A Stolen Election in 2004?

[Tgace]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-12-27-edit_x.htm

Election Day leftovers
Compared with the presidential election in Ukraine, this year's elections at home went off smoothly. Certainly no candidate here had to overcome massive fraud or a bizarre face-disfiguring poisoning. But eight weeks after Election Day, several U.S. races are still unresolved because of glaring human errors, machine malfunctions, disputes over vague or contradictory election laws and other echoes of the mess that tied up the presidential race four years ago.
They are a reminder of how close the nation remains to a repeat of the contentious 2000 fiasco, and a monument to the failure of states to attack the problem.

In Washington state, the gubernatorial election has been through three recounts and stands a mere 130 votes apart. Democrat Christine Gregoire is on top in the final tally, a reversal of the original result, and Republicans are weighing their next steps, with legal challenges in the offing. In dispute are votes overlooked or disqualified earlier.

Puerto Rico's gubernatorial election is tied up in federal and commonwealth courts with battles over "mixed" ballots, in which voters indicate a preference for one political party overall but may then vote for another party's candidate in a given race.

San Diego's mayor, already sworn in for a second term, ran second among those who went to the polls Nov. 2, but more than 5,500 write-in votes for a challenger were disallowed. A recount has been requested, and a court challenge is likely.

Ohio's votes for president are being recounted. And two court challenges, involving the presidential race and a major statewide race, seek to have the election thrown out altogether because of machine malfunctions, the double-counting of some ballots and a failure to provide adequate numbers of voting machines, particularly in predominantly minority precincts. The evidence, however, does not suggest that the discrepancies would give John Kerry enough votes to overtake President Bush in the state that decided the race.

Presidential recounts are also being sought in New Mexico and Nevada. A scattering of legislative races from Texas to New York are still in dispute. And one North Carolina county has to vote again next month because 5,000 votes were wiped out by a computer.

Thankfully, the 2004 presidential race wasn't close enough to be within the "margin of litigation." But voters are routinely being disenfranchised by an assortment of failings. Among them:

•Counting errors. A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.

•Machine malfunctions. In Ohio, 92,000 ballots failed to record a vote for president, most of them in areas still using discredited punch-card technology, and an unknown number were counted twice. Optical-scan systems failed to record votes in parts of Arkansas. Glitches in new high-tech electronic machines gave Bush extra votes in at least one Ohio county and wiped out thousands of votes in others across the country.

•Registration confusion. Four-fifths of the states went into the election without computerized statewide voter databases. Congress mandated those databases to address the registration issues that arose four years ago. Standards for issuing and counting provisional ballots, cast by people whose status is challenged, vary widely among states and even within states.

•Legal uncertainty. From Seattle to San Juan, the ongoing disputes dramatize how many jurisdictions need to clean up the contradictions and disparities in their patchwork election laws. The objective should be for every vote to count, instead of for every vote to be open to legal manipulation.

•Lack of respect for voters. Reports of hours-long lines, too few voting machines and attempts to discourage voters through the selective enforcement of regulations suggest that too many officials treat the electorate as a nuisance to be kept at bay, not as the foundation of democracy.

Elections in this country are largely state and local responsibilities, and for most of the USA, the 2004 election was over nearly two months ago. But the widespread evidence of still-unresolved problems is a reminder of how much state and local officials have yet to do to make the most basic exercise of democracy work as it should.

It's not Ukraine, still just a fledgling democracy. But two centuries of experience should have taught us to do better.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.cincypost.com/2004/12/08/black120804.html

Bipartisan system protects integrity of the vote

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By J. Kenneth Blackwell

Jesse Jackson is at it again. The master of eloquent mendacity recently picked up a bundle of misunderstandings, fiction and bunk and compared Ohio's election on Nov. 2 to that of Ukraine's. Jackson doesn't bother with facts when half-baked suppositions better fit his partisan agenda.
If Jackson was not aiming to delegitimize a democratic process, I'd suggest laughing off the charges. But his are serious. As a former United States ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a two-term Ohio secretary of state, I will substitute facts for some of the wild speculation Jackson traffics in.

Ohio has an election system that is transparent, bipartisan and fair. I'd like to take credit for it, but the fact is that parts of it -- like the rules concerning provisional ballots -- have been in place since the mid-1990s. Other key elements, like the bipartisan boards of elections, have been around much longer than that. I did not wave the system into existence just for this past election.

Ohio's election system both makes sure that citizens have every chance to make their views heard on election days and provides checks against possible fraud.

The system's watchdogs are representatives of the major political parties.

Who has a greater incentive to guarantee that the other side isn't rigging the system? Each county has a four-member board of elections -- two Democrats and two Republicans. They make the decisions about the placement of voting machines. They certify elections. They choose voting devices and deploy those systems on election days.

Democratic county party chairmen like Franklin County's (Columbus) William A. Anthony Jr. serve on boards of elections. They are not in the business of trying to suppress their party's vote. Nonetheless, Jackson rather bizarrely insinuated that Anthony deliberately agreed to place too few voting machines in heavily Democratic neighborhoods and too many in Republican ones. "Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?'' Anthony recently told the Columbus Dispatch. Jackson has no answer. He just fans the flames with even more flat out false information.

Jackson claims that he has identified fraud in Ohio because "Ellen Connally, an African-American Supreme Court candidate running an underfunded race at the bottom of the ticket, received over 100,000 more votes than (John) Kerry in four counties.''

However, a quick check of those four counties -- Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren -- reveals a different reality. Kerry actually received 21,019 more combined votes in those counties than Connally.

The truth is that Ohio's election officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- are in the business of seeing to it that the vote is counted fairly. This is a long process, one that is best not hurried.

Election workers in Hamilton County have been putting in 18-hour days, checking each of the 13,976 provisional ballots by hand against voter registration lists. It is the same process in the other 87 counties.

Across Ohio, 77 percent of the provisional ballots were accepted and counted in the final tally by county boards of election. Most commonly, ballots were rejected because voters weren't registered. A few voters voted twice. A small number were rejected because voters cast their ballots at the wrong precinct.

Contrast Ohio's 77 percent acceptance rate with the 50 percent in Jackson's home, Cook County, Illinois. Why not cry about voter suppression and malfeasance there?

The vast majority of Ohioans knew where to cast their votes. I believed that with an electorate that had grown by 22 percent, a massive education campaign could dispel any lingering confusion about where and how to vote. We used radio and television ads. Cards mailed to registered voters reminded them of their precinct and voting location. Using a sophisticated computer system, we called voters with a recorded message that was another reminder of their precinct and voting place.

The phone messages, by the way, targeted urban areas -- the same areas that were the focus, we now hear, of alleged Republican drive-down-the-vote efforts.

Leaders need to tell the truth and be responsible. Leaders don't peddle fairy stories to win applause from disappointed partisans. Sen. Kerry and Anthony are leaders. Jackson props up delusions.

Ohio is not Kiev. It is not even Cook County, home of fabled rough and tumble elections, where even the dead took such an interest in politics that they couldn't stay away from the polls.

No, Ohio's system of elections is not perfect. But it does provide transparency and safeguards against fraud through bipartisan oversight and administration. I look forward to working to improve it with those who have constructive proposals. We won't be helped by self-appointed spokesmen for democracy who denigrate the democratic process in Ohio -- and the efforts of the tens of thousands of Ohioans of both political parties who make it work.

J. Kenneth Blackwell is Ohio's secretary of state.

 

[Tgace]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/205766_skip30.html

Election system in no danger of collapse

By CHI-DOOH LI
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The prevailing "glass-half-empty" school of thinking has people wringing their hands over what is perceived as a broken-down elections system in this country and concern that an electorate so deeply divided portends troubled waters for the union.

Here's my "glass-quite-full" take on all this nonsense.

First, our elections system is not broken. There may be some cracks and flaws here and there that could use a little (emphasize little) tweaking, but our democracy is not about to collapse under the weight of malfunctioning voting machines and imperfect counts and recounts.

What about Florida in 2000 and those infamous hanging chads that first came into our national consciousness and vocabulary? Am I forgetting those supposedly new and improved ballots that befuddled so many Gore voters into inadvertently casting ballots for Pat Buchanan?

What about Ohio in 2004, where broken-down voting machines and poorly trained elections workers required some voters in urban precincts to wait seven hours in rainy weather to vote? Is it reasonable to expect voters to show the dedication of long-suffering Boston Red Sox fans trying to buy World Series tickets?

And what about the current gubernatorial election drama playing right here in Washington state and making front-page headlines all around the country, where every recount seems to add or subtract votes at random?

My response to this hullabaloo is that it sounds a lot like Chicken Little's sky-is-falling routine.

It is precisely the robust health of our democracy that has brought our elections system under the kind of spotlight otherwise used only by former East German secret police types to extract involuntary confessions to trumped-up crimes.

The presence of two evenly balanced political parties espousing clearly distinctive political philosophies and visions of governance has brought about an era of tight presidential races where every vote really does count.

In lopsided elections of the recent past (Johnson-Goldwater 1964, Nixon-McGovern 1972, Reagan-Mondale 1984, Bush-Dukakis 1988), did you hear one peep about ballots being confusing or erroneously set aside?

The Chicken Little mentality extends also to the non-stop (since the 2000 election) woe-is-us commentary on the deep chasms between Red and Blue America and how our country seems so irreconcilably divided.

Why is the obvious so lost to so many -- that close presidential elections, small majorities in Congress and hotly contested ballot issues signify a democracy that is alive and well?

For voters, it means that we have real choices in elections. For the Republicans in Congress, it means they are one bad policy mistake away from losing their majorities in one or both houses, and jeopardizing their chances in the 2008 presidential race.

I call that textbook political accountability. Shouldn't we be celebrating, instead of flagellating ourselves?

Democrats enjoyed 40 years (1955-1994) of hegemony in Congress, and during most of those congressional sessions the GOP was outnumbered 2-1. While Republicans did put up some tough fights in presidential elections during that era, the de facto one-party system we had in Congress then was far more problematic for the health of the union than the scratch and claw catfights we're seeing between the two parties today.

I've lived long enough to remember long stretches of time when people really didn't care about elections at any level or issues other than their own pocketbooks. Apathy reigned throughout the political system.

People are anything but apathetic today. Passions abound on a host of issues: Iraq, foreign policy, environmental degradation, corporate corruption, gay marriage, abortion, to name just a few.

I don't like the angry shouting and the finger pointing any more than the next person. But if that's the price we're paying for people to care and for people to be really involved in the political system, I say that's a fair price.

As for the recent elections, there are allegations of dirty tricks being played on some voters in Ohio. But to date, we have seen no substantive allegation of outright fraud anywhere, including here in Washington state.

Those responsible for the mix-ups and missed ballots in King County and elsewhere should be held accountable for what appears to be plain negligence and lack of attention to detail in a terribly important election. But let's not overreact and think the entire system is failing.

No amount of legislating and rule making will make elections perfect. It's in places such as North Korea and Cuba where elections are perfected, and the government party candidate always wins 99.9 percent of the vote.

I'm thankful that politics here, including elections, is still an art, not a science.

Happy New Year.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1220/p08s02-comv.html

What Counts in Ohio Recount

President Bush was officially reelected to a second term on Dec. 13 by the Electoral College with a 286 to 252 victory. That might have dampened a continuing low-level buzz about the legitimacy of the Nov. 2 popular vote count, which Mr. Bush won by some 3.5 million votes.

But not in Ohio.

Bush officially took the state's pivotal 20 electoral votes by 118,775 ballots. That was close enough to cause some losers to pay for a recount, begun last week. Also, Ohio's high court has been asked to review issues raised about the voting process, such as double-counted ballots and a shortage of voting machines in heavily Democratic areas.

Tellingly, the recount challenge doesn't come from the Democratic Party, but from the Green and Libertarian parties, which don't stand a chance of winning Ohio even if Bush actually lost the state.

That doesn't mean individual Democrats aren't crying foul. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, for instance, has implied that some of Ohio's new electronic voting machines were set to record votes for Bush by the company that manufactured them because the firm's president supported Bush.

That charge may be a bit extreme, but it's worth watching the more credible challenges and recount as a useful exercise to help all states further improve their election machinery. Reconfirming Bush's victory will also help many disaffected Democrats move beyond faulting their loss on the voting system, and allow the party to get on with repairing itself.

For widespread vote fraud to have occurred in Ohio, the major parties would have had to conspire together. Each of the state's counties has a bipartisan election board made up of two Republicans and two Democrats with authority over polling places and machines used. That's a pretty strong rebuke to those who allege voter fraud on a scale that would've given the state to Sen. John Kerry.

That's not to say that long lines and touch-screen voting machines that didn't produce a paper trail (as in Ohio) aren't problems that need fixing. American elections must be an example for other nations. Giving Ohio's vote count a clean bill of health would help that cause.

 

[rmcrobertson]

1. The guys claiming that the election was stolen were claiming that the election was going to be stolen before the election. This hardly proves that they're wrong, but it certainly suggests bias.

2. The fact that computers MIGHT be hacked is not proof that they WERE hacked. Nor is the sloppiness of local election officials.

3. Many facts and figures were presented. One saw no ANOVA tests/results at all; these are fundamental to good stats, because analysis-of-variance tests provide a check on whether or not one's results were statistically significant.

4. The mixing of numbers and speculations is not a scientific approach. Such studies should be set up so that methodologies and study results are presented, analyses of data are presented, and THEN conclusions are provisionally attempted. These guys presented results the other way around, in a fashion consistent with their pre-election beliefs. This is visible throughout their reports, in which phrases such as, "must have been," appear far too often to patch over holes.

5. Election data is inherently sloppy. My understanding is, in fact, that ALL elections have a percentage of slippage in them that cannot be eradicated, as small errors and delays add up. The bigger the election, the bigger the drift: actually, election votes ought to be reported as a number, "plus or minus," an error factor, just as national polls are, and for pretty much the same reasons.

6. The real question is this: was this election MORE sloppy or suspect than previous elections, either nationally or in specific states? An offhand guess is that we do not have the data to answer this questionsly meaningfully.

7. Any way it's sliced, Kerry at least lost the popular vote: the claims that the election was fixed are based on relatively-small numbers of votes in two key states.

8. One's own pre-election bias--based in part on what "Mother Jones," correctly identified as the fear whipped up by the scummy likes of Savage and Limbaugh and Hannity (a pack of multi-millionaires who make their money the old-fashioned way Goebbels did--they lie, tell scary stories, and blame minorities for white men's problems)--was that Kerry was going to lose by a couple of percentage points.

9. "Mother Jones," nailed it on the topic of why Kerry lost, in this writer's opinion.

10. Again, conspiracy theories rush in to take the place of understanding history and present culture. It's like the recurrent, ineradicable claim that advertising uses, "subliminal messages," when what folks fail to see is that THEY DON'T NEED TO, because the real motivations of ads (primarily, the development of fears and desires that cannot be assuaged, so that people endlessly buy the things that they have been taught will make the fears and desires go away) can be put right out in the open. Bush didn't win because the Republicans orchestrated some Big Cheat Plan. Bush won because he, his Party, American culture, and corporations have spent (with our encouragement!) the last four years drumming a set of fears and desires into the electorate's heads and hearts. He won because people are scared (gay marriage is your enemy! you need a gun! your kids' teachers hate God some and America worse! furriners is getting all the good jobs! terrorism is everywhere! you need to buy more stuff!), and desirous of a narcissistic, greedy, wasteful child's life in which we can have all the SUVs, electronic trinkets, stupid housing developments and backlit lawn gnomes that we want, without consequences.

11. In other words, Bush won because we--and I do mean, "we--" want our privileges and illusions maintained, and apparently we don't give a rat's who suffers for them long as it ain't us. And he won because he's fundamentally ignorant about the historical changes that have taken place since some of us were kids, and has succeeded in bamboozling voters into believing that he can roll back the clock to about 1957. (Better that than 1157, which seems to be what the likes of Osama bin Laden wants--but the lies about history are remarkably similar, which causes one to wonder if the motives for voting Republican and joining Al Quaida aren't disturbingly similar.)

12. There's always a temptation, in sparring or a technique line, to explain away a loss or a clumsy night. This is not a wise approach.

 

[Makalakumu]

The problems with many of the articles posted include...

1. Specific instances are given. Thousands of instances. So many that they are impossible to ignore. And ALL of them seem to have fallen in Bush's favor. This is like throwing a thousand coins into the air and watching them all land with one face up.
2. They trivialize the "mistakes" made by saying that elections aren't perfect and then they tell us that we should just "accept" this as normal. ********.
3. Apparently, there is so much evidence that not even the partisan hacks in the FBI can ignore it.

 

[Makalakumu]

1. The guys claiming that the election was stolen were claiming that the election was going to be stolen before the election. This hardly proves that they're wrong, but it certainly suggests bias.

Because they outright claimed that they would, "hand over the electoral votes."

2. The fact that computers MIGHT be hacked is not proof that they WERE hacked. Nor is the sloppiness of local election officials.

The FBI is investigating these claims as we speak. Here is what we know, a method was created for this to happen. Evidence that would indicate that it DID happen exists in the form of voting mistakes. We do not know who.

3. Many facts and figures were presented. One saw no ANOVA tests/results at all; these are fundamental to good stats, because analysis-of-variance tests provide a check on whether or not one's results were statistically significant.

There was an analysis of variance. How else is the author coming up with this conclusion?

4. The mixing of numbers and speculations is not a scientific approach. Such studies should be set up so that methodologies and study results are presented, analyses of data are presented, and THEN conclusions are provisionally attempted. These guys presented results the other way around, in a fashion consistent with their pre-election beliefs. This is visible throughout their reports, in which phrases such as, "must have been," appear far too often to patch over holes.

Which holes? What studies are you referring?

5. Election data is inherently sloppy. My understanding is, in fact, that ALL elections have a percentage of slippage in them that cannot be eradicated, as small errors and delays add up. The bigger the election, the bigger the drift: actually, election votes ought to be reported as a number, "plus or minus," an error factor, just as national polls are, and for pretty much the same reasons.

I agree with this statement, however this election was still to close to call in that circumstance. Anything that falls within the margin of error is still a tie.

6. The real question is this: was this election MORE sloppy or suspect than previous elections, either nationally or in specific states? An offhand guess is that we do not have the data to answer this questionsly meaningfully.

The largest freedom of information act filings ever are now underway. Thousands of reports of fraud exist...and not just in Florida and Ohio. When does one have ENOUGH information?

7. Any way it's sliced, Kerry at least lost the popular vote: the claims that the election was fixed are based on relatively-small numbers of votes in two key states.

How are you making this assumption? If you look at the sheer volume of claims, this is not at all certain.

8. One's own pre-election bias--based in part on what "Mother Jones," correctly identified as the fear whipped up by the scummy likes of Savage and Limbaugh and Hannity (a pack of multi-millionaires who make their money the old-fashioned way Goebbels did--they lie, tell scary stories, and blame minorities for white men's problems)--was that Kerry was going to lose by a couple of percentage points.

This is only shifting the focus away from data in question. It is just a story and it DOES NOT in any way address the reality of what happened in those claims. Although it does address a certain amount of truth...

9. "Mother Jones," nailed it on the topic of why Kerry lost, in this writer's opinion.

I don't think the writer knows the scope of what he is trying to explain.

10. Again, conspiracy theories rush in to take the place of understanding history and present culture. It's like the recurrent, ineradicable claim that advertising uses, "subliminal messages," when what folks fail to see is that THEY DON'T NEED TO, because the real motivations of ads (primarily, the development of fears and desires that cannot be assuaged, so that people endlessly buy the things that they have been taught will make the fears and desires go away) can be put right out in the open. Bush didn't win because the Republicans orchestrated some Big Cheat Plan. Bush won because he, his Party, American culture, and corporations have spent (with our encouragement!) the last four years drumming a set of fears and desires into the electorate's heads and hearts. He won because people are scared (gay marriage is your enemy! you need a gun! your kids' teachers hate God some and America worse! furriners is getting all the good jobs! terrorism is everywhere! you need to buy more stuff!), and desirous of a narcissistic, greedy, wasteful child's life in which we can have all the SUVs, electronic trinkets, stupid housing developments and backlit lawn gnomes that we want, without consequences.

Again, you have a point about why Bush won so many votes. Yet, you are not even addressing the sheer number of recorded instances of what we are talking about. Bush may have "won" a lot of votes in the way that you say, but he got "just enough" from a statistically impossible set of circumstances.

11. In other words, Bush won because we--and I do mean, "we--" want our privileges and illusions maintained, and apparently we don't give a rat's who suffers for them long as it ain't us. And he won because he's fundamentally ignorant about the historical changes that have taken place since some of us were kids, and has succeeded in bamboozling voters into believing that he can roll back the clock to about 1957. (Better that than 1157, which seems to be what the likes of Osama bin Laden wants--but the lies about history are remarkably similar, which causes one to wonder if the motives for voting Republican and joining Al Quaida aren't disturbingly similar.)

You are not taking into account all of what occured. For instance, half the country did not buy this BS. (over half when the "just enough" is taken into account)

12. There's always a temptation, in sparring or a technique line, to explain away a loss or a clumsy night. This is not a wise approach.

Sometimes cheating really is cheating, even in sparring.

 

[rmcrobertson]

One couldn't begin to disentangle all that spaghetti.

However, two points: a) claiming that some ANOVA must have been done or the authors wouldn't be saying what they're saying is hardly documentation that any analysis of variance was done; b) claiming that "thousands of reports were received," is exactly remininscent of Richard Nixon claiming that, "thousands of interviews and tens of thousands of facts were collected involving over 73,242 FBI man-hours," so go home, the republicans had nothing to do with Watergate.

 

[Makalakumu]

One couldn't begin to disentangle all that spaghetti.

However, two points: a) claiming that some ANOVA must have been done or the authors wouldn't be saying what they're saying is hardly documentation that any analysis of variance was done; b) claiming that "thousands of reports were received," is exactly remininscent of Richard Nixon claiming that, "thousands of interviews and tens of thousands of facts were collected involving over 73,242 FBI man-hours," so go home, the republicans had nothing to do with Watergate.

Instances of sabotage, voter intimidation, voter suppression, and outright fraud have been documented. There are sworn statements by experts in many fields who have studied this. When Rep. Conyers calls for this investigation and if this investigation happens, this matter will come into the light and we will be left with some hard decisions...

Consequently, the exit poll discrepancy is well documented...

1. http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf

2. http://www.freepress.org/images/departments/997.pdf

3. http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_WPwappendices.pdf

4. http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2545298,00.html

5. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0412/S00167.htm

6. http://mediastudy.com/exitpoll.html

7. http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm

Here is a summary of some of the claims being made...

1. http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/{FB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665}/REPORT_TO_NATION2.PDF

2. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/fitrakisvotestmt12804.pdf

3. http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

Republicans try to block recount...

1. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121404Z.shtml

Evidence of Fraud in Florida...

1. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm

Republicans buy Vote-switching software...

1. http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html

 

[Makalakumu]

Consequently, the exit poll discrepancy is well documented...

1. http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf

2. http://www.freepress.org/images/departments/997.pdf

3. http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_WPwappendices.pdf

4. http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2545298,00.html

5. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0412/S00167.htm

6. http://mediastudy.com/exitpoll.html

7. http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm

Here is a summary of some of the claims being made...

1. http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/{FB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665}/REPORT_TO_NATION2.PDF

2. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/fitrakisvotestmt12804.pdf

3. http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

Republicans try to block recount...

1. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121404Z.shtml

Evidence of Fraud in Florida...

1. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm

Republicans buy Vote-switching software...

1. http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html

For those of you who feel that this argument has been bereft of fact, read on. Pretty much everything posted is bombshell material.

 

[loki09789]

For those of you who feel that this argument has been bereft of fact, read on. Pretty much everything posted is bombshell material.

What everyone here is citing is second and third (fourth/fifth...) hand information. I would say that the only 'facts' that are hard in this thread are that people have organized and published the information cited...the factuallity/accuracy of the information in total or parts conclusively points to inconsistency, sloppiness and problems.

The rest is conjecture.

 

[lvwhitebir]

From: http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/10565452.htm

ALAN FRAM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A handful of House Democrats plan a long-shot effort to snarl President Bush's formal re-election by preventing Congress from counting Ohio's pivotal votes when lawmakers tally the electoral vote on Thursday.
...
In a measure of the dispute's political delicacy, proponents are considered unlikely to find a senator who will co-sign the objection, which is required to force Congress to act on the challenge. Most Democrats are reluctant to launch a serious effort to undo the election, in which Bush outpolled Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., by more than 3 million votes nationally.

Even so, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has sent letters to senators seeking their support for his plan to object to the counting of Ohio's 20 electoral votes, which gave Bush his November victory over Kerry.
...
The House Democrats' chief hope of finding a supportive senator may be Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Her spokesman, David Sandretti, said Tuesday that she has been asked to sign the complaint "and she is considering it."
...
Should a senator and House member formally challenge a state's results, the two chambers must meet separately and consider the objection.
...
In January 2001, some House Democrats challenged Florida's electoral votes but no senators joined in the effort, dooming it.

Ok, here's the checks and balances we have in place. If there are so many problems of irregularities, why haven't the Democrats in both the House and Senate stepped up to the plate to challenge the results officially and quickly? Why only a handful? Why is one senator (a Democrat) only considering it? Why hasn't this been the most important thing to them, especially since Ohio could be tilted either way?

I suspect that the problems are being over-hyped. Ohio had a recount with very little change in the final results. Ohio is 75% punch-card voting so we can't say there was electronic fraud. We've seen that it takes two Republicans and two Democrats to certify the election in Ohio, which they have done even in this most pivital of states.

The level of hype doesn't match the response of "those in the know." If the fraud is so widespread and so terrible, our hope is that our elected leaders will do their duty. Nothing we say or do will change the outcome of this election otherwise. We'll see what happens on Thursday.

WhiteBirch

 

[lvwhitebir]

Here's what I tell my wife when she complains about something:

You can complain and moan all you want but what do you want to DO about it? If there's nothing you can do, leave it be and move on with your life.

If there was such a widespread problem, what do we (the people) do about it? Our government isn't doing anything, even the Democrats in Congress aren't driving this home as a major problem (and they had the most to lose if you ask me). If the checks and balances we have in place aren't catching or solving any perceived problems, what can WE do?

WhiteBirch

 

[rmcrobertson]

Again, not digging through the whole plate of spaghetti.

The Florida Data site does indeed look well done, with clear analyses of the data and clear documentations of statistical significance. However, the site in no way claims that there was fraud--it claims that there is a smallish but significant difference between party affiliation and vote registration by different types of voting machines.

One of the first things anybody hears in a stats class is this: correlation does not imply causation. That is, finding some relation between two events does NOT mean that one event caused the other. This (which is what superstition is based on: I stepped on a crack and my mom fell down the stairs a week later, so, "Step on a crack/And you break your mother's back," is true) is about the oldest error there is, and it is particularly apparent in all conspiracy theories.

The reason it's an error is that two events happening together may not be related at all; they may be related in complex ways; they may have multiple causes that have nothing to do with the perceived relation between the events; there may be some (or multiple) other cause/causes for both events.

In this case, the differences--they're not necessarily discrepancies, just differences, as any decent statistician will tell you--are far more-easily explained by the politics, the class differences, the historical voting patterns, of Florida. For example, it is quite possible that voting machines in poorer districts are worse-maintained and less well-operated than in richer ones: while this may correlate highly with Republican/Democratic differences, they probably correlate very well indeed with income levels. And of course, local political organizations screw around with their opponents all the time: check out the 1960 Presidential election, if you want to see crooked.

But does this indicate systematic, national conspiracy? No. It indicates nationwide politics, and nationwide capitalism--which is why conspiracy theories are so nice, because fixing them doesn't require anything fundamental, let alone radical. We just get rid of the Bad Guys and put Our Guys in, and everything's just peachey. Come on, folks--season 4 & 5 of, "Angel," showed more understanding about who the Bad Guys are.

Bush won by going on for 3 million popular votes. His victory correlates highly with what a lot of people were claiming and thinking before the election (including myself), and it's simply not a shock that Americans would vote that way--for reasons I dislike very much indeed, but that's hardly the issue. And oh, incidentally, the Presidential results fit very well with the Congressional and Senate and Governorship results--or were all those crooked too?

Our side got whupped. The surprising thing, as "Mother Jones," points out, is that the election was extraordinarily close--which ought to be a bit of a warning to all the Bush supporters, who seem to be stuck in this fantasy that Everybody Loves Bush and it's Morning In America, but probably won't.

Don't panic. Eventually, things will get better--not because some fantasy Pendulum Always Swings Back, but because Marx was right--capitalism inevitably produces contradictions that force changes. All you needs to do, is have a little faith, and keep your head down and keep plowing forward as best you can.

 

[Makalakumu]

Statistics aren't the only data in this case. There is ALOT more. Nobody is basing their conclusions off of the statistics alone. You have to actually read some of this stuff...

 

[rmcrobertson]

One did. Much of it is biased claptrap pumped up by an herbologist from New Hampshire who's into neuro-linguistic programming. (See quackwatch.org, and look up NLP...regrettably, a number of martial artists also seem to buy into this junk.)

Until something solid is put out there, we'll be going with the simple explanations--the dems got beat, the elephants played politics, the voting system in this country is badly-maintained.

The conspiracies are quite out in the open. You want to see 'em? trace through the wacko Tom De Lay's gerrymandering, bullying, Bible-thumping, and out-and-out crookedness. Look at the nutty way we do campaign financing. Scope out Bush's family tree.

 

[Ray]

The election turned out just fine. I am satisfied that many of the candidates and initiatives that I voted for were elected or passed.

I recall the democratic party, even before the election, had recommended crying foul even if nothing was apparently wrong.

 

[rmcrobertson]

One also recalls that the Republicans did exactly the same, and--at least in states like Texas--fiddled extensively with districts, voter accessibility, aand lawsuits to favor their side.

 

[Ray]

One also recalls that the Republicans did exactly the same, and--at least in states like Texas--fiddled extensively with districts, voter accessibility, aand lawsuits to favor their side.

No, I don't recall that the Republicans said "if there is no fraud, say there is anyway."

And this Republican did no such thing. Nor, as a volunteer for the Bush campaign did I receive any communications to that effect. I do believe that the democratic party put such instructions in a memo.

 

[Makalakumu]

What everyone here is citing is second and third (fourth/fifth...) hand information. I would say that the only 'facts' that are hard in this thread are that people have organized and published the information cited...the factuallity/accuracy of the information in total or parts conclusively points to inconsistency, sloppiness and problems.

The rest is conjecture.

You have provided no basis for this judgement and you have made claims that have absolutely no factual backing.

I suppose the actual election data, signed affadavids, and statistical analysis done by people at Princeton and MIT somehow do not constitute hard facts...