I just don't get 'em. I don't understand how people can look at the same set of numbers and come up with radically different conclusions, how one statitician can debunk anothers' work, etc.
I dunno. I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and if I don't get it, I'm pretty sure most people won't. You'll notice how the other side spins things---they don't dispute it with more numbers; they dispute it by saying, "Internet conspiracy theories," or "the election went smoothly," or "you can't expect the system to be perfect," etc.
In other words, they use words to counter numbers, and by doing so they have more powerful influence over most people, who just tune in for sound bites, read headlines, or skim articles. Hey, I'm GLUED to developments about fraud, and if *my* eyes glaze over when reading things like "the tally for X county, when compared to Y, with Z number of absentee votes...figure, number, table, chart," then I think the way the evidence is presented must change. There's some guy on DU here who keeps saying CHANGE THE FRAME (a la Lakeoff or however you spell it), and I have to agree.
Put it in terms most people will understand and relate to. Show them this map:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x92747or this one:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=201x5919These are crystal clear. Appeal to people's sense of justice and fairplay. Talk about the dirty tricks, the criminal elements rather than the more opaque mathematical elements. Say very clearly, "Wealthy white people got more voting machines and didn't have to wait as long as poor Black people and Democratic areas." Say, "Poor and working class Democrats, especially Black people, received phone calls telling them to go to the wrong polling places and we have proof." Keep saying "we have proof" rather than "evidence." That's what's so genius about Jesse Jackson getting involved. He's a strong communicator (usually, anyway---I read elsewhere on DU that his moment on Countdown wasn't all that terrific).
We can take a leaf from the GOP notebook, and simply choose three major points and hammer, hammer, hammer on them all the time. Don't bring anything else up, and if someone does bring something else up to counter your arguments, just bring it back around to those same three points. (As those with NLP skills know, if you repeat something three times, it is more likely to sink into consciousness; if you ask questions of an audience that gets them to respond "yes," three times, you essentially have them in the palm of your hand. Think about "Are you ready to rock?" "I can't hear you, I said, Are you ready to rock? Oh, come on, you can do better than that! Are you ready to rock?" and the audience goes wild.)
In another way to counter spin, I'll say this: I'm in media relations, and I know that people believe that if the media writes a story about something that it lends it an air of legitimacy, so that's another area we need to hammer on. People are probably saying, well, if they have proof of fraud, wouldn't it be all over the papers and on my Yahoo! headlines? I don't have an answer for that, but perhaps the brain trust at DU might.