How the mainstream media treated the "stolen election" story in November 2004

This post is in response to the lovely comments from Elizabeth Edwards trying to somehow change the subject and say that Kerry "gave up too soon" in 2004. She seems to forget what the mainstream media did at the time when any allegations of voter fraud were mentioned.

There were many allegations of a media "lockdown" immediately after the 2004 election that basically put all news regarding voting discrepancies in the convenient category of "conspiracy theory" by "web bloggers". Ewww...bad... As WaPo parrots chortled, it was all the poor sport antics of the "spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists".

John Conyers made a note of it then:




The Washington Post had several indications that the wacky web bloggers were up to no good...probably because they are America-haters:



Not to be outdone, Fox News knew what to do:



The New York Times did their duty kissing the buttocks of election fraud:



If you want a good start on what happened after the nightmare of democratic kidnapping occurred, check these PDFs out:
http://www.eriposte.com/election04/eRiposte_2004_results_2.pdf
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

Live the nightmare again:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/vote2004/
http://www.archive.org/details/dn2004-1103-special

What kind of shrivelled balls does Edwards have that he didn't speak up at the time?

Who are the conspirators?

Which precincts had over 10,000 ballots mismarked or votes switched?

I am so sick of this shit. There's STILL no evidence of a conspiracy.

How about HAVA?

What about the exit-polling?

What is it about bushco that makes you think they don't conspire?

I am so sick of people who are willing to let bushco slide for stealing elections.

If you can't, you've got no evidence. Stickers on ten ballots is not evidence of theft. Twenty ballots dampened by humidity is not evidence. Not enough voting machines in Dem run precincts, is not evidence.

There's NO evidence.

If there's tons, it shouldn't be hard to give me the precincts where the thousands of votes were switched, and suspects who oversaw the conspiracy.

Ever heard of Gahanna 1-B?

How about the 25%+ Presidential undervotes on DREs in some New Mexico precincts and the 80% Presidential undervotes on DREs in some Pennsylvania precincts?

How about voter-initiated reports of DRE vote-flipping in dozens of states, 95%+ favoring Bush?

How about the illegal "caging" of Black servicemen and women on duty in Iraq to prevent them from being allowed to vote?

Read something, would you? Read anything. Here's a start:

Read Conyers.

Read Fitrakis and Wasserman

Read Freeman

Read Thiesen and Stewart

Read Koehler

Read Gideon

Read Alter

Read Friedman

Read Curtis

Read Palast

Read Miller

Read Phillips

Read Simon

Read Mitteldorf

Read Gumbel

Read Rubin

Read Wallach

Read Mercuri

Read Landis


OR.... (if you're not much of a reader), sit in front of a TV and watch:

Hacking Democracy

Stealing America: Vote by Vote

The Right to Count

Commander 'N Thief

American Blackout

Eternal Vigilance

Uncounted

OR .... if even that effort is too much:

Go to the Election Reform forum, dial back to November, 2004, and start reading the very informed threads here. Yours is not a familiar avatar in those parts, so you stand to learn a great deal without leaving the comfort of your computer desk.


The fact that -- three years later -- you have apparently still not done even elemetary reading and research around this issue does not mean that the evidence doesn't exist. It says nothing about the 2004 election fraud, but it speaks volumes about you.

Why can't anybody do it. Which precincts had the thousands of votes switched or stolen, who is suspected to have orchestrated the theft in those precincts.

That's a stolen election.

Give me the evidence. Simple task.

Since you may not know how to search for these references on the 'net, here's the first one (Conyers report: What went wrong in Ohio?") It is highly readable and chock-ful of the very examples you crave.

www.amazon.com/What-Went-Wrong-Ohio-Presidential/dp/089733535X

From your responses, however, my guess is that you won't take any more time to read the evidence than you have already. Let's see, it's been almost three years, there have been hundreds of articles published, and yet "someone" still wants to see the evidence. The one with the cross-eyed, blissful smile.

Since I'm feeling particularly kindly to the willfully-ignorant tonight, here's another link, complete with 208 references (many of them 'net links).

www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Any further response to you would just take away from your opportunity to catch up on your reading. Two last suggestions: It would also help if you would take your fingers out of your ears and stop yelling, "I can't hear you!!".

The Conyers report didn't purport to demonstrate that Kerry won Ohio; you've asserted it. Disconnect.

As for the stuff in RFK Jr.'s article that isn't in Conyers, start here, work your way through graf by graf, write the rebuttal, and then perhaps you will have standing to talk about the "willfully ignorant."

The evidence for a stolen election is well contained in the work of authors whose identities are known to all of us. Just like my identity is known to long-term readers of the ER forum. I am confident in my reading of the evidence and in my interpretation of the facts that have been presented in a number of credible sources. I haven't devoted my life to election integrity since 11/5/04 because there was nothing better to do with my time. I also didn't get involved as a precious academic exercise. This is the future of the country we are (or should be) dealing with.

Unlike you, I am not suffering from cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, you praise Mitofsky and his skill. On the other hand (now where have I heard that before?), you have a piss-poor performance in the 2004 election exit polls conducted by your expert and a follow-up report that didn't lay anything to rest about why his performance was so bad. You have to reconcile those disparate facts (or opinions) and so you belabor the minutia for (what?) three years now. On this other hand, I see a respected scientist whose exit poll research methods worked just fine -- they just didn't coincide with a reported vote that did not accurately reflect the consent of the governed. No wonder Mitofsky didn't live much longer -- I am sure it was a burden for him to see his life's work trashed by election thieves and their apologists. No wonder his follow-up report is hard to find on the 'net these days.

You have evidence (as do we all) from a variety of other sources relaying information on the host of methods used to improperly and illegally manipulate the 2004 election results (I think Harvey Wasserman has enumerated almost 50 separate methods used in Ohio alone). And we have the evidence of almost seven years of corruption, incompetence and a fundamental disconnect with the American people on almost every issue. We also have evidence of similar election fraud methods being perpetrated in other elections by the same gang of Rethug thieves (see the Siegelman thread on the "Greatest" page now, and the GAO report thread calling more attention to FL-13.). Yet we still have Rethugs governing (and acting) as if there is to be no day of atonement awaiting them at the ballot box. The only people I know who act so cocky (other than some no-nothings here) in the face of the above-delineated patterns are those who believe that the fix is in, and that it always will be.

That's why some of us are working for election integrity and election justice. That's why more of us should be. The ballot box is the great leveler, the great force for moderation, our last protection against "true believers" wherever they appear in our body politic. Now, when we need that moderating force the most, we still have Rethugs (and the voting machine companies and the "now-you-see-them, now-you-don't" quasi-academic enterprises like the American Center for Voting Rights) fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent any meaningful election reform.

Something is happening here, but you still don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? Good night and good luck with that cognitive dissonance. I fear it can become a chronic disease.

I'm a political scientist. As far as I'm concerned, I'm professionally and ethically obligated to form an opinion on the strength of the evidence that the 2004 election was stolen, in consultation with relevant experts. Quite obviously, it's the consensus judgment of political scientists that the evidence is weak. Given the passion with which not a few political scientists dislike George W. Bush -- and, frankly, the incentives to make the first compelling case that Kerry won -- I find it remarkable that there isn't more dissent from this view.

I have no way of knowing how your mind works, so I will accept your testimony that you don't suffer from cognitive dissonance, but your profound indifference to expert opinion occasions some discomfort on my part.


I agree, and that's why I want you to stop purveying misinformation. You can't possibly think that I post to DU as a "precious academic exercise," so try a mental model that makes sense. Deal with reality as it confronts you, not the way you want to imagine it, or me. If you're not experiencing cognitive dissonance, maybe it is time to start.

That's corking good rhetoric, I guess, but it evinces very little understanding of survey research. There must be some pertinent parallel in your epidemiological training. Some methods yield reliable and accurate results when properly administered. Some methods don't, because crucial variables are outside the researcher's control. In a 2006 pre-election poll, proportionally more Democrats than Republicans indicated that they would be willing to participate in an exit poll. There is no reason to assume that a researcher can overcome unequal willingness to participate through "skill." It's an empirical question -- in fact, a bunch of related empirical questions. I should not have to explain this sort of thing to you.


There is no evidence supporting the accuracy of the exit polls. It is possible to pretend that, say, evidence of machine misallocation in Franklin County, Ohio, and the double-digit exit poll discrepancies in New Hampshire are mutually supporting, but they aren't. "Fraud is fraud" is not a cogent argument. My opinion of the people who purvey the myth of exit poll accuracy is much like my opinion of people who argue that no planes struck the Twin Towers. My opinion of the people who defend these disparate arguments by appealing to political considerations, likewise.

In response to your comment, "In a 2006 pre-election poll, proportionally more Democrats than Republicans indicated that they would be willing to participate in an exit poll. There is no reason to assume that a researcher can overcome unequal willingness to participate through 'skill.'"

To begin, despite your earlier comments about 'misinformation', Mitofsky did not present similar evidence from 2004 to support an "unwilling Republican respondent" hypothesis. (Fortunately, you acknowledged that earlier.) Second, researchers have been dealing with this issue forever. They solve the problem through stratified random sampling. That is, if there was some need to obtain equal representation of respondents from each party AND party affiliation was something that interviewers determined early enough in the interview to use as a screening question. Then, if the party affiliations (not the candidate chosen) of voters could be ascertained with which to weight the exit poll results (and one assumed (this is perhaps a stretch) that unwillingness to participate in an exit poll was unrelated to candidate chosen), the "adjusted" exit polls would have some meaning. However, please note that this process does not adjust the "raw" exit poll results with the "reported" vote. It also presumes that this adjustment to exit poll results would be necessary because Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to participate in exit polls always and everywhere and that the difference would be sufficient to skew the results of the exit polls without the recommended adjustment (a major procedural adjustment to pursue based on the result of a single pre-election poll, I would submit).

Now my question: I spoke recently at a regional conference of public administrators at the invitation of a political scientist who presented a paper on HAVA implementation in Tennessee. During his presentation, he indicated that there had been surprisingly little published within the political science community about the issue of 2004 election fraud or, for that matter, election fraud in general in recent years. Since you posit a "consensus" among your colleagues on this issue, how did you determine such a consensus? Can you direct me to articles in political science journals on this issue? Have political scientists been polled on the issue and was the reluctance to be labelled "tin-foil conspiratorialists" by their colleagues accounted for in adjusting the results? (That last point is a joke, but as with any herd mentality, it probably should not be.) These are serious questions -- "my" political scientist says your discipline has been relatively silent on this issue, whereas you posit a delineated consensus among them. Any references you could share would be appreciated.

Finally, an analogy. When speaking with audiences of various stripes on election fraud, I have often discussed the reluctance displayed in this country (among many groups) to consider the possibility that significant (some say 'wholesale') election fraud has and is occurring. I ask the audience to consider the reality of pedophilic priests who preyed on the children of their parishes across this country without detection for decades. Because the thought that a trusted spiritual leader would also be buggering children is so abhorrent, I am sure that most parishoners for years did not even want to consider that this behavior was occurring, and would have responded accordingly to any assessment of the problems through surveys. I would also expect that any pedophiles among the parishoners would also be reluctant to speak affirmatively for fear of bringing attention to themselves. Finally, I would also expect that any parish pedophiles who were participating with the priest in buggering the children would certainly disparage the very idea in order that their behavior could continue undetected. (I think it goes without saying that any survey of priests on the same issue would have likely surfaced no reported evidence for pedophilia. The perpetrators would have remained silent, and other innocent priests would not have responded affirmatively for fear of what it might say about their profession.)

So, in this analogy, survey research of parishoners on the issue of pedophilia among parish priests would have likely resulted in a conclusion that the problem did not exist at all in this country. My expectation is that such a sensitive survey of this nature would have been administered only to adults, further diminishing the prospect that current victims would be included in the survey. In this analogy, individual aggrieved voters -- those who found themselves in front of vote-flipping DREs or who were improperly purged from precinct rolls through "caging" and other methods -- would have sounded very much like underage children trying to report being buggered by parish priests. There is a built-in disincentive to believe those reports among the election officials who are wedded to (and perhaps benefitting from) the status quo. Besides, computer "glitches" leave much less evidence for any CSI unit than child rape.

Unfortunately, with election fraud (particularly electronic election fraud), the vast majority of voters who are being molested don't feel a thing. And surveys of voters (on the problem of election fraud) would include only people who still believe in the "system" sufficiently to keep participating. Otherwise, what would be the point? On the other hand, surveys of people who are unlikely to vote (a population that is certainly under-represented in election-related survey research) would likely surface a considerable mistrust of the voting system itself. My basis for that comment is my own personal experience in 2004, when I registered 909 people to vote but had many, many people tell me that their vote didn't "count", that the system was rigged, that -- as a result -- they didn't bother.

On November 5, I awoke to wonder just whose perspective was the correct one. It is because I have come to learn how vulnerable to attack our paperless, computerized voting systems are, because I have learned how often problems sufficient to impact election results have occurred and because I have become firmly convinced that the current strain of Rethug has, at base, no moral center that would diminish any urges to bugger our elections, that I spend my days doing what I am doing.

Last point: It matters not to me what motivates you to be against DREs. At this moment, I am only happy that you are. I believe they have already been manipulated to achieve election fraud; I expect that you see their potential for achieving the same outcome. On this point, we are both right.
If we both act on our common belief (that DREs are hazardous to the health of our democracy), we might just save our democracy.

Now I must be off, to life as I know it. Peace out.

Bernie, but you do at least two people an injustice here: OTOH and Mitofsfy. OTOH is not suffering from "cognitive dissonance" AFAICT - he merely suffers from a malady, which I also suffer from, of being unable to conclude that because Evidence A and Evidence B both suggest C, Evidences A and C must corroborate each other, even if they cannot simultaneously be true.

It's the Bart Simpson fallacy: "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything".

And far from Mitofsky going to his grave thinking that election fraud had scuppered his beautiful exit polls, or, worse, thinking that his exit polls had gone unaccountably wrong when the discrepancy was all an artefact of election fraud, quite the opposite was the case. I have on my computer possibly one of the last emails he wrote, delighted that the analyses he'd asked me to run on his data confirmed his own conclusions that the cause of the exit poll discrepancy was extremely unlikely to be due to election view, but, as he had always maintained with good evidence was due to a tendency for Democratic voters to be sampled at a higher rate than Republican voters.

You wrote:




Yes, he did. The Edison-Mitofsky evaluation document, published in January 2005, provided a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis.



Telephone polls often used stratified samples, with quotas for various demographics. This is not done in exit polls for good reason - it would assume the conclusion in advance. The point of exit polls is to find out who actually voted for whom - and you can't do that if you make a priori assumptions about turnout in different demographics. Instead, the precincts are drawn by meand of stratified sampling, based on past turnout. In addition, visible demographic characteristics (age, race and sex) of people who were selected (as the "nth voter") but who either refused or were not approached for some other reason, is recorded, and used to estimate whether actual sample has a similar demographic composition to ideal sample (if all selected had participated). By this means, pollsters can re-weight their response to reflect non-response bias by visible characteristics. However, by definition, they cannot reweight their sample by invisible characteristics such as who voted for whom. Thus they know that non-response bias occurs; what they can't know is whether the bias affects anything other than age, race and sex. They would be foolish to assume it doesn't, and they don't. They therefore ALSO reweight by pre-election expectations, and by this means, Mitofsky was clear before a single result had been reported that some of the samples had an unusually strong pro-Kerry bias in 2004.



And, as I said, this would result in the poll proportions reflecting the turnout assumptions of the poll. In any case, it isn't how it's done.



See above.



It is very difficult to get a random sample from face-to-face selection procedures. What is extremely clear from the exit poll data is that the size and direction of the discrepancy was directly proportional to factors associated with difficulty in sticking to strict Nth voter protocol. This in itself strongly suggests that where difficulty in sticking to strict Nth voter protocol was greater, either interviewers tended unconsciously to select more willing looking respondents, or that less willing respondents were simply able to evade the selection procedure.

However, the most clear finding, in my view, to suggest that polling factors, and not vote-switching fraud, were primarily the cause of the discrepancy, is that there is not a sniff of a correlation between the magnitude of the discrepancy and any advantage to Bush relative to 2000. In other words, despite the fact that in 2000, the polls were unusually close, overall, to the official vote, the degree to which Bush increased his voteshare is completely uncorrelated with the degree to which the polls appeared to overestimate Kerry's vote. This means that the two phenomena (swing to Bush; "redshift" in the polls) are extremely unlikely to have had the same cause.

I wrote some of it up here:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Febble/11

and here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x398267

Mark Lindeman wrote some of it up here:

http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/slides.html

And wrote a Kos diary on exit polls here:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/4/135126/905

None of which means that fraud didn't occur in 2004. But it means that it electronic fraud probably didn't occur on a scale of millions; that exit polls are not a good indicator of vote-switching fraud; and that there are more ways to disenfranchise US voters that directly stealing their votes.

First, I'm happy to answer questions, but I hope you also will answer my question below. Do you think that the New Hampshire exit poll result (Kerry winning by 15.0 points, with a standard error of 2.8) was accurate? If so, why, and where do you think those votes are? If not, what are the ramifications for the rest of this discussion?

You entered this thread with the claim, "The Mitofsky report itself disproves the 'reluctant Bush supporter' hypothesis." In my professional opinion, that is flatly untrue. In my observation, you seem to be bobbing and weaving rather than either supporting or retracting that assertion. Are you going to defend that assertion, or not?

It's true, but irrelevant, that Mitofsky couldn't cite a 2004 pre-election poll that indicated that Democrats were less likely to participate. My point was that there is no reason to assume that pollsters can elicit equal participation from each candidate's voters just by using good methods. There are things they can do to guarantee bad results, but nothing they can do to guarantee good results.

To Febble's remarks on stratified random sampling (or weighting), I would only add that in fact, you started by saying that researchers "solve this problem" by stratifying, and ended by pointing out why the exit pollsters couldn't. Your reasoning is sound. This is one reason why they don't call competitive states based on exit poll results alone: they cannot afford to assume that their results must be accurate withing sampling error.

Now, as for political scientists, many good ones have worked on various aspects of election fraud -- it's a bit scary to start listing them, but the list would include (in alphabetical order) Michael Alvarez, Henry Brady, Thad Hall, Benjamin Highton, Martha Kropf, Walter Mebane, Jasjeet Sekhon, Charles Stewart, Michael Traugott, and Jonathan Wand. I'm not sure what "your" political scientist meant when he said that there had been surprisingly little published on the subject, but it's true that people haven't been knocking each other down in the rush to publish articles supporting the null hypothesis that Bush got more votes! Much of the work exists as conference and working papers. Actually, the published work is considerable as well, but I have no idea what it is that someone thinks we should have published more about, so I'm not sure where to direct you.

I do not think you are really offering a "joke" when you speculate that political scientists might be intimidated by "the reluctance to be labelled 'tin-foil conspiratorialists' by their colleagues," but I think you are kidding yourself. Do you really think the author of "The Wrong Man Is President!", Walter Mebane, is sitting on evidence that Kerry won because he is afraid of what his colleagues might think? (Not to single out Mebane: I think most of the people I mentioned above authored articles on all the different ways that Gore won Florida.) Febble of course isn't a political scientist, but does she strike you as someone whose quantitative judgment is skewed by her reluctance to believe that Kerry won? Do I strike you as someone who runs from a fight? I might hope that at some point you might actually set aside perplexing stereotypes and engage substance (for instance, the first two paragraphs above).

I have no clue what to do with your analogy to pedophilia. Are many people reluctant to believe in election fraud? probably many are, yes. What bearing does that have upon assessing evidence of election fraud? I'm here asking you to support your claims; you're talking about pedophilia. What's that about? I think it's wonderful that you are working for election integrity. I do not think it's wonderful that you're saying stuff like "The Mitofsky report itself disproves the 'reluctant Bush supporter' hypothesis." That's about in a league with appealing to astrology to critique Bush's foreign policy -- it may play well with people who don't know better (and in this case, many don't), but it will create some strain with people who do.

Guys,

I have spent the day ruminating about the process -- actually a number of processes. This process -- debating exit polls -- is not one I wanted to re-ignite or to engage in myself. So I want to make a few more points about how I see things, and leave this thread at that. Sorry, OTOH, if I leave any of your questions unanswered about New Hampshire or anything else. I am just not interested in this debate -- and I never was when any thread posted on the ER forum in 2005-06 remotely related to this issue sparked a continual and energetic response from you two energizer bunnies. Here is how I see things:

1) I believe in exit polls and trust in the competence and skill of those who administer them for a living.

2) I believe that the statistical anomolies in 2004 in the exit polls/reported vote for many states raised serious and warranted suspicisions among many of us.

3) I believe the confusion expressed by most on-air network journalists to the flip-flops in the exit poll data raised other immediate concerns. After all, these networks had paid for the conduct of the exit polls and they should have been aware (and forewarned) about any adjustments that would occur late into the night with the results. They were not, and it showed.

4) I was likely one of the first to email Mitofsky directly (with 48 hours of the election) to ask him three basic questions about the disconnect between exit polls/reported votes. Like hundreds of others, I never received a response. That was the first thing to raise my suspicions. His decision to go into hiding and not speak publicly or answer questions in an open fashion after the election compounded those suspicions. (And no, Feeble, emailing you and a select handful of other supporters does not qualify as an open dialogue.)

5) The obviously pre-planned attacks by the Rethugs on the exit polls that appeared immediately after the election (I saw Bush senior denigrate the methodology myself on one network news program within two days of the election) suggested to me that the Rethugs had anticipated the exit poll/reported vote disconnect and were prepared to start the psychological inoculation to denigrate the methodology immediately. (And I don't suspect they had any knowledge of "exuberant Kerry respondents" on the Thursday after the election.) Unlike Bush senior and the Rethug spin machine, I did not disrespect Mitofsky's professional skill and experience or presume that he didn't know what he was doing. (If it's not clear, I still don't.)

6) For months, I awaited some formal explanation from Mitofsky and so I was also likely one of the first to download and read his 1/19/05 report. Though it is true (from my re-reading of that report today) that Mitofsky posited that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters, I see no evidence presented in that report to support that assertion. I did see (again) a statement (on p. 37) that "there was no significant difference between the (exit poll) completion rates and the precinct partisanship." The accompanying table on that page supports that statement.

7) I took comfort in the fact that a number of social scientists, mathemeticians and survey researchers came to the same conclusions after reading and reviewing the Mitofsky report as I did.

8) Given how much concern had been raised about the value of the exit poll process (and the 2004 results), I watched with interest (and concern) as requests for access to the raw (individual-level) 2004 data by other independent researchers went unanswered. Excuses that the raw data were proprietary fell flat for me and many others.

9) My concerns increased in 2006 when discrepencies between exit poll results and reported votes persisted.

10) The revelations that have continued to surface since 2004 of voting machine-related "glitches", interferred-with recounts, destroyed evidence, vote rigging software whistle-blowers, universal condemnation of the security safeguards in all instances when voting equipment has been examined by outside experts, coordinated "caging" exercises, intimidation of multiple U.S. Attorneys around "voter fraud" issues and many other bits and pieces of evidence (not the least of which is what we found when we examined the Diebold central tabulator in Memphis, what happened in the Siegelman re-election bid in Alabama and the continuing concerns about FL-13) are -- to me -- all reflective of a basic pattern of conspiracy to commit election fraud by the Rethugs. I do not hang my hat on any single piece of evidence or any single debate around that evidence. In our state, I have been up close to these evil bastards and they put off a foul odor.

In closing, I want to make one final point. The purpose for the pedophilic priest analogy I posted earlier was to suggest that there is a built-in disincentive to think ill of cherished institutions (or persons) and thus an understandable willingness to look for any other explanations ("sore losers" in the case of elections, "excitable children" in the case of pedophilic priests) when there is a disconnect between our expectations and the posited "reality". As I have thought about this final response to you two, I have come to believe that there is another cherished institution that is under attack here and now -- the fundamental value of survey research to predict political behavior. This is, after all, how you focus your professional energies. The thought that highly competent and skilled survey researchers can fail so dramatically to accomplish what they were paid for in 2004 (as Mitofsky admits he did in his report) must be concerning to the two of you. If -- regardless of their best and most considered research efforts -- survey researchers cannot predict with any acceptable degree of accuracy the political outcomes they are asked to assess, then there is no political "science", at least as it involves voting behavior.

In the end, Stalin's comment (or at least the comment attributed to him) may trump all; "The people who cast the votes (the same ones who speak to the exit pollers) decide nothing -- the people who count the votes (or pretend to) decide everythng." In this country, and in other democracies around the world that are succumbing to the same computer-assisted (but certainly not relied on) election fraud marathon we are witnessing, this may have been the "truth" that I did not want to imagine or accept. I still don't.

Free, fair and verifiable elections are the foundation of our communal legitimacy, are what helps us enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness secure in the belief that our government reflects the strength, goodness and basic morality that exists within the majority of us. I hope that the tools of your trade will continue to be of some use to us, though they are certainly under attack now (and not by those of us with whom you have engaged in debate here for 36 months). Being unable to accurately predict the outcomes of our elections means that we are truly in the dark and at the mercy of political elites not of our own choosing. I don't think we are there yet -- I still believe that we can institute voting procedures and safeguards that will result in the accurate enumeration of the consent of the governed, inside and outside the voting booth. But if we fail to re-secure the franchise soon, there are other options available to us, as there have always been to freedom-loving people throughout history. Whatever comes, I hope to be available to support and defend a system of governance that is certainly not perfect but (as Churchill said) beats the hell out of all the rest. I hope the two of you are also.

Vote free or die bold. Now it's time for bed.

You're willing to say that "I believe in exit polls," but you aren't willing to say whether you believe the exit poll that says Kerry won New Hampshire by 15?

You could write a 1300-word response, but you couldn't answer that question?

Wild. I still think you're overdue for that cognitive dissonance.

I think you know well that Febble had all kinds of suspicions about the exit polls. I started from a different point, but I always figured that the exit polls might be of some use in figuring out where miscount did and didn't occur. But it's hard to get at what actually happened without being willing to address questions like the one I posed to you.

I'm really not interested in debating the existence of a "basic pattern of conspiracy" -- what seems relevant to me is what happened where, when, how -- as well as what could happen in the future, and how to prevent it.


Well, no. Febble is a research psychologist. I'm a political scientist who inter alia studies public opinion, but nothing in my worldview is rocked by a three-point error in an exit poll. That's trivial compared to the real problems in survey research: broadly, how the heck do ya figure out what (and how) people really think?

Again, that's spirited, but I have no clue why you would think voting behavior research is gutted by a three-point error in an exit poll. (Whether it is "science" -- well, I think it can be argued either way. But that argument has no bearing on what actually happened in 2004, which was what you had originally opined about.)

In your efforts to restore verifiable elections, I support you. In your willingness to make bald assertions of fact and then sidle away in an analogical fog, I don't. Truly, I fear you are trying to protect yourself from knowledge, and I always regret that.

is people's willingness - even people I admire enormously, like you - to assert that a piece of evidence - the exit polls - is indicative of fraud, and yet be unwilling to discuss the question as to whether it is. I know the subject bores you, but as I said downthread, getting stuff wrong can seriously warp a debate, and while it hasn't put you off your stride, in many ways I think it put an important sector of the Election Reform movement off its stride, which is why, although frankly, the subject bores me now, I feel honour bound to keep trying to present what I see as a more veridical account of the exit poll narrative.



In that case, why not the competence in their judgement as to why there was a greater than unusual "redshift"?



Including me. Which is why I have spent so much time on the darned things.



Of course they were aware. They actually have their own people at the "decision desks". The networks know how the exit polls work. That's why they don't "call" states until the "adjustments" have reached a given confidence level. Please read my DKos diary (linked in the previous post) for more information.



He did not "go into hiding". I read interviews with him myself. He may not have answered your email, but he did answer very many others. He also conducted an in depth investigation into the poll, and made the report publicly available for scrutiny in January 2004. It wasn't until April or so of 2005 that he contacted me, and that was because I'd written a piece criticising his own report (and the USCV analysis of it). He thought my criticism was valid, and hired me to redo the analyses.



But you disrespect his own opinion, formed before a single result was in, that the polls had an greater than usual pro-Democratic bias in several states, together with his own conclusions from his own post mortem of his own poll.



There is a great deal of evidence presented in that report. What you have done (reasonably, I did it myself) was to equate "participation rates" with "completion rates". The two are not the same thing. What the report does is give strong evidence that differential participation rates resulted from factors likely to make strict Nth voter protocol more difficult. But even if we consider differential response rates: it is perfectly possible that Kerry and Bush voters were equally likely to respond if approached, but that Kerry voters were more likely to be approached by/approach the interviewer, and the evidence supports this hypothesis. You also need to avoid the ecological fallacy (committed by Freeman, among others) in thinking that because total completion rates were not lower in precincts with stronger Bush support that relative completion rates were not lower among Bush voters for any given completion rate. If completion rates were lower in urban precincts, but lower still among Bush voters than among Kerry voters, because urban precincts tend to be more Democratic, you'd see lower completion rates in Democratic precincts, but greater response bias in those same precincts, because the relative completion rate differential was greater.



Well, not many survey researchers. Can you name one? (NB Freeman is not a "survey researcher").




Well, you missed the point. The point was not that they were proprietary - Mitofsky has always insisted that the data be publicly available, and indeed it was available for free download to anyone for over a year. What was NOT released were the precinct identifiers for the simple reason that given the extraordinary level of personal detail in the released data, in some instances, if precincts were identified, so could individuals, together with very personal information, including, inter alia sexual orientation. Nonetheless, "blurred" data was carefully prepared for Ohio, and made publicly available by ESE, and both the "Best Geo" and "composite" estimates made at close of poll (i.e. adjusted only by geographic stratification, and adjusted by pre-election expectations, respectively, and not by incoming returns) for each state was published in the Evaluation document.



And yet again the close of poll data was available for anyone to download, and many did. No cover-up, no conspiracy. And the fact that there was also a discrepancy in 2006, as there has been in every year since at least 1988, with a large one in 1992 is as consistent, if not more consistent, with an explanation lying in polling methodoligy as it is with an explanation lying in fraud. Note that the Dems won, and won in line with pre-election polling, even winning a couple of expected marginals by a hair.



Well, I have no quarrel with you over the unreliability and insecurity of electronic voting, nor with your case that malice has been aforethought. What I take issue with, as I said previously, is concluding that because A and B both suggest C, that A and B necessarily corroborate each other. IMO, they don't. What the exit poll narrative does is scale up the evidence for skulduggery to a scale of millions and place the mechanism on electronic fraud. Closer inspection shows that the exit poll evidence actually contra-indicates electronic fraud on a scale of millions. It says nothing about voter-suppression, little about high residual votes in Democratic precincts, or places I am genuinely suspicious of (New Mexico). In other words, it misdirects. And I don't like misdirection whether it is done through honest misevaluation of the evidence or deliberate sleight of hand. Sometimes I honestly think that Rove was behind the exit poll story, in order to distract attention from the real methods used to ensure Bush's victory. (That is almost not a joke).

Cheers

Lizzie


Edited to fix tags, and to say - my name is Febble :)

That's why I've asked for the precincts where the thousands of votes have been switched or are missing.

Because they don't exist.

and that's why nobody has any.

YOU should be able to back it up. Three precincts where thousands of votes were lost or switched. Why do you think you should be able to slander someone when you have no facts to back up what you say.

you wont even have to buy a book. proof 2000 was stolen.

2004. Which precincts had thousands of stolen votes in Ohio. That's what this thread is about. Why can't anybody answer a simple question.

There is evidence across the board and nearly 100% GOP that they committed offenses of every type and that the secret counting apparatus was flawed and abused(with names and actions in suspicious instances.

The missing "evidence" that the steadfastly naive Dems relied(rely?) upon are vote tallies and accountable ballots. Suppressed votes don't count in that rigged game. Neither do electronic votes and tallies. Neither do hopelessly blocked from recount ballots in critical states like Ohio. While the Dem posture remained largely static and unchanged, the GOP squeezed shut the ability to retrieve even the votes actually cast while expanding caging lists and invisibility. The suppressed more and diverted to still uncounted absentee ballot status people Dem lawyers helped into those blind alleys.

Assuming we know everything, estimates of actual votes cast can arguably put Kerry ahead by 5%, but the actual ballot "evidence" is not recounted or accountable. Adding suppressed votes also gives him a clear victory if only by the electoral change in Ohio where deliberate efforts were publicly done to slow and thwart voting in poor neighborhoods.

But this was a big "messy" unseemly joke that the media wore themselves out chuckling about in 2000. Other messes like the hilarious hanging chads(also a deliberate effect of fraudulent punching devices and paper) were gone and since Kerry had been had again just like when he signed up dutifully in Vietnam there was going to be no entertainment watching the Dems twist slowly in the wind to be mocked and vilified by the cynically amused MSM information gods at the feet of Bush.

The controversy and argument here is symptomatic of the "news" breakdown. There is evidence, even in select ballot recounts to point to treasonous, necessary and decisive fraud. And it is true, in other nations people have been led to the streets and the cheated candidates subsequently to prison, to try to restore democracy. The bottom line is that is where the stark choices were. The real and everlasting shame is the Dem cover-up of the fraud, simply not upholding the truth and making a lying legitimacy supreme over the lives and welfare of citizens and soldiers alike. No one died. No Constitutional crisis happened. ALL that came in the slow burning consequences of silently giving a dictator illegal sway over the people. And the long term price will be far far worse than fighting the first cause.

The missing word in the MSM election discussions is fraud. The cheating was noted for weeks in the early voting and discarding of absentee ballots. The issue of fraud itself vacates a legitimacy that insures the votes are never accountable and prefers self spun myth to evidence. We have NO accountable MSM media responsibility in insuring democratic elections. They are simply tools for sale to sell a a WH story.

That had the thousands of ballots switched or stolen. I don't understand why that's so complicated.

in Ohio, please do. When you narrow yourself it just becomes easier to get stalled and defeated and the evidence simply destroyed. No one tried too hard simply because it was very predictable this time no one would succeed in changing the election. In 2000, people forget, the Florida House already had set up electors regardless of a possible Gore recount victory. Then the GOP controlled Congress, always lockstep in these matters, would have delivered the coup not SCOTUS. Nor would have the MSM helped or the Dems persevered beyond that.

It is a footnote now that Gore actually won the election in 2000. Kerry victory investigators might get the honor someday of another such footnote.

The fraud and the extreme high probability that Bush stole his victory is logically indisputable. On the contrary, someone has to prove to ME, that the secret loving little king actually won. He does not deign to strengthen his claim. The 99.99999999% most likely explanation is that he cannot and dare not, added to the plus of discounting elections and democracy(or truth for that matter) to the rubbish bin of neocon triumph. People who put faith in a Bush victory worship a darkly evil Santa Claus, the burden is on them not Kerry, if truth- or evidence- really are ever to matter again in America.

The twistedness of this debate is still affected by a victorious lie, not an evident truth.

We let people go into hysterics over precincts with 10 stray ballots, and treated it the same as precincts with larger anomalies. That's the problem. That's why it's impossible to get to the bottom of anything. Nobody will get down to looking for real evidence because ranting and selling books and going on speaking engagements is more fun, and profitable.

question is that there are actual ballots still that can be physically recounted to win the election. yet the victory of a fraudulent system prevents this, among other systemic liabilities. None of this or the theoretical certainties should distract from the singular issue of fraud itself. Even an mathematically "elected" president who cheated on this scale should be removed.

There have to be ballots to be counted. Paper ones that are wrong by the thousands. Or electronic ones that have been switched. Which precincts were thousands of ballots stolen or switched.

Voter suppression is a crime. Where's the evidence Bush or Rove ordered it? Who organized the suppression in each county or precinct?

You can't just throw accusations around. You have to have proof.

and/or when even minimally investigated . . . the power or will to fight back.

sandnsea has been asking for proof that Kerry won.

You assert that there is "proof" (proof that Kerry won?), and the problem isn't a lack of proof.

When, then, can we count on you to present the proof?

there's no problem with proof, the only problem is that we don't have investigations...and without the investigations we can't have the proof?

Isn't this, um.... circular?

And what about all the diligent investigation that has been done in Ohio? It seems to me there has been a fair bit of investigation by all sorts of people and teams of people - but a serious shortage of proof.

There have been investigations done in Ohio which make pretty clear that Kerry seems to have won the electoral votes in Ohio.

Those investigations were -- at least in part -- carried out before the Democratic majority.
Did you think that the GOP was going to overturn 2004?

See my post -- VOTESCAM --

And, if you have any questions on Ohio, I think Greg Palast is probably the answer to that --
PLUS, John Conyers, of course -- I believe he has info on his website about his investigation.

well short of proof. And I will note one of the investigations cited by Palast is my own work.

But there is certainly overwhelming (I would say) evidence that Kerry would have won a bigger share of the vote in Ohio had the playing field been level.

lying around. And, when discovered there is usually an attempt to cover it up.

Again -- these steals have not only been going on since 2000 or 2004 -- they've been going on since at least late 60's, early 70s --- see VOTESCAM.

if I were you.

Febble is going along gamely as if she knows what you meant, but I'm not sure.

When someone says "There is proof of these things," but then refuses to point to the proof, for me it raises questions whether we're participating in the same conversation.

Do you think someone has proven, maybe by a preponderance of the evidence, that Kerry won? If so, direct me to the proof.

Or did you mean that you are confident that 'the proof is out there' although you don't know specifically where? If so, then I'm not sure there's much more to say beyond "Well, it's interesting that you feel that way."

You could have meant something by "There is proof of these things" other than either of those alternatives. If so, will you please explain it?

I myself saw my vote switch to Bush 5 times when I tried to vote for Kerry in Baltimore, MD, my statement was even ridiculed
here at the time, (my voting technique caused the problem, or I didn't properly follow the procedures) What procedures,
you press next to the candidates' name. I am still waiting for my Democratic Party to care about the integrity of the vote
and the right of all their supporters to cast a ballot.

Farhad Manjoo put it this way (with plenty of snark) --

Manjoo and Mark Hertsgaard walked through some of the problems with Miller's book -- for which, of course, some people assailed them as corporate tools. At any rate, I agree with Manjoo that the book promises a lot more than it delivers.

Fooled Again pulls together a lot of important information, but it is wildly indiscriminate. For instance, throughout the first chapter, Miller tries to establish that it is a "miracle" that Bush won. The way Miller tells it, all the pre-election indicators pointed to Kerry. That's just silly. He tells his story very well, but it isn't always the right story.

here's a snip about the congressman that wrote HAVA, doesn't it strike you as odd that Abramoff is making a major effort
to schmooze Rep. Ney? He was on the Financial Services Committee, House Administration (Chair), Transportation and Infrastructure,
Joint Library, Joint Printing. I think I read somewhere that DeLay and Ney were the big donation targets for Abramoff.

Could it have something to do with the fact that Ohio was a swing state, and they needed somebody to sell the hoodoo, vooodoo
machines that had no paper trail. You have heard where they deliberately provided faulty paper ballots to certain Democratic
precincts in 2000, they wanted to discredit paper ballots.

Ney Pleads Guilty to Corruption Charges
Lawmaker's Conviction Is 8th in Abramoff Probe
By Susan Schmidt and James V. GrimaldiWashington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 14, 2006; 2:18 PM

Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) pleaded guilty yesterday to corruption charges arising from the influence-peddling investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, becoming the first elected official to fall in a scandal that may damage his party's chances in next month's elections.
Ney, 52, emerged from a month of alcoholism treatment to appear in federal court in Washington, where he admitted performing official acts for lobbyists in exchange for campaign contributions, expensive meals, luxury travel and skybox sports tickets. Ney also admitted taking thousands of dollars in gambling chips from an international businessman who sought his help with the State Department.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/13/AR2006101300169.html

What precinct did Ney steal the election in?

a link between Abramoff, Rove and all the GOPers

What you think, and a dollar, will buy me a cup of coffee.

Evidence. Where's the evidence Ney and Rove conspired to steal Ohio?

But, I still think there was evidence of purging in Florida and Ohio and here's an interesting article about touchscreens.
Now I am no super brain but if you look at the map at corpwatch, it looks to me that all the loyal Bushie states did not
have DREs, where the dem states did.

Touch screen voting machines will account for approximately 30% of the votes cast in the U.S. elections this November. In 20 swing states, where the election is expected to be close, 14 states (representing over 200 electoral votes) will be using electronic voting, many for the first time. Because U.S. national elections are won or lost on a state-by-state basis, results in these 20 states will likely determine the winner. (A total of 270 electoral votes are needed to win the presidential election.) Nevada will be the first state to have a paper audit trail for its new machines, and some states have implemented DREs in only some of the counties in the state. For example after objections were raised in Ohio, only 6 counties will be using DREs. In Florida, 15 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward will use the new machines. (County by county breakdowns for all states are available at Electionline.org)

The maps below show which swing states have implemented electronic voting and show current polling data which indicates which candidate is believed most likely to win the state's electoral votes. Poll data is a composite of recent Zogby, Rasmussen, Scripps Howard and other published polls. Data compilation and Kerry vs. Bush map courtesy of www.electoral-vote.com.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11517

This makes no sense, at least as a theory about election theft in 2004.

... their 2004 ballots, despite a judge's order to preserve those ballots? It's one thing to let the evidence "move along" when no one is looking but to discard/destroy that evidence when a judge has ordered you not to -- now that has to look suspicious to even the hardest-boiled skeptic of election fraud.

Most counties supplied their voted ballots, but it's impossible to conduct a thorough audit without the unused ballots as well.

It seems to me that Jennifer Brunner got it about right here:

... election fraud. Since when do election officials ignore wholesale a judge's order to retain evidence of a potential crime? If there was nothing to hide, then they would have likely had no problems holding onto that evidence forever. Just like they would have had no problem actually conducting a lawful and proper recount/audit, which was as interfered with in Ohio as the original election.

Enough of this. I'm going to bed. You and sandnsea can keep playing tag-team. Some of us need our energies to actually make a difference. Nighty night.

et al, and all the skullduggery that went on like the amazing shrinking Workmen's Compensation Fund, look all I was trying
to say is they set up a link between the bag man for the Republican party and Ney knowing it was a swing state.

One thing that happens in a lot of these discussions is that people use phrases such as 'election theft,' but the meaning morphs.

If you read your post in the context of the entire thread, you'll see why it wasn't clear to me that "all (you were) trying to say" was that they set up a link, etc. As I understand it, a central problematic of this thread is whether Kerry could have won the election if he had refused to concede. (There are lots of other ways of framing the question, but most of them have to do with what Kerry should have done after the election.) In that context, some folks are saying 'obviously Kerry won,' and some folks are saying 'not so much.' But of course that opens into all the other facts and questions about Ohio 2004 (and beyond).

BTW, in case I forget to mention this somewhere else arguably more appropriate, the skankiest 2004 numbers I've seen (on a wide scale) were from New Mexico.

admitted to taking bribes and was connected with the "bagman" for the GOP Abramoff. I don't think that
he got a yen to have a clean election one day to save America.

As with everywhere around the country, Pennsylvanians stood in line for hours to vote on electronic voting equipment and then large numbers of them apparently cast no vote for President (40% in some precincts, 70-80% in others). As Marybeth Kuznik (a PA poll-worker) said, "we knew immediately that something was not right."

I had to wait 2 hours to vote on a rigged machine (keep switching to Bush when I pressed button for Kerry) but the line was
enormous and yet the precinct count for the entire day was only 900+ some votes. I estimated that there at least 350-400 people
while I was there for those 2 hours. I would say that the vote count was way off, I heard from my neighbors that it was
crowded when they went as well. This was in Baltimore, Maryland when I voted in November of 2004, I have sworn an affadavit
to what happened at my polling place.

out in that other blog lately?
Read greg palasts' bok and steve freeman's book. two simple books, then come back and talk.

The tabulated counts were too far outside of the range predicted by the exit polls in too many cases for it to be chance. So, either the way they did the exit polls or the tabulated count is wrong.

The people who did the exit polls opted to assume the tabulated counts were accurate and explained the discrepancy by identifying a problem in the exit polling. They said their sample design was reasonable and their analysis were correct. What they said was wrong was the implementation. The procedure for selecting which voter in a selected precinct was not rigidly defined - like take every nth person). So, they claimed that Kerry voters were more eager to say who they voted for while Bush voters were shy.

While I question this because Bush was the President, the media and establishment favorite, I did not notice the Bush backers in 2004 being reluctant to say who they were voting for. There would actually be more reason to think there would be shy Kerry voters - in conservative Catholic areas, where some Bishops said it was a sin to vote for the moral religious Catholic in the race.

The problem is that I can not disprove that explanation. Even arguing it never happened before doesn't mean it didn't. The type of bias they describe can not be proven or disproven.

The other thing is that the majority of people in this country could not be made to believe a sample was more accurate than a tabulated count. I know you will mention Ukraine - there it was not just the fact that the exit polls were wrong - the US was supporting in "loser".

The other thing is that the discepancies could be missmarked ballots. In Ohio, many people using the caterpillar ballot would have said they voted for Kerry when ultimately it was not tabulated that way. (The exit polls in FL in 2000 had the butterfly ballot people misclassified.

Not exactly. Even if "the way they did the exit polls" was perfect, the exit poll could still be wrong, because it depends on the voluntary cooperation of over a quarter of a million voters who were asked to participate. But of course you're right that the difference can't be plausibly attributed to chance. We could say "either the exit poll result was biased or the tabulated count was wrong (or both)."


No, they didn't. They tested a particular hypothesis about miscount (miscount concentrated in DRE precincts -> greater exit poll discrepancies in DRE precincts) and found it unsupported. They found that several variables that could contribute to non-response bias or participation bias (such as distance from the polls and interviewer age) were correlated with exit poll discrepancies. They therefore found more evidence for exit poll error than for vote count error. Of course these analyses didn't prove anything about the accuracy or inaccuracy of the vote count.

It has also been pointed out that Bush didn't do better, compared to 2000, in precincts with big exit poll "red shifts" than in other precincts, which is odd if "red shift" is a fraud measure. Similarly, Bush didn't do better, compared to pre-election polls, in states with big red shifts than in other states. I don't know if the exit pollsters looked at either of those results at the time, but I imagine that, like many of us, they concluded that the double-digit Kerry exit poll leads in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire were very unlikely to be true. Those results don't demonstrate the accuracy of the vote counts, although they raise questions about how widespread miscounts are likely to have been.


Well, the procedure was well defined as "take every nth person," but we know for a fact that not every interviewer rigorously followed the procedure. The exit pollsters emphasized the importance of making sure that interviewers followed the procedure in future, but no way of conducting an exit poll is guaranteed to yield an unbiased result.

By the way, the words "eager" and "shy" don't appear in their analysis. They do assert that unquantifiable "motivational factors... led to Kerry voters being less likely than Bush voters to refuse to take the survey." That would be 'on average.' I'm sure you're right that some Kerry voters were shy about it.


Actually, since you mention it, the exit poll discrepancy in 1992 was almost as great as in 2004. But yes, when it comes to speculating about why voters did or didn't participate, speculation is all we can do.

Their exit polls didn't match either, they had a recount, it proved nothing. If somebody would ever throw out the routine errors and look only at the true anomalies, we might get somewhere. But as long as people prefer red meat rants over reality, that's what we'll get no matter what the truth is.

But it sort of got buried in mid-sentence.

Yes, New Hampshire even more than Pennsylvania explodes the myth of exit poll infallibility. I suppose it's possible to believe that the pre-election polls, the combination of optical scan and hand counts, and the targeted suspicion-based recounts all were wrong, but why would one?

those 3 counties used the Unilect DRE. The lowest was, one county had levers @ .29%

from all I've heard. And weren't there some horrific problems with Shouptronics in Philly?

My position is, when we stop trying to pretend that the exit polls are right, we can focus on the real evidence. Not that I need to lecture you or VotePA about that -- you folks are walking the walk.

ETA: It just occurred to me that someone might think I thought you were from PA. No, no, two distinct northeastern states with dynamic election integrity advocates.

Anybody wants to just start zeroing in on the "glitches", that would be great. Look how well they've done in CA. Staying stuck on stolen election 2004 doesn't help that process. Seeking clean elections, in every precinct, is the way to move forward.

I am sick and tired of the media and anyone else using the word "glitch" for these massive FAILURES, with 10s of thousands of votes missing. PLEASE PEOPLE - JUST DON'T DO THIS. It plays into the media's hands, and to their mantra that these machines are fine.

10,000 missing votes is a FAILURE not a "glitch" and it really pisses me off to hear even one lost vote get trivialized -- let alone that many.

:grr:

Repeat after me:
It's a FAILURE not a "glitch".... It's a FAILURE not a "glitch".... It's a FAILURE not a "glitch"....

And the truth is, they usually ARE glitches. Regardless, if you want the machines fixed or thrown out, then you do what it takes to get it done. People understand glitches and will want them fixed. They will not believe stolen election.

In addition, Mercer County threw out the Unilect - and bought Hagel's ES&S. Trade one mess for another because somebody didn't explain that all the machines can fail.

Or compare what happened in those 3 counties with precincts in Ohio that used the Unilect DRE.

What was the previous undervote rate in those counties. Who is on the Board of Elections. What are the demographics. How did other elections in that county turn out.

PM demodonkey if you want the exact citation.

Why should anybody have to PM you. Put the real evidence out here where everybody can look at it.

I will PM demodonkey for the precincts. But I won't do it for you -- you're just a lazy loud-mouth.

with thousands of votes switched or stolen.

And that makes me a lazy loud mouth.

:crazy:

Not that you would anyway.

that something is very very wrong nothing will.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3959

That's not the topic here.

I thought you had replied to me, not to sandnsea.

Your answer doesn't make much sense as a response to sandnsea, either, IMHO, but that's your right.

Which precincts had the thousands of votes switched or stolen, who orchestrated the theft.

Simple task. That's what is needed to prove the election was stolen.

"BREAKING: JUDGE DENIES PLAINTIFF MOTION TO REVIEW PAPERLESS VOTING MACHINE SOURCE CODE IN CONTESTED FL-13 U.S. HOUSE ELECTION, PLAINTIFFS TO APPEAL"

If a judge is willing to prevent an American from seeing what could be evidence of a stolen election, I can't explain to you, if you don't already know, what is wrong with that.

Any one else want to try and explain this? Please feel free.

Thousands of votes stolen. Details. Evidence.

That is what is required to overturn an election.

Now, heck if I know what happened with that poll -- there are lots of theories. But it's sort of funny that the people who trumpet the authority of exit polls almost never mention this one. I can't help wondering, if the U.S. exit polls had shown Bush ahead and Kerry had won, whether some folks would point to Venezuela to support the exact opposite of their current position on exit polls.

Last year I wrote this post on what the Carter Center has said about exit polls over the years, although unfortunately it then changed its site and broke the links (but hey, what is Google for?). Here's a sound bite:

I think that even in other countries major discrepancies indicate the POTENTIAL of fraud, but you would still want to prove it.

It's a shame that Mitofsky has now died, and that he refused many sincere requests from his academic colleagues for access to the raw exit poll data.

I profoundly regret that some out-of-field academics have spent so much time and energy making that assertion. (Never mind that the report didn't even offer a "'reluctant Bush supporter' hypothesis.")

With all due respect, very few of the people who hectored Mitofsky for the "raw exit poll data" could be deemed "academic colleagues."

The fact that Mitofsky did not use the term "reluctant Bush supporter" does not negate the presentation of data in his report disproving that notion.

Since Mitofsky would not respond to many people except a select (filtered) few, he left the world leaving most of us with many unanswered (though repeatedly asked) questions.

But tell me, did Mitofsky consider Zogby to be a colleague worth responding to? As Zogby has stated, he also got no answers from the "father of exit polling", despite several efforts on Zogby's part.

Be back in a little while.

The report could disprove "reluctant Bush responder" whether or not Mitofsky actually endorsed "reluctant Bush responder," although it's not clear why that would matter.

I never talked with Mitofsky about his opinion of Zogby, but the journalistic record shows this:

As for me, when I read Zogby International's press release on the 9/11 Truth poll, I was amazed. The lead paragraph patently misrepresents the questions it characterizes. I don't know whether Zogby even reads all the stuff going out under his name, but, eww.

... which attempted to answer questions about why their exit polls differed so markedly from the reported vote. Information on p. 37 of that report deals with the "RBS" b-s. However, the 'net link that I found to that report (listed on one of the papers critiquing Edison-Mitofsky) no longer works and the web-site www.exit-poll.net contains no reference to that report. For the sake of people who are new to this debate, I strongly recommend that they read the 1/19/05 report. Do you have an active link that would allow them (me) to access this report again? For such an historic document, I am surprised it is not still readily available on the 'net.

Here is a link to one of several critiques of the report. (Any interested reader can Google "exit polls 2004 Edison Mitofsky" to find many other scholarly and not-so-much critiques of how the 2004 exit polls were conducted, analyzed and massaged.)

www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

The RBS issue is discussed on pp. 8-11 of this report.

As for Mitofsky not thinking much of Zogby, I suppose if someone (Zogby) accused me -- publicly and repeatedly -- of violating the ethical standards of my profession, I would do my best to denigrate him also. One good place to hear Zogby's comments about this issue is the documentary, "Stealing America: Vote by Vote".

Doesn't that alarm you?! (And don't kid yourself that there are lots of impressive signatories. By now you know Kathy well enough to have some thoughts about that.)

Look, you're an epidemiologist, right? If you find these arguments persuasive, make them yourself, or at least paraphrase them. Why should I have to do all the work? (But in the meantime... you're familiar with the ecological fallacy, yes?)

I hadn't realized that the evaluation report had disappeared from the Web. I agree, it should remain available. I'm happy to send people a copy of my PDF, but I don't know immediately whether there are copyright issues should I repost it myself.

Mitofsky vs. Zogby: check the date. I have no way of knowing, but I think Mitofsky got in the first lick. Whether or not that's true, it's likely that responding to Zogby's queries was not at the top of Mitofsky's to-do list -- and I think Warren is fairly remembered as "irascible."

You and I agreed to disagree a long time ago about the probity of the exit poll evidence. I don't want to spend my Friday night re-hashing an issue that has been covered (ad nauseum) on hundreds of threads in the ER forum over the past three years. As you well know, I believe there is a wealth of evidence (in addition to the exit polls) for 2004 malfeasence, which is why I have spent most of my time since 11/04 working for election integrity and election justice. Since we agree on some of the remedies to our current insecure election process, it matters not if we took the same trail to get there.

I think you know my personal (very negative) history with Kathy. (So does my local sheriff ....) But I do respect the other co-authors. As I said, there are many other links available to critiques of the E/M report (I could have posted Freeman) but the link I posted is readable and the product of a number of qualified (and sane) scholars, one flaky self-promoter notwithstanding. That's why I don't consider it Kathy's report -- it wasn't.

I do find it VERY odd that the 1/19/05 E/M report is not still readily available on-line. Rather than you sending out a PDF to someone, I would love to see whether either of us could actually still find a link to that report. Posting a link would make life easier for everyone. Not being able to find a single link (to a truly historic, major piece of the 2004 puzzle) would be very, very interesting. (I went through the first three pages on Google without retrieving a link. Maybe you could do a better job.)

I hope we can find a still active link to Mitofsky's own attempt to explain why he suddenly could not administer credible exit polls.

Not being able to do so would be priceless ... for my side of the argument.

The last thing I wanted to spend the evening doing was correcting your misstatements on GD/P.

Febble has a name for what I think is happening here, but unfortunately the idiom is offensive in American English. Basically, you advanced a very weak claim about the exit polls, which you feel is somehow buttressed by other arguments. But a fallacious argument can't be salvaged by surrounding it with other arguments. If the argument doesn't stand on its own, it should be abandoned.

Of course many arguments neither stand nor fall, but rather sort of wobble. I would say that this one wobbles, except that so many other lines of evidence within the exit polls infirm it that I think it's pretty much shot. I'm really not sure that anyone in the country truly believes, all the way down, that the New Hampshire exit poll was accurate -- so what sense could it make to argue that 'reluctant Bush responder is refuted by Mitofsky's own report'?

Please answer that question. It might give me some insight into what we are actually talking about.

It's certainly true that Kathy didn't write that report all by herself. I could say more, but it would be beside the point. The question remains whether you are willing to take up any of its arguments.


That characterization raises some doubt about whether you ever actually read the report. You do know that the exit poll discrepancy was almost as large in 1992 as in 2004, right? How, then, could you characterize the question as "why (Mitofsky) suddenly could not administer credible exit polls"?


Why? I think at some point you have to be straightforward and consistent about whether you intend to make an exit poll argument or not. At that point, we could assess whether the continuing availability (or not) of the report had any bearing on the argument you actually made.

EDIT to correct accidental emoticon -- yikes!

Just thought I'd make it clear that Febble's offensive word doesn't mean that Febble would mean to be offensive if she used it.

I've called it the Bart Simpson fallacy above: "I didnt' do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything".

I think there's a better one about breaking something but I can't remember it. Brain's getting addled.

Right, the word just has a different meaning in American English.

I didn't realize (or remember) that archive.org stores PDFs, or at least stored this one. http://tinyurl.com/3d4re4 should take you to an archived copy. (I tried incorporating the URL as a link, but apparently the board software automangles it.)

respect at least some of the other co-signatories. I was even one of the signatories (briefly) on an early draft myself.

But there are very serious problems with the paper, and as you probably know, at least one of the signatories (an actual author) subsequently published a paper in which he dissented from the main plank of the argument (after a good deal of hassle, as you are probably aware).

But no, I don't want to rake over the arguments yet again here. That's the last thing I want to do. But it really saddens me when, three years later, when we know so much more, the same errors (because they are errors) are being propagated in support of a cause that deserves evidence that can stand scrutiny, and the exit poll evidence simply doesn't. Not only that, but it leads to wrongful allegations against people like Kerry and Edwards, as well, sometimes, as to very misguided strategies as to what to do about election reform in the US. I know that you yourself, despite giving some traction to the exit poll argument, nonetheless are a supporter of the Holt Bill. But the "massive electronic theft" narrative, the sole evidence for which lies in the exit polls, AFAICT, has, IMO, seriously imbalanced the debate about DREs, and fuelled much of the campaign against any bill that didn't ban electronic voting completely.

I don't think 2004 was stolen electronically. The sad thing is that in the future elections might be. And in the mean time, systematic disenfranchisementof those who would most benefit from a Democratic administration goes on.

about election fraud 2004?

I seldom watched Nightline any more before they aired that. Now I don't watch it at all.

Koppel mentioned that they had had quite a bit of snail mail and e-mail, begging them to do a show on the theft of the election. Viewers claimed to have evidence that they wanted the show to expand on and expose. Koppel claimed to be responding to those viewer pleas.

Cokie Roberts and Koppel sat there and calmed everyone's fears. They acted like they were speaking to children who are afraid of the dark.

"Oh, my no, that did not happen," said Cokie. She went on to laughingly reminisce about how blatantly elections were stolen in Louisiana when her daddy was a politician and she was a mere slip of a girl. Koppel laughed right along with her and implied that we children had nothing to fear.

I just about needed a barf bag. It was the last time I ever watched the show.

I think I remember that Nightline show and seeing Cokie giggling about her Louisiana daddy's election war stories.

It has to be archived somewhere...

auhtorization. We all knew it was stolen. Kerry promised us that every vote would be counted. Boxer and Conyers stood up. Kerry left the country on jan 6th when he needed to protest the ohio electoral count!

Don't defend this. kerry is a good man. But what he did after this election is indefensable. He needed to demand the vote count. The votes would not ahve been destroyed, and Bush would be OUT of office.
Don't ever try to defend this crap.

The ONLY acceptible defense in the world is from those who claim his children were going to be killed. Even if that were true, he could have opened his mouth to the world, and gotten secret service protection.

I was an accountant. I like cold hard numbers that add up. I didn't see incontrovertible proof that the election was stolen. What I saw were shenanigans in Ohio and other states. I saw things that looked suspicious. The U.S. Attorney firings scandal added to my suspicions. Maybe it was stolen; the fact is we'll never know, especially since voter suppression means votes not cast. There is no way you can contest by presenting votes not cast.

it is certainly true that the volume of hard evidence is less than it would have been if over 50 of Ohio's counties had not destroyed or purged their 2004 ballots, despite a judge's restraining order.

Hell, if the 2004 recount in Ohio had simply been conducted properly, this all would be moot, we would not be raising our debt ceiling for the fifth time in six years, we would not be contemplating war in Iran, S-CHIP would be fully funded, our President could string two sentences together without the slurs and cocaine jaw-jerk choreography and our country would enjoy a modicum of respect in the world.

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.

As David Cobb said so accurately, "Either every vote counts or democracy is a sham."

An extremely disturbing occurance. If it was an accident then someone else needs to be in charge of ballots, in those 50 something jurisdictions. If not....


nuff said.

& well said FBN.

Someone saw from the street John Kerry at his residence near the window going into a fit throwing papers around. He knew he was f*cked. He knew the mainstream media would not allow for him to take several months to find proof of the stolen votes with evidence that could be used in court. He knew that if he protested the vote, he would be railroaded.

I will defend Kerry as long as I live. He is an American hero. He tried to defend what is defendable. You can't count air as votes.

The evidence for stolen elections just keeps mounting. Although, like Holocaust deniers, some people keep insisting that it didn't happen in 2004, a large proportion of Americans now know better. The question is what to do about it.

We need to keep ratcheting up the public (and political) education about this issue. David Earnhardt's ground-breaking film, "Uncounted", will be released next month. Among many topics in this ambitious film, the complicity of the media and their herd instincts are dissected in detail. Here's a current DU thread that will take you to the movie trailer and web-site:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x483938

I also want to remind folks that there were a few journalists who refused to drink the kool-aid in 2004. Keith Olbermann has many friends here, but everyone may not know Robert (Bob) Koehler, a columnist for the (Chicago) Tribune Media Services, as well. Here is an excellent column that Bob released in April, 2005, that calls his colleagues to task for ignoring the most important story of the last 100 years.
------
The silent scream of numbers
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?
( http://www.commonwonders.com/archives/col290.htm )

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don’t make sense (see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

And we might, no, we must, ask — with more seriousness than the media have asked — about those exit polls, which in years past were extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This swing is out of the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined pollsters to hypothesize a “shy Republican” factor as the explanation; and the media have bought this evidence-free absurdity because it spares them the need to think about the F-word: fraud.

And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry Neal wrote in the Washington Post about Bush’s inexplicably low approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval rating. This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a president’s second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” asks exit polling expert Jonathan Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush mustered low approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on Election Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media has no curiosity about this anomaly.

Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference — one of dozens of speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and dirty tricks from sea to shining sea — said, “When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death.”

In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

5 or 6 part installment coverage about the break-in and theft of computers and records in Dem Campaign headquarters in Toledo. NO other NATIONAL media would cover it. NONE. it was as if it hadn't happened, Eventually, Keith Olbermann relented and devoted a look at it, when NO ONE else would.

And the snarky editorial coverage by the Cleveland and Akron papers of the calls for the Ohio recount, ridiculing the winter soldier activists waiting outside courts for hours and days in the knife-chilling November rain and snow, and well beyond November, were unforgivable.

I remember.

I've met a few folks in campaign field ops that all tell similar computer theft stories from '04.

I'll do my part (however small) to make sure wherever I am during that time has a legitimate and fair voting process going on. I would suggest all that care about this country join me.

Here, at the request of Fly By Night, is a response to the inquiry from sandnsea asking for specifics about the 80% undervote rates in Pennsylvania.

Background: Three PA counties, Mercer, Beaver, and Greene, used the Unilect Patriot paperless touchscreen DRE on 11/2/04. At the end of the day, results showed approximately 10,000 undervotes in the Presidential race, or an overall undervote rate of approximately 5-8%. Historically PA Presidential elections have an undervote rate of 1-3% maximum. So these 10,000 missing votes were quite an anomaly. But predictably it got little press coverage.

Eventually the Unilect Patriot machines were decertified for use in Pennsylvania, but only after citizens invoked a little-known (at the time) law that allows citizens to petition for a re-examination of a voting system.

The most affected county, Mercer thankfully authorized an 8-member multi-partisan Independent Election Committee to look into the problems. They produced a 22-page report, which I have a PDF of and can send via regular e-mail if anyone wants to see the full document. Here is an excerpt from Page 6, regarding problems on November 2, 2004 election day:



Bad communication, but bad machine decertified, problem solved. Or was it? If this was just 'error' caused by bad machines, wouldn't we expect to see them fail somewhat equally across the board?

Well, what was never pushed in the media (or even by election integrity activists, including me) was that the most affected precincts tended to cluster in the 'blue' areas of Mercer county (and the others) especially in poorer and minority areas! For example, the City of Farrell is almost 47% African-American, with an median income level only a little over half of the average of PA in general. http://www.city-data.com/city/Farrell-Pennsylvania.html

Like Ohio, in 2004 Pennsylvania had known visits from the 'mighty Texas strike force' with things like handbills saying that Democrats were required to vote Wednesday Nov. 3. Pennsylvania had greater exit poll discrepancies than Ohio and more EIRS 'incidents' than Florida! Despite the 'stuff' done, it wasn't enough to flip the final result here in PA, but it did skim from Kerry's total in the popular vote.

So the question remains -- was the Unilect problem in Pennsylvania just a bad machine, or was it somehow targeted and part of a greater overall effort?

I guess we'll never know for sure, but as one of the nine original Regional Coordinators of the Ohio Recount who worked on the ground there for a month and trained volunteer observers, I will go to my grave certain that Kerry won Ohio. Can I prove it? No (thanks to Blackwell) but that doesn't mean that it isn't true. And Pennsylvania, with these strange happenings is equally mystifying.

And the media was, and is still, for the most part pretty much silent.

Beware everyone -- 2008 looms large and history denied tends to repeat itself.

Now let's look at the obvious first. Farrell has a population of 6,000. Do you seriously believe they stole the election in towns of that size?

I will go look at the Farrell PA precincts and see if there's a pattern. I will also look at the Unilect machines across the country, and see if there were similar failures in any other precincts with the same demographics.

This is the work that didn't get done. You cannot overturn an election with "a machine broke".

Now, give me the Ohio precincts where thousands of votes were switched or stolen - enough to actually make a 60,000 vote difference that would be required to overturn the election.

The same thing is going to happen in 2008. Actually, it may be a lot worse due to more states using electronic ballots...

Sheesh...

OK. Provenance please. Where do those plots come from. They are Made Up. Check out the info against publicly available data. I don't know who drew them but I'll have something to say with whoever it was when I find out. I once found them on Wikipedia attributed to me. I deleted them (not because the attribution was wrong, but because the plots are).


Check the facts, and then put those plots out of their misery. They are disinformation.

I can go back and redig through the data; perhaps you have data that shows the relationship of paper ballots/exit polls to electronic ballots/exit polls that shows no disproportion?

Let's see it.

and in particular, check out what voting methodology was used in each state. They are completely inconsistent. Also you need to look at ALL the states, not just the ones that show worse exit poll results for electronic voting. One of the biggest discrepancies was NY which is all levers.

ETA:

The data you need are here:

http://www.vote.caltech.edu/media/documents/Addendum_Voting_Machines_Bush_Vote.pdf

Pages 16 and 17

I have a lot of other things to work on today than go through stuff from four years ago.

Here are some initial links:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/031104dontmatch.htm

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=exit+polls+paper+electronic+voting&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

given the fact that there were only 40 paper ballot precincts in the entire poll, nationwide, and that they were all in rural precincts (i.e. atypical, nationwide), it makes sense to compare the discrepancy in those precincts with comparable precincts. And when they are compared, the exit poll discrepancy is not significantly less (actually highly variable in both) in paper precincts than other technologies.

And I'd be happy also not to discuss "stuff from four years ago" if the same erroneous information "from four years ago" didn't keep reappearing on the internet. I keep thinking I've left those plots behind - and then someone goes and makes them into an animated gif. If they'd spent the time they'd spent animating actually checking to see whether they were actually true, then we might have an accurate set of plots in circulation. Except that as an accurate set of plots wouldn't make the case that the exit poll discrepancy was greater where electronic voting was used, they probably wouldn't be of much interest.

If you are going to post "stuff from four years ago" it would be nice if it was actually correct.

As for your links - I don't dispute that immediately after the election there were reports that perhaps the exit poll discrepancy was due to electronic vote fraud. It's why I got interested myself - I wondered if Bush really had carried of a mega heist. Nor do I deny that there has been a great deal of discussion about it, and that other people have come to a different view from my own. I think they are wrong, but that's not the point at issue here. What is at issue here is the information conveyed in the plots you posted which is simply wrong, and you can check that yourself. I gave you a link to some data you could use to check it against, and Verified Voting has info as well. Neither are consistent with those plots, and I have never found out who made them.

But it wasn't me.

As you know, there wasn't a single majority HCPB state in the country. So one has to hope whoever made those graphs didn't think s/he was depicting HCPB. More likely HCPB + optical scan, but even then (again, as you know), the categorizations are from bizarroworld.

Of the four states with the most HCPB -- Vermont, Maine, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire -- two had catastrophic red shifts, one had almost none, and one was about at the national average. Of course the precinct values are (marginally) more revealing.

But in that case the categorisation is weird.

As you may know (and you can see from my sig), I actually analysed the data for Warren Mitofsky. One thing I looked at particularly was the relationship between voting technology and redshift at precinct level (so a much finer-grained analysis than is possible at state level). In the exit poll precincts, a very small proportion of precincts were paper, and they were almost all rural. What was interesting was that when paper precincts were compared with other technologies in comparable rural or suburban precincts there was no statistically significant difference. When only urban precincts were considered, levers tended to have greater discrepancies than the other technologies (largely because of the NY effect), and also punchcards. So if anything, it was the older, non-digital technologies that were associated with bigger discrepancies.

But the most striking finding is that there was no tendency for the discrepancy to be greater in precincts in which Bush had increased his vote share the most. So if the discrepancies were substantially due to fraud - why didn't it show up in greater-than-expected Bush vote-shares?

That, to me, was the nail in the coffin of the idea that the exit poll discrepancies were due to fraud. It's possible that some were, but not enough to account for a statistically detectable proportion of the discrepancy.

Which doesn't mean that there wasn't skulduggery all over the place (I'm suspicious of NM), but a lot of that wouldn't show up in exit polls anyway. Voter suppression wouldn't, and there was plenty of that. Nor does it mean that DREs are reliable, or can't be hacked. We know they aren't and they can be.

But IMO the exit poll discrepancy was almost certainly due largely, if not entirely to polling methodology factors, which means that even if Kerry morally won Ohio (which remains possible) and thus the EC, it is very unlikely that he won the popular vote. Vanishingly unlikely, I'd say.

Let's look at Mercer County. First off, the election official has acknowledged that he made a programming error and did not adequately test the machines. James Bennington is the source of the Mercer County election problems. Is he being accused by Fly by Night, or any other DUer, of intentional fraud?

Mercer is a strong Dem leaning county, where the elected county commissioners were also the board of elections. They were likely to be Democrats. Are they being accused of being part of the conspiracy as well?

Mercer County had 51,564 presidential votes cast, 51,073 senate votes, 50,919 for State Treasurer. I don't see much of an argument or a county wide undervote problem.

There is a problem with the Unilect machines, however. These are the same machines that completely lost votes in North Carolina that threw a state election into question. They are very old, mid-nineties machines. There was another case back in 1997 where the machines' counting was questioned. They are also wired on one system, so when one goes down in a precinct, they all go down. That's why there were so many precincts that did their entire election with paper ballots. Some of those ballots weren't counted either, because security procedures weren't followed. There were also incidents where people were required to sign ballots, which also invalidated them.

Farrell 1-2,with the 80% undervote involved 272 votes. 51 votes were recorded in the presidential race while an unopposed candidate for a state house seat garnered 199 votes. Certainly a problem, hardly election theft.

W Middlesex also had machines go down and used paper ballots. W Middlesex is a Republican leaning precinct.

When the facts are objectively stated, and not lumped into one hysterical rant, what usually unfolds is incompetence and laziness. That isn't to say that this is true in every county or precinct, which is why I keep asking for the Ohio precincts where shenanigans went on that actually could add up to 60,000 stolen votes.

I've read that Kerry asked for an immediate reading on what happened in Ohio in deciding to stand and contest or not -- and the response was it was a very powerful conspiracy there.
Obviously, we don't have the power in government to stand against corruption any longer!!!
That's how weak we are now ---!!!

Now, is Kerry telling America this --
not that I see!!!

Look, Kerry seems an OK human being to me -- but he shouldn't have been the candidate and I think he got there because the DLC helped the attack on Howard Dean.

Probably Kerry actually won in Ohio -- but we don't have the power to contest these criminal activities. Got that -- ????


PS: I remember asking someone why so few people in America understood that the Tunnheim Panel/1992 JFK Classfied Records Act had reached the conclusion that--
"OSWALD WAS EMPLOYED BY THE CIA WORKING ON HIGH LEVEL ASSIGNMENTS AND PROBABLY ALSO FOR THE FBI."

And, of course, to back this up there is a memo by John McCone, Director of the CIA also stating clearly that Oswald was trained by the CIA; one reason being to spy in Russia.

The individual I was speaking with said . . . "because there isn't anyone powerful enough to do anything about it."

That knocked me back -- he was right --- and that was probably 5 years ago -- !!