“Every indication was there that this was going be a landslide in Romney’s favor favor.”
I concur with your “Landslide” predictions, but since many of the states have Republican governors as the Chief Executive of the state, wouldn’t they be privy to shenanigans of that magnitude?
Even if you can’t stop a ballot from being fraudulently cast or counted initially, can you not validate it?
Call the supposed voter and ask if they voted? If the answer is no, you have your answer. If the answer is that they are dead, you have your answer. If they say yes, you have your answer. In data analytics it’s called filtering and validating.
This is a path to a solution Bshaw. I note that you didn't ask the voter how he or she voted. You understand the problem. There needs to be a consensus that a lack of verifiability guarantees the end of freedom. Most people have other concerns in their lives, and are not computer system designers. They see an industrial-sized box in a precinct and assume their votes are counted. The precinct workers, who now mostly function as ushers, makes it appear that data are being collected. Decades ago, and today in a number countries, including Israel and Spain, those precinct workers, known to many in their communities, would gather after the polls closed to count the ballots, with a representative of each of the major parties present. The ballots were locked then locked and guarded until being transported to a secure vault. But the initial count became the reported count unless there a recount was required. Acquire the count immediately to minimize the chance that corruption during transport would not be detected.
It sounds like you know more about statistical methods than I. My area involved guaranteed message transport and error detection and correction. Our voting systems wouldn't satisfy FDA requirements if votes were numbers generated by analytical instrument. Our voting systems are mostly farcical project cludges, probably designed by local AGs so that they can claim to have developed voting mechanisms for their states, justifying their two hundred thousand dollar salaries with generous retirement packages.
There are so many gaps in the chain of custody of votes that without a thorough analysis, it is not possible to know where counts are corrupted. It is simply a fact that an audit trail is impossible. To assume that political opportunists didn't take advantage of that uncertainty is foolish. With more votes counted than registered voters in many precincts in Ohio and Colorado, we know that some of the corruption was crude, since were I to manipulate votes I'd make the reported numbers as plausible as possible, knowing the pundits will explain how it could have happened. But it would be similiarly foolhardy to presume that there wasn't much more sophisticated manipulation of the ridiculously vulnerable transport systems, which have proved to be easy prey to amature hackers, good hackers being too busy and careful to report their success in accessing a number of the machines used for voting.
We also have no idea what becomes of voting data once it is sent to an official collating location. Votes were once counted by Voter News Service in New York, a remarkable betrayal of voter trust if they had known. Few know today. Transparency is not a hallmark of the current administration. Just as the federal reserve should be audited, an audit of our secret central vote counting process might reveal much about what voting is really about. My guess is that the invention of plausible counts occurs within states, which may account for the significant gains in states that already have Republican governors.
Perhaps a random sampling via phone calls of some number of precincts would dampen the open corruption, but local precinct counts are the only way to protect the secrecy of our voting system while minimizing the cheating due to corruption of the data. Union members could be identified through calls to their homes, and might be reluctant to reveal having voted against someone or some measure important to union officials (not forgetting that you did not suggest voters to reveal their selections, but realizing that those selections can so easily be altered makes the question an important one). We know that every telephony switch can be legally and secretly monitored by at least the FBI (since about 2001) meaning hostile government agencies may provide identities to their friends in the SEIU; paper ballots protect our all-important secret ballots. It isn't clear whether calls to voters would be legal, though a request for a re-vote might satisfy the courts.
Of course, but have you considered, they might be complicit? I watched Kaisic on FOX tell us that they had the fraud issue covered stem to stern.