Doing the Fraud Math

I have said before I don’t care which bones man won Wisconsin, but I am curious to know which bones man would have won Wisconsin had there been a legal election.

I was doing the mathematics for the ballot box stuffing which has been documented to date in Milwaukee. If the law had been followed, excess ballots would have been removed by random draw. The ward-by-ward canvass on the SEB web site gives the following totals for the 314 wards of the City of Milwaukee.

Total Ballots Cast	Kerry	Bush	Badnarik	Cobb	Nader	Harris	Brown	Scat.
276,921	198,907	75,746	478	194	1,226	31	41	298
	71.8%	27.4%	0.2%	0.1%	0.4%	0.0%	0.0%	0.1%

The ballots cast for Peroutka of the Constitution party are co-mingled with the totals for Scattering.

If 7,000 ballots are removed by random draw exactly according to these candidate ballot percentages, the each candidate looses the following number of votes.

Kerry	Bush	Badnarik	Cobb	Nader	Harris	Brown	Scat.
5,028	1,915	12	5	31	1	1	8

Kerry loses ground by 3,113 votes. This is more than 1/4 of his 11,384 ballot (not vote) lead in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the ballot box stuffing is more subtle than this simple minded approach would indicate.

The stuffing of ballot boxes is worse than Greg Borrowski has reported. In the article from February 9, 2005, it was reported that the 2 wards with 500+ stuffed ballots were incorrect. Of the remaining 15 wards with discrepancies of more than 100 shown on the map, you have the following ballot stuffed percentages. Yes, in ward 260 of Milwaukee, more than 2 of every 5 of the 473 ballots found in ballot box were not cast by an elector.

Ward Name	Total Ballots Cast in Ward	Kerry	Bush	Other	Excess Ballots	% Stuffed
Ward 260	473	427	44	2	200	42.30%
Ward 14	713	683	28	2	249	34.90%
Ward 216	857	432	414	11	217	25.30%
Ward 312	1327	699	613	15	319	24.00%
Ward 62	1059	536	508	15	234	22.10%
Ward 44	1941	1323	598	20	357	18.40%
Ward 188	1501	748	735	18	260	17.30%
Ward 300	681	650	31	0	117	17.20%
Ward 259	1091	751	335	5	179	16.40%
Ward 124	870	731	137	2	136	15.60%
Ward 9	902	772	126	4	127	14.10%
Ward 71	928	842	84	2	114	12.30%
Ward 39	2096	1,204	845	47	241	11.50%
Ward 258	1029	791	227	11	111	10.80%
Ward 58	2162	1248	878	36	101	4.70%

For the 15 wards with known ballot box stuffing, I used the ward percentages as a guide on how the vote tallies might be affected if there were a random draw of ballots. For the remaining 297 wards of the city, I used the ballots cast for those 297 wards as a guide on how the vote tallies might be affected if there were a random draw of ballots. Here is how the vote tallies would be affected if there were a random draw of ballots for the 16 bins (15 wards and remainder of city).

Votes Lost due to Removal of Excess Ballots
	Total	Kerry	Bush	Badnarik	Cobb	Nader	Harris	Brown	Scat.
15 Stuffed Wards	2962	2083	862	4	0	12	0	0	1
Rest of City	4038	2913	1092	7	3	18	0	1	4
Total	7000	4996	1954	11	3	30	0	1	5

Even this more nuance approach means Kerry loses ground by an average of 3042 votes if the law had been followed and excess ballots removed. I will not bore you with the details of error bars for hyper-geometric distributions except to say this: a cumulative error in the 16 bins (15 wards and the rest of the City) of 25 votes gives a confidence interval of 99%.

Statistically, this means, with a random removal of ballots from the respective ballot boxes, there is only 1 chance in 100 that Kerry would lose ground to Bush by less than 3015 votes. Call it 3000 for round numbers. Three thousand is still more than ¼ of Kerry’s 11,384 ballot (not vote) victory in Wisconsin. What are the ballot box stuffing numbers are in Madison, Kenosha, Racine and Green Bay, West Allis, Wausau, Eau Claire, etc.?

Also 7,000 is the low estimate of the number of ballots stuffed into the ballot boxes in the City of Milwaukee. If the actual number is 10,000 ballots, then a similar analysis leads to the conclusion: there is a 1 chance in 100 that Kerry would lose ground to bush by less than 4310 votes. Call it 4300 for round numbers. Ballot box stuffing (neglecting all other fraudulent activities) accounted for at least 3,000 extra votes for John Kerry in the City of Milwaukee alone.

But, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says: We have to move beyond fraud.