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they did show up...,
2004-11-05 11:24:01
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guadianship of the christian jurisprudent...,
2004-11-05 13:54:12
voting fuckups, placeholder:
because this shit is really silly, or, as the sandwichman says:
The US system is illegitimate long before a single vote is cast, counted or converted. First, you need a democratic culture to even consider having a democratic political system. Market totalitarianism doesn't cut it. Second, you need a system that is designed to maximize political participation and competition rather than restrict it. Electoral college, gerrymandering, first past the post, campaign financing... Third, you need to have some kinds of "checks and balances" on corruption. When the business of government becomes giving out contracts to corporations who then make political contributions to those who vote for or dispense the contracts the issue of who steals how many votes has already become moot.
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio. ACLU has to litigate to have absentee ballots counted. Greg Palast argues the exit polls more accurate than the vote totals: A total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. Statistical correlation between higher republican turnout and electronic voting machines, evidence mounts, blah blah blah. Olberman runs some numbers:
incongruous voting noted on the website of Florida’s Secretary of State: 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County— Bristol, Florida and environs— where it’s 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida’s panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long “Dixiecrat” histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn’t of itself suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn’t mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters... 93,000 more votes than voters. Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
"Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right":
Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.
Further, data that are underplayed in the report provide support for the hypothesis that the election was stolen.
First, the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while that fact is consistent with allegations of fraud (if you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed), Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.
Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the president's men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0—the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).
Other report data undermine the argument that Kerry voters were more likely to complete the exit poll interview than Bush voters. If this were the case, then one would expect that in precincts where Kerry voters predominated, the cooperation rate would be higher than in pro-Bush precincts. But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds.
Notable tinhats:
- Christopher Hitchens, March 2005.
- Matt Taibbi, Jully 2005. Pt. 2.
- Mark Crispin Miller, None Dare Call it Stolen, August 2005.
- Paul Krugman, What they did last fall, August 2005.
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006:
"Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen," Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. "You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb."
- "My tinfoil hat is off to you, sir!
:: posted by buermann @ 2004-11-05 13:51:57 CST |
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