: if a large number of voters voted BOTH against the one-man-one-woman marriage amendment (and so were pro-gay) AND for George W. Bush, in Delaware County Ohio in 2004--an unlikely event according to Richard Hayes Phillips and other researchers--does a sampling of ballots bear this out?
Ideally we would want a large sample of whole ballots from across the area being sampled. Photographing all the ballots from several precincts where the anomalies occurred shows something significant no doubt, but such ballots are not available to researchers for months, sometimes years after the election in question, due to lawsuits or stonewalling by election officials.
Timely study of ballots is available only through polling, either conventional exit polling, where data is obtained by the pollster for several candidates and issues for each individual voter, or through parallel election polling, where a sampling of a precinct’s voters is obtained on a secret, written “facsimile ballot.”
Granted that a parallel election may not attract a “random sample” of the voters—indications from four different elections in Ohio of from one to four precincts per election show that Democrats and/or left-leaning participants are sampled more heavily in parallel elections than Republicans or right-leaning participants. However, in whole-ballot investigation, that is not a problem, or at least, it can be taken into consideration.
For instance, in the highly contested 2006 Kilroy-Pryce Congressional race in the Fifteenth District of Ohio, Franklin County official recount results show that there were a number of voters who voted a straight Democrat ticket except they votedPryce(R) and not Kilroy (D) for US Congress. How likely is that?
Let’s look at the parallel ballots received by voters exiting from four precincts in Clintonville, a mostly professional-class neighborhood just north of the city of Columbus. In particular, let’s look at people who voted Republican for all candidates except for Kilroy, and people who voted for all Democrat candidates except for Pryce.
Note that only five candidate races and five issue contests were on the parallel ballot, in order to simplify and keep the ballot to one page.
First, a breakdown of voters by party preference as indicated on their ballot choices in each of the four precincts: (sorry the chart broke down in e-transmission, but I think you can figure it out--email me if not.)
Precinct in Clintonville
19C 19D 20A 20D UNK TOTAL
total number of parallel
voters, all parties 141 163 96 162 64 626
total number of Republican
voters, at least 4 out of 5 ,
all four precincts 23 21 7 30 5 86
Republican, 5 of 5 candidates 13 17 4 19 4 57
R, 4 of 5 candidates 10 4 3 11 1 29
R, 3 of 5 candidates 4 4 2 4 2 16
Total number of Democrat
Voters, at least 4 out of 5,
All four precincts 109 129 86 122 54 500
Democrat, 5 of 5 candidates 86 100 67 101 32 386
D, 4 of 5 candidates 23 29 19 21 22 114
D, 3 of 5 candidates 2 4 1 1 1 9
Neither party dominates
(voted third party or no vote
for candidate or candidates) 3 3 0 5 2 13
Neither party dominates
and 3/2 split (R & D)
combined, i.e.,
“Independent” Voters 9 13 3 10 5 40
Are Ohio Voters REALLY Independent?
1. Most Ohioans, some 70% or more, do not register as Democrats or Republicans (although they are only required to do so when voting in a primary; their last primary would reflect their most recent party affiliation). About half of the voters in this ward in Clintonville are registered as Democrat or Republican, but in actual voting, in this parallel polling sample, voters definitely lean either Republican or Democrat. By the definition of D’s being voters who voted either 5 of 5 or 4 of 5 Democrat candidates and R’s being voters who voted either 5 of 5 or 4 of 5 Republican, D’s were 500/626 or 80%, R’s were 86/626, or 14%.
The rest--40/626, or 6%--can be called Independent or No-Party voters. These percentages represent the way the parallel voters actually voted and may not correspond with their party registration. This midterm 2006 election is known as the election where Republicans reflected their dissatisfaction with their own party politicians. It would not be surprising to see R’s jumping ship for some races, while staying with their party for candidates they deemed still OK.
2. R’s polled were more likely to cross over to vote for the candidate of the other party (Third party candidate voting was so low in these four precincts that it can be ignored for this discussion.) by a comparison of 29/86 for the R’s and 114/500 for the D’s. If we add in the 3 of 5 candidate voters as showing a party preference, the numbers for the R’s are 45/102 and for the D’s123/509. The R’s sampled were likely to “jump ship” for 1 or 2 of the 5 candidates 44% of the time, while D’s jumped ship 23% of the time. Of course there could be a sampling adjustment needed, as pointed out by Pokey Anderson via phone conversation: are cross-over R’s more likely to vote in parallel elections, sensing that we parallel pollsters are on the “Lefty” side of the spectrum, and cross-over D’s less likely to vote parallel, sensing our disapproval? That is hard to gauge, but we do use secret written ballots in parallel elections, so that no one need feel embarrassed by their responses. Also it could be argued that the mavericks—the independent, non-party-committed voters are MORE likely to vote with us, of either party. Because no poll can factor in every possible bias, this conclusion that more R’s crossed over to vote for one or more D’s, than D’s crossed over to vote for R’s, at a ratio of almost double, is presented here as a probability, not a certainty.
If one uses the official results as a measuring stick versus the number of registered D’s and R’s who voted (data that, unfortunately, is not being made available to citizens until after January 15 from the Franklin County Board of Elections), one could see if this trend of R’s crossing over to vote for D’s bears itself out. Whole ballots may not be available from the BOE—in their case printing from the paper roll of the electronic voting machines—for months, or even years, if the 2004 election is a model.
We DO know the party registration, as determined by previous primary elections, of our parallel voters en masse, since they signed our parallel signature books. But I believe the actual ballots are a more accurate reading of which party’s candidates they REALLY favor.
Who Did Cross-over Voters Vote For?
Taking all the precincts together, Democrats who crossed over for one of five candidates, voted for these R’s: O’Donell (judgeship), 95 votes; Blackwell, 1 vote; Hartmann, 3 votes; and Pryce, 7 votes.
Republicans who crossed over for one of five candidates, voted for O’Neill 11 times, Strickland 9 votes, Brunner 6 votes, and Kilroy 1 vote.
Factoring in the larger number of D’s polled parallel than R’s, by 80% to 14%, or 5.7 to 1, defining R’s as those who voted 4 or 5 of 5 R candidates and D’s likewise, then crossovers comparing R’s and D’s can be weighted as follows:
O’Donell crossovers/ O’Neill 95/11, corrected for fewer R’s sampled = 95/(11)x (5.7) = 95/63, or about 1.5 times as likely for D’s to vote for the R judge, as R’s to vote for the D judge. Why D’s would vote for the R judge in Clintonville is unknown. Judges do not have a party affiliation next to their names on the official ballots, but it doesn’t make sense that D’s would confuse these judge names, though similar, any more than R’s would.
For governor the numbers are D’s one vote for Blackwell, R’s 9 for Strickland, so 9/1 R/D crossovers. Or corrected for fewer R’s polled, (9x5.7)/ 1 or R’s 51 times more likely to vote for Strickland as D’s for Blackwell. That would certainly help explain the landslide victory for Strickland!
For the 15th District, the D/R vote ratio is 7/1. Corrected for fewer R’s polled and it would be 7/ (1 x 5.7) = 7/5.7=1.2 times crossover D’s are likely to vote for Pryce, as R’s for Kilroy. This ratio is so small as to be insignificant, and in fact does NOT support the supposition that Dems voted for Pryce any more than Repubs voted for Kilroy.
For the secretary of state race, the numbers are 3 Dems for Hartmann and 6 Repubs for Brunner. Corrected for fewer R’s polled and we get 3 Hartmann’s/6(5.7)Brunner = 3/34= 1 to 10 times more likely for D’s to vote for Hartmann as R’s to vote for Brunner. This is also compatible with Brunner’s decisive victory.
For the Senate race, there were an insignificant number of crossovers.
Another odd combination of choices is: Strickland-Brunner-DeWine-Pryce (the judgeship race either not voted for or about evenly divided between the candidates), 21 ballots out of the 626. These were perhaps Republicans who were disenchanted both with Blackwell and with Republican control of the SOS office. Or this could indicate the strength of the candidates for people truly non-partisan.
More analysis of the whole ballots might provide further insight into voting trends. It would be more accurate to extrapolate the data gathered from these four precincts in Clintonville to a larger sampling area, if the precincts were more spread out geographically.
Also more parallel election polling sites would give us a better basis for looking for fraud and for debunking claims that R’s or D’s who otherwise voted a straight party ticket crossed over to vote for one particular candidate.
Anyone rigging elections will have to start vote-swapping for more than one candidate to be believable. Hopefully the complications of changing multiple races on each individual ballot will be their undoing. One can imagine a program that swaps votes for every tenth vote for candidate A and every tenth vote for candidate B, but these changes would not remain synchronized for the same ballot for very long, and would lead to anomalies of D’s or R’s crossing over. Whole ballot sampling could demonstrate the likelihood of such a crossover.
Nov. 26, 2006, updated May 20, 2007 I am currently working on an analysis of a four-precinct parallel election exit poll done on Nov 7, 06, demonstrating how this analysis can be used on more complicated data, including the large number of “Undeclared” voters in Ohio. Please contact me at honestelectionscow[at]gmail[dot]com for this new report. The most common criticism of using parallel election results as data to reveal fraud in the official election, is that conservatives/Republicans will be under-sampled. Indeed that has been the case in the four official elections in which we have run parallel elections in Ohio, to a greater or lesser degree. In the previous parallel election run in the May primaries, 2006, in three Westerville, Ohio precincts, all in one location, it was easy to tell who the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Independents were, both in the official election and the parallel election, since they were given ballots by party affiliation. The spoiler in the purity of party identification is that some Democrats registered as Republicans in that election in order to vote against Blackwell, by voting for Petro. But there is no reason to doubt that these party line crossers voted the same way in the parallel election, they asked for a Republican ballot to match how they voted officially. It is a proven assumption, at least in Ohio, that progressives/liberals/Democrats participate in parallel elections in greater percentages than conservatives/Republicans of all those voting official on election day. In the primary mentioned above, we had 25% of all the Republicans who voted that day, voting in the parallel election, 30% of the Democrats, and 35% of the Independents. [need to check to get exact numbers!] The percentages seem to depend in part upon precinct composition: in majority Republican precincts we get higher percentages of Republicans (parallel participation/ total R official voters) participating than in majority Democratic precincts. And vice-versa. I have not analyzed these data in detail. Another factor is how we, the parallel data gatherers, present ourselves. Voters are highly partisan at election time, and if they perceive that we are “left (or right) wing activists,” while they are the opposite, they are less likely to participate. We also tell them we are non-partisan, “not representing any political parties or candidates.” In the primarily Republican area such as the May primary in Westerville, we were in Republican territory, so we dressed in OSU colors (neutral at least) , and did not mention “machine insecurity” or fraud as a reason for collecting data, unless we were pressed. Several voters asked if we were there for the school bond issue, an issue that passed by over 80 percent, along mostly non-partisan lines. In the recent Nov. 7, 2006, parallel election, in Clintonville, several voters responded to our request for their participation in the parallel election with, “ I don’t believe in polls,” or “We should just count the real ballots!” Also the National Republican Party has stated to the media that, “Exit polls are bad because they negatively affect Republican turn-out,” … “or under-report Republican votes.” Of course exit polls would not under-report Republican votes if there was not negative publicity to Republican constituents! It is a fact that conservatives are less likely than progressives/liberals to believe that voting machine fraud is a problem (don’t have the citation, but I am thinking of the study done earlier this year on people’s belief in voting insecurity correlated to TV stations watched. CNN watchers were over 50% likely to believe in voting fraud, while Fox watchers were less than 1 percent!) And therefore if they believe that an exit poll is for the purpose of exposing machine insecurity, or even malfunction, they are less likely to participate. One can feel the reception change in primarily Democratic precincts from chilly to “Thank goodness you are doing this!” By our conscious effort to be non-partisan and promote “honest elections for ALL voters,” we eliminate some party bias to participation. The rest of the bias can be corrected for, to a great extent. One must know the party affiliation of both all the parallel voters and all the official voters. From Board of Election records sent to us, we can look up the party affiliation of our parallel voters, most of whom signed in our parallel poll books . The BOE also will send to any citizen who requests it, the names, addresses, and party affiliation of all who voted in the official election , for the same precincts. Unfortunately, the Franklin County BOE has told us that this list of voters won’t be available till Dec. 15. Meanwhile, we have the list from the individual precincts of all voters through 4 pm and we are interpolating that data through 7:30 pm. We are making the assumption that voter party affiliation did not change much by percentage in the last 3.5 hours. We will check this assumption when we get the BOE data after Dec. 15. But with the estimated breakdown by party of official voters and parallel voters , a comparison can be made of the percentage of official Democrat voters we got to participate versus the percentage of official Republican voters we got to participate. Then calculations can be done so that if the percentages are made to be equal, we can calculate how this would have affected the vote totals for a given race. For example, if there are 100 voters in the official election registered as Democrats (call this number 100 OD—official voters Dem, and 80 registered as Republicans (80 OR), AND we get 50 Dems to vote parallel, but only 20 Repubs, of course the R. candidate is going to get fewer votes than if we had sampled the R’s in the same percentage. In this example we got 50% of the D’s to vote parallel, but only 25% of the R’s. To correct for this sampling bias we need to project how many votes the R candidate would get if we sampled the R’s ALSO at 50% (40 of our R voters out of 80) Since 50% is twice 25%, or double, we simply need to double the number of votes the R candidate got. This method assumes the R’s we would have sampled to make the percentage equal to that of the D’s, voted the same way as the R’s we DID sample. If R’s crossed over to vote for a Democrat candidate, such as many did in the Nov. 7 election, we are assuming that the same number did in the corrected R vote as we captured in the actual parallel R vote. We are also ignoring the Independent, or Undeclared Party voters, since it is much harder to guess which candidate they voted for. In this same example, if our parallel election got 60 votes for Strickland, and 10 for Blackwell, AND we correct for the under-sampling of R’s (half as many percentage-wise as for D’s), we must multiply Blackwell’s votes by 2, to give us 20 votes for Blackwell, in our projection of how an equal sampling of R’s would affect the vote totals. Then the corrected percentage of votes for the governor’s race is 60/80, or 75% for Strickland, and 20/80 , or 25% for Blackwell. Uncorrected percentages were 60/ 70, or 86% for Strickland, and 10/70, or 14% for Blackwell. (The percentages will not add up to 100% if we consider the Independent voters.) One can see by these numbers how under-sampling R’s can lead to inflated results for D candidates, if the under-sampling bias is not corrected for. Here is the formula: First determine the percentage of parallel D voters to total official election D voters. Call this PED/ OD. Do the same for R voters. PER/OR Call R candidate total PE votes RV. Call corrected RV “CRV”. Ignore Independents. (Independents, and/or Undeclared voters, are not ignored in the soon-to-be-released report on the General Election on Nov.7, 06 in Ohio, since there are so many.) (PED/OD)/ (PER/OR) x RV= CRV To get the corrected percentages: CRV/ (CRV+ DV) = percentage of CRV DV/ (DV+ CRV) = percentage of DV This formula will also work in the event that D’s are under-sampled. That will happen when pigs fly, and/or when D’s lose faith in polling as a way to reveal machine/election fraud.Weighting Results for Undersampling of Republicans in Exit Polls or Parallel Elections
By Marj Creech, risenregan[at]earthlink[dot]net
Call total PE Dem candidate votes DV.
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