Okay, one of the reasons I started this blog is that I’m hoping it will help me break through my writer’s block with regard to a technical paper I’m working on.  It was rejected 6 months ago from the journal I submitted it too.  The reasons given were valid.  Frankly, it is too long and perhaps not the best fit for that journal.

I’ve decided to break it into two papers, one going to a very technical journal and the other to the industry journal my current paper isn’t actually well suited for.  But I haven’t done any actual writing yet.

But I read this post about writer’s block today at Camels with Hammers and decided I should try to post, if not every day, at least once a week.  My next project to write about was going to be my analysis of my husband’s poker hands, but I’ve decided that needs to wait until I manage to explain my thesis regarding the computation of engineering design values for newly developed composite materials. Because that’s what I need to work on.

In the meantime, in my reading time, I’m managed to find some additional information about other similar audits happening.  Turns out the key phrase was ‘post election audits’.   My google-fu is sadly at the level of a typical doddering old fool, but having stumbled across the phrase, I found some other people pursuing similar verification schemes.

Counting Votes is organizing audits and describing what kind of criteria audits need to meet.  The procedures and safeguards described meet with my approval.   Here’s another paper on similar lines. North Carolina has actually published some data on their post-election audit results.

Turns out that there are now 12 states that have laws requiring post election audits, which is an apt description of what I want to do.  Kansas is not one of them. According to the Counting Votes, Kansas ranks as ‘needs improvement’.  I meet with a lawyer Saturday to discuss filing suit so that I may obtain the records needed to conduct such an audit.

I’ve also pulled down some new data and found an election that doesn’t fit the pattern.  In fact, it looks opposite the pattern.  It’s the Ohio 2012 Presidential contest.  It looks like this:

I haven’t done any further analysis on these races yet.  I picked Ohio 2012 Presidential race because I remember seeing a small news item a couple months ago about how some hackers claimed they had foiled a republican vote-rigging scheme in Ohio.  I must admit, it’s quite intriguing how the pattern is reversed there.