That’s because Clarkson, a mathematician, used the same argument in a previous lawsuit she lost, The Topeka Capital-Journal reports.
Lahey did, however, deny a motion by Sedgwick County election commissioner, Tabitha Lehman, to dismiss Clarkson’s open records case. But it’s a negligible victory, because the point of Clarkson’s lawsuit was to check the accuracy of the voting machines, the Wichita Eagle reports.
The paper tapes that Clarkson, a statistician, is calling into question are printed by the voting machines when each voter casts a ballot. A plastic window in the machine allows the voter to view the tape and verify their choices before pressing a button that records their votes.
There are “anomalies all over the place,” in the election results, she noted. The only way to find out if the machines were broken or tampered with is to check Lehman’s results against the paper tapes.
“I’m disappointed the judge ruled I wouldn’t be allowed to look,” she said. “No one ever looks at them. How can we know?”
She sued last year, in the hopes of gaining access to the tapes under the Kansas Open Records Act. She lost, however, after representing herself without a lawyer.
Former U.S. attorney Randy Rathbun has since taken up the case, the Eagle reports. Clarkson is a chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, and Rathbun said that while she’s a “brilliant statistician,” she’s a “horrible lawyer.”
Americablog notes that not only did Clarkson find irregularities in election returns from Sedgwick County, she also found them in other counties throughout the U.S. But she’s had to deal with stiff opposition from the state in her attempts to confirm if the irregularities are fraud or other anomalies.
When she analyzed election returns at the precinct level, she found that to a statistically significant degree, candidate support correlated to the size of the precinct. In Republican primaries, this bias has favored establishment candidates over tea party party candidates. And in general elections, Republican candidates have been favored over Democrats. Amazingly enough, that’s even if the precinct demographics suggested that the opposite should have happened.
A 2012 paper released by analysts Francois Choquette and James Johnson piqued Clarkson’s interest. The paper demonstrated the same pattern of election returns, favoring Republican candidates in primaries and general elections. Specifically, the irregularities were found in precincts using “Central Tabulator” voting machines. It’s been previously demonstrated that these machines are vulnerable to hacking. The analysts found that the results are both widespread and significant.
What did they find?
Their analysis showed that Mitt Romney could have gained an extra one million votes in the Republican primary, mostly at the expense of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Significant votes were also ceded by President Obama to John McCain due to this irregularity, Americablog reports.
Although Clarkson has discovered the same statistical irregularities in several localities, she’s decided to focus her efforts to confirm whether they amount to fraud in Sedgwick County because the county uses Real Time Voting Machine Paper Tapes. These tapes provide a paper trail, something that other localities don’t provide. But she’s been repeatedly shut down in her efforts to verify the county’s election returns.
County election officials refused to let the computer records be part of a recount and told Clarkson that if she wanted to get paper recordings of votes, she’d have to go to court and fight for them, the Wichita Eagle reports.
So she did just that — filing a lawsuit against the Sedgwick County Election Office and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, asking to access the paper records from the voting machines. These records don’t identify individual voters.
But the software for these voting machines is proprietary, meaning that even elections officials can’t examine it and post-election audits can’t be done, said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to safeguard elections in the digital world.
So then Clark requested the county do a recount in 2013, but by then, the time to file had expired. Next, she filed an open records request, but officials would not provide the requested documents. Next, she filed a lawsuit but the judge said the paper records were ballots, and even though they don’t identify individual voters by name, they were nevertheless not subject to the state’s open records law.
Once again, Clarkson filed for a recount after the November election, and once again Sedgwick County officials refused, saying only a judge could release the records.
For her next step, she sought a court order that would give her access to a sample of voting records, Americablog reports. This would give her the opportunity to check voting machines’ error rates. But the order wasn’t processed by the Secretary of State’s office, even though they are legally required to respond to her within 30 days. Later, the office said they didn’t know they had received her request.
In Thursday’s ruling, Rathbun sought a vote recount, thinking that Clarkson could then watch the process and garner the information she wants, the Wichita Eagle reported. But Lahey ruled that Clarkson had already brought the tape access issue to court and lost, so he couldn’t order Lehman to turn them over now. And the law prohibits fighting this legal issue twice.
Rathbun, Lahey said, had “won the battle” because now the case can go to trial regarding the question of whether to conduct a recount. However, the judge added, he “lost the war,” because Clarkson won’t get access to the ballot tapes, even if she wins at the trial.
Lahey gave Clarkson the option to appeal the ruling before deciding whether to go to trial. Rathbun said later they are likely to appeal.
He also ruled that Clarkson’s 2014 request for a recount of votes was timely, and criticized the assertion by Lehman’s lawyer, Assistant County Counselor Mike North, that too much time has passed to conduct a recount.
Whether Lehman erred in rejecting Clarkson’s initial request regarding a recount would be one issue in a trial, Lahey said. If officials don’t do their work, they can’t hide behind deadlines “to excuse the failure to act,” the Eagle reported.
And while it wouldn’t change the outcome of the elections, which have been certified, a belated recount would have value in ensuring the integrity of future elections, he noted.
