"The margin of fraud"

Many DUers have argued that Dean or Edwards might have inspired more people to vote. Others have said the candidate doesn't matter because the election was rigged.

Just because they're stealing elections doesn't mean they can steal any election.

Vote fraud can steal a close election, but the wider the true winner's margin, the more vote fraud is required. I call it "the margin of fraud."

It's plausible that Rove tricked us into thinking Kerry was "electable" and Dean "unelectable." Reporters who sat in on RNC strategy meetings believed Reps were most excited about facing Dean. But that could have been reverse psychology. (Why did they invite reporters in, anyhow, if not to trick them/us?) If the Democratic candidate had energized people more effectively than Kerry, he would have received an even larger (legitimate) margin than Kerry received. (The same is true of Gore in 2000.)

Had our candidate been way ahead in the polls, Rove couldn't have stolen the election without the reality being obvious to the whole world, even to our evidence-blind, corporate-whore media.

Hopefully we've caught Rove anyhow! Let's hope... and keep working hard at this, because ours is no faith-based investigation!

P.S. I want to shamelessly plug my article on Republicans' long-term strategy to discredit and eliminate exit polls: Steal votes. Discredit exit polls. Eliminate exit polls. Steal more votes. which I believe illuminates a Republican strategy we've been blind to.

that journalists kept talking about "the margin of litigation" when what really mattered was "the margin of litigation" plus "the margin of fraud." Litigation is about technical issues in counting ballots (which provisional ballots should count; should hanging and dimpled chads be counted; etc.). Fraud is about stuffing the (electronic) ballot box with fake votes and ripping up (deleting) legitimate votes.

- Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your position, but if fraud did take place I don't think you can really criticize Kerry for not winning by a huge margin if he won he won, and that in itself is a 180 degree reversal to what most people believe at the moment obviously

My post is absolutely not intended to impugn Kerry.

I'm simply making the point that a play-it-safe campaign aimed at winning 51% or 52% of the vote is smart when the election is fair. But the "losing" side in such an election can easily steal itself a few % of the vote and "win." A more daring candidate would have had a chance to win 55% or 60% of the vote. (On the other hand, the more daring campaign might have tripped up and lost the election.) From Rove's perspective, he could guarantee "victory" over a don't-rock-the-vote Dem, but he would have had trouble stealing 10% or more of the vote. The fraud would have been too apparent.

Candidates should not have to campaign under the belief that their opponent can push a button and steal 5% of the vote, so I don't blame Kerry. I'm merely offering a theory to explain why Rove might have maneuvered to nudge the Dems toward Kerry.

If that makes any sense.

maybe I'm stating the obvious, but going into the election with all the polls and mainstream media saying it was "tight" and "tied", I was worried because we've always known the recipe for stealing the election included having it be extremely close.

enough that they couldn't just swing the tabulations within the margin of error's of exit polls and win (or, at least, it want close enough that they could plausibly swing the tabulated results into Bush's favor and outside of automatic runoff territory). Since the margin of error on exit polls is two sigma, making them equal to a confidence interval of 95% rather than 64%, its really hard to explain results that deviate outside of this margin. As far as I'm concerned, Kerry beat the margin of fraud, and the Repugs just decided that they would throw a Hail Mary, so to speak, and see if, with the help of a slow, biased media defense, they might just get away with it.

Hopefully, to continue with the football metaphor (sorry...I suck), we can get an interception and make the Repugs regret this desperate move.

***** Unofficial Audit of NC Election: Comprehensive Case for Fraud
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x45003

It has, IMO, national implications. You shave enough votes off all across the country, you manufacture your 3.5 million popular vote margin. Plus, think of all that "insurance."

Plus, the vote suppression efforts alone wasted probably hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Democratic votes.

Neither of these two points are made in the post linked to above, they're mine. But I think they're valid.