>>One voter Annette Harper came to the precinct this afternoon looking to vote, but was told she couldn’t vote because her name was on the Democratic poll book as voting in the June 3 Democratic primary.<<
If the Democrats keep a tally of who votes in the DEM primary, that would change things. At least then you could determine approximately how many votes were illegally cast, by going through all the poll books.
That still leaves the problem of verifying who those illegal votes were cast for, however, since ballots are supposed to be secret. Sure, you could assume they’re mostly Cochran, but it would probably take individual interviews to verify that.
Possible outcome: A sympathetic judge rules that the RunOff Election is invalidated, and must be held again, with poll workers instructed to tell every voter that they are not eligible to vote if they voted Dem in the June 3 primary.
Best outcome: Senator Cochran realizes the mess he’s created here and concedes the election to McDaniel based on his near certain opinion that he won it only because votes were cast illegally for him. That would reunite the GOP as well, and someone should get working on making it happen.
I just can’t see that making a difference. If you prove illegal activity went on in a large enough quantity, the election result is in question regardless of who voted for who. The judge must call for a do-over of the runoff.
That's what this sheet shows:
It shows who voted in the 'Rat primary on 6/3/14. It also shows that several of those voted again in the GOP runoff on 6/24.
Based on that image it appears that
James Earl Hayes, 126 Sewanee Dr, Jackson
Sandra B Haynes, 302 Galvez St, Jackson
Pearline Herron, 114 Sanford St, Jackson all voted
illegally - or someone did on their behalf.
Just let statistics do the work. When a sample is big enough, it's makeup is the same or very close to the same as the total population. No need to know any particular individual.
Assume the margin of victory is 2,000, and the race is really close, 50.01% to 49.99%. That means a little more than half of the total ballots cast went to the winner. If you grab 4,000 ballots, without looking at ANY of them, you can figure a majority went to the winner. If you grab 5,000, the range of votes to the winner is probably in the range of 2,400 to 2,600, with 99.9999999% confidence. More than enough to overcome the margin of victory.
If the winner won by a fat margin, then more of any given sample is winner's votes, and it takes a smaller sample (maybe 110% of the margin of victory) to conclude, with high confidence, the contest was decided wrongly.