Fingerprints Of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted?

In this report, we describe results from a telephone poll conducted the night of the national election of November, 2006. The poll methodology was explicitly designed to detect partisan manipulation of the vote count, and to separate evidence for manipulation from poll sampling bias. Our premise was that politically motivated tampering would target races that were projected to be competitive, while the perpetrators would be less motivated to interfere in races that were not projected to be close. Designing our poll to be maximally sensitive to such a pattern, we selected 16 counties around the country where, of the three most prominent races (Governor, Senator or US House), there was at least one competitive contest and one noncompetitive contest. In our study, the responses of the same group of respondents were compared to official election results for pairs of races, one competitive and one noncompetitive. We used paired data analysis to compare discrepancies between poll and official count for these matched pairs. Our results revealed much larger discrepancies in competitive than in noncompetitive races (p<0.007), suggesting manipulation that consistently favored Republican candidates. We also found a linear relationship between the size of the pro-Republican disparity and the tightness of the election (p<0.000022). These results corroborate analyses published elsewhere, also suggesting significant vote manipulation in favor of Republican candidates in the November, 2006 election.