He does have a few disagreements with my approach. For example, what he describes as a nitpick, I would respond with: That’s a feature, not a bug! My choice of limiting an analysis to the precincts with more than 500 votes cast results in what he considers an overemphasis on the effect I’m am concerned with. This is absolutely true. That particular analysis was designed to draw out that effect and make it more apparent. The vote share data is very noisy and impacted by many different factors. The trend is real, but is easily missed in the inherent noise of the larger dataset.
Mr. Ames wonders if some other, correlated factor such as the voter registration numbers, would display a similar trend in the cumulative chart. He shows this is true for the share of Republicans in this particular data set. But this is not a universally correlated trait across the different states where such trends have been found, and it was not enough in Sedgwick County Kansas to account for the difference in vote share.
I discuss this factor at more length in my recently published paper “Audits of Paper Records to Verify Electronic Voting Machine Tabulated Results” in the Summer 2016 issue of The Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy. The graph displayed above is from that paper, illustrating that although there is an upswing the cumulative graph for share of Republicans, it is much smaller than the upward surge of the vote share for various republican candidates in 2014.
His parting comment “While the charts may be explainable through vote fraud, there are other, perfectly innocuous explanations that can be put forward, as well.” is true. Yes, there are other possible and innocuous explanations. Statistical analysis only illuminates correlations and other relationships. Further investigation is needed to determine cause. Just because the trend is a predicted sign of election fraud does not mean election fraud occurred.
The only way to tell if our machine tabulated vote count is accurate or undermined is to conduct a proper audit. That’s never been done here in Sedgwick County. I’ve requested access to do this as a voter and been denied. I filed the proper paperwork in a timely manner asking for a recount of those records after the 2014 election and was denied. I’ve sued for access as an academic researcher and been denied.
Why should I trust a vote count that our officials will not allow to be publicly verified? Why should anyone?