Here is the evidence:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf
By the way, it was pretty well known at the time of the election that Ohio was stolen. This is just the final nail in the coffin. What a pity the "liberal" multibillion dollar media censored this issue.
To summarize, a precinct by precinct analysis indicates that the exit polls are way too far off to be possible.
Hopefully this issue will finally get serious attention especially with regard to Ney.
The Dots Connect Between Abramoff, Ohio 2004 Election Smokescreen and Ney’s Former Staffer Revealed to be on Diebold’s Payroll While Working for White House Law Firm
The Gun is Smoking - 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount
Elections Official: Some Voting Machines Could Be Hacked
The supervisor of elections in Tallahassee tested voting machines several times over the last several months, and on Monday, his workers were able to hack into a voting machine and change the outcome. He said that same thing might have happened in Volusia County in 2000.
http://www.wesh.com/news/5542983/detail.html
Evidence of a Stolen Election
Note - the Edison Mitofsky findings are in the link I posted immediately above this post.
Vote Fraud Theorists Battle Over Plausibility
Study Gets Blog Love, But Comes Short of Proof
By Terry M. Neal
Washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Sunday, April 24, 2005; 11:27 PM
After my recent column on President Bush’s popularity woes, a torrent of e-mail flooded in from angry Democrats insisting that Bush’s relative lack of popularity only reinforced their belief that the 2004 election was stolen.
Regular readers are well aware that I’m not a conspiracy theorist. My natural journalistic skepticism applies not just to politicians and people in power, but to wild-eyed theories as well. The Talking Points column that followed the polling piece debunked the idea that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy.
Similarly, it strains credulity to think that there was some sort of massive, coordinated effort to steal an election. Such a conspiracy would have had to cross state lines, involve hundreds or thousands of people and trickle down from the heights of power to the lowest precinct worker.
Yet there’s lots of chatter in the blogosphere, but little coverage in the mainstream media, of a study that suggests the early exit polls that showed Kerry beating Bush may have been accurate after all. The study, conducted on behalf of U.S. Count Votes, a non-partisan but left-leaning non-profit organization.
The statisticians who performed the analysis for U.S. Count Votes, led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Steven F. Freeman and Temple University’s Josh Mittledorf, have not been eager to use the word conspiracy. After all, they’re scientists. Their job is dispassionate, quantitative analysis. But in some ways they seem to be playing a game, too, because the study clearly leaves the impression that the authors believe there was wholesale fraud in the 2004 presidential election.
The methodology and math of the study are far too complicated to get into in detail here. But here is a link to the entire study for your reading pleasure ( http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf ).
Among other things, the study reports that some of the largest discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tallies occurred inexplicably in battleground states.
“This discrepancy between exit polls and the official election results has triggered a controversy which has yet to be resolved,” according the report.
Last year’s exit poll was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press, and many reports, including one from Edison and Mitofsky, have found flaws in the poll.
The U.S. Count Votes analysis noted that Edison-Mitofsky’s “national poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0 percent, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5 percent. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance.”
Even Edison and Mitofsky have acknowledged that the problem between exit polls and the vote count could not be explained simply by statistical error. One of their primary explanations: Kerry voters were more likely than Bush voters to participate in the exit poll.
But the U.S. Vote Counts analysis refutes that point and suggests that Bush voters actually participated at a higher rate than Kerry voters.
“We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation,” the U.S. Count Votes report suggests.
I called the exit poll coalition to get its take on the U.S. Count Votes analysis, and was called back by none other than Warren Mitofsky, the president of Mitofsky International and a pioneer of the art and science of exit polling.
Until now, Mitofsky has not spoken publicly about the USCV study. He thinks it’s bunk.
But it’s not a comfortable case for him to make. “I think they’re wasting everybody’s time, frankly,” Mitofsky said. "I know they’re very serious about believing that there was fraud, but I don’t happen to share their view. I find myself in the awkward position of having to argue that the exit polls were wrong.
“This is not the first election with errors – and the simplest explanation is probably the right one. I think fraud on a massive scale that their conclusion essentially requires is totally implausible. To make it plausible it would have a lot of people working together, and you know from being in the news business how hard it is to keep something secret. I just think their whole explanation is implausible.”
I called Mitteldorf for an explanation, and he said he only knows the “what,” not the “why.” The “what” is that the unprecedented discrepancy between exit poll and vote counts cannot be explained merely by statistical error. It is possible though, he said, that there was widespread fraud – particularly in key battleground states – without a conspiracy.
“It doesn’t necessarily take a conspiracy,” he said. "It could just be that there was an atmosphere [from Republican leaders] of ‘Hey, we really need to win this election, wink, wink. Whatever you do, we’ll stand behind you. There will be no investigation because Republicans control the courts and everything, especially in places like Ohio.’
“It could just be that there are thousands of people working independently but with the knowledge that they are being protected and will never be prosecuted for this crime. . . . But I don’t know. That’s not my area of expertise.”
Polling, Mitosfky argues, is not Mitteldorf’s area of expertise. He and others have taken the USCV statisticians to task for shoddy work.
“The trouble is they make their case very passionately and not very scholarly,” Mitofsky says. “I don’t get the impression that any of these people have conducted surveys on a large scale.”
Others have questioned the methodology and conclusions of the USCV report as well – and not just Republicans. Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal, who writes the mysterypollster.com blog, accuses USCV of blithely ignoring crucial parts of the Edison-Mitofsky report that attempted to explain the reasons for statistical error – particularly the failure of polltakers to follow crucial directions.
“The Edison-Mitofsky report includes overwhelming evidence that the error rates were worse when interviewers were younger, relatively less experienced, less well educated or faced bigger challenges in selecting voters at random,” Blumenthal writes . "The USCV report makes no mention of the effects of interviewer experience or characteristics and blithely dismisses the other factors as ‘irrelevant’ because any one considered alone fails to explain all [statistical error]. Collectively, these various interviewer characteristics are an indicator of an underlying factor that we cannot measure: How truly ‘random’ was the selection of voters at each precinct? It is a bit odd – to say the least – that the USCV did not consider the possibility that the cumulative impact of these factors might explain more error than any one individually."Ultimately, the USCV report is interesting. But is it anything more than that? Given the statistical complexity of the information, I don’t feel qualified to answer that question after a few days of investigation. Scientists and statisticians will continue to debate these issues for months, if not years to come. And certainly some mainstream media journalists will keep digging – although investigating something does not guarantee an outcome.
People on the right will cry bias because I even acknowledged this report. People on the left will cry bias because I didn’t endorse it. Rather than tell people what to believe, I prefer to let people decide for themselves. And some people on both sides will say I’m the one who’s weasely because I don’t take a position.
The bigger question to me is what Democrats have to gain from focusing on the past. Anger over the 2000 election didn’t help the party in 2002 or 2004. And even though Kerry has claimed that voter intimidation did occur in some places, not even Kerry or his top aides and advisers have glommed onto the USCV report.
Blumenthal, who has worked for Democrats for two decades, said in an interview that it is unfortunate that the debate over an implausible conspiracy might overshadow the real debate over things like voter suppression, intimidation and disenfranchisement. Blumenthal says his disbelief in the mass conspiracy theory doesn’t diminish his belief that Republicans have attempted to suppress votes, at times.
“In order to advocate for a change you shouldn’t have to buy into [the theory] that five million votes were stolen,” Blumenthal said. “I’m not saying that there is no possibility that there wasn’t a vote stolen here and there. But do the exit polls present a case for fraud. I don’t think so.”
? 2005 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
It’s amazing how all the dots seem to magically connect in conspiracy cloud koo-koo land…
Honestly, BB - why do you even bother?
I just glanced at the paper but it seems a tad “light in the pants” with too much hand waving. Was it peer-reviewed? If there is one thing that I have found in academic papers is that without the review process shoddy science would rule and be the norm. The math isn’t complicated but I do find thier conclusions a tad strained.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Honestly, BB - why do you even bother? [/quote]
I don’t know why he bothers either, but it’s fun to watch.
Suddenly it’s all so clear…I’m a new man after reading that!
I think the only proof there is about a conspiracy is that the Democratic Party has conspired to fuck itself for the last 8 years by running Al Gore and John Kerry…
Why don’t they try to give the American public a reason not to vote for Bush instead of whining and bitching at losing a close race?
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
It’s amazing how all the dots seem to magically connect in conspiracy cloud koo-koo land…[/quote]
Exit polls were historically a way of flagging possible vote fraud - when the polls indictated VOTE FRAUD, suddenly the polls are wrong?
Besides, it’s not only the exit polls that say the election was suspect or fraudulent…
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
October 26, 2005
As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.
New tests fuel doubts about vote machines
Dec. 15, 2005
TALLAHASSEE - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines – and possibly other new voting systems in Florida – according to the state capital’s election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.
Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines.
Who fought tooth and nail to not have any verifiable paper trail? And why the f*** WOULDN’T you want one in the first place when the company who makes the vote machines also makes ATM’s?
Bush’s ‘Incredible’ Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
November 9, 2004
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.
Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
Gallup: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Ever for 2nd-Term Prez at this Point
May 23, 2005
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA
Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml
Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.
Bev Harris: Embezzler Programmed Voting System | Scoop News
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
Cincinnati News, Sports and Things to Do | Cincinnati Enquirer
http://nightweed.com/usavotefacts.html
Diebold Inc. in a tailspin after resignation of CEO and filing of a class action fraud lawsuit
December 17, 2005
On Monday, longtime Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell resigned effective immediately after an acrimonious board meeting. On Tuesday, a massive class action lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in Ohio against the firm and eight current and former executives for securities fraud, concealment, and insider trading.
Did I mention Bush lost all three debates?
Yep it’s a wacky world BB - or as your known at your day job - Scott McClellan.
And yet somehow, some way, all these relatively mainstream newspapers, magazines, and TV stations like the NYT, Time, CBS, CNN, etc., that are slobbering over themselves on the NSA issue and speculating about a possible impeachment of the President just simply can’t find the time to cover this amazing story? I’m shocked that such a wonderful story with no logical holes whatsoever would be so ignored. Something just doesn’t add up… Hmm…
AWESOME LOGIC!!!
That’s it, I’ve become a dEMOCRAT!!!
This was the last straw!!!
On a serious note, let’s change the Constitution.
Let’s make it a one time race between:
al “Republicans are brown shirts” gore, and john “I’ll be keeping your money and using it to pay my parking expenses” kerry and George W. Bush/Cheney in 2008.
Would that satisfy the nutjobs/floudering democrats?
Hope I have helped!!!
JeffR
[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
It’s amazing how all the dots seem to magically connect in conspiracy cloud koo-koo land…
Exit polls were historically a way of flagging possible vote fraud - when the polls indictated VOTE FRAUD, suddenly the polls are wrong?
Besides, it’s not only the exit polls that say the election was suspect or fraudulent…
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
October 26, 2005
As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.
New tests fuel doubts about vote machines
Dec. 15, 2005
TALLAHASSEE - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines – and possibly other new voting systems in Florida – according to the state capital’s election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.
Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines.
Who fought tooth and nail to not have any verifiable paper trail? And why the f*** WOULDN’T you want one in the first place when the company who makes the vote machines also makes ATM’s?
Bush’s ‘Incredible’ Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
November 9, 2004
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.
Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
Gallup: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Ever for 2nd-Term Prez at this Point
May 23, 2005
20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA
Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml
Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
Cincinnati News, Sports and Things to Do | Cincinnati Enquirer
http://nightweed.com/usavotefacts.html
Diebold Inc. in a tailspin after resignation of CEO and filing of a class action fraud lawsuit
December 17, 2005
On Monday, longtime Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell resigned effective immediately after an acrimonious board meeting. On Tuesday, a massive class action lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in Ohio against the firm and eight current and former executives for securities fraud, concealment, and insider trading.
Did I mention Bush lost all three debates?
Yep it’s a wacky world BB - or as your known at your day job - Scott McClellan.
[/quote]
What?..nothing about the great jew conspiracy?
You used to be more entertaining JTF.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Something just doesn’t add up… Hmm…[/quote]
That would be the left.
[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
Bush’s ‘Incredible’ Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
November 9, 2004
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.
Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
[/quote]
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/11/Columns/Internet_post_electio.shtml
Election 2004
Internet post-election rumors missing one little thing: evidence
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
Published November 11, 2004
Claims are lighting up the Internet that last week’s presidential election was rigged and stolen. Some of this also has crept into the cable TV networks and conspiracy peddlers on radio.
Ordinarily I would ignore this as background noise. But the clamor is so incessant, and enough reasonable people are asking about it, to make it worth discussing. I fully understand this will not satisfy the true believers and will only anger some “you-lost-get-over-it” Bush supporters.
At any rate, here are some of the top claims, and the factual basis that lies beneath them. (A tease: A couple of them are actually true!)
CLAIM: Voting patterns in some Florida counties were suspicious because Bush got many more votes than the number of registered Republicans.
Several impressive-looking charts and graphs are flying around. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann singled out five Florida counties for what he called a “sudden” outbreak of “irregularities:” Baker, Dixie, Holmes, Lafayette and Liberty.
In those counties, Republicans make up only 7 to 24 percent of registered voters. But Bush won there with between 64 and 78 percent of the vote.
How can this be? Easy. They are northern “Dixiecrat” counties where being a registered Democrat but voting Republican is an old habit. The same counties voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2000, and his father in 1988 - when registered Republicans made up as little as 2 percent of the electorate!
By the way, to make this claim, the conspiracy folks have had to contend that voting was more suspicious in counties without electronic machines.
CLAIM: Touch screen machines in Broward County started “counting backwards.”
No, they didn’t. The voting machines in the precincts worked fine.
Broward’s central vote-counter was not programmed to expect more than 32,000 votes in any single precinct.
With the limit exceeded, the running totals in four races (all constitutional amendments) did, indeed, start declining.
Observers quickly noticed it. It got fixed. The accuracy of the individual voting machines was never in question. Nobody’s vote was a “negative” that subtracted from the vote totals.
CLAIM: Palm Beach County reported getting more votes for president than the total turnout.
No, it didn’t. The initial voter-turnout figure on the state’s Web site didn’t include absentees, that’s all.
CLAIM: Several hundred ballots in Seminole County were “mysteriously” wet and could not be read.
Sort of. About half of 1,500 blank ballots in one precinct, at a church, got wet and nobody knows how. They got more ballots. Nobody was denied.
CLAIM: There was a suspicious difference between the exit polls and the final results.
My goodness! All of a sudden the art of polling, which my Democratic friends were insisting was unreliable right up until the election, is now is to be taken as gospel. Exit polls are “never wrong.”
The exaggerations continue to grow. Kerry’s lead in the exit polls keeps getting bigger. The polls’ margin of error keeps getting smaller.
The Florida exit polls from Election Day are lined up on my desk. The biggest lead Kerry had was 51-49. The last update showed 50-50. The actual result was 52-47. Within the margin of error. Sorry.
CLAIM: In some precincts, voting machines started Election Day with “extra” votes already added.
This one actually was started by Republican poll watchers in Democratic precincts in Philadelphia. They even summoned the District Attorney’s Office for a raid. They were entirely mistaken.
Here’s the kicker: Over the past week, the Republican angle has been stripped away, and I have heard several Democrats complaining about machines starting out with extra votes.
CLAIM: A machine in Franklin County, Ohio, recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush.
This is perfectly true, and one of at least two serious machine mistakes around the country. When the results cartridge of an older-generation machine was plugged in to the counter, it reported almost 4,000 extra votes for Bush, when only 638 people had voted in the precinct.
At the risk of being labeled part of the plot, I want to point out that they caught this obvious mistake. You can’t "stuff’ the ballot box. There is a signed, independent record of how many people voted.
CLAIM: Kerry really won Ohio.
There are still 155,000 or so uncounted provisional and absentee ballots. If by some miracle Kerry got almost all of them, he would win. A miracle.
Furthermore, there also were 93,000 “spoiled” ballots in Ohio that, had they gone to Kerry by a miraculously large margin . . . uh, well, still wouldn’t have been enough. By the way, there were fewer undervotes and overvotes than in 2000.
CLAIM: Electronic voting machines in Carteret County, N.C., mysteriously “lost” more than 4,500 votes - most of the votes cast in the county election!
This one is true, too, and disturbing. According to the Carteret County News-Times, the county’s machines counted only the first 3,005 votes and didn’t count the rest.
The Carteret screwup didn’t change the presidential outcome, but a couple of state races were close enough to be affected. Besides, the standard of “no harm, no foul” is not good enough. But I would point out that even this mistake was obvious and immediately detected.
CLAIM: There’s a lot more.
No doubt I am furthering the conspiracy by leaving something out. Yes, another Ohio county claimed homeland security and locked down its vote-counting room. Somewhat less reported is that a Democratic Party observer was inside and said he saw no irregularities.
Don’t forget, Broward County sent out some absentee ballots too late.
There were many anecdotal reports of touch screen machines balking at recording the correct vote. Most came from Kerry supporters, but some Bush voters complained too. In my own case, I had to push the screen several times to record a vote in a judicial race. How many voters cast an incorrect vote without realizing it (which seems unlikely, given the reminders and review screens) is anybody’s guess.
In conclusion, am I saying that any of this “proves” the machines weren’t rigged? Nope. For all I know, evil geniuses at Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S really did conspire to shift votes to Bush. I don’t believe it, but I can’t disprove it either. You can’t prove a negative. Hard evidence, please - which means more than just quoting somebody’s Web site.
Times news researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this column.
[Last modified November 11, 2004, 05:36:33]
If it’s too bad to be true, it may not be voter fraud
Most statistical enigmas in recent election have logical explanations, despite Web rants
Those who believe the Nov. 2 election was fraught with fraud or conspiracy that kept Democrat John Kerry from winning the White House should talk to Lana Morgan, supervisor of elections in Florida’s Lafayette County.
That county, along with about two dozen others in the state, has been the subject of intense speculation on the Internet because while 83 percent of residents are registered Democrats, Republican President Bush won 74 percent of the vote.
But that’s the way it always has been, Morgan said.
“We’re in the Bible Belt. There’s still enough people that have got enough Christian in them that they vote their morals over the pocketbook and praise God, because I’m one of them,” she said.
Accusations of widespread organized voting fraud elsewhere in the country similarly wilt under scrutiny. Academics and independent groups watching closely for shenanigans say that, so far, no evidence has emerged that suggests a “stolen election.”
Still, articles and postings on the Internet scream “fraud” and “hacked election.” Six members of Congress have called for an investigation of the election because of problems in individual precincts and counties, including the delay in ranked-choice results in San Francisco Board of Supervisors races.
The BlackBoxVoting.Org Web site, a driving force in the scrutiny of electronic voting machines prior to the election, says it has “taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines.” That group has made a large Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the election.
But VerifiedVoting.org, founded by a Stanford University professor to examine problems with electronic voting machines, counters that no evidence has been found of wide-scale problems or manipulation of those machines.
“As far as the information (BlackBoxVoting.Org) have presented publicly, we have not seen fraud and certainly not to the degree that would impact the election results,” said Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org.
Other problems in individual precincts or counties are par for elections, said Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
“If we held a contest where we had to start 500,000 automobiles around the country on a cold morning and have them all start … it wouldn’t happen,” Patterson said.
There were problems – such as in Carteret County, N.C., where 4,500 votes were lost, and in a precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, where Bush received about 3,900 additional votes that were nonexistent.
In Sarpy County, Neb., south of Omaha, a single voting machine recorded 10,000 extra votes. As in Ohio, election officials caught the problem the next morning and recounted all the votes from all the machines, said Kay Forslund, election commissioner for Sarpy County.
Similar corrections have occurred in other counties with flawed results, and most states take several days or weeks before finalizing their tallies to account for such inaccuracies.
The seemingly inaccurate Florida results occurred mostly in counties in the conservative panhandle. In every county flagged by Internet election skeptics, the result mirrored the 2000 presidential election – Bush beat Democrat Al Gore by wide margins that year, too.
In those counties, tradition dictates that local officials are Democrats and those who want to vote in primary elections must similarly register, Morgan, the elections supervisor, said. Years ago, that party allegiance extended to congressional and presidential contests, but that’s when Democrats “weren’t ungodly like they are today,” she said.
The other major incidence of alleged fraud occurred in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Kerry beat Bush by 220,000 votes. On the county’s election result Web site, it appears that the number of actual voters exceeded the number of registered voters by huge margins in some precincts.
But that’s because in even-numbered years when there are congressional elections, the county’s results are grouped by the larger contests on the ballot, not by precincts, said Kathy Dreamer, ballot department manager for the board of elections.
“No, there’s not a problem (with results),” Dreamer said.
Other less concrete examples of potential problems fanned by Internet chatter include the difference between exit polls and actual results in states that use optical scan voting machines versus those that use electronic touch screens.
Skeptics have said that election results and exit polls vary by a larger degree in states with electronic touch screen voting.
Such a claim glosses over the complexity of state elections – voting machines vary county-by-county in almost every state, and the same type of machine may come from several different manufacturers.
“I would be really suspicious of any claim of that kind,” said Harvard’s Patterson, adding that such an analysis would take months and that getting the needed raw data might be impossible. But, he said, he would be interested to see the results of such a study.
Still others, such as the 65 people who demonstrated outside the federal building in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, point to spoiled ballots in Ohio and the difficulty some people had in voting there.
But those problems occur every election, Kerry himself conceded the race and his 135,000-vote loss in Ohio would be nearly impossible to make up based on spoiled ballots, Patterson said.
“It seems to me it’s hard to make the case that the election hinged on these things,” he said.
But that isn’t likely to change the minds of those on the Internet claiming election fraud, said David Emery, a San Franciscan who debunks rumors and urban legends on the popular Web site at http://urbanlegends.about.com/ .
“Any discussion of a rumor or conspiracy – even when people debunk it – seems to help its longevity,” Emery said. Most rumors start “out in the wild of the Internet,” are passed by e-mail and on message boards and gain steam. Some, like the claims of the swift boat veterans who attacked Kerry’s Vietnam service record, play out on the national media stage.
Emery researched and debunked some political rumors prior to the election, including a supposed meeting between Kerry and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey (doctored photo included). He said he probably will avoid post-election rumors because the issues are too complex.
“The misinformation game seems to have exploded with the Internet,” Emery said. “People just seem more inclined to want to spin things and convince people of the things they agree with.”
E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44908-2004Nov12.html
The Election That Never Ends … Online
By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004; 9:58 AM
John Kerry may have conceded his loss in the presidential election the day after the polls closed last week, but the blogosphere is still abuzz with charges of e-voting machine fraud and other conspiracy theories claiming that President Bush didn’t fairly (or actually) win reelection.
The mainstream media – and many bloggers – dismiss most of these charges, distinguishing the 2004 election’s outcome from the actual hanging chad mess of 2000. Nonetheless, as blogs became a more influential voice in the run-up to this year’s election, it’s interesting to note how bloggers and the Internet in general continue to play a huge role in parsing through the results of this year’s campaign. Wacky or not, the back-and-forth online chatter about alleged election fraud is a sign that technology’s impact on democracy continues to play out.
A number of influential news organizations, including The New York Times, made it a point to delve into the online rumor-mongering: “In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week’s presidential election took root and multiplied. But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong – though many were still reluctant to let them go.” The article cited postings on CommonDreams.org and BlackBoxVoting.org. “[G]round zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah,” the Times said, noting that Kathy Dopp, armed with a master’s in math, posted a table of data on her www.ustogether.org Web site “comparing party registrations in each of Florida’s 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a ‘surprising pattern’ in Florida’s results showing inexplicable gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used optical-scan voting systems. The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp’s number crunching was hard to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own bar charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories – along with their visual aids – were distributed by e-mail messages containing links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where other eager readers diligently passed them along.”
Traffic to Dopp’s site jumped from 500 to 17,000 and her findings were highlighted by some in Congress calling for a probe into voting machines, the paper said. “But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp’s findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.”
? The New York Times: Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried: Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried - The New York Times
The Washington Post weighed in with its own piece on the post-election online rumor-mongering yesterday, and like the Times, the Post made clear that “[e]ach of the claims is buoyed by enough statistics and analysis to sound plausible. In some instances, the theories are coming from respected sources – college engineering professors fascinated by voting technology, Internet journalists, election reform activists. Ultimately, none of the most popular theories holds up to close scrutiny. And the people who most stand to benefit from the conspiracy theories – the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee – are not biting.”
? The Washington Post: Latest Conspiracy Theory – Kerry Won – Hits the Ether
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html
The Philadelphia Inquirer weighs in today with it’s own look: “Armed with thousands of reports of malfunctioning voting machines, lost ballots and suspicious vote counts, they are filling the Internet and the airwaves with arguments that President Bush’s victory was a fraud. Web sites and blogs are streaming headlines such as ‘Votescam: The Stealing of America’ and ‘Evidence Mounts That the Vote Was Hacked.’ Groups such as stolenelection2004.com contend that electronic voting machines were tampered with to tip the election in Bush’s favor.” A report in Tuesday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution said: “None of the conspiracy theorists has provided proof of widespread errors that might have changed the outcome of the election, which official tallies say Bush won with a 3.5 million popular vote margin and 286 electoral votes, 16 more than needed. Independent groups that monitored the voting found problems scattered around the country, but nothing decisive, and election officials have generally dismissed the Internet chatter. Even so, Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan research group set up to study the nation’s voting system, is not surprised that doubts are surfacing. After the 2000 election, he said, ‘any problem is going to get noticed, no matter how small.’”
? The Philadelphia Inquirer: Some Still Fighting Election Outcome
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/breaking_news/10159539.htm
? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Election Conspiracy Theories Persist
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/1104/11polvote.html
Here’s a link to the Mysterty Pollster’s (a long-time Democrat, recall) analysis of the exit-polling crap, which was cited in the first article I posted:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/the_freeman_pap.html
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Election 2004
Internet post-election rumors missing one little thing: evidence
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
Published November 11, 2004
[/quote]
That was a week after the election – now there is PLENTY of RECENT evidence that casts serious doubt on the 2004 election.
Diebold machines with software that wasn’t certified were used in the 2004 election and they were shown to be EASILY hacked and the election results could be simply reversed. That’s all anybody concerned about democracy really needs to know.
The simple fact that machines with no paper trail COULD be and WERE hacked simply add credibility to any of the other oddities, SPECIFICALLY EXIT POLLS.
Personally I would LOVE to have proof the election wasn’t stolen - seriously. The problem is no one can prove or hasn’t proved it WASN’T while too many indicators say it likely WAS.
We’ve already determined most politicians are crooks. Combine the fact that Diebold and ES&S are Republican owned companies who’s software engineers include convicted felons.
Add in a debate AGAINST not having a paper trail - as if that ever made any semblance of sense - except for someone who might want to say, STEAL AN ELECTION. That should be proof enough for most people - first the fact that having a paper trail was even a debate AT ALL and secondly that “no paper trail” was the decision.
Oh, that evidence… how convienient. Everything becomes “he said, she said” because there is no way to verify the vote except to go back to the machine count that may have been HACKED in the first place.
Leon County, FL to Dump Diebold After Undetectable Hack Reverses Test Election
This proves that the votes themselves were changed in a one-step process that would not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure - using only a credit-card sized memory card.
March added later, “this was all done without getting any passwords for any system. All we had was the same degree of physical access that any mid-to-high level elections staffer or official would have.”
The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio’s '05 Election…
The Columbus Dispatch’s pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as “uncannily accurate for decades”, called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor.
But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by ReformOhioNow.org – a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell.
On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different – and we mean impossibly! – from both the Dispatch’s final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:
ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No
ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No
ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No
ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No
ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No
Now, you tell us…What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch’s poll and the final results?
Now, we’ll tell you…This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties…41 of them employing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California’s Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.
Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper) confirmed to be easily hackable.