NEWS: What Were the Odds That Bush Would Win?

What Were the Odds That Bush Would Win?
by Alan Waldman - November 25, 2004
http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91472
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Despite mainstream media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with theories about how John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2 -- claiming Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting to steal the election for George W. Bush.
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Reports from Ohio indicate that the state´s chief elections official J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, arranged for ample voting booths in GOP areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts. Despite the huge increase in new voter registration (91 percent of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer total voting machines than were used in 2000. Lawyer Ray Beckerman reported, ¨Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio. People waited in line for as long as 10 hours -- but only in Democratic precincts. All day long, touch-screen voting machines in Youngstown registered ¨George W. Bush¨ when voters pressed ¨John F. Kerry,¨ despite complaints to police throughout the day.
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Kerry´s victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris and Zogby pre-election polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule -- an incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses (Bush had 47 percent, requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the challenger -- as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this time). Nor is it credible that: the surge in new young voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for hours on campuses nationwide) miraculously didn´t appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who´s lost support; and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail, and grossly underestimated Bush´s appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that Bush beat mathematical odds of 99 to 1 in winning the election. Election results are not final until the electoral college votes on Dec. 13. There is still time to investigate, to find the truth and, if the results match the probabilities, to swear in legitimately elected President John F. Kerry. Alan Waldman is a Los Angeles
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read entire article

well, you can't get much above 100%

I hope the vague hints I have heard about people working on this are accurate, I really do

but your link is funked :(

you can see the problem is I put the address up this way:

hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91472

last part should be:

oid=oid: 91472 (without the space)

Here's the real link:

http://tinyurl.com/3rmfj

The Hartford Advocate, even though it's just a "news weekly," is a step in the right direction. But until the NYT or the WP starts running with this ball, I don't see this going anywhere.

Sadly, I'm not surprised the Kerry camp apparently isn't interested.

There are a lot of good things about this article which others will talk about and that's great.

But I find it disheartening that this canard was repeated:

"and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail, and grossly underestimated Bush´s appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts."

This shows how our influence here at DU (and we DO have an influence in the media) must be wielded with restraint and accuracy. This "fact" of the exit polls being wrong in "non-paper-trail" states is just not accurate. The original analysis totally depended on which states were considered paper trail states - and the states were not accurately placed in the correct categories (sorry - don't have links for you, but I encourage anyone to take the data themselves and then divide the states how they see fit). While the exit polls are definitely suspicious, it's much more accurate and supportable to say that the exit polls were off in swing states.

But this canard has stuck and there's very little anyone can do to correct it now. I only hope it can be an object lesson is how we need to be restrained and accurate with our analyses here at DU.

but these are open discussion forums - we discuss and refine information. Hopefully we move in the direction of increasing accuracy as we discuss - I think we are doing that. But we are not journalists (at least not in this capacity). Waldman is fully responsible for vetting the accuracy of his article. As for the other media sources that observe and comment on our ongoing discussion and, in particular, grab iconic bits of discredited information in order to discredit our entire efforts - how can we defend against that?

In a perfect world (ok - in MY perfect world), everyone would always be most concerned with the accuracy of their information. For me, this is the only road to a better world - the truth.

But, ultimately, you are right. Journalists need to vet the accuracy of what they publish. Hell, what spurred me to investigate (and ultimately analyze) these data on my own was that I planned to send the info out in an e-mail TO FRIENDS.

It's a little frightening that journalists are willing to send the information out to the world having not done some simple vetting themselves.

to read that.

Thanks, Kerry, for conceding. Asshole pussy-man

whatever else he was and is I don't he's a coward

I guess your definition of a "coward" is different than mine.

He said he would make sure every vote counted. He conceded and ran off the political stage with his tail between his legs a mere few hours after the polls closed.

This is not what I call leadership or courage.

popular vote etc. and that there was no way to flip Ohio on that basis, so what should he have done exactly - start shouting fraud without a shred of evidence at the time, it would have been a bloodbath and done the Democrats no favors in the future and I think when Edwards said that all the votes would be counted he as well as Kerry genuinely meant and believed that, I'd say the situation now is somewhat different, but I really can't see what else he could have done at that point .

or maybe it's just that he's been in the democratic Party for so long, he forgot how to fight, he forgot how to be an "opposition" to anything.

or something like that.

I know, hard to believe and I'm sure it's bullshit, but that was the story flying around

and it was based on SAT scores -- though I think "officially" Kerry never released his to the public.