URGENT from BBV - need DU help in debunking NYT article

See this thread:


Requested by hedda_foil and Bev Harris, in order to put together a PR push against the media backlash against all of our efforts

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2687293

re debunking (point by point) the NYT article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html

such commercialism as registra is wrong and timewasting.

for those of us who have vowed to never register JUST to see a single webpage.

www.bugmenot.com

So sweet.

The NYT article refers to the Caltech-MIT "voting technology project" which has released this statement here:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0411/S00140.htm

I think it's a good idea to first debunk this one as it is more specific and "scientific" than the NYT stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong. And I think DU'ers have already made objections somewhere.

I will take a closer look at this, too.

thread linked to in the OP? Please? Thanks.

http://archive.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?day=20040316
From Salon:
Sticky connections'

Time magazine questions just how even-handed President Bush's blue-ribbon panel on pre-war intelligence will be.
>
"Panel member Charles Vest, president of M.I.T., has been accused by a colleague of being slow to investigate allegations of fraud at a lab that does missile-defense work for the Pentagon. Ted Postol, an M.I.T. professor of technology and national security, says Vest was told in 2001 about allegations that officials at the school's Lincoln Laboratory misled federal investigators about the failure of a key test of the U.S. missile-defense system — a top Bush priority. Postol claims that Vest 'did not take action,' even though he 'knew there were potential criminal violations and scientific fraud.' A spokesman for M.I.T., which received $726 million in federal work in 2003, said any suggestion that Vest ignored the claims is 'categorically untrue.'"

--

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~progress/articles/ji_hitech.html

The "ivory tower" insulates us from many of the consequences of our work, so perhaps we don't realize that yearly, 81% of the research conducted at Caltech is publicly funded, and that 24% of such funding comes from either the Department of Defense (DOD) or the Department of Energy (DOE), and may be used for military purposes. For example, Caltech is a member of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, which oversees the DOE-sponsored $19 million Center for Simulating Dynamic Responses of Materials. Scientists and engineers who receive funding from this Center are creating a "virtual shock physics laboratory" whose main goal is to simulate the detonation of high explosives. Fully 40% of all applied science research at Caltech is paid for directly by the DOD.

The thread "E-mail I'm sending to politicians and media" is the one with the dirt on Caltech.

If we get an addy for someone at Caltech, we may be able to influence their decision to blow smoke up bush's butt.

Let's Go Get Those Bush Bastards!

I'm working on the "credentials" angle and debunking the "internet conspiracy theorist" shit--

Link: http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10398

Read and respond to this right-wing wacko's perverse ideas that Democrats and bloggers issued phony polls! It's posted on ZOGBY's site from yesterday! Get a response and send it into Zogby pronto!

http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10390

The Exit Poll Scandals
Just because it was November, didn’t mean that the Kerry camp and its network shills couldn’t come up with some more “October surprises” on Election Day. After all, for the Democrats and their media affiliates, it’s always October.

No Exit

On Election Day, the early returns from the Big Media-commissioned “exit polls” were that Sen. John Kerry was drubbing Pres. Bush across the East, especially in the two states Bush had to carry, Florida and Ohio, if he was to have a chance at winning the election. Keep in mind, that unlike the network election coverage, which begins in earnest only after the polls close, the exit polls start coming out early in the day, hours before the polls close.

<snip>

On November 9, reader Will Hartje wrote from Phoenix, “I believe the erroneous polls may well have been manufactured to provide cover for the ensuing fraud that would have been perpetrated had the election been close.”

“They would have been used as ‘evidence’ to support a rigged vote, had the Democrats had the opportunity to do so.”

I believe that Will Hartje is right, and thanked him for the tip. That his explanation didn’t occur to me is due, I guess, to my not being devious-minded enough to keep up with these people. How many cover stories do you think they had cooked up, "just in case" the media failed to deliver the election? The mind boggles.

But many readers may find Hartje’s hypothesis paranoid. Assuming those readers are not socialists and communists for whom the epithet “paranoid,” like its complements “racist” and “sexist” is merely a diversion from making the right judgment at the right place at the right time, they are surely unaware of the planning, flexibility, and quickness of the Democrat hoax machine. And so, we need to go back to Florida, 2000.


(11/12/2004)
- By Nicholas Stix , Michigan News

I mean, can you BELIEVE this crap?

Footnote #2 in the link: "The primary election return data source for this paper is uselectionatlas.com, supplemented by official state web sites, to update the election returns."

Footnote #2 in the second version of the report itself on my desktop:

"The primary election return data source for this paper is uselectionatlas.com, supplemented by official state web sites, to update the election returns. The exit poll data were taken from the cnn.com web site. The poll data can be accessed through http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/index.html. Because the web site does not report the bottom line candidate percentages directly, we had to calculate them from the demographic breakdowns. In this case, we estimated the Bush percentage of votes in the exit polls using the gender breakdown. For instance, 54% of the respondents in Florida were women, 46% men. Women gave 50% of their votes to Bush, men, 53%. Therefore, Bush’s overall share of the exit poll in Florida was calculated as (54% x 50%) + (46% x 53%) = 51.38%."

THEY'RE HIDING THE FACT THAT THE CALTECH/MIT REPORT IS USING THE "CORRECTED" EXIT POLL DATA!!

Compare this to the second footnote of the Freeman report, which tells us he uses the exit poll data from ELECTION NIGHT. They'd managed to get hold of it before it was thrown into the black hole. Adobe Reader won't let me copy it because I don't have the privileges.

Finally, THE CALTECH/MIT REPORT ONLY DEALS WITH THE ISSUE OF THE "BLACK BOXES," FOR WHICH THE ORIGINAL DATA TURNED OUT TO BE FAIRLY WEAK. WHAT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MUCH MORE WIDESPREAD, RATHER, IS THE USE OF OLD FASHIONED JIM CROW TACTICS TO BLOCK MINORITY VOTES.

So is the page itself. It was done on November 9. The one I reference is the second version done on the 11th. The group filled in that data later, clearly upon reflection.

WE NEED TO GET THE WORD OUT ON THIS.

And that is why I took a copy of the report. I thought something like that might happen.

These people are as thick as pigshit.

Al

That's where the fraud in this article lies -- "The Final CNN exit polls".

We know those were altered by CNN!!!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2687293&mesg_id=2689866

Tis a significant discovery. See if you can spot any more changes.

I'm on this, but I've got such a mess on this machine, I can't even find the fing basics on the first broadcast of how easy it was to rig the machines...can someone repost that please

for Bev Harris's work BEFORE the election ....
can someone find that
were there any awards?
Is there a convenient site with some of this info?
(dontcha just love those grannies from seattle?:)

...to the possibility that vote fraud occured. Since these are the first letters to the editor I have seen about the topic in any major newspaper, I would say that the NYT story served to open the door to discussion of vote irregularities rather than shut and lock it. Perhaps what the NYT wanted?

the "revised" exit poll date. I have looked and looked for where I read that, though, and I can not find a source.

“When we saw that Johns Hopkins study , part of us thought, ‘Gee, maybe we shouldn’t go ahead until we figure all of this out,’” says Sullivan. “But then we thought, ‘And wait one more election where people who’ve never been able to vote independently don’t get a chance to vote?’

Can anyone confirm that Bev is referring to the Avi Rubin study in the above quote

taken from here

http://www.missoulanews.com/Archives/News.asp?no=3670

Study -- because he's at Johns Hopkins, as are all but one of the others on his team (Dan Wallach is at some university in TX -- Rice?? Don't remember).

They have now changed the report to admit this.

.. it certainly did open the door. FP NYT is sort of like the coming of age for a story. And notice how Hardball and Olbermann lapped it up on Friday night.

I don't think it was deliberately sloppy. That was an accident. But did they want to open the door.. yes. Most probably the did. The Old Grey Lady is nothing if not deliberate.

al

Recounts provide evidence. Why would journalists -- whose "fifth estate" function includes the government watchdog function, blithely accept a machine's count without seeking independent corroboration? It's their job to be skeptical, curious, and assume that scoundrels are afoot.

Why assume, with no proof, that the exit polls are wrong? Maybe the machines are wrong.

The mere possiblility of insecure servers and anomalous results should send up alarms. Unless they have no idea how machines can be hacked (My machine had a printer!) or are cowed by the White House.

If they won't ask the hard questions, why do they, without a single recount to back them up, balk at covering a citizens' movement to make sure our voting is fair.

The whole world is watching. If we can't prove we can elect our own leaders cleanly, why should they expect any more from us in Iraq?

If it does turn out that the vote has been tampered with, how silly are they going to look if they've taken some experts' word that everything is just fine without a shred of proof?

Nobody's opinion matters here. Only a hand recount will tell if the total on the machines is inflated; if it is, investigating how it got that way is part of their job.

Maybe they'd rather cover nothing lest their election analyses turn out to be merely the improvisations of the hoodwinked.

The blogs (i.e. uppity citizen publishers like us) are doing their job because they are not doing it.

Finally, if it turns out that the election was altered at the server level, there's a Pulitzer to be had for saving the republic. Is the Times interested in being in the running?

p.s. anybody fact-checked that study? Seems to me they assigned the Bush vote to Kerry in a very blue state, Rhode Island, maybe, and then said it was outside the margins. It's a footnote.

Oh shit, from the Times,

"Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War" -- "The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future."

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?hp&ex=1100408400&en=27b47c63b0a8e037&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Do you think they're ON to us? ;)

fyi only. I've put together information from some of the
best research information on the Voting Anomalies, that other
people have posted on the Web, and I'm going to include that
in a possible letter response to the NY Times article
that tried to dimiss all of the E voting questions as
'Conspiracy Theories'.

I'll post the letter on this thread very soon.

If you think it has value , please feel free to use it as
a template for letters to the Editor of the NY Times, and
lets flood the Times with replies.

All,

I'm offering the below letter, as one possible reply to the
Friday NY Times hatchet job story on Computer Voting concerns .

The below letter has a LOT of data and information that credible
sources have posted on the Internet.

Please understand that I have not done the below research, and it is not my work, so I do not deserve or want any credit for it.

I am simply putting it together in one place.

And while the below letter has a lot of information, I want the Times to address all of these issues, rather than sweep them under the rug via the use of derogatory labels, such as 'Conspiracy Theorists' :


Dear New York Times Editorial Staff,

Below is detailed information regarding reported E voting numbers, from various mathematicians, Computer Scientists, statisticians, and other qualified people , experienced in statistical norms and acceptable levels of deviation, between poll studies and reported E voting totals for the 2004 Presidential Election.

These numbers need to be looked at and verified for their validity, and reasonable plausible explanations need to be made to account for the very significant differences between exit polls that were highly accurate in 2000, but now report a statistical significant variation, beyond the acceptable statistical norm, between exit poll results and E voting numbers in Swing States, that did not implement a paper audit trail, along with their Computer Voting machines.

I must point out that I have not had the opportunity to personally validate the accuracy of all of the below numbers.

However, since the implications to our Country are very profound, IF the below numbers are correct, in the interest of protecting our Democracy, I have chosen to make them available to you for study and verification.

I have put the below list of 8 E Voting Discrepancy Cases in order of Importance, as I see them, with what I perceive as the most critical Cases appearing first.

Lastly, I have included a lot of data here, but there is no need to read this entire document, in order to understand the significance of the arguments presented here.

Some of the underlying supporting data is included here, since it's significant and without it , it's difficult to show the magnitude of the the statistical anomalies in the reported E voting totals. In cases where the supporting data was too large to include, I have provided the URL link to it.

Just an fyi. I"m a Database Administrator, and I was a member of my College Debate team.

If you wish to rebuttal these numbers, do so with facts, and not with 'persuasion by ridicule' tactics, by using emotional labels such as 'conspiracy theory', 'kooks', 'sore losers', and other attempts to discredit an individual, because you can not discredit their facts or position via a logical and reasonable rebuttal.

The Collegiate Rules of Debate, not only disallow any and all attempts of 'persuasion by ridicule', but actually deduct one point for every attempt that a Debater made to win the debate by personal attack, instead of via facts and logic.

The originators of Collegiate Rules of Debate were wise enough to know that if you make a factual assertion, and I respond with a personal attack, then by my lack of addressing your facts, I am actually admitting that your facts are correct.

If the best 'research' that the N.Y. Times can do is to label people as 'Conspiracy Theorists' because they can not refute their facts, than the very act of having to resort to labeling, instead of providing credible evidence on how and why the people questioning the official results are wrong, only underscores the validity of the Premise that the reported Computer Voting totals contained significant errors, either of an intentional or an unintentional nature, and of a scope large enough to tip the race to Mr. Bush.

Therefore, please respond to the below findings, with a logical and fact based rebuttal, or admit that you do not know whether the Election results may or may not have been tainted.

But please don't resort to the type of labeling that we have come to expect from FOX News.

You're supposed to be above that sort of 'journalism', which does not do justice to your reading public, the Country, or the great stature of the New York Times.

So Please read on, check the validity of the numbers, and then follow your motto of reporting 'All the News thats Fit to Print.' :

I) EXHIBIT I : Dr. Steven Freeman of Univ. of Pennsylvania research paper puts the odds of exit poll statistical anomalies being off to the degree that E voting totals indicate at 1 in 250 Million

In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman, who has a PH. D from MIT and whose expertise lies in Research Methods, states :

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one.

The 12 page Research paper can be read in it's entirety at : http://www.ilcaonline.org/freeman.pdf

A brief article on this research paper can be found on The Washington Monthly magazine at :
<<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/20... >>

Professor Freeman concludes the research paper with this statement :

"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."

II) EXHIBIT 2 : George Bush's 8 Million New Votes Found - Statistical Analysis

By Alastair Thompson - Co-Editor <http://scoop.co.nz >

WHAT I DID

The raw data is below and I will post an excel spreadsheet of this online soon so people can fill in the gaps (this is really a bit of a work in progress as is the DU tradition). I picked and chose my states on the basis of where I thought it likely that the votes came from and stopped when I got to 90% of the vote difference this only took 31 states.

FINDINGS

1. Bush did not pick up many votes at all on the West Coast.. in fact he lost ground in both Washington and California. This is interesting as this is arguably where the BBV machine manufacturers have been receiving the most heat. However it could reflect a relative lack of interest in so-called "moral issues" out west.

2. The five states I picked on the basis that they are known to have lots of voting machines (and particularly Diebold machines) had a significantly higher percentage increase in bush voters than average… 25% compared to 17% nationally.

3. Likewise the swing states also had a higher average rate of new bush voters at 21%. This however might be expected as they also had much more active campaigns.

4. Among the 31 states I examined were three big democratic states NY, NJ and IL. I selected them on a hunch because a) they are unlikely to be suspected of being used in a vote rigging exercise, but b) necessary to include if you want to achieve a large across the board popular vote gain that does not look too suspicious. These three states averaged a 21% vote gains for Bush and NJ and NY achieved around 25%. However between them they contributed 1.7 million new bush votes, or nearly 20% of Bush's total vote gain.

5. The remainder of my selection of states is broadly defined as "red states", they averaged 20% in terms of voting gain for bush. Notably both Kansas and Utah achieved % gains for bush below the national average. I am guessing here but I would have thought both states were "moral issue" based voter heavy.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE VOTES

6. In sheer numeric terms Bush gained far and away the most votes in Texas and Florida, 900k and 700k respectively.

7. 60% of all Bushes new votes, 5.2 million votes, were gained in just 11 states…FL, TX. NY, OH, PA, GA, MI, NJ, TN, NC, IL

8. Add in another 8 states and you get to 82% of all bush's new votes or 7.1 million… the states are WI MN IND AL OK KY AZ LOU & MD

9. Put another way 7.1 million votes or 82% of bushes gain was achieved in states totalling 65% of the popular vote. Within these states he achieved an average vote gain of an astonishing 23%.

10. 92% of the vote gain is found in the 31 states I selected data for.

11. The rate of bush vote growth in the remaining 20 states was just 5% on average.

12. In percentage terms Florida and Georgia (both heavily Diebold equipment using states) were the standouts with 32% gains respectively.

13. In percentage terms five other states showed more than 25% growth in the bush vote, in ascending order they were Arizona, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Of these AZ, NM and OK both recently upgraded their machines to new tech machines. NJ and TN also both use computerised voting machines, albeit older models.

CLICK HERE TO SEE WHICH MACHINES ARE USED WHERE - VerifiedVoting.Org\'s Verifier

<http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/index.php?topic_stri... >

RAW DATA SUPPORTING THE ABOVE HYPOTHESIS CAN BE FOUND AT :

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... >

SOURCES OF THE DATA AT THE ABOVE SUPPORTING LINK ARE :

2000 Results Via CNN <http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/ >
2004 Results Via C-Span <http://network.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/election_n...

Exit PollingReported Vote

State Kerry Bush Diff .Kerry Bush Diff Bush Gain

AR 45 54 -9 45 54 -9.8 0.8
CO 49 50 -1 47 52 -5.6 4.6
FL 51 49 2 47 52 -5.0 7.0
IA 50 49 1 49 50 -0.9 1.9
MI 52 46 6 51 48 3.4 2.6
MN 52 46 6 51 48 3.5 2.5
MO 47 52 -5 46 53 -7.3 2.3
NH 54 44 10 50 49 1.4 8.6
NJ 54 44 10 53 46 6.2 3.8
NM 50 48 2 49 50 -1.1 3.1
NV 49 48 1 48 50 -2.6 3.6
NY 62 36 26 58 40 17.3 8.7
OH 51 49 2 49 51 -2.5 4.5
PA 53 46 7 51 49 2.2 4.8
WI 51 48 3 50 49 0.4 2.6
WV 45 54 -9 43 56 -13.0 4.0

III) EXHIBIT 3: Regarding Exit polling

Historically speaking, Exit polling always correlates within 2% with voting tallies.

We need reasonable answers, or in the absence thereof, a serious investigation of the following facts:

a). In Election 2004 the only exit polls that did not correlate closely with voting tallies were in states using BBV or a combination of methods including electronic machines. <http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388 > "

Why?

b). In Election 2004, in every instance where there was significant statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the voting tallies, George W. Bush was the recipient of additional votes and never John Kerry.

Why ?

Below are just some of the numbers of the states that reported a significant discrepancy between historically
reliable Exit polls, and Reported Voting totals, with the plus factor indicating the percentage in favor of Mr. Bush :

NJ +4B NC +9B FL +7B OH +5B CO +4B PA +5B NH +8 NM +3B

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000 ... <http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000... >
<http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm >

http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news /... <http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/... >

***The statistical probability of a & b resulting from something other than random chance will be published shortly.

c.) "The last wave of national exit polls we received, along with many other subscribers, showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent.
( Please note that the below source is the New York Times )

" http://nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll .... <http://nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll.... >

Lastly, If you think that I am screaming fraud, you are missing the point .

I do not claim that the above is proof that fraud occured.

I submit that these issues should be thoroughly investigated, not in any attempt necessarily to overturn the election, but to pursue the truth which is the mainstay of any democracy and which used to be the heart and soul of news journalism

IV) EXHIBIT 4 : OHIO NEWSPAPER FINDS E VOTING GLICH GIVES BUSH NEARLY 4,000 EXTRA IN ONE PRECINCT. ARE THERE MORE LIKE THIS ?

In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry.

While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct
supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering
that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center.

The Columbus Dispatch has investigated the matter and the director of
the board of elections within the county admitted that Bush only
received 365 votes. He stated that a "glitch" occurred in the
electronic voting machine during the vote tally. This glitch could have given nearly 4,000 fake votes to George Bush if it had not discovered.

The Gahanna incident is just one confirmed mistake and was discovered by activists on the Internet. It was a fairly easy "glitch" to detect given the large discrepancy between the head count at the polling station and the votes for Bush.

Given this voting error one must ask, how many more glitches occurred that only involved tens or hundreds of votes?

In Florida, exit polling data showed the opposite of the final results provided through the state. Even more surprising are the changes in votes per party that occurred on November 2nd.

Counties using e-touch voting machines in Florida showed an average vote gain of 29% for Republicans and a 23.8% increase for Democrats, which is a quite reasonable and normal difference and to be expected.

However in the Florida, counties that used optical scan vote machines showed drastic differences.

Republicans gained by 128.45% in counties using optical scan voting machines while Democrats had a -21% loss (Yes, that is a NEGATIVE 21% ).

Some districts in Florida showed Bush gains over 400% while one, Liberty County, gained over 700% for Republicans.

These types of Gains are virtually without precedent and require a
plausible explanation.

V) EXHIBIT 5 : Major Media Reports of Major E Voting Problems by Victoria Collier, author and Editor

Below are links to a powerful documentary and several revealing articles reported by major news media exposing serious problems with electronic voting machines. This is followed by excerpts from an excellent article which explains core problems within the elections system.

Washington Post - "In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a computer."
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29190-20... >

New York Times - An article titled "Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud," presents the troubling results of a detailed study by Johns Hopkins University. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws." "The systems....could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment." "Ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.htm... >

Associated Press/ABC - "Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates."
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=220927 >

CNN - "An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus."
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.proble... >

USA Today - "Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning." "Most of the machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount". "Over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly."

<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-11-03... >

These are only a few of the many problems that we know about. How many more votes were changed or disappeared that we don't know about?

VI) EXHIBIT 6 : Why a full, unbiased Investigation is required .
From Marc Sapir MD, MPH, Executive Director,
Retro Poll, www.retropoll.org

Despite the fact that the Democrats registered far more people in the past six months than the Republicans did, and despite a huge voter turnout, with first time voters (according to Warren Mitofsky's poll) giving Kerry a 60:40 edge, President Bush appears to have increased his national vote total by 8 million votes
compared with the 2000 election.

Yet Mitofsky saw no desertion to Bush from 2000 Gore voters (90% of Gore voters stayed with Kerry and 90% of Bush voters stayed with Bush).

How can these contradictory pieces of information be reconciled?

They can't, if Mitovsky's data is correct.

So let's assume Mitovsky is wrong and there was some shift of former voters to Bush.

One possibility is that an increased rural vote went for President Bush more heavily percentage wise than it did in 2000.

However, there do not seem to be enough rural voters in the U.S. to improve that vote by more than perhaps a few million votes.

A second is that perhaps Mr. Bush uniformly made major inroads in the urban-suburban areas and lost them by a much slimmer margin this time, adding vastly to his urban vote totals as well as to rural increases.

Reviews of the actual major urban-suburban vote totals will confirm or refute this hypothesis.

A third possibility is that Mr. Bush improved dramatically in some urban areas in particular and not in others.

If such asymmetrical results were to be determinative in a few states such as Ohio,
one would have to ask the question "how did it happen?"

The more valuable approach, were there to be significant non uniformity seen across urban areas, would be to carry out a study of results comparing urban counties in key states that had used the Diebold electronic voting machines versus those that had used other methods of voting; to also evaluate the turnout and results of each of these metropolitan areas comparing their 2000 and 2004 experience both controlling for and not controlling for a shift in the
methodology to touch screen computers.

And thirdly to consider the issue of potential absentee and provisional vote suppression

If there are some urban areas with lower turnout, looking at the challenged voter experience (though this last concern is separate from the 8 million vote demographic issue).

Because neither the polls nor the demographics appear to statistically explain the 8 million vote (16%) surge for Mr. Bush in this election, the 2004 Presidential race can
not be declared final, free or fair without such studies.

They are, of course, easy to perform for people in the business and could lessen any concerns of fraud.

XII ) EXHIBIT 7 : The following exit poll analysis is from Jonathan D. Simon, an attorney and former political survey and exit poll analyst living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

EXIT POLL VS VOTE TABULATION ANALYSIS

By Jonathon Simon VERIFIEDVOTE2004@aol.com

<mailto:VERIFIEDVOTE2004@aol.com >

I'm working on Warren Mitofsky (head of exit poll consortium used by all of the major television networks) to see if I can get a few answers.

I can tell you that his methodology was, as the night wore on, to mix in actual tabulation data with the initial
pure exit poll data in such a way that by the time the full vote count was in, the "exit poll" would conform very closely to the "actual" vote.

The only thing "sinister" about this is that very few people knew what was happening and the publishers of the rolling data (such as CNN) continued to refer to it , erroneously and deceptively, as an exit poll, when it was no longer an exit poll but based on increasing amounts of "actual" vote data from target counties, and therefore contaminated by whatever vote counting "inaccuracies" were going on.

It was certainly not Mitofksy's purpose to have his polls act as a check mechanism against vote fraud, but strictly to develop a better and better projection of final results as more data was available and it became possible.

It is very important for anyone attempting to use his polls as part of a check mechanism to obtain data from the right time of the day, when the number of respondents was more or less complete but the contamination with "actual vote tabulations" had not yet begun.

Using Ohio as an example, I have printed out results at two times, 7:32 pm (shortly after the polls closed, when it was probably pure or nearly pure exit poll), and 1:41 am (when the poll data had been conflated with, and largely displaced by actual vote counts).

The differences are striking.

At 7:32 pm, it was Bush 47.9%, Kerry 52.1% in the exit poll, which represented a discrepancy of 3.1% from the ultimate tabulated results of Bush 51% Kerry 49% (actually I believe Bush had slightly more than a 2% lead when taken to the next decimal place, so the discrepancy was even greater), and significantly was outside the poll's supposed margin of error.

At 1:41 am, the exit poll had been "corrected" with "actual" results to Bush 50.9%, Kerry 48.6%, which of course very closely conformed to the "actual" tabulations, and eliminated the discrepancy.

This occurred without any appreciable increase in # of respondents (i.e., it was not a "better" exit poll, it was just not an exit poll at all). It's a miracle!

I have printed out what I think is some fairly pure exit poll results for 47 states (incl. DC), but missed four.

I'll append the results below, with crude analysis. It would be very useful, but I'm not sure how difficult given that so few people knew that the exit polls were melting under their noses, to retrieve the best Mitofsky data from the peak times when the exit poll was complete but no tabulated data had found its way in.

There are also the Zogby polls to consider, and perhaps others.

The media is once again blithely dismissing the "early" exit polls as mysteriously invalid, without so much as a mention that when two counts don't match up they both need to be investigated (obvious, right?).

Mitofsky himself has no inclination to defend his own polls but is willing to fall on his sword and "admit" that they were "off" to help insure, in his words, "the orderly transfer of power."

Apparently it is not much of a concern to him to whom, and it has not occurred to him that, under the current set up, no transfer of power can be possible at all before Hell freezes over, because the imcumbents control the voting machinery and will take no steps to unrig it.

I am working on either helping him see the light or at least teasing some helpful information out of him, but I'm not optimistic.

Here's some data and, as I said, crude analysis

Further note: “I examined the discrepancies between the actual vote tabulations as reported and the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll results in 47 states, incl. D.C. (in 4 statesNJ,NY,NC,VAI did not have early exit poll results available, and the later results had already been amended to reflect input of actual vote totals, which rendered them corrupt as exit polls and useless for the purpose of checking the veracity of actual vote totals).

I noticed an overall red shift (to Bush) across the spectrum of states, but the shift was significantly nonuniform.

Having divided the 47 states examined into two groups, 35 noncritical states and 12 critical or suspect states (Nebraska included because of ES&S control and prior anomalies even though not a battleground state), I calculated that the average discrepancy in the 35 safe states was a +1.4% red shift, that is the average of the vote totals in each state was 1.4% more favorable to Bush than what the exit polls predicted (= total movement of 2.8%).

In the 12 critical states (CO,FL,MI,MN,NE,NV,NH,NM,OH,PA,WI,IA) the average discrepancy was a 2.5% red shift (= total movement of 5.0%), nearly twice that in the safe states.

This in spite of the fact that the average sample size in the critical states was nearly twice that in the non-critical states and should have produced significantly more accurate results.

Further, assuming a 3% margin of error and 95% confidence interval for each state poll (the standard Mitofksy protocol, but a conservative assumption here, since the sample sizes were significantly increased in critical states), the red shift exceeded the margin of error in 4 of the 12 critical states (and equaled it in a fifth).

The chance of this occurring in 4 of the 12 states in the absence of "mistabulation" can be computed using a simple probability equation and is approximately 0.002 or one in five-hundred.

It's a relatively crude analysis and better analysis would have to wait on more complete data, but basically what it's telling us is that we can say with 99.8% certainty that "mistabulation" played some significant role in this election.

From the specific discrepancies in Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico; from the amazing voter turnout, which any analyst on truth serum will admit should have guaranteed a Kerry victory; from what we know, but the media has now chosen to forget, about how suspect and partisan the vote counting equipment is; and from pieces of circumstantial evidence, such as Bush not deigning to campaign in Ohio (crazy unless the fix was in): we can be all but certain that another election has been stolen and that the toilet has been flushed on our democracy.

Kerry has conceded. But the truth remains to be dug out to lie in the light and stink in the open air.

If we can do no more, let's at least make sure we don't rest until we have done that.

Later note: “ Warren Mitofsky says that he knew in the afternoon that his exit polls were off in nine states, but this does not sit well with me (I'd need to know how he would know at that point and, assuming he knew, why he would go ahead and promulgate them without caveat?).

Way too much work went into getting the exit polls right this time for me to just accept that they can't do as well as they were doing routinely in the 80s and 90s.

This is not, like stained glass, a lost art.

It might be a bit long for em to read mind.... (here is the full link to the Washington Monthly - CalPundit - Kevin Drum's post.) hadn't seen this. It is good albeit rather skeptical.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005147.php

I didn't read the whole part where you treat the various papers and articles but a couple of notes from your introduction.

You refer to "exit polls that were highly accurate in 2000". Remember that the repukes also claimed inaccurate exit polls in 2000. It turns out that they were accurate when the recounts ended after Bush was sworn in and released sometime around 9/11 (or on 9/11). The article I read was practically illegible and most repukes claim it says Bush won no matter how you counted the votes. So unless you cite the sources that show that Gore did win (I think Mitofsky actually admitted it--read it somewhere here in the past few days), most people don't hold that view, especially those aiding and abetting the usurpers. I read (here) that the exit polls were considered accurate before 2000, and have only been called into question by the repukes and the actual (fake) vote tallies that handed Bush the presidency.

Love the request for an honest debate and the citing of the debate rules. I doubt they have anyone on staff that isn't too lazy to even read your whole letter.

You know those debates they have on Slate. I've seen them about movie stars (following links from gossip sites) and I know they have them on politics. It would be nice if you could put together something in that vein, and get someone to represent the other side and let them get in their best shot. It would be wonderful to have a debate in a foreign paper.

I haven't even read the NY Times article yet. I am just responding to your fantastic letter.

this has a lot of names that are in the rep party roberson,j.fawell,j.abramoff j.coors,j. keys. if this has been looked at thanks

http://www.seekgod.ca/cnporganizations.htm

... just wanted to make sure that you got everything off ok.... see how it goes...

I also posted this on the other thread, but wanted to get people's take on it here:

An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by implication) the Rest of the US Press:

Dear New York Times, etal,

As a long-time subscribed reader of your publication—one I have always staunchly defended one of the best in the world--I am incensed by your dismissive handling of what is one of the most significant breaking news stories since Watergate.

Here I am, seated at my computer, submerged in the nefarious bowels of the internet—reading a New York Times article with all the “twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust” of booking an airline ticket, making a hotel reservation, a bank transfer or reading the Washington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, ABC, NBC, and CBS headlines—things most of us do on a regular basis in the “parallel universe” that is the internet (citing another derogatory and patently absurd quip by NBC News’ Chip Reid).

I am neither internet enthusiast nor blogger: the term blogosphere did not even enter my vocabulary until several weeks before the 2004 election when these citizen journalists, some more legitimate than others, began emerging as a powerful political force in the election. I am not unlike most of your readers: educator, writer, editor, translator with a PhD and a two-page publications list under my belt, in German and English. I volunteer for my local park district, where I offer performing arts programs for children and youth. All in all, I’m pretty average—not unlike the now nearly 40,000 people who’ve signed the electronic petition to Congress requesting an investigation of the 2004 presidential election. (Note: I do not argue for the legitimacy of all these signatures—what’s a few thousand plus or minus in the greater scheme of things?). The internet is not a distant planet: I would venture to guess that it is “inhabited” or at least visited by 99.9% of your readers.

These readers don’t appreciate their entirely justifiable concerns about the accuracy of the electoral process being discredited and dismissed as conspiracy theorist-quackery—as eight out of nine responses printed in today’s evidence.

One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way this story began: you claim that it emerged from the ether “in the course of seven days” as mysteriously as the creationist version of human evolution. But that is not the case.

So how thousands of Times’ readers get swept up in the maelstrom of the “online market of dark ideas surrounding the last week’s presidential election”? What really happened to spawn the internet hysteria?

The stage was set on election night, with worldwide shock and disbelief over Bush’s “overnight sensation” victory: observers throughout the country and the world who had been following the election closely tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident that “help was on the way.” This logical assumption was based not only on early exit polls: it was based on the worldwide public perception, particularly salient in the United States, that the only way a Republican victory could be secured was through a dubious fiat similar to the one we witnessed in 2000. As one astute reader responding to your front-page coverage of this highly significant media event succinctly stated: “If George W. Bush had won the 2000 election honestly, people would not be so quick to assume that he did not win this one fair and square either.” Of course, that was in the letters section, A30. So many readers may have missed it.

Years before the election—perhaps it was with the quiet passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act which mandated the use of Diebold and ES&S machines notorious for “tamperability”--concerned citizens from various walks of life--professors, computer scientists, systems analysts, even grandmothers and literary publicists from Seattle--had been attempting to sound the alarm: the Diebold voting machines are not secure; the democratic process itself is in jeopardy, seriously so. Inspired partly by a John Hopkins University study, Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer protection organization Blackboxvoting.org, co-authored the book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, published by Plan Nine Publishing. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Hopkins Security Information Security Institute was the author of that study. Rubin is a qualified expert with years of practical experience in the field of cryptography, network security, Web security and secure Internet services who was employed by such companies as AT&T and Bellcore prior to accepting his appointment at Johns Hopkins. On Wednesday, October 27, 2004—one week before the election, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast an alarming segment covering electronic voting, which featured not only Rubin, but David Jefferson of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who described the system currently in place as the “electoral weapon of mass destruction” which could easily be manipulated by a rogue programmer. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University and author of several “legitimate” books on American government published by Norton & Company, also pointed out the potential for problems with the machine-voting systems—and these are but a few of the “minority report-esque” voices who attempted to sound the alarm before the most recent election scandal broke loose on the internet. Are we to discredit these experts as “internet conspiracy theorists”?

In the hours since you posted your disparaging report, the bloggers have lashed backed faster than you could flog them: As Joseph Cannon’s Friday blog points out, even as you discount the “early” reports that began appearing just two days after the election, you neglect to take into consideration Dr. Stephen F. Freeman’s (University of Pennsylvania; degree: MIT) study published on November 10, which—two days prior to your biased and poorly researched report—lent support to the bloggers’ “conspiracy theories.” Instead, you invoke the imprimatur of Harvard, Cornell and Stanford, citing an email by three unnamed political scientists posted to the website ustogether.org (a study that has since been revised and is now being referred to in the scientific community as the Dopp and Liddle report). According to your account, there was not sufficient “concrete support” to merit the investigations sought by the three Congressmen (John Conyers. Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler). The “Dixiecrat” theory has, in fact, since been de-debunked by solid research findings, not by anonymous emails shot off from prestigious schools. At present, the three primary studies circulating on the net are the Dopp and Liddle report, the Caltech report and the Freeman’s MIT report. Dr. Freeman’s report concludes that while “Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate," and that furthermore that, "As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." Freeman concludes that the odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one.

These studies do not involve a the kind of fuzzy math implied by the Times’ report of “blog-to-e-mail-to-blog”—they involve a diligent, however frenzied, study of the actual data produced by exit polls versus actual results. These so-called “internet conspiracy theorists” are credentialed professionals engaged in hard research--most of which is beyond my grasp as a classically literary-minded PhD, but which clearly reflects solid research conducted by people who, by virtue of their professional training in precisely the fields required to analyze this data, are hard at work doing the job of the entire nation right now. They are doing your job, and they deserve your support and gratitude, not disdain, derision and dismissal. The fact of the matter is, the situation we face as a nation is far too complicated to be figured out without the aid of sophisticated independent scientists who can analyze the data. The jury is still out on this one: the fact of the matter is, there are three well-researched statistical analyses that will need to be studied, compared and analyzed by highly discerning and well-trained minds. That is likely to take some time—consider the stakes involved, we’d best just hold our breath waiting for the research to be complete. In the meantime, these three studies alone provide enough evidence of “anomalies” to merit a thorough, time and cost intensive investigation.

Let’s not even begin to ”discuss” or otherwise dismiss the most recent findings of investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of those internet-conspiracy-theorist-bloggers charged with snowballing rumors in cyberspace: in his BBC report (also available online) he states that “documents from the Bush campaign's Florida HQ suggest a plan to disrupt voting in African-American districts.” Is it the BBC that is spreading rumors, or Germany’s highly regarded Spiegel (also available online), which rightly identifies Palast as an “investigative reporter, documentary film producer and best-selling author” and the remaining “internet conspiracy theorists” as “watchdog groups” (in most democracies, this is a positive moniker not a pejorative).

I must confess, Mssrs. Zeller, Fessenden and Schwartz, in my professional capacity as a translator of German historical and literary texts, I often have the unpleasant task of researching “internet conspiracy theories” and subjecting myself to the horrific rantings of stark-raving lunatics on the net. One classic example can be found at this site: http://www.regmeister.net/verbrecher/verbrecher.htm. This, sirs, is an “internet conspiracy theory”—the remaining sources I have cited here are highly legitimate studies and reports conducted by credentialed scientists and respectable journalists.

Had you done your research, you’d have recognized the difference. Perhaps you got your internets confused: I see from today’s headlines that the “Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War”—Tim Weiner reports that “the Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats—a ‘God’s-eye view’ of battle.” Maybe that was the internets you had in mind—I’m quite content with the God’s eye-view I’m getting right here and now on this ol’ fashioned democratic internet.

The story is bigger than Watergate. Your dismissal of it is on a par with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Lilian Friedberg
Reporting from the Democratic Mandate of the United States of America

Way to go!

:toast:

Great Work!!!

By the way professor Steve Freeman has a website up where he will be updating his research
http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf /

put it on my website. I am putting together some things from here and there, and I am keeping track of all the MSM work on the election. This will be included as a response to the NYT article. Thanks in advance.

That is a wonderful letter and I am bookmarking this page.

and powerfully written....


thank you

Very well written. Make sure you send it to multiple people over at the Times.

have any of you CREW people taken note of my posts about the German blog that is writing in English about the fraud scandal?

I got in there once, posted a short version of NYT letter, then I think they kicked me out. But I really think that's a good place for some of the EVIDENCE to go

Anyway here is the site
http://www.heise.de/tp/foren/

i've also notified some very geniusy geeks in Germany. I think they are watching this unfold (i hope) unless they think i'm nuts--maybe i am. parallel universe? so what was that, send it to several people at the NYT or to one person at the several NYT?:)

on one of the german threads in that forum someone was going the "dumb american" route, saying, uh those stupid americans'll never have the balls to recount/resist/ --subject line was "too complicated" --the german seem HIGHLY pissed at us, have completely written us OFF (as a nation and a people), sounds like "well they got what they deserved" -- like really veangeful -- hence very unwilling to assist in any way

Man, when those flyers came through, then EIR (you guys are AMAZING!!!), then Redefeat, yeah, sure would have liked to put them out there too complicated, huh? :)

At any rate, you certainly gave us that Kerry party, didn't you? THANK YOU

i think I'll dress up as a ketchup bottle and call myself a national vegetable.

Although there quite a few clever posters there, the majority of the posters there are very RW. I post there occasionally, but it doesn't seem to be worth it; the self-important, neo-conservative dickhead quota is too high (I'd say around 85%).

TP isn't a blog, but a pretty respected magazine for internet culture; heise is the leading German IT publisher.

has some good stuff to say (guess I meant forum not blog)--but the German netspace (whatever you wanna callit) , kinda scarey place aint it? I'm just thinking in terms of press, not persuasion...

Times is out there pretending everything's under control in NM as votes "trickle in" "About 750,000 people voted in New Mexico, and Republicans said money that should have gone toward counting votes was spent on a marketing campaign intended to increase turnout."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/politics/14vote.html

I love the articles, hate the discussion board (kinda strange for a social-liberal magazine to have a RW community). :hi:

and they call us stupid, far as i can tell someone round here's doin a good just of keepin the riffraff out: i lived in Germany ten years--was among germans when they were on their "sunday best"--i'd hate to be around them when they're at their worst.

and that reminds me, remember the "our man in baghdad" lines about Bush? maybe we could send him to germany. better yet, austria. with arnie.

Check them out. Not one name is attached to the study
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Election2004.html

Then check the reports on the Caltech/Mit VTP main page. Every study lists names of the scientists involved in the study.
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/

I've only checked out the VOTING MACHINES AND THE UNDERESTIMATE
OF THE BUSH VOTE report thoroughly and other than the chart on Page 3 the report is a piece of poorly documented opinions. This is suppose to be the work of Nobel Prize winning quality scientists? I think not. I think this is the work of a graduate student and a spin doctor. My suggestion is to contact Caltech/Mit VTP and make them put some names on this paper.

For instance Pg. 4 reads "Therefore, for the remainder of this paper, I treat voters who use punch cards, hand-counted paper ballots, and optically scanned ballots as all voting on “paper.” Who the hell is "I"?
I honestly don't think any of them will attach their name to this poorly written trash.

Here's the Contact People. wesite. Let's get someone to admit to authoring this crapola. I'm working Monday but I'll give it a go if I get home in time.

http://www.vote.caltech.edu/contact.html

Caltech Contact:
Karen Kerbs
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project
California Institute of Technology
1200 E. California Blvd., MC 228-77
Pasadena, CA 91125
Ph: (626) 395-4089
Fax: (626) 793-3257

MIT Contact:
Stephanie Frye
Project Coordinator
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, E-15 315
Cambridge, MA 02139
Ph: (617) 253-7394
Fax: (617) 258-6264

Caltech Media Contacts:
Robert Tindol
Media Relations
(626) 395-3631

Jill Perry
Director of Media Relations
California Institute of Technology

MC 0-71
315 S. Hill Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91125
Ph: (626) 395-3226
Fax: (626) 577-5492

MIT Media Contact:
Patti Richards
Senior Communications Officer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(617) 253-8923

Finally, here's an interesting story about the research fraud scandal he was involved with. He sounds like he may be a great scientist but has no morale compass in his day to day dealing with the world. (There's rumors I've yet to confirm of reprimands personal misconduct.)
http://mindgallery.com/hiddenroom/outbreak.html

The Baltimore Affair

An early case was headline material. Charles Maplethorpe, a recent graduate student at MIT told Feder and Stewart that a paper by Weaver et al. in the jounal Cell was not a truthful account of the experiments it reported. A co-author of the paper was David Baltimore, who had shared a Nobel prize with Howard Temin for the discovery of the enzyme reverse transcriptase, whose existence disproved the assumption that RNA was copied from DNA and never vice versa. (Temin had been saying this for years, but the particular pair of similar experiments by Temin and Baltimore seem to have convinced people.)

A fraudelent paper co-athored by a Nobel prizewinner was headline material if indeed it was fraudulent. The bioscience establishment had so far blocked any real attempt to clean up bioscience. Perhaps, baited by Nobel-sized publicity, Congress might weigh in on the side of reform.

Was the paper indeed bogus? Feder and Stewart looked into it as well as they could with the limited evidence available. (Stewart is the chief detective of the pair, Feder the diplomat.) The original whistleblower was not Maplethorpe but Margot O'Toole, who had worked with Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a co-author of the Weaver et al. paper. O'Toole had been trying to perform an experiment that followed up on the Weaver et al. paper. The experiment refused to work. A falling out ensued, and Imanishi-Kari exiled O'Toole to mouse breeding. Among the mousebreeding records were 17 pages of data, including some on a reagent called BET 1. In Weaver et al. BET 1 distinguished clearly between two particular sorts of antibodies. In the 17 pages it did not.

If BET 1 behaved as the 17 pages showed, O'Toole realized, the failure of her own experiments was explained -- and the Weaver et al. paper was certainly wrong and possibly a fraud. She took her questions to Henry Wortis, who had supervised her Ph. D. work at Tufts University, where Imanishi-Kari was slated to go, and to the authorities at MIT. At MIT ombudsperson Mary Rowe told O'Toole that if she wrote up her complaints she would receive a written response to them. But then David Baltimore entered the fight in support of Imanishi-Kari and this assurance evaporated.

At both MIT and Tufts investigations found things wrong with the paper but said that no correction need be published.

And there O'Toole, recognizing the power arrayed against her, let the matter rest. When her fellowship at MIT expired she went to work answering the telephone for her brother's moving company.

Then Walter Stewart started telephoning her. At first she wanted to stay silent, but eventually Stewart convinced her that she had a duty to science to tell what she knew, and she agreed to cooperate. Stewart began studying the case and the immunology on which it was based. In the latter he had the independent advice of an NIH scientist, whom, in light of what happens to whistleblowers, I do not name.

Imanishi-Kari was later to claim that the BET 1 sample whose data appeared in the 17 pages was a bad batch, an explanation that had long before occurred to Feder and Stewart, but when they asked to see the data on which the figure in the paper was based Baltimore, who was captaining the defense, refused all cooperation.

Baltimore's view of Iminishi-Kari throughout the affair followed a sinuous course. One assumes that as co-author he originally believed in the veracity of Imanishi-Kari's data. Soon after the trouble started, in a letter to Herman Eisen, chairman of the MIT investigating panel, he disowned Imanishi-Kari but said that any warnings about the paper would be delivered privately. then, in testimony before John Dingell's committee he disowned his letter to Eisen, and reaffirmed his faith in Imanishi-Kari. When ORI said that she had forged data Baltimore said he had placed too much trust in her, and when the United States Attorney in Baltimore MD failed to indict her Baltimore's public faith in Imanishi-Kari began to recover. He changed sides four times in all.

Feder and Stewart wrote up their conclusions for publication. NIH would at first not permit them to submit their manuscript, but with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union they got the prohibition lifted. NIH sent the manuscript to several scientists for review. Most said the manuscript raised serious questions about the veracity of the data in the Weaver et al. article, but that it should not be published.

Nevertheless NIH gave final permission for publication. None of the journals approached would do so. The nearest miss was with Nature, which kept the revision process going for a year, asking for lawyer-induced changes. Finally, after editor Maddox said again and again that the proofs would be sent next day and failed to send them, they withdrew the manuscript.

Years later, after ORI said that major parts of the data had been forged, Nature then published Feder and Stewart's paper.

I am so impressed with g9udit and catastrophicsuccess for their letters in #19 and #30. GettysbergII makes an excellent point in #46 and as always, huge kudos to Eloriel, hedda_foil and Bev Harris for their tenacity.

TYY:yourock:

I'm so frustrated --there's a huge buzz inGerman language forums -- they are very HOSTILE, not only to whoever's NOT in the WH, but to the american people--but these guys don't have the latest info (and of course are disparaging us--jeez at least they have the TECHNICAL skills to find it if they wouldn't just rather believe we're stupid). Is it even important any more to get the most recent data out there.

I don't know where you guys are at, what is priority and cannot navigate this HUGE thing that is DU, but I think with some "private tutoring" I might be able to help circulate the most important info in the german blogosphere

feel like I'm stumbling around here getting in the way when I could actually be helping.

Maybe the bulk of the work is done....

http://forum.tagesschau.de/archive/index.php/t-5608.html

unlike the other forum I posted, i don't know how conversant these guys would be in English, also don't know if you NEED to get this info out there. Can someone please help this catastrophic success? If you don't NEED that, that's OK too....sorry, i'm not good for much but readin (in German) and writing (in English, well, yeah German too, but not "sophisticated")

. . . using BabelFish translations. Pretty interesting. The whole world is unhappy with the BFEE. No surprise there. Check out the war protesters in Glasgow. http://www.sundayherald.com/46016 And the Dutch are pulling out their 1350 troops in March. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=247544

TYY

I am a German, and I'm spreading the news about the vote fraud stuff on telepolis already. This forum is absolutely not right-wing, btw, just to the contrary. But due to its popularity, it has attracted a lot of disinformation trolls who follow the Neocon agenda. This might have created your impression that the forum is right leaning.

In the long run, I don't think the Germans will buy that the election was fair. They don't even buy 9/11.

I think everyone has to make a choice: Either Bush has legitimately won the election - or math and natural sciences are still valid. I prefer the second one.

From Prof. Sam Wang of Princeton University.

http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/pollcalc_validation.html

Interesting reading. :)