[USA] Evidence of Vote Fraud -- 2004 Presidential Election

rescath

Membership Revoked
Bearded Weirdo said:
Rescath, I can admit there MIGHT be a problem. I can see also see that both sides could be the problem, one side could be the problem, or no sides could be the problem. I can also see that the Left's hatred of G.W. Bush will cause them to use any excuse possible to try to create doubt in peoples' minds about the legitamcy of his presidency. So far in Ohio we have one confirmed glitch (not on a DIEBOLD machine btw), and some strange numbers from a district that uses optical scan and not these computerized voting machines. So far this isn't the story that Randi Rhodes on Air America is trying to turn it into, but it will cast doubt on President Bush's legitamcy to the gullible and hateful.

Now, the only reason this "glitch" was caught was because the numbers were outrageously out of line. More "subtle" discrepancies will probably go unnoticed. And I don't believe for a second that stuff like this can happen accidentally. I'm a computer programmer, and this is simple ADDing, for goodness. They probably have a "shaving" algorithm built into the software and in this case it "malfunctioned" to the point that the discrepancies were outrageous. In NUMEROUS districts in Cuyahog County, the vote totals well exceeded the total number of registered voters, by more than what can be explained by provisional ballots. There's clearly a pattern here.

PS -- if these machines are capable of just accidentally ADDing 3,900 votes here and there to Bush, then they should be pitched as defective and unreliable. While the company may not be Diebold, all the major voting machine companies are Republican-affiliated. Diebold has in the past been caught with similar "glitches" When's the last time a Diebold ATM machine accidentally put an extra $3,900 into my checking account. Yeah, right.

Wake up, people -- this is clear fraud.

I cannot stand Kerry and find it repugnant that he might win (even more repugnant than that Bush won), but I also am distraught by the fact that all future elections will undoubtedly be rigged. We've been taken over by a tyrannical dictatorship.
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
I don't know what to say Rescath, I don't think the few examples we have found are clearly vote fraud. I think if they went to the pain of rigging the machines to favor Bush they would have made it much harder to detect. It would not be hard to write a few more lines of code to ensure that more votes didn't show up in a precint than actual voters.

I'll tell you this, there are alot of very biased people looking into this, hoping to all heaven that they can find irregularities and evidence that Bush cheated. Let's see what they come up with. My guess is that they will not be able to come up with actual evidence that Bush cheated.
 

bigwavedave

Deceased
Bearded Weirdo said:
No, but it still wouldn't mean that they had intentions of finding out the actual truth.

fine. let's throw out the assumptions about the intentions of either party and find out what happened. fair enough?
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
I am all in favor of voting machines that leave a clear paper trail, but all the claims of intentional fraud are coming from extremely biased sources who are starting with their preconcieved notions, selectively cherrypicking facts that support those notions, ingoring exculpatory facts, and spinning the resulting BS to be 'clear proof' of fraud. This is a standard disinformation tactic. There are a number of investigations underway, as well as a lot of reporters following the story, so I will wait until the actual facts come out instead of listening to the reams of blatant leftist propaganda and hysterical rhetoric on the subject that are posted on this thread.

Just as the chad debaucle caused the demise of the punchcard system (which had been use for decades without problems until 2000), this year's election will lead to rules requiring better accounting with hardcopy recordkeeping. It is part of the normal evolution of technology, as anyone in any technical field knows, that when a new technology hits the market, problems occur, corrections are made, and the technology improves. To expect a new technology to be perfect at its market debut is totally unrealistic. You may not like it, but that is the way it works.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Ought Six said:
I am all in favor of voting machines that leave a clear paper trail, but all the claims of intentional fraud are coming from extremely biased sources who are starting with their preconcieved notions, selectively cherrypicking facts that support those notions, ingoring exculpatory facts, and spinning the resulting BS to be 'clear proof' of fraud.

That's not really true. Bev Harris has been on this crusade for a number of years now. She runs the www.blackboxvoting.org website and has written a book documenting the fraud. I highly recommend it.

Absolutely there should be a clear paper trail. If nothing else, I hope that all these irregularities will force that issue.

While there's no absolute proof of fraud -- and there never will be unless the states allow a full audit of what happened during the elections, the indications of fraud are very very strong. There's prima facie evidence of fraud.

Hopefully we'll find out. The aforementioned Bev Harris has generated thousands of of Freedom of Information Act requests in the aftermath of the elections demanding all the voting records of the states -- things like the number of voters who signed in to vote (still done on paper) vs. the actual machine vote counts. If there are more discrepancies, she'll find them. Keep tuned in to www.blackboxvoting.org.

It's unconscionable that we let these voting machine companies get away with this.

OK, even if you don't believe there's fraud now, don't you think that it's possible that someone with an agenda could become a programmer for one of these companies and could tamper with the software himself? I know several people who work for Diebold and was even extended an opportunity to work for them myself as a programmer. I declined. At any rate, what's there to say that I didn't get the job and I tampered with the source code to add votes to my favorite candidate -- Michael Peroutka?

There's NOTHING to stop that, nothing.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
... and the evidence continues to mount !!!

In Palm Beach County, Florida, 88,000 votes appeared out of thin air. There were 88,000 more votes reported than actual people who showed up to vote (including absentee).

Still in denial?

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000715.html

Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters
November 5, 2004 04:56 PM

According to the official election results posted on the Palm Beach County election website, 542,835 ballots were cast for a presidential candidate while only 454,427 voters turned out for the election (including absentee). This leaves a discrepancy of 88,408 votes cast for the presidential candidates.

Palm Beach County's supervisor of elections is Theresa LePore who is known for the 2000 Presidential Election and the notorious "butterfly ballot" that caused confusion among seniors and other Floridians.

Other election oddities occurred throughout Florida with some counties registering a 400% increase in expected voter turnout among Republicans while Democrats supposedly experienced a -60% decline in expected support within certain counties. The 50+ counties experiencing the high percentage fluctuations in expected turnout used optical scan voting machines on November 2nd.

Vote discrepancies were also found in Gahanna, Ohio which gave an extra 4,000 votes to President Bush. The error was explained away by Franklin County administrators as a "glitch" in the electronic voting system.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
Rescath, I don't think you get it. Your latest article (the one about the 88,000 extra votes in Florida) is not evidence of fraud. The article does not say who the votes went to. I believe it even implies that both candidates got some of the votes. If this were fraud on part of the Republicans. George W. Bush would have got all of the votes. Seeing that Washington Dispatch is a very biased source, I would imagine that if President Bush got all of the votes they would have hammered that point home. So far we have a few glitches and a conspiracy theory.
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
bigwavedave said:
fine. let's throw out the assumptions about the intentions of either party and find out what happened. fair enough?

No Dave, it is not fair enough. You are a smart guy, and I think you know what is really going on here. The smart people behind this know they can't prove fraud, but they can stir up their gullible followers by making them think that Bush stole the election. They can't have their sheep thinking that old dumb shrub could actually win an election without stealing it.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Bearded Weirdo said:
No Dave, it is not fair enough. You are a smart guy, and I think you know what is really going on here. The smart people behind this know they can't prove fraud, but they can stir up their gullible followers by making them think that Bush stole the election. They can't have their sheep thinking that old dumb shrub could actually win an election without stealing it.

That's stupid. You might actually be able to prove the fraud. You execute a search warrant at Diebold and ES&S -- impound all their source code, internal memos, etc. But the Republicans behind the vote fraud will never allow that to happen.

Another approach is to impound the voting machines themselves and to examine the internal logs (that's what Black Box Voting will do). They've proven cases of fraud in the past this way.

And the final way will be to examine all the discrepancies in all the counties. Find all the cases in which there was a problem like that in Franklin county. If a vast majority of these glitches favor the Republicans, then you have evidence of fraud. And you don't even have to prove vote fraud. You need to examine and audit, the best you can, every single county, and throw out those votes which are questionable and have glitches -- and prove recounts where possible. That would overturn the election even if you can't prove fraud.

Finally, no, Shrub didn't steal the election. He's way too stupid to pull it off. It's people like Rove and Cheney who engineered this (of course with the help of Diebold and ES&S).
 

ainitfunny

Saved, to glorify God.
ANY "ELECTION" THAT INCORPORATES AN UNVERIFIABLE BALLOT COUNT IS ON IT'S FACE FRAUDULENT. So let's quit talking about the "ELECTION" of George Bush, and henceforth refer to the SELECTION of Mr. Bush for president.
 

computerbooter

Contributing Member
[voting machines] "The software is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a pr

I find this extremly interesting!! I have been working with a major software vendor's energy mgt software for better than ten years. It's not that way anymore, it's been fixed (excuse the pun) but a few years back we found that when a calculation went past 32,000 that was it. It just displayed 32,000. So if the calculated air flow from a fan was 36,000 the system displayed 32K. It took a while to figure out because some of what I was working with was varriable air volume stuff so if the total dropped below 32K things would be correct again.
The work around was to divide all of the factors / 10. so that the outcome would be a number X ten. Ie 36000 became 3600 add the zero in your head. It was very time consuming until it was fixed And to add it took that company better than a year to admit that they had a "glitch"

Interesting huh?? I'm sure it's just a coinsidence!!

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news...0041105/2337890425.htm&photoid=20041012WAS99D

The Broward County Elections Department has egg on its face after a computer glitch misreported a key amendment race, according to Local 10 political reporter Michael Putney.

Amendment 4, which would allow Miami-Dade and Broward counties to hold a future election to decide if slot machines should be allowed at racetracks, was thought to be tied. But now that a computer glitch for machines counting absentee ballots has been exposed, it turns out the amendment passed.


"The software is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting backward," said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman.


That means that Amendment 4 passed in Broward County by more than 240,000 votes rather than the 166,000-vote margin reported Wednesday night. That increase changes the overall statewide results in what had been a neck-and-neck race, one for which recounts had been going on today. But with news of Broward's error, it's clear Amendment 4 passed.


The glitch did not affect the outcome of any other races. The vote-counting error did affect totals for amendments 4 through 8. But amendment 4 was the only race for which the corrected numbers changed the result.


Lieberman admits that the error is an embarrassing mistake.


"I think the people have a right to expect that when the numbers come up on screen that those numbers in fact the actual total numbers at each step of the process and not just after the final vote has been certified," Lieberman said.


Putney said there is a lot of finger-pointing going on in the elections department. Lieberman blames ES&S Systems, which manufactures the software in question. She says they've known about the problem for at least two years because there was a Broward County mayoral race in which the same thing happened. She said nothing was done about it.


Miami-Dade County also uses ES&S Systems. That county did not have the same problem Broward did because it uses different software, according to Putney.


Stay with Local10.com and Local 10 News for more on this developing story.


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"The software is not geared to count more than 32,000 votes in a precinct. So what happens when it gets to 32,000 is the software starts counting backward," said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman

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It really dosen't matter if these elections are skewed by fraud or faulty machines
the outcome is the same. I'm with the people who want a paper trail for these machines.

CB.
 

CTCStrela

Membership Revoked
voteonce.jpg


Here we go again....
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
It really dosen't matter if these elections are skewed by fraud or faulty machines the outcome is the same. I'm with the people who want a paper trail for these machines.

Computerbooter, I also want a paper trail for these machines.
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
ainitfunny said:
ANY "ELECTION" THAT INCORPORATES AN UNVERIFIABLE BALLOT COUNT IS ON IT'S FACE FRAUDULENT. So let's quit talking about the "ELECTION" of George Bush, and henceforth refer to the SELECTION of Mr. Bush for president.

Thankyou. You have proved one of my points. This is what it is all about isn't it, casting doubt on President Bush's legitamcy. Let me ask you two questions:

<b>#1</b> If Kerry had come out the winner, using your logic, would he have been "ELECTED" or "SELECTED"?

<b>#2</b> Were the other winning candidates and ballot measures that appeared on these machines "ELECTED" or "SELECTED"?
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
rescath said:
That's stupid. You might actually be able to prove the fraud. You execute a search warrant at Diebold and ES&S -- impound all their source code, internal memos, etc. But the Republicans behind the vote fraud will never allow that to happen.

Another approach is to impound the voting machines themselves and to examine the internal logs (that's what Black Box Voting will do). They've proven cases of fraud in the past this way.

And the final way will be to examine all the discrepancies in all the counties. Find all the cases in which there was a problem like that in Franklin county. If a vast majority of these glitches favor the Republicans, then you have evidence of fraud. And you don't even have to prove vote fraud. You need to examine and audit, the best you can, every single county, and throw out those votes which are questionable and have glitches -- and prove recounts where possible. That would overturn the election even if you can't prove fraud.

Finally, no, Shrub didn't steal the election. He's way too stupid to pull it off. It's people like Rove and Cheney who engineered this (of course with the help of Diebold and ES&S).

Rescath, as O6 pointed out, there are already serious investigations into this.

Black Box Voting is not a group to be doing this. Randi Rhodes (of Air America) was trying to raise $5,000,000 for Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. Do you see the conflict of interest here?

I have no problem with <b>serious, non-partisan</b> investigations, I do have a problem with people who are sore about losing the election make an embarrasment of our election process.

Also you don't help your case by calling President Bush Shrub or calling him stupid. It does make you look biased.
 

Keesha

Contributing Member
Election 2004

The fact is that someone has to win and someone has to lose. Get over it if your man didn't win. We were upset when Clinton got in but we lived with it. We were upset when Gore just couldn't believe he didn't win. Life goes on! Everyone can't be happy at once! Period! I will say that Kerry is more credible to me since he conceeded with no fight. That says a lot more about him as a man than how Gore acted! Nothing is perfect, it isn't going to be changed. You can live with Bush for 4 more years. Then probably Billary will get in and you will be happy again and I will not be happy. Life goes on....
 

bigwavedave

Deceased
must read! esp starting at "On the CNBC TV"

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

by Thom Hartmann

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
 

bigwavedave

Deceased
keesha, you need to be put down sweety. we'll be as humane as possible. ;)
:sheep:

--


House Dems Seek Election Inquiry

By Kim Zetter
Wired News

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110704A.shtml

Friday 05 November 2004

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."

John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.

"But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they're fixed so that it won't affect other elections in the future," Doty said. "We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system."

Doty said, however, that if the GAO does find a lot more problems that haven't yet been reported, then people will at least know about them and be able to decide what to do about them.

"We're hopeful that the GAO does not find such terrible irregularities that it would demonstrate widespread problems," Doty said.

No one was available at the office of the GAO to respond to questions. But a GAO representative told Wired News in September that the agency was planning to produce a report on e-voting after the election anyway.
 

susie0884

Dooming since 1998
Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

Hmmm, it would be pretty easy a day or two after the election to complain that even though you tried to vote for Kerry, the machine said Bush. It wouldn't have to be true, and it would be fairly hard to disprove, I imagine.
 

bigwavedave

Deceased
susie0884 said:
Hmmm, it would be pretty easy a day or two after the election to complain that even though you tried to vote for Kerry, the machine said Bush. It wouldn't have to be true, and it would be fairly hard to disprove, I imagine.

do you mean electronic voting? i doubt they threw away the computers though they may have made some modifications to the data.

turn 'em on and try it. no big deal.
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
CommonDreams.org, MoveOn.org, and other ultraleftist partisan sites are screaming conspiracy because they do not have the honesty or integrity to face the fact that THEY LOST. They must spin these bizzare fantasies to enable their own state of denial. How sad. :shk:

The truth is that America rejected the leftists and their philosophy. I do not expect them to ever comprehend that, but it remains true none the less.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Bearded Weirdo said:
Black Box Voting is not a group to be doing this. Randi Rhodes (of Air America) was trying to raise $5,000,000 for Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. Do you see the conflict of interest here?

I have no problem with <b>serious, non-partisan</b> investigations, I do have a problem with people who are sore about losing the election make an embarrasment of our election process.

Also you don't help your case by calling President Bush Shrub or calling him stupid. It does make you look biased.

BlackBox Voting is just trying to get a hold of the evidence -- bring it out into the public domain. I fully support that. Once the info comes out, then it will force the actual "serious investigation" to happen. BlackBox has no jurisdiction anyway -- that goes without saying. Yet, without their efforts, however, this info will most likely never come out.

I used the term "shrub" only because the poster to whom I was replying had used the term. I will not hide my disdain for Bush, but I do not like Kerry either. In fact, I like Kerry less, and I find it repugnant that I'm in effect promoting a cause which would bring him into office. Yet, despite that repulsive potential consequence, I believe strongly that the integrity of the voting system is gone. This may be our last chance to do something about it.

I'm a non-partisan equal-opportunity disdainder. I can't stand ANY of these people. Kerry, Bush, Republicans, Democrats -- they're all as corrupt as sin. And I'm just plain sick of it. In that sense, I'm not biased, because I can't stand Kerry even more than I can't stand Bush.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Keesha said:
The fact is that someone has to win and someone has to lose. Get over it if your man didn't win. We were upset when Clinton got in but we lived with it. We were upset when Gore just couldn't believe he didn't win. Life goes on! Everyone can't be happy at once! Period! I will say that Kerry is more credible to me since he conceeded with no fight. That says a lot more about him as a man than how Gore acted! Nothing is perfect, it isn't going to be changed. You can live with Bush for 4 more years. Then probably Billary will get in and you will be happy again and I will not be happy. Life goes on....

This is NOT about Bush or Kerry. As I've said, I can't stand Kerry even more than I can't stand Bush. I have this lump in my stomach because I'm in effect promoting a cause which would bring Kerry into office.

This is NOT about who won or about winning; this is about the integrity of the entire voting process. This may be our last chance to do something about it. Otherwise, we're going to slip very quickly into a totalitarian system.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
susie0884 said:
Hmmm, it would be pretty easy a day or two after the election to complain that even though you tried to vote for Kerry, the machine said Bush. It wouldn't have to be true, and it would be fairly hard to disprove, I imagine.

Many of these complaints were lodged DURING the actual voting. They're on record.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Ought Six said:
CommonDreams.org, MoveOn.org, and other ultraleftist partisan sites are screaming conspiracy because they do not have the honesty or integrity to face the fact that THEY LOST. They must spin these bizzare fantasies to enable their own state of denial. How sad. :shk:

The truth is that America rejected the leftists and their philosophy. I do not expect them to ever comprehend that, but it remains true none the less.

These are not bizarre fantasies. They're NOT pulling this stuff out of thin air. There's prima facie evidence of fraud -- pure and simple.

You're the one who's hurling unsubstantiated allegations. That's what's sad. You're so partisan for Bush that you won't face the objective problem with what happened on November 2.
 

Bearded Weirdo

Inactive
Here is an article explaining the problem with exit polls:

<b>FAIR USE/EDUCATIONAL/DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY

<i>Published on Monday, November 08, 2004</i>

<font size=+2><center>Experts Explain Problem With Exit Polls</center></font>
Interviewed voter sample was likely biased

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Contributing Writer

</b>
For a brief moment in time last Tuesday, the numbers were in favor of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry.

That’s because exit polls—data taken from interviews with voters as they left the voting booths—erroneously calculated that Kerry would sweep up enough electoral votes to beat President Bush and win the presidency.

But when that prediction proved wrong, many were left wondering why the polls were off beam.

“It was a phenomenon of overreaction,” said William Schneider, a CNN senior political analyst who spent election night interpreting exit poll numbers. “Yes, there were some problems, but nothing particularly unusual.”

Schneider, who was an associate professor of government at Harvard from 1972 to 1979, said that the significance of exit polls was overplayed.

He said that exit polls, as a predictor, represent only a portion of the electorate and their results do not necessarily reflect the preferences of an entire state.

In a report obtained by the New York Times on Friday, officials with the National Election Pool (NEP)—the group in charge of administering the exit polls—attributed the inaccurate predictions to factors outside of their control. The NEP officials said that in some cases, pollsters were unable to get close enough to talk to voters, and that in several precincts, Democrats were more willing to talk to surveyors than Republicans, resulting in numbers that favored a Kerry win.

The NEP report stressed that in the end, exit polls achieved what they were designed to do: assist news networks in deciding which states to color red and blue in the race for electoral votes.

“If you look at broadcasts from election night nobody made the wrong call,” said Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press Thomas E. Patterson, who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government.

Patterson pointed to the internet as a major factor in causing the numbers confusion, specifically weblogs, or “blogs,” that fed early exit poll data to millions of people without warning viewers of the polls’ limitations. Beginning at noon on Election Day, numbers from one-third of the precincts were leaked to blogs.

“I don’t think exit polls failed,” Patterson said. “I think the bloggers misused them.”

“Partial exit poll results are always unreliable,” said Schneider.

Since 1980, exit polls have been the primary means of predicting election winners. But after the 2000 election, when exit polls caused the media to vacillate between calling Florida for President Bush, or for former Vice President Al Gore , networks have been more cautious about declaring the winner based on only exit poll results.

CNN, according to Schneider, relied on four sources to predict results this year: exit polls, pre-election public opinion polls, polls in specific precincts and finally, the vote count itself.

“None of those is always reliable,” he said. “Even actual vote counting has errors, as we saw in Florida in 2000.”

He said that aside from being a predictor, exit polls are equally valuable in helping analysts figure out why voters vote the way they do.

“We can look at a number of voting patterns and analyze, for example, the religion factor, the culture factor and moral values of voters to give us a clear picture of where they are coming from,” Schneider said.

The exit polls also had a palpable effect on the campaigns, something that was a surprise to many analysts.

“I’ve never seen it happen where it affected campaigns,” Schneider said. “Both Republicans and Democrats tried to use them to make last-minute campaign adjustments.”

In the future, said Schneider, the media will be even more wary of using exit polls.

“Caution is the bottom line,” he said.

Harvard Crimson article
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
r:
"You're so partisan for Bush that you won't face the objective problem with what happened on November 2."
I am a libertarian, and voted for Badnarik, not Bush. Sorry I do not measure up to your Repub stereotype.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Ought Six said:
r:I am a libertarian, and voted for Badnarik, not Bush. Sorry I do not measure up to your Repub stereotype.

Doesn't matter. The statements in your previous post attacking the liberal left clearly indicate that you have an axe to grind and that you're not being objective.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
According to the 2004 exit polls, only 14% of registered Democrats voted for Bush (statistically the same as what he received in 2000) -- compared the the 2004 reported numbers which showed Bush receiving a sizeable majority of them.

Republican pollster Dick Morris admits that it's inconceivable that so many exit polls could be wrong. He's just being honest here -- www.scoop.co.nz published a statistical analysis which indicated that the odds of the exit polls being as far off as they were outside the margin of error was something like an average of 1 in 500,000 per state. Now, put that together with the 7 or 8 states in which these polls were that far off, and you have astromical odds against it. In other words, it's simly not possible that all these exit polls were that far off.

His only conclusion was to surmise that the exit polls were rigged.

EXCEPT that the extremely reputable Zogby called the election for Kerry (with 310 electoral votes) based on his exit polling. And it seems that ALL the exit pollers would have to have conspired to rig the exit polls.

So who's advocating the conspiracy theory now?

Those who believe that everything was on the up-and-up are the conspiracy theorists here.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html

George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush’s Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide – statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote – and losing Florida’s independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html]

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across the country – especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually inconceivable.

“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering – as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe – Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris’s conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves “more scrutiny and investigation.” [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it’s impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush’s totals weren’t artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater’s performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What’s remarkable about Bush’s increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush’s Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush’s ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore’s Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear – maximize Bush’s support among social and economic conservatives – including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives – and turn them out by driving up Kerry’s negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry’s leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove’s estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush’s 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush’s new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush’s performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

Bush increased his turnout in all 67 Florida counties, marking the second consecutive election in which Bush increased Republican vote totals in all Florida counties, and overall achieved a 34 percent increase in Florida votes over his 2000 total.

Since Bob Dole’s 1996 turnout of 2.24 million Florida votes, Bush has increased the GOP’s performance in the state by an astonishing 74 percent. Making Bush’s gains even more impressive, Kerry also saw gains in all but five Florida counties and in 22 counties earned at least 10,000 more votes than Gore earned in 2000.

Exceeding Kerry

But Bush’s vote gains exceeded Kerry’s in all the large counties in the state except in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade, where Kerry increased his turnout by 56,000 new votes compared with Bush’s 40,000 new votes. This Democratic improvement in Miami-Dade seems to have come in large part from Democratic success in registering new voters in the county by almost a 2-to-1 margin over Republicans.

In spite of this new-voter registration advantage, Kerry only earned a 7-to-5 increase of new voter turnout over Bush in Miami-Dade, a statistical oddity given the fact that Kerry did a better job than Gore in turning out his Democratic base, earning a vote total equaling 85 percent of all registered Democrats in the county compared with Gore’s total in 2000 equaling 83 percent of all registered Democrats.

In other Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties, Kerry gained 114,000 new voters, earning nearly 770,000 votes, and bested Bush by more than 320,000 votes. But, this was actually a modest improvement for Bush over 2000, thanks to Bush’s increase of 119,000 new voters in these counties, from 330,000 votes in 2000 to 449,000 votes in 2004.

Bush’s performance in these two counties is worth studying in greater detail. In both counties, Democrats saw a significant increase in new voter registration since 2000, more than 77,000 newly registered Democrats in Broward and 34,000 newly registered Democrats in Palm Beach.

Republicans on the other hand only registered 17,000 new voters in Broward and a bit more than 2,000 new voters in Palm Beach. While both counties saw substantial numbers of new unaffiliated or third party registered voters, the Democratic advantage in both counties combined of more than 111,000 newly registered Dems against fewer than 20,000 newly registered GOP voters, as well as the voter intensity that these new registration rates usually represent, suggested that Kerry should have done better than Bush relative to the 2000 election.

Instead, Bush actually increased his vote total in the two counties by earning about 5,000 more new voters than Kerry.

New Level

Beyond southern Florida, Bush took turnout throughout the state to a new level, testing the bounds of statistical probability by winning votes seemingly from every corner of the state, from the panhandle to the Gulf Coast, from the I-4 corridor to the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville to Miami.

Another county worth examining in some detail is Orange County, a swing county home to Orlando in the center of the state. As in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, Democrats successfully registered substantially more new voters than Republicans, about 49,000 new Democrats against about 25,000 new Republicans.

These gains broke what was once a statistical tie in registered voters between the parties, giving Democrats a 214,000 to 187,000 advantage across the county. But Kerry only managed a narrow countywide victory with 192,030 votes against 191,389 votes for Bush. In 2000, Gore carried the county with 140,115 votes against 134,476 votes for Bush.

While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations.

Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much hope of quelling these rising suspicions.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
the REAL Conspiracy Theory --

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00124.htm

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

3- That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)

6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
What really cinches it is the double fact:

1) exit polls are off by astronomically impossible margins in the 7 or 8 states in which there was electronic voting

but

2) exit polls just coincidentally happened to be correct in the states with paper voting.

#2 vindicates that there wasn't anything wrong with the basic methodology being used by the exit polling.

So take the astronomical impossibility of #1 combined with the amazing conicidence of #2 and you have an open-and-shut case.

BUSH RIGGED THE ELECTION !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You who believed he didn't are bizarre conspiracy theorists -- :screw: :screw: :screw: :screw: :screw:
 

Vector

Veteran Member
"When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Arthur Conan Doyle

Republicans shyly make their presence felt
By Harry Mount
(Filed: 04/11/2004)

It's only at an American party that you could have too much food and drink, but not enough wine glasses. That's what happened at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square on election night. Three bars remained open until dawn, with a fine selection of wines - a chilled, bone-dry Chardonnay and a Shiraz - and beers (Michelob, Budweiser and Rolling Rock).



The mock Victorian pub in the bowels of the grim concrete embassy was better than any real one I've ever been to: interns straight off the set of Sex and the City forced pitch-perfect Martinis on you, breaking rhythm only to "sir" or "madam" you whenever humanly possible. Mountains of mini-hot dogs and kettle chips did the rounds.

But, at midnight, only two hours into the party, they ran out of wine glasses. Being American and generous and hospitable, they had over-catered on supplies, but weren't prepared for quite how many trips to the bar their British guests would make, and how many glasses each of them would use. We settled for tumblers of Chardonnay.

The miscalculation in the embassy kitchens, though, was nothing compared to the atrocious electoral arithmetic in America over the past few months. Ever since Kerry was declared the Democrat candidate, he has progressively narrowed down Bush's lead in the polls to nothing. The polls were, supposedly, too close to call throughout the past month.

And Tuesday's exit polls, which the political eggheads in the embassy were quoting to each other feverishly, hit a new low in psephology.

Throughout the day, they showed a sure Kerry win: the ABC tracking polls for the network pointed to a Kerry victory in all but one of the swing states. Over on our own Sky television, the doyen of polling, Mori chairman Bob Worcester, was still confident of a Kerry presidency at 3am.

And then the results came flashing up on the screen: Kentucky, Indiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, all voting for Bush in bigger numbers than four years ago.

Why did the pollsters get it so staggeringly wrong?

Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's adviser before he succumbed to leg-over difficulties, has written in the New York Post about how impossible it is to get exit polls wrong. They are as close as you can get to the actual result because they are based on interviews with voters as they leave the polling places, just after they've cast their ballots. The only problem with the exit poll is that it doesn't reflect the absentee, mail-in or early-voting ballots - and that includes military votes, which tend towards the Republicans.

But that wrinkle is not nearly deep enough to explain the distorted results. Dick Morris holds that the fact that exit polls are right is an axiom of politics, so he can only explain the polling disaster as a deliberate act of fraud and bias.

What he doesn't take into account is a new phenomenon, the Shy Republican. For years, British pollsters have had to deal with the Shy Tory factor, where conservatives are too cowardly to admit their ruthless conservatism to pollsters and so they pretend they are voting for nice New Labour or the Lib Dems. Some pollsters actually build in a Shy Tory factor into their research and add on a few points to the Tories as a matter of course.

It's not clear when the Shy Tory first emerged: some time after the 1950s, the last time when to be a Tory was a boast, not a shamefaced admission made to fellow Tories in safe houses under cover of darkness.

By the time of the 1992 election, Shy Toryism was endemic: the polls pointed to a clear Neil Kinnock victory, but the Shy Tories crept into the polling booths in their millions, recording the greatest amount of Conservative votes ever.

Australia was also hit by Shy Toryism last month. The incumbent prime minister, John Howard, was said to be level-pegging in all the polls with his Left-of-centre opponent, Mark Latham, only to pull off a crushing victory in the election.

Shy Toryism is rampant, too, throughout France and Italy, where to emanate soft-Left opinions is to be morally superior; where voting for centre-Right Chirac or Berlusconi is what you do once you've left the dinner party table and you're safely tucked behind the polling booth curtain.

The exception in Europe has been Spain, the only modern example of Shy Labourism. In their election, just after the Madrid bombs, the Spanish in their droves told pollsters they'd vote for the pro-war conservative José María Aznar; once inside the booths, caution took over and they plumped for the anti-war socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

America, though, has always been the home to heart-on-your-sleeve Republicanism, built along the lines of that 1950s Tory feeling - where a pride in patriotism and small government has been something to shout about.

That shouting has gone quiet, under the assault of Michael Moore, mainstream European opinion and the slivers of liberal America that run down the East and West coasts.

It certainly went quiet in the American embassy in the early hours of yesterday morning. The cinema in the basement was packed with several hundred diplomats, journalists and politicians of every hue; Charles Kennedy, David Davis and Denis MacShane were all of the party. Whenever Larry King announced a new gobbet of good news for Kerry - based on the exit polls - a roar of approval went up from about half the audience.

Whenever a bit of good Bush news got through, despite the best efforts of the pollsters … complete silence.

And, all the while, across the Atlantic, the Shy Republicans were silently flooding into the polling booths.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...0405.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/11/04/ixop.html
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
r:
"Doesn't matter. The statements in your previous post attacking the liberal left clearly indicate that you have an axe to grind and that you're not being objective."
LOL! You hypocrite! I am looking forward to the day when you stop your relentless leftist propadgandizing and show one tiny molecule of objectivity here. :lol:
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
I wonder if Fund has been reading this forum ???

Conservative John Fund Jabs Voter Conspiracy Theorists


By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com
November 12, 2004

Washington (CNSNews.com) - The charge by some on the left that President George Bush stole the 2004 presidential election was dismissed Thursday as "Internet conspiracy theories" by the author of a new book on voter fraud.

John Fund, the author of "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, told CNSNews.com that "you can always tell a losing party by the number of people in the fever swamps who come up with elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the fact that the real problem is they lost an election."

"The real story is what do we need do to clean up the system to make it both easier to vote and harder to cheat -- we don't have that discussion right now. What we have are Internet conspiracy theorists," Fund added. His remarks followed a speech at The Federalist Society's 2004 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C.

As CNSNews.com reported Thursday, the conspiracy theory circulating among some political left wingers accuses Republicans of stealing the 2004 presidential election. While many Americans wonder why Election Day exit polling was so inaccurate and showed Democrat John Kerry winning, liberal bloggers and activists say the exit polls were actually right on the mark. They say Republicans used fraud to distort the vote and give President Bush the victory.

Greg Palast, a contributing editor to Harper's magazine, conducted an investigation into voter fraud for BBC television's Newsnight and declared that John Kerry should have won the election.

Palast's assessment is echoed by U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), five other Democratic congressmen and liberal groups such as Common Cause and People for the American Way. They are demanding action on what they see as election fraud in key states including Ohio and Florida. Conyers has asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to probe the election results and hopes to get congressional hearings on the subject. Kerry's brother Cam Kerry has also weighed in on the allegations of voter fraud, assuring those concerned that "we are not ignoring it."

In addition, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, ABC News and the Washington Post have all reported on the accusations that Bush stole the 2004 election. On Wednesday, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader called for an investigation into the electronic voting machines used in New Hampshire and demanded a recount.

But Fund said the all of the allegations are baseless.

"The Kerry campaign has more lawyers on the ground than the number of some of the votes that were disputed in some states and they are not contesting [the election results.]" Fund said. There are real (voting problems) but Internet [fanatics] don't help this for anyone," he added.

Fund said he has seen similar conspiracies developing from the right in past elections.

"There were some people who did that with Clinton in the 1990s. They went a little overboard and there are some people doing it on the left right now," he said. "A sure sign that you are a losing party is you retreat to conspiracy theories."

'Poisoning the well'

In his speech to The Federalist Society, Fund detailed how he challenged many of the claims of voter disenfranchisement in the 2000 election cycle.

"John Kerry ran around the country for a year saying 1 million African Americans had their votes stolen (in 2000)," Fund said.

"What does saying that 1 million African Americans had their votes stolen, do to race relations in this country? Because the implication of that is, The Man is stealing your vote. That's pretty dramatic in terms of poisoning the well," Fund said.

He also challenged two prominent African Americans -- Donna Brazille, who served as campaign manager for 2000 Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton -- to "give me the names of any of the 1 million people" who had their votes stolen.

"And I waited. They didn't have any names. Do you realize that they ran around the country for a year and they have no names?" Fund asked. "The time has come to call the bluff on race and simply get on with doing the right thing," he added.

Part of reforming the election process will entail requiring photo IDs of all voters to cut down on potential election fraud, according to Fund. He noted that photo IDs are required to fly an airplane, enter many federal buildings, cash a check and even to rent a video at a Blockbuster store, but not to vote in most states.

"The only place we don't require a photo ID for, in almost two thirds of the states, is voting. How bizarre is that?" he asked.

Among the reasons the Nov. 2 exit polling was so inaccurate was that so many people cast absentee votes, according to Fund.

"When I looked at the exit polls, I said 'Gee, three out of ten people voted early or absentee. How in the world do you exit poll the absentee voter?' That is one of the reasons why the exit polls were off among other reasons," Fund explained.
 

fruit loop

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Fraud, schmaud......

...there have been allegations of fraud in just about every election ever held. I've heard stories that Lady Bird Johnson helped have Kennedy assassinated so her husband could be president, for crying out loud.... :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

It's time for everyone to just shut up and get over it.

Bushies, you won, and remember that humility is a virtue but gloating is not.

We Shrub haters should shut up and secretly hope that instead of puking on the Japanese food like his daddy did, El Shrub Jr chokes on it.

End of story.

Let's get on with our lives.
 
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