Peer-reviewed algorithm article published

Today, a momentous thing happened in the world of election integrity. The peer-reviewed Journal of Information Warfare published an article today about the algorithm found in New York’s voter rolls. Titled, “The Caesar cipher and stacking the deck in New York’s voter rolls”, the article represents the state of my knowledge of the algorithm at the time the article was submitted to the journal.

Since then, I have learned more about the algorithm and have published that information here. The importance of the article is that it may represent the first time an algorithm like this has been discovered in America’s voter rolls and the first article on the subject. As a peer-reviewed journal, the article has weight it wouldn’t otherwise have.

What does “peer-reviewed” mean? It does not mean that the author sent the article to a bunch of his friends and they gave it a thumbs-up. It also doesn’t mean the author restricted the reading list to friends with doctoral degrees. It means that the journal stripped the author’s name from the document to make it “blind”, then sent it to three reviewers of their choosing. Those reviewers read the document carefully, looking for any detail that might be wrong, or any point that was inexpertly articulated, missing information, and citations that should be present but weren’t, or present that didn’t belong.

In my experience, submitting articles for peer review is an arduous process, unlike submitting articles for a consumer magazine or news story online. One peer-reviewed article I wrote a few years ago took about a year to get through peer review. After sending it in, it was assigned to an editor and a statistician, who went over every number with me, cell by cell, to be sure every value was properly justified. After that was done, I had more extensive revisions to go through to simplify the presentation as much as possible. I had to delete information that was completely true but did not add to the argument I was making, or distracted from the main point.

The point of peer review is not to rubber stamp an article (though that may happen at lower quality journals), the point is to perform a thorough check of the article to be sure it is accurate and represents a fair description of the facts both pro and con related to the subject.

Because peer-review is a rigorous process, and reviewers tend to be experts, getting through peer review can be likened to putting three expert witnesses on the stand in a court of law, to attest to the accuracy of the material.

Many articles have been written about election fraud. Most are written about fraud in other countries, not America. American articles about election fraud tend to extol the virtues of the American system while exploring the faults in other nations. If they do touch on fraud in America, it is usually voter fraud (small scale non-systemic fraud committed by an individual) as opposed to fraud committed by persons with official access to the election process. This article is one of the very few that deals with the potential of systemic election fraud in the United States.

It took about six months to see this article through the review process, but that doesn’t include its first submission to a different journal, which rejected it for politicized reasons. The first few lines of the article were written about two weeks before New York Citizen’s Audit State Director Marly Hornik made her famous presentation at The Pit in Arizona last year in early August.

Next, there is an article about New Jersey’s algorithm waiting in the wings, but more on that later…