The next U.S. presidential election is a year away, but Richard Charnin is still reliving the voting of 2000, 2004 and 2008. He believes the counts were wrong.
Charnin is a quant. He has master’s degrees in mathematics and operations research and has worked on Wall Street, first as an applications developer at brokerage White, Weld & Co. in the 1970s, later as a consultant to major financial institutions.
Drilling into, and blogging about, election results, Charnin asserts that he has uncovered discrepancies that cannot be explained by randomness: ballots not tabulated, inconsistencies in the ways different types of machines count votes and too much variation between statistically valid exit polls and final, official tallies. “A clear pattern has emerged which confirms the overwhelming evidence of election fraud,” he writes in his 2010 book, Proving Election Fraud.
Despite his exhaustive documentation, Charnin is not universally endorsed. His evidence tends to show that Democratic candidates have been disadvantaged, and that invites accusations of partisanship. (Even Barack Obama’s decisive 53 percent of the 2008 popular vote was at least a few points shy of the reality, says Charnin.) In any enterprise that involves automated processing of items in the millions — be they bank checks, bill payments, standardized tests or tax forms — errors are inevitable and tolerated. But those error rates are in fractions of percentage points, well below what Charnin is alleging occurred in public elections.....