Posted on 09/08/2004 10:11:26 PM PDT by seastay
An analysis of data from the Aug.15 referendum in Venezuela to recall President Hugo Chávez indicates that certain forms of computer fraud were unlikely to have occurred during the electronic voting process, according to a study by computer science researchers from Johns Hopkins and Princeton universities.
Groups opposed to President Chávez charged that statistical anomalies in polling data indicated that election results were fraudulent. However, an independent analysis of the same data by Edward Felten, professor of computer science at Princeton, and Aviel D. Rubin, professor of computer science, and Adam Stubblefield, a doctoral student, both at Johns Hopkins, did not detect any statistical irregularities that would indicate fraud.
The study and related information are available at http://www.venezuela-referendum.com.
“The opposition's claims, that statistical anomalies in the reported results indicate fraud, seem to be incorrect,” Felten said. “However, this does not rule out the possibility that other types of fraud, which would not have left statistical traces, may have occurred.” The researchers classified the study as a statistical analysis and not a comprehensive investigation or audit of election procedures and documents.
Rubin added, “The types of fraud that would be most likely to be employed by a cheating government would not leave the kinds of statistical evidence that opposition groups have been charging. Simply changing some number of ‘Yes’ votes to ‘No’ votes inside the machines would not produce statistical anomalies, but could change the outcome of the election.”
The researchers warned that electronic voting is susceptible to fraud and that electronic voting systems are generally more susceptible than less automated polling techniques.
A faculty member at Princeton since 1993, Felten’s research focuses on computer and Internet security and on technology and the law. Rubin’s areas of research are systems and networking security and computer privacy. Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, Rubin was a researcher at AT&T Labs.
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With Chavez you can be sure that if your vote could have made a differance he would not have let you do it. He resisted the recall until he was sure the fix was in.
"This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4,580 automated centers, say 3,000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1,580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out."
Mr. Hausmann told us that he and Mr. Rigoban also "found very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and a probability of less than 1% that the anomalies observed could be pure chance. To put it another way, they think the chance is 99% that there was electoral fraud.
The authors also suggest that the fraud was centralized. Voting machines were supposed to print tallies before communicating by Internet with the CNE center. But the CNE changed that rule, arranging to have totals sent to the center first and only later printing tally sheets. This increases the potential for fraud because the Smartmatic voting machines suddenly had two-way communication capacity that they weren't supposed to have. The economists say this means the CNE center could have sent messages back to polling stations to alter the totals.....
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