and embarrassing to be an American these daze.

My country has become a duplicitous tyrannical farce of a nation.

... and how much is learned helplessness.

Probably a hefty amount of both. I don't deny any of this but I certainly feel helpless; there are, as you say, a lot of people who deny it because this is, after all, the United States of America, where votes are supposed to be sacred. I certainly wouldn't have believed twelve years ago that there would ever be any question that my vote would be counted.

system in this country is broken. I bet most answer no.

This is what scares me, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"reluctant Republican responders" or whatever, without *any* evidence, or just ignore it and pontificate about what was in the minds of the electorate, but refuse to demand paper ballots so we would KNOW...

the elephant in the room...

there's Stockholm Syndrome, which I believe accounts for a lot of the Republicans du jour.

within airc, approx 30 minutes. I was so confused I tried to find other sources and this with less than 23% of the vote counted.

How do exit polls change so dramatically in such a short period of time AFTER all the polls have closed?

There were only two sets of exit polls: the early set which sat at 50/50, and the later full set which were Walker by 4.

You're thinking of the results so far tallied, which can swing wildly depending on which areas report their votes first. It's possible somebody on Blitzer misidentified those as exit polls, but if so they were wrong.

They were at 50/50 when Blitzer announced that CNN could not call this race as it was 'too close to call' with 'not enough votes counted'. Shortly after that CNN called it for Walker. So when did it go from 'too close to call with not enough votes counted, to approx 60/40 and called for Walker with only 23% of the votes counted?

There were only the two sets that I mentioned. The RESULTS, as in the actual vote count, did briefly touch 60/40 before going down. So that must have been what you were seeing. If they identified it as exit polls, they were screwing up.

And when I saw them changing, I looked online as it was a stunning change in so short a time.

I didn't bother watching any of the TV coverage, just the online stuff.

Fitrakis is good poeple -- Wayne State University and all that.

I expected the thing to spit out a reciept for me to keep, which had my ballot choices clearly marked on it. I figured if anything went wrong with the machine (CAUSE ITS A FUCKING COMPUTER, and that kind of thing, you know, HAPPENS!!!!!) someone could call me, I could bring in my signed piece of paper, and the results could be checked against the electronic total for verification. I asked the lady working about this, and she looked at me like I spoke to her in Klingon, and said something about I guess it's just too hard to make that happen.

I told her that if PLUG-N-PLAY is beyond your grasp, you probably shouldn't be on your side of that table, and decided at that moment that I would hate those machines for ever.

-Laelth

the more likely it is that they are committing ELECTION FRAUD.

these threads.

It's all so sadly predictable. That's the frustrating part.

Is it time to "occupy" the elections until we have free, fair and verifiable elections monitored by the UN?

It can be made nearly impossible when there is already an entity in the system.

Not that I would suggest doing anything, y'know, illegal. Just saying it could be done...

Maybe somebody is listening.

Someone cracked the internal memos of Diebold as well as ES&S, I believe. At the time plenty of reason to believe there was chicanery going on.

I suspect the companies have strengthened their passwords since then.

the computers on election night here in Los Angeles.

And as we all know, the virus can be installed prior,a nd will eat itself so there is no sign of it afterwards. That is old news.

Isolated network?????
you think?

make the most sense, but in light of how stupidly so many other things are done in this field these days...

If you build the machines, using a proprietary transfer protocol would be cheap, simple, and practical since there's no need for the machines to talk to any others not on the same network.

And isn't that the real point? That there is no way of knowing or finding out without inside info or a court order. The idea that our elections are controlled by this kind of scheme is outrageous, but nobody that can do anything about it seems to care, which leads to a whole other line of reasoning...

We have been acutely aware of the red-shifting and the suddenly "suspect" exit polls...
for quite a while.

Telling each other about stuff we already know about isn't actually helpful; in fact it's probably damaging, since it becomes a sort of social display rather than an actual issue.

So then, what can we do? What action is there for the people to take? waiting for "our leaders" to, well, take the lead on this seems counter productive - even if they did, they would only be "our leaders" until the next machine vote deposed them.

But at the same time, why has nothing changed?

If we were willing to fight as hard as Republicans do, for their issues, this would have become a serious Congressional investigation by now, despite the bias of the right wing mainstream media.

We really need to understand why we are not able to involve enough of us in serious movement building. OWS said it would come roaring back "in the Spring". But it did not. Why?

How come?

"In Charnin's analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within a statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 state elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 state presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening?

"One in one million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion," said Charnin.

More statistical proof of Republican operatives, zealots and sympathizers tampering with the vote is found in the fact that 132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

Say you have a fair coin to flip. We would expect that if we flip that coin there would be an even split between heads and tails – or in this case, Republicans and Democrats. Election results falling outside the margin of error should be equally split between both parties. Yet, only five times, less than expected, did the extra votes fall in the direction of the Democratic Party.

So what are the odds? According to Charnin, of 132 out of 300 state presidential elections exceeding the margin of error in the direction of the Republicans – one in 600 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

Dems think that since a few of them do get elected, than there is nothing wrong with elections. But since we can't check to see if the votes were accurately counted then the only way to win is if Democratic voters simply overwhelm the rigged machines.

Another link?

it would shake their foundation of trust in things in this country that can no longer be trusted. Their view - no one is smart enough or organized enough or tight-lipped enough to pull off something like this.

Nothing ever came of it.

People waited in line for hours to vote. Thousands had to leave without voting. Mostly this happened in African American neighborhoods. I worked my ass off for Kerry and was emotionally devastated for weeks.

I agree with those who have said we ought to request help from the UN to monitor the elections.

I don't trust the computer voting machines as far as I can throw them.

So simple.

tamper with.

If the discrepancy was random error, you would occasionally expect to see a blue shift - an election where the Democratic candidate's official results came out higher than the margin of error in unadjusted exit polls. I could be wrong, but I have not seen this happen. It seems that only Republicans our-count the exit poll results.

Let's say that there is a 50/50 chance that this would happen in one poll. Not much to get excited about. Twice, the odds would be 1 in 4, three times 1 in 8. After twenty anomalies the odds are over 1 in a million. Now when it happens scores of times, we are way beyond a plausible random chance.

There is at least one common explanation outside of election fraud: GOP voters are more likely to not cooperate with exit polling. But I have not seen any persuasive data to support that theory - outside of the discrepancies themselves - and that would seem to beg the question.

IF it were random, over a few election cycles it would even out. But it never does. I always goes Republican.

WAY too much smoke over this issue for there not to be a fire.

Pretty obvious, eh?

-- Mal

He knows the fix is in. He's a Made Man, and the rest is just theater.........

eom

into a mainstream forum debate?

How can we?

Tell your friends to k/r this post. We MUST start with taking back our election process, or this Kabuki Theater will continue and the fascists will have won.

...to investigate this, demand special prosecutors, use their contacts in the MSM to drive stories, and to introduce legislation for paper ballots or at the very least to demand the propriety software of the voting machines be under real regulation.

They have done nothing.

We too, have only squawked on and off for 11 years, in a disorganized, ad hoc way, and not built a fire under our representatives to do something about this.

Even with most Americans in denial, I can't believe the Democratic office holders are. And even with only a minority of Americans realizing that the vote is stolen--that never stopped the Republicans. The Republican minority always makes a huge noise about everything and eventually they drive the discourse.

We have been quiet and passive. That is a bigger problem than denial and learned helplessness. In other words--why don't Republicans suffer from learned helplessness? They always fight.

Most people, even on the nominal "left", don't want to admit that voting is not accurate and is being criminally stolen. Because to admit this would be to admit that there's nothing that can be done about the problem short of revolution. And revolution is hard, messy and uncertain.

There's a lot of good, logical stuff in this very thread that points to it. I was especially impressed by the poster that noted that it NEVER shifts to Dems, but ONLY to Republicans. If it weren't a criminal conspiracy, it would be logical to expect it to even out over a few elections, BUT IT NEVER DOES!

and PLEASE let's join together to take back our votes!

and blame him for the recession & unemployment. And that's exactly what they did.

It was a Venus Fly Trap. And it's playing out just as they planned it.

And it was a cynical, cruel ploy to distract liberals/progressives by giving them a candidate who would ostensibly fulfill their dreams of culmination of the civil rights movement so many had fought in.

Sleight of hand. Distract the left with what they thought was the ultimate dream fulfilled.

Give them a quasi Democrat who is afraid to rock the boat.

Cynical. Diabolical.

But this was after all exit polls showed Kerry winning, but we ended up with Bush 'winning.'

How can we get other DU'ers to be more active in their states to demand this?

and Democratic incumbents made us go away. They literally physically locked us out of the public auditorium room when they hired a Registrar of Voters with a bad record and no education. They did nothing when we found a GOP sponsored company switching voters party affiliations so Democrats could not vote in the primary. We found a lot worse than that....

if "rigging" is the reality based on the totality of the evidence, it seems to me that both sides must be in on it, or the losers, like the dems allegedly during the Bush years and now more recently in WI, would be screaming to high heaven.

If not, it needs to be explained why the dem leadership collectively has been so accepting of the unacceptable, since the achievement of their goals largely begins with the vote. It's hard to understand why they'd be or are so docile when they can provide input into remedial efforts even as the losers in such a scheme, if by no other means than bringing it up with higher frequency when in front of the mike with some "liberal" media, thereby raising awareness of the problem in the electorate.

They don't have any problem with doing such when they wanna fire them up on any other issue of their choosing, do they?

how can we pretend to be, not just a democracy, but the Greatest Democracy Ever! When we can't get our officials to stop stealing our elections? It's appalling. And a good reason to flee the country.

How can we allow this? Oh, right, there was a coup and now a dictatorship by unnamed and invisible tyrants. Hard to defeat an invisible opponent.

God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120,000,000 people together, you know what the trouble is.

having them actually counted make verification almost impossible.

I posted the following on DU in 2004:

Since 2000, I've been sitting on something I stumbled over on the net. I was not able to take the research further, because doing so requires knowledge about stock sales and transfers, corporate buyouts, etc., and I have no expertise in that. The summary below was sent to two trusted, extremely high profile investigative Dem authors (friends of mine), who both told me that if the evidence could all be gathered, the story would be a bombshell.

In 2000, this story sounded like something from the blue -- like the craziest of conspiracy theories. Now, after Ohio and after the AG mess has ripped the curtain off the Mayberry Macchiavellis, do you think it is far fetched? Impossible?

If anyone wants to follow up on this, please post your research on DU.

................

In late 1997, a Texas corporation that had previously consisted of a solid business in auto parts outlets and industrial supplies began to suddenly buy up companies related to voting machines and election services. The company was Tyler Corporation and the CEO was William Oates, founder of Business Resources Corporation and CEO of Business Records Corporation, which he also started.

Tyler Corporation purchased Business Records Corporation in 1998, and Oates replaced Fred Meyer, a Dallas man whose credentials include chairmanship of the George W. Bush inaugural, chairmanship of Victory 2000 (the Bush fundraising campaign) and a Bush family crony for many decades. Tyler Corporation changed its name to Tyler Technologies. According to election fraud expert Eve Waxtell, Tyler had/has financial ties to Cronus Corporation, which had purchased companies controlling 80 percent of the U.S. voting systems (CES, Thornber, and Governmental Data). There were crossover members of boards of directors between Cronus, Tyler, BRC and other entities in the elections services business.

Here's where it gets even more interesting. After buying an enormous share of the elections business starting in late 1997 and installing Oates (an elections old hand) as CEO, this previous autoparts business-now elections services corporation Tyler started dumping this elections segment of its holdings in December 2000. Oates left then. I've lost my notes on the stock sales, but I was following some records of insider trading. C.A. Rundell, CEO of Cronus and a director of Tyler, dumped 65,000 shares of Tyler stock in December 2000, for example. The corporation that went from an auto parts business to elections services and installed a CEO with elections experience began to sell all that elections stuff in December 2000.

Oates became the CEO of another new firm that specializes in data collection for government entities; other directors of that company have Cronus and Tyler ties, and all began at Eastman Kodak, which dabbled in election services until scared off by fraud litigations in the 1980s. Fred Meyer became the CEO of Aladdin, a company he served for many years earlier in his career.

Is there a story here? Some questions beg to be answered. Why did Fred Meyer leave Tyler in 1997? Did he remain a de facto force? Was Oates hand-picked by Meyer?

Here's the possibility: Was Tyler Company/Corporation used as a front in order to gather physical control of a vast segment of election services through the 2000 election? Did Fred Meyer step aside (at least in name) as CEO because he was too close to the Bushes and the Bush campaign?

I have no background in mergers, acquisitions, the corporate world or the stock market. Some of these corporations have changed names, been bought out, bought up, stopped and re-started, merged, etc. There probably are a lot of ways to track more information that I'm just not familiar with. It is true that things are not always what they seem (skim milk masquerades as cream) but the trail begs following. The implications are staggering, if the story pans out.

Comments are welcome.

Kick and Rec!

If, as it turns out, and as the CW has been spouting since 04, that exit polls as they've been implemented actually do NOT in fact serve as 'validators' of the election numbers, due to "reluctant republican voters", and other weird phenomena, then WHY haven't a bunch of statistics geeks gotten together and designed an exit poll that is meant to control for all these factors that have been skewing exit polls for all these years?

Where are the new, election-verifying exit polls? Didn't this strike anyone (in the mainstream) as a problem that needed fixing?

We are led to believe we have a choice. As Jesse Ventura said, professional wrestling in business suits.

Don't forget this:
Michael Connell's Convenient Plane Crash

How about the economic depression we're still in which neither party is doing anything about? And I stress neither one. All they're doing is blaming each other like school kids. The voting machines are rigged? Gee, that's a shame but for millions of us who don't vote, the point is? Actually the point is we're probably the smart ones since we adhere to the late George Carlin's rule of non-voting - we can bitch and gripe because we didn't partcipate in this crap...

Occupy Everything.

The only way to get anyone to look into a big election like the Wisconsin recall; is to make a big deal out of a recent election irregularity that is easy to prove.

Mitt Romney won Maine (in the primaries)and there were huge blocks of Ron Paul votes not counted. Unless this issue was resolved and I just didn't see that story.

It makes sense to me that if we could turn the eyes of the press to this vote theft (and away from Obama gaffes). That more light could be brought to bear on past elections. Logically, looking at the discrepancy in Wisconsin exit polls versus election results would be the next step.

Watch the Rachal Maddow video; it's a place to start. With proof we look less like a bunch of conspiracy theorist and more like concerned citizens with a legitimate concern.