The Dems didn't lose because of vote fraud.

I strongly believe that 2000 was stolen. It was a travesty. However, even if there was vote fraud in Ohio (the notion of which is only backed up by circumstantial evidence) Kerry would have lost by over 3 million votes nationwide. The fact that most people believe that we lose because of election rigging reveals a great problem- that it isn't what is wrong with the Democratic party as the reason we lose- that it isn't the party's fault. We need to change to win.

Contrary to Shrub and companies claims, the Democratic party is not "out of the mainstream" and "moving too far to the left". First of all, the mainstream is bullshit. The mainstream is NOT what we want to conform to at all. Just because we don't march lockstep with their idiocy does NOT mean we are "too left". In fact, geniuine conservatives should be appalled at Bush and his administration.

The main problem the Dems face is framing the debate and acting like real liberals, not trying to pull off the DLC- centrist "maybe you have a point, Bushies" attitudes. Right now Democrats use Frank Luntz's words when refuting Repuke ideolgy. Republicans control the debate. Democrats don't attack enough- they respond to Republican statements. Dems need to take the initiave. The Democrats need to come up with their terms on policy issues.


Finally, Democrats need to show America what REAL liberals are like! Don't be ashamed. Don't be like Terry McAuliffe and the DLC. Right now the Republicans have crafted an image of a liberal as a craven, perverted, immoral, America-hating, anti-religious freak. What do Democrats do when they are labeled liberal? They shrink in the face of criticism and the party drifts right. They don't fight back and then "wussy" can get added to the list of negative liberal connotations. We need to reclaim the word liberal and wear it with pride and show Americans what liberalism actually is. We can't win elections as the party is now. Maybe Dean will change things, but who knows.



After ranting, I realized that this thread basically states problems with no real solutions, but as a 16 year old my suggestions as to what to do would be largley ignored anyway! Sorry, but it felt good to type this shit

You're right, it should have been a slam dunk and it wasn't. How do you have a candidate running against a President who endorses the President's most INSANE POLICY.

Now for election fraud, do an author search for "TruthIsAll." Read his statistical analysis. You can't have an election that violated every law of statistics. Remember, statistical analysis, just like he uses and the university folks who back him up, is the basis for all scientific discovery and work, e.g., DNA analysis. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a verifiable set of facts based on long established statistical laws.

Once you read up on this on DU and this link from Dr. Steve Friedman, an eminent statistician, you will see that there was massive fraud.

http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm

Nevertheless, we need to be bold and proud of our ideas and programs.

Even if there was fraud in Ohio, there wasn't three million votes nationwide's worth. And even if there was, and it was actually a tie, there's no reason it should have been even that close. Moreover, the plurality of Kerry voters voted for him on his Iraq policy. Anyone who cared enogh to think it was an insane policy either voted for Kerry or wouldn't have voted for a Democrat.

There are 50 states. That's a lot of votes. Maybe more than 3 million.

Cheers

interesting but I don't think there is any evidence for it. Furthermore, had Clark run, there would have been a strong anti-war sentiment with substance to back it up. Look at recent polls about public perception of whether we should have gone to Iraq. Majority opposed to going now. That would have been an easy majority, I assert, to capture with a real strong candidate.

Now, as for the main point, here are some facts on election fraud.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x343088

Hot off the press!

Cheers.

Evidence
(There was more opposition to the war than support in terms of Bush policy. Therefore, a Democrat opposed to the Bush policy, de facto, would have GAINED support)

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Feb. 16-21, 2005. N=1,502 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?"

....................Approve...Disapprove..Unsure
2/16-21/05..............40........53........7
1/5-9/05.................45........50........5
10/15-19/04...........37........56.........7
9/8-13/04...............47........45........8
8/5-10/04...............43........52........5

It's not the Official Viewpoint of DU, but it's truth I wish more DU'ers held.

Viewpoint of DU"...

:hi:

I just felt like ranting, what can I say. Sometimes I get flustered reading GD and I don't post here often. This thread is a reply to all of the people I got mad reading. I read here a lot, but don't post much. I stick to the lounge generally

you say it is truth, as i sit and see texas had votes stolen. prove me wrong. that makes absolutely no sense for you to tell me it is a truth, when i know better. i watched in this state, the state i am in. was reported.

Straight democratic ticket votes got registered for Bush. How many??? :shrug: But it happened.

but the election fraud was widespread, pervasive.

Look at NM. We only had 5 electoral votes, but they'd barely lost the state in 2000 and wanted it badly last year.

To believe they won this state, you'd have to believe that 17,000 people left their nice houses to go stand in line to vote for one or two judges and not in the general election.

I'm sorry, but that strains credibility beyond the breaking point.

We had the ES&S machines here. What they did was simply subtract votes from Democrats in national races. For some inexplicable reason, they left the votes for judges intact (not important enough, I guess). Democrats swept all of those races.

The fraud was massive and it occurred everywhere, from Sproul's discarding all voter registration forms for Democrats to the hacked voting machines.

We'll never know whether Kerry or Bush won the election, although the exit polls gave it to Kerry. What we DO know is that Bush had to cheat at every level and in every state to get that 3,000,000 vote margin he mistakenly thinks is some sort of mandate.

become president in 2000. The fact that we even have an electoral college influences how people vote, so even without fraud, we don't really know what the "popular" vote would be. That's just not how we do it in this country.

The suspicion of election fraud wasn't just in Ohio, although that was a critical state. The difference there was a lot less than 3 million (more like 130,000) and it is possible that fraud there could easily have tipped that states votes into the wrong column. We don't know if Kerry really won Ohio or not. We won't know unless all the evidence is examined.

I don't think most people at DU believe that there was election fraud, but most people certainly think that this administration is corrupt enough to sink to anything, the exit polls are curious, and where there is smoke, there just might be fire.

The popular vote isn't the issue. If it were then Gore would have won in 2000 despite KKKrove's efforts.

The issue is about 120,000 votes in Ohio and any of us who were at the polls that day know for sure there was foul play. I saw it myself.

Who knows what combination of events would have been enough? I saw voters who went home after waiting hours in the rain, provisional ballots that weren't counted, machines that didn't count the votes correctly. This isn't (or shouldn't) be news to anyone here.

This is not to mention Florida, New Mexico, etc...

Again, excellent point. Now open your mind. I'm totally impressed that we've got the youth movement starting on DU. Stick around.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x343088

texas early votes were being recorded bush when straight dem ticket hit in the heavy democratic areas, austin, houston and elpaso. there are some more free votes. happened two weeks of early voting and election day, no corrections

same happened thru out new mexico

we could go to many states with examples like this. how hard to reverse a couple million from one candidate to another

no i do not have your confidence the vote wasnt stolen, in more than one state. and until this is addressed i wont have confidence in 2006

i disagree

The young have so much at stake because they have to live with the mess being created for so long. It is nice to see young people explore reality on the Internet and try to figure out what is going on.

I really think the elections were stolen this time too, both in Ohio and Florida. There were plenty of criminal acts and we do not see one prosecution and that should tell you something along the lines of 9/11 where nobody was even fired, especially * by the voters.

If you watched "Unprecidented" on the Internet you know that just the illegal counting of the veterans votes in 2000 that were dated after the election made the difference. That act alone stole the election.

In 2004, the Congress had allowed $4 billion to "fix" the elections. They would allow new machines without paper trails. It was not oversite, it was deliberate. When called to support paper trails long before the elections, no Senator could even sponsor a bill. What is telling is that the Florida company that sold machines for elections in South America had paper ballots because it was a no-brainer.

Even to this day, people do not challenge why machines are connected to telephone lines at all. That is completely unnecessary, as a calculator can add the final results of each machine very easily. It is absurd to connect the machines where they can be manipulated, even with a paper trail. The cost of printers was one BS reason for leaving them off, but they did not mind the expense of telephone connectivity.

Older people are going to go through a betrayal syndrome because they thought the US was goody-goody instead of the most ruthless nation on the planet. At least those of your age will not be brainwashed into accepting the party line as reality, when it is really just an illusion.

If you want to know how brainwashed people were and how corrupt the government is, I suggest you read some at cannabisnew.com. You really cannot believe all the godawful pot laws their are and the harm that comes with the laws themselves without reading some on it. The fact that you cannot smoke a joint in peace or freedom should explain a lot.

I suggest to you that as long as their is a two party system without a dirct vote for president with a majority required for victory that the system is rigged for the wealthy to control the populace.

That was fine expression for anybody and very admirable from someone 16 years old.

Give me a good reason to believe the voting machines rather than the exit polls. The exit polls try as hard as they can to be accurate; unless they're accurate they won't get business. They have a strong reason to be honest. The voting machines have absolutely no reason to be honest. They can be easily mis-programmed or hacked or patched (and without a doubt have been many times already and were during the 04 election). They have absolutely no reason to think they'll get caught since the source code is off-limits and the vote, even where there's a paper trail, is almost never audited or when it is audited the most suspicious areas are not re-counted (as in OH where the 3% hand recount avoided all the suspicious places).

If you could cheat and determine the next president and knew there was no way you could never be caught, would you?

Besides, it shouldn't be my job to prove fraud. It should be the government's to assure me by its transparent and fair vote-counting procedures that it's fair and just. As things now stand the vote is counted in secret by the most rabidly far-right (and in some cases criminally so) vote counters it's possible to find.

Prove to me there was no fraud. I believe Kerry won by a greater margin than Bush allegedly won by. All the polls indicate he did, in OH as well as probably FL. He ran a fine campaign, the Dems got out the vote in record numbers, etc. The central (not the only) problem was the counting of the votes. Prove me wrong.

since you are so sure that they are more accurate than the official results! Who needs to actually count anything - exit polls should be enough, right?

about election fraud, your other points are valid. I hope that bringing Dr Dean in as party chair is the beginning of shit-canning the DLC. Another good move would be actively soliciting Gen. Clark as the 2008 nominee. IMHO

living in denial and saying that we lost because of voter fraud and not because of our overall message and stances is foolish.

but you are wrong about the fraud - exit polls are almost never wrong - and more people intended to vote for Kerry than Bush - I'm in FL and I KNOW Bush didn't win this state by the % they say he did. But our message won't matter until we do something about this black box voting - Jesus H Christ would be defeated by these thugs unless we get a fair and accurate count - the message is important but a fair and accurate count is more important.

of the grieving process. It's only natural.

Stage two is anger, and that should be kicking in just in time to get a big turnout for the congressional races.

I don't agree with you that there is so much trouble though. Using popular votes, the Democratic presidential candidate has won three of the last four elections. I'd hardly call that time to panic.

there is no way of knowing what the actual out come would have been...jusr as I thought that college students and blacks would put big numbers into the Dem vote, it was found to be aprox' 50/50....as for the dems defining who they are...we need to stop being defined by Karl Rove... yes; let's hope that Dean is the man to do this

away. That's what I really believe.

Now that's really STUPID. That should be the democrat mantra.

Kerry's comments in early 2004 that he didn't need the South to win were well reported in North Carolina. If I remember correctly, he, or a representative, stated that he would focus on the Southwest instead. From what I've seen and heard, it doesn't appear that many Southerners forgot what he had to say.

Half of that, about 1.5 million swing over to Kerry and he wins the pop vote. If you look at the fraud allegations, the exit polls and early vote numbers from just three states, Ohio, Texas and Florida. Where * had the opportunity to grab extra votes. He could have taken the majority there. We are talking about fraud in just over 1% of the total vote. I find it very plausible.

If votes aren't being counted correctly, that seems to me to be the first place to look for fixes.