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Thread: (Huge) delegate vote anomaly in Alabama verified

  1. #1

    (Huge) delegate vote anomaly in Alabama verified

    As pointed out by dsw in the Daily Paul's post below, a really strange gap is visible between Paul's popular vote in Alabama's primary and thevote count in favor of his delegates, as it all happens on the same day through the same ballot. If you are not familiar with the enigma addressed here, I can only encourage you to read the post linked below first.

    http://www.dailypaul.com/223002/voti...about-this-one

    I think that it is worthwhile separating the discussion of this one in its own thread as the mathematical analysis and speculative interpretations are quite different from the other issues raised elsewhere.

    As per Republican Party Rules, you could only vote for 1 candidate, and then only for the delegates of that candidates. For each of your candidate's delegate proposed, you had to choose between a Mr Jones or a Mr Smith to get the job. A rather complicated affair as illustrated by the typical ballot:



    And that is only the first of the two pages...

    A Gingrich supporter had to trawl through a list of 9 separate delegate contests, Paul 16, Romney 18 and Santorum 3. Voter's fatigue is very visible in the data: almost 20% of the electorate failed to reach the end of the delegate list after it started to fill it in!

    I have collected all the precinct information available as of today (60 counties out of 67), ie 1,864 precincts x 46 delegate ballots = 85,744 data points. I have not included the additional Congessional District Delegate races, only the statewide ones.

    The chart below verifies and confirms dsw's observation:



    On my data, 82,940 votes were cast for Paul's 1st delegate contest, but only 29,609 for him directly as President choice. -64%.

    187 precincts have votes for Paul's 1st delegate, but none for him as President. Yes, that is 10% of them all.

    In Lowndes County, votes for Paul as President are only a 10th of the votes for his 1st delegate on the list.

    In Walker County, in the "Prospect Method. Chuch" precinct, Paul's 1st delegate contest collected 34 votes. Paul as a choice for President? 1 vote. One vote.

    As can be seen on the chart, the other candidates tend to get 1 vote in the delegate contest for 1 in the President's choice, with little volatility above and below that, as per the Republican party rule reiterated on the ballot itself. Paul's distribution of votes is from a different planet.

    More to come.

    Edit: How unusual is it to have 1/3 of the votes in the presidential preference vote that you get in the delegate races? Here is a partial answer:

    Last edited by Liberty1789; 04-07-2012 at 08:03 AM.



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  3. #2
    Wow that's confusing as hell.
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
    T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

    "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

    We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me

    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  4. #3
    We went over this weeks ago.

    See the precincts around tuscaloosa.

    There were a lot of people, maybe 10% of the total, who filled out all the delegate spots. In many precincts where Ron Paul didn't get many votes - he got a lot of delegate votes. 5% for Paul, 10% voting for everything.

  5. #4
    I've never seen a ballot like this in CA....where there's all these delegates' names listed.

  6. #5
    ****************************
    Tuscaloosa - U of A Student Rec
    *************************

    Gingrich
    Range 38-30
    Candidate Total 30

    Paul
    Range 29-24
    Candidate Total 26

    Romney
    Range 48-32
    Candidate Total 53

    Santorum
    Range 35-30
    Candidate Total 34

    ****************************
    Tuscaloosa - Green Acres Health
    *************************

    Gingrich
    Range 4-3
    Candidate Total 1

    Paul
    Range 5-4
    Candidate Total 4

    Romney
    Range 4-3 (a single 4, in the middle)
    Candidate Total 3

    Santorum
    Range 9-8
    Candidate Total 10

    ****************************

    *************************

  7. #6
    You'd think in alabama of all places the ballots would be a little more user friendly.
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous

  8. #7
    Wasn't the issue with this initially that the bad ballots were by their laws supposed to have been thrown out?
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous

  9. #8
    Wait, somehow we got more votes for delegates than the straw poll?
    Want more information regarding the chaos surrounding the 2012 Republican Nomination? Check out http://www.electionchaos.com



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  11. #9
    On that day, it certainly did look like "vote fraud". "Why did Ron Paul get so many more votes for his delegates than he got himself? There must be vote fraud" was my thinking.

    But I looked at the numbers and found that where Ron Paul did well, such as University of Alabama precincts, the number of votes for Ron Paul were about the number of votes for his delegates. "Range" = the most and least votes in the delegate election.

    If there's a scandal, it's that Alabama allows people to vote for the delegates for all the candidates, not just the candidate they voted for.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by kathy88 View Post
    You'd think in alabama of all places the ballots would be a little more user friendly.
    I didnt' want to say that, lol.

    At my small county convention here in Georgia, there were a dozen people present and it was pretty much, "Okay, who wants to be a delegate?. . . . Okay, you got it."
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
    T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

    "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

    We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me

    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by nobody's_hero View Post
    I didnt' want to say that, lol.

    At my small county convention here in Georgia, there were a dozen people present and it was pretty much, "Okay, who wants to be a delegate?. . . . Okay, you got it."
    Cool ? So you're a delegate?
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by kathy88 View Post
    Cool ? So you're a delegate?
    shhhh
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
    T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

    "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

    We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me

    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by parocks View Post
    There were a lot of people, maybe 10% of the total, who filled out all the delegate spots. In many precincts where Ron Paul didn't get many votes - he got a lot of delegate votes. 5% for Paul, 10% voting for everything.
    I do not follow the math here. Paul gets X% in the Presidential Choice vote. Then 10% of voters vote for all delegates. Is it what you are saying? So ALL candidates should get more delegate votes than their Presidential Choice vote. And that is note the case.

  16. #14

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Liberty1789 View Post
    I do not follow the math here. Paul gets X% in the Presidential Choice vote. Then 10% of voters vote for all delegates. Is it what you are saying? So ALL candidates should get more delegate votes than their Presidential Choice vote. And that is note the case.
    No.

    10% voted in all the delegate elections.

    Not everyone who voted for a candidate voted in their candidates delegate elections.

    Person 1 - voted for a candidate, and voted in all delegate elections.
    Person 2 - voted for a candidate, and did NOT vote in the delegate elections.


    There was Overvoting, and Undervoting.

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by parocks View Post
    There was Overvoting, and Undervoting.
    Thanks, I see. Let me show you why I do not believe that. See the chart below: people who went for Gingrich, Romney or Santorum did the job mostly right, as per the instructions. The result is that 1 vote in the Presidential Choice and 1 vote for the delegate is the most frequent observation (ratio of one, the peak of the bell curves for all of them). Instructions were followed. 1 for 1. Why is only Paul subject to a totally different instruction compliance pattern??




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  20. #17
    Please, I did go over this 2 weeks ago.

    Ron Paul only got 5%.

    Look at what happens when Ron Paul got 20%. It was normal.

  21. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by parocks View Post
    Please, I did go over this 2 weeks ago. Ron Paul only got 5%. Look at what happens when Ron Paul got 20%. It was normal.
    Nope. Paul score >20% in only 27 precincts and even there he is stuck at 0.8.

  22. #19
    Awesome, Liberty1789! Thanks for doing this and doing a better job with it than I did.


    And ... I think parocks has a solid point. It would explain why Ron Paul delegate races got on average what would amount to 15% of the total vote, 5% from Ron Paul voters and 10% from people who didn't understand the instructions. (I'm assuming there was little overlap between those groups.) It explains why Mitt and Newt have close to the same distribution on the graph, because they had close to the same number of votes. It explains why Santorum had the fewest delegate race totals that exceeded Santorum's own vote, because he had more votes. It explains why the hand-counted precincts had roughly the the same level of discrepancy as the machine-counted precincts.

    If nothing else it could explain a large part of the effect. And taking into account that different candidates had different levels of enthusiasm from their supporters (i.e., likelihood of just voting for the candidate and ignoring the rest of the ballot) and different levels of ability to understand and follow directions, ...

    Sigh.
    Last edited by dsw; 04-01-2012 at 06:59 PM.

  23. #20
    It says right on the ballot that votes for delegates that are different than their presidential choice is against party rules. More than likely people did not read or understand that and voted incorrectly. Eg:

    Voted for Paul for President
    Voted for Joe Smith for delegate (Romney delegate)

  24. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by tbone717 View Post
    It says right on the ballot that votes for delegates that are different than their presidential choice is against party rules. More than likely people did not read or understand that and voted incorrectly. Eg:

    Voted for Paul for President
    Voted for Joe Smith for delegate (Romney delegate)
    And that, by itself, is a problem.

  25. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by Liberty1789 View Post
    Nope. Paul score >20% in only 27 precincts and even there he is stuck at 0.8.
    I'm not interested in figuring out what your graph says.

    This was taken care of 2 weeks ago.

    It looked like major fraud at the time. I thought so. But then I looked at the numbers closely, and it turned out that a lot of people voted wrong.

    People voted wrong.

    But there were lots of types of wrong voting.

    The order of the candidates on the ballot is a factor as well.

    Gingrich was first, then Paul, Romney, Santorum.

    Gingrich's first delegate race got the most votes, because that was the first delegate race on the ballot.

    A lot of people voted wrong, a lot of people voted wrong in many different ways. A lot of people voted for some, but not all, of the delegates for the right candidate.

    What can be seen where Paul does well is that the number of real Paul votes exceeds the lowest number of votes in his delegate races.

    Much in the way that the "vote flipping" graphs tend to obscure and ignore what is actually happening, so does this chart.

  26. #23
    i see what parocks is saying i think, so for example, this guy votes for romney and then votes in each slot of delegates so, hes voting in gingrich's 1st slot of delegates and then pauls and then romneys and then santorums..Even though its against the rules to vote for other candidate's delegates other than your pick for pres, the machines are still counting the votes even tho they should be invalid?

  27. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkKirk View Post
    i see what parocks is saying i think, so for example, this guy votes for romney and then votes in each slot of delegates so, hes voting in gingrich's 1st slot of delegates and then pauls and then romneys and then santorums..Even though its against the rules to vote for other candidate's delegates other than your pick for pres, the machines are still counting the votes even tho they should be invalid?
    Right. That happened a lot. That shouldn't be. It's a clear problem and it should be fixed somehow.



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  29. #25
    Well, I suppose the elephant in the room which no one wants to mention is that if there was vote flipping from Paul to Romney in the overall and not in the delegate races, the election results make a lot more sense.

    But it would be very difficult to show in Alabama because that ballot system is the most convoluted Rube Goldberg device ever conceived by humanity. The results of that election are about as meaningful as a series of "Ask the magic 8 ball" sessions.

  30. #26
    The elephant is also missing a baby.

    If 10% of the people (for ALL candidates) screwed up their votes, they why did Romney's vote count match his delegate count so close. Same for the Grinch and Santo, but to a lesser extent.

  31. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by parocks View Post
    And that, by itself, is a problem.
    Oh agreed. It is by far the most confusing ballot I have seen in a while. It took me a few minutes to figure it all out and I get this stuff.

  32. #28
    a bunch of things happened.

    1) some people voted in every delegate race. about 10%

    2) some people started voting in every delegate race and then got bored or realized their mistake

    3) some people started filling out Gingrich's delegates then stopped somewhere in the process.

    4) some people filled out the delegates for the person they voted for and completed it.

    5) some people filled out the delegates for the person they voted for and got tired of it and quit.

    6) other people randomly picked delegate races to vote in, perhaps because they knew a person there.

    7) 100 different other reasons why people voted in some races and not others.

    There were a lot of people not voting the way the instructions said. Over 10%.

    What you're looking at is a whole bunch of voters voting in a whole bunch of different ways.

    I looked at this over 2 weeks ago. It looked like fraud, because we assumed that overvoting would disqualify the ballots, and that there was no way that there would be so many voter errors. It really look like they took away the Ron Paul votes.

    But then I looked at where Ron Paul did well, and in those cases, his numbers were about the same as everybody elses, so not fraud.

  33. #29
    When I was at the polls, there was a young lady beside me that voted for Paul and then started filling in Gingrich's delegates (immediately below the Presidential candidates.) She caught herself after a couple and asked the poll workers if she needed a new ballot. They instructed her to finish filling it out and see if the machine accepted it - which it did. That night I saw these discrepancies coming up and figured that problem probably repeated all over the state.
    ROLL TIDE ROLL!!!
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

  34. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by parocks View Post
    But then I looked at where Ron Paul did well, and in those cases, his numbers were about the same as everybody elses, so not fraud.
    That was the extent of the analysis?!?

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