Posted on 05/05/2005 5:51:12 PM PDT by RWR8189
Russ Baker an investigative reporter and essayistis a longtime TomPaine.com contributor. He is involved in the development of a new not-for-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing investigative journalism in America . To read more about the problems in the 2004 presidential election and proposals for reforming our electoral system, see Best Of TomPaine: Election Irregularities In 2004.
Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. They werent. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush.
I looked especially closely at the theory that fraud is the only way to explain the large gap between the early exit polls, which showed Kerry doing very well, and the final result giving Ohios key electoral votes to Bush. According to this theory, there was no way the actual tally could vary so greatly from the exit polls. The proponents of this view essentially accuse the legendary exit pollster Warren Mitofsky, and a media consortium, the National Election Pool (NEP), of some kind of complicity or at least willful denial. I found no evidence whatever of either.
For casting doubt on the conspiracy theory, TomPaine.com and I received virtual barrels of e-mail, most from angry anti-Bush activists who could not believe that their hard work had been for naught. I also heard from Steven Freeman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of a widely cited study that served as the primary basis for the pro-theft-theory folks, The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy . His remarks, and my response to them, appeared on TomPaine.com.
Privately, I heard from many Democratic officials, election reform advocates and analysts from inside Ohio and elsewhere, who believed my reporting to be accurate, and who were more than a little perturbed by the frenzy, which they found a counterproductive distraction from the serious ongoing effort to reform election practices. Since the debate refuses to die, this seems a good time to trumpet the arrival of not just one, but two, new technical analyses that cast further doubt on the theory regarding exit poll fraud. The author of the first is an earnest young fellow in San Diego named Rick Brady.
Brady's paper is a must-read for those still genuinely weighing the arguments on the exit poll controversy, writes Mark Blumenthal, a longtime Democratic pollster on whose website blog, MysteryPollster.com (Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling) Brady sometimes posts.
Bradys point-by-point refutation of the Stolen Election thesis, in which he exposes fallacies, misuses of data and other technical sloppiness, can be found here. These range from an inapt comparison with German exit polls to reckless application of out-of-date margin-of-error statistics.
Meanwhile, a growing chorus of voices is raising doubts about the methodology and conclusions of a loose-knit coalition of academics called U.S. Count Votes (USCV) which has been at the forefront of the Ohio Fraud movement. As Warren Mitofsky told me privately back in January (hes now gone public with this) and demonstrated to me in some detail whyhe finds the fraud theory highly implausible. Recently, WashingtonPost.com columnist Terry M. Neal interviewed Mitofsky about the findings of USCV. Mitofsky said :
"The trouble is they make their case very passionately and not very scholarly. I don't get the impression that any of these people have conducted surveys on a large scale."
Although many of the USCV people have degrees in statistics and math, those are general skills that constitute only a part of the toolkit needed to design and deconstruct complex polls. Thats not to say they dont have some legitimate points, just that they dont have the chops for such a powerful conclusion.
Like the USCV folks, Rick Bradyauthor of the new study is no polling expert. He has been deeply involved with graduate-level statistics primarily while earning a master's degree in public planning, but appears to have approached the exit poll mystery with the best qualificationsan agile and open mind.
The other study comes from Elizabeth Liddle, a U.K.-based former USCV contributor and Ph.D. candidate in psychology/cognitive neuroscience who published her own independent study, which demonstrates fundamental problems with the fraudniks conclusions.
She begins by acknowledging her own concerns with the situation in Ohio. I believe your election was inexcusably riggable and may well have been rigged, writes Liddle. It was also inexcusably unauditable. I am convinced that there was real and massive voter suppression in Ohio, and that it was probably deliberate. I think the recount in Ohio was a sham, and the subversion of the recount is in itself suggestive of coverup of fraud. I think Kenneth Blackwell should be jailed. However (and I'll come clean now in case you want to read no further) I don't believe the exit polls in themselves are evidence for fraud. I don't think they are inconsistent with fraud, but I don't think they support it either.
Specifically, Liddle asserts that the exit polls were not just wrong in so-called battleground states, as the fraudniks assert, but everywhere. My analysis shows that the swing states were not in fact more wrong than the safe states, writes Liddle. This evidence shows that the greatest bias was [actually] in the safest blue states... Moreover, the pattern of polling bias is the same as in the nearest comparable election, 1988, another two-horse race where there was also a large significant over-estimate of the Democratic vote and another losing Democratic candidate (Dukakis).
Liddle explained to me that, since 1988 at least, voter sampling has consistently over-polled Democrats. Ive heard a variety of explanations for this, but in general, its not hard to imagine that Democrats might be at least marginally more inclined to explain their political decisions to exit pollsters, who, after all, are representatives of the often-reviled liberal media.
In fact, it seems that Republican voters are overall slightly less likely to accurately express their preferences to in-person interviewers, even in precincts where they constitute a sizable majority. For fairly complex reasons, a slight undersampling of Bush voters produces a larger gap between exit polls and final results in (A) evenly split precincts than in highly partisan precincts, and in (B) highly Republican precincts than in highly Democratic precincts. Not knowing this, says Liddle, one could look at certain precincts and immediately, if incorrectly, smell something foul.
So, absent the emergence of true polling methodology experts screaming theft, we may reasonably conclude that no evil genius rigged the results. Instead, what we experienced was probably an amalgam of system failings, miscalculations, incompetence, and, in some cases, the variably successful exertions of biased election officials. These are, at worst, symptoms of gaming the system, a deplorable practice hardly limited to this election or, historically, to one party. The anomalies being cited, including by Christopher Hitchensapparently without any notable independent verificationin a widely cited Vanity Fair piece, may prove to be invalid, or attributable as well to other factors. Perhaps fraud occurred on an isolated basis, but no one has come forward with careful documentationas opposed to hystericalunscientific allegation.
Until the public becomes confident in the underlying integrity of the electoral apparatus in this country, none of the urgently needed improvements to that system can take place. Thats why the conspiracy-mongering must cease. Can we instead please turn now to the many substantive proposals already being proffered to make things betterincluding pending legislation? Lets keep our eye on the real ball thats in our court.
Two times this fall, my caller ID showed Gallup Poll.
I didn't answer.
I had to wait over an hour at the little township precinct in South Eastern Ohio where I lived at the time. I'd been voting there for almost 30 years, and had NEVER had to wait more than a few minutes. Our little community turned out in droves for President Bush.
Then again, those $500 shoes or whatever they were didn't do much for the good ole' boy look he tried to foster, and that dog just didn't hunt.
Very well said! Kerry couldn't even win Pike Country which has gone gone Democrat for years (where he registered for a hunting licence, and then had some fake photo ops acting like he was actually a hunter).
To me, Ohio is the epitomy of the Red States. At the end of the day, we can see a fraud from a mile away.
That is just silly. Why would you do that?
If you don't want to be polled just decline to answer their questions. Why lie. What silliness.
Because I don't want politicians to live and die by exit polls.
Your lieing will have zero influence on politians and their relience on polls.
I guess you lie to the census taker too.
"I guess you lie to the census taker too."
Only when they ask anything beyond the relevent numbers related questions.
For what purpose do you lie? Why not just tell them you don't want to answer?
OK it's none of your business, now leave me alone.
The left won't accept this because the left believes that fraud is a legitimate tactic.
If your standard operating proceedure is to cheat, you will always expect the other guy to do it also.
You want me to leave you alone or is this what you are going to tell the census taker?
bump for later
If everyone had to show a picture ID, there would be a verifiable RECORD of who voted.Evil republicans couldn't "preload" machines with votes. Oh, wait, dems don't want any accountability.
I'm from Ohio originally, but I don't think it is necessarily a red state. After all, it kept re-electing John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, two of the biggest leftists ever.
Essentially, the FReeper whose name I have forgotten concluded that there was strong evidence that there was fraud in Ohio -- but not fraud of the type that unjustly altered the election results. Rather, the fraud was perpetrated by paid Dem workers on their own party.
Republicans, for the most part, relied on unpaid volunteers for canvassing, voter registration drives, telemarketing, etc. The Dems (whether out of necessity or for what they perceived to be good reasons) paid many staffers to do similar work -- either by the hour, or on a "commission" basis. and here's where their problem arose.
In Ohio, and elsewhere, apparently Dem workers were paid a bounty of $10 for every newly registered voter they signed up. The Dem workers -- or many of them, anyway -- quickly realized that with the use of phone books, they could submit fake new voters to the party. And the Ohio Dem Party didn't realize the treachery until the new voters failed to show up to vote. They thought that they had tens of thousands of new Dem voters, but they simply weren't there. The Ohio Democrat Party was convinced that this tidal wave of newly registered voters would bring the state in for Kerry, but of course, it never happened.
The GOP was apparently aware, at least to an extent, of the Dem-on-Dem fraud. Their worry, of course, was that mass numbers of these fictitious voters would show up at the polls. Hence, the massive GOP presence at polling places. But, as it turned out, the level of Election Day fraud was not notably higher than usual. The "inside" fraud had taken place months before.
If anyone can remember the post to which I refer, I'd appreciate a link. It's definitely worth a read.
An ELECTION JUDGE, one Dr. S.L. Lee, who is a retired Battelle Memorial Labs employee, purposely lied about "seeing Bush-ite vote fraud" on his Asiawind web site. Not only did he fan the flames of disinformation under his own handle, but also came in as an alias, "Greg Ting," and added to the falsehoods. Is it against the law for a election judge to do something like that?
Can we get him to look at the last Washington state governor race?
Again, this guy was an election judge in Columbus, OH:
http://www.asiawind.com/forums/read.php?f=3&i=142467&t=142467
Author: SL Lee
Date: 11-04-04 01:47
Some think Bush has won fair and square this time. As an election judge, I can tell you that it was not.
At my location, there were three precincts voting in the same school gymnasium. The one with multifamily housings (i.e. lower income) had 850/3 people/machine ratio. The other two precincts with large single family houses had 500/3 and 880/4. The line on the lower income area was always the longest. Many could not wait and had to leave because election is not a holiday. They have to make a living. Even so, the lines were cleared in mid afternoon. This was at a high income neighborhood. I am a witness to this process.
In a much lower income neighborhood, a large precinct was allocated with 3 machines and two of them didn't work. The waiting period was 4-5 hours, well after the closing time of 7:30pm. In some machines, when the voter selected Kerry-Edwards, the light for Bush-Chenney showed up. When the voter questioned the officials, the answer was hit the 'vote' button any way.
Was it by accident or by choice such arrangement was made? We have no way to tell, other than the fact that the Director of the Election Board is a Republican. He had tried to use an archaic law to block new voter registrants (disallowing registration forms that were printed on paper less than 80-lb paper) and allow challengers at the voting precincts to slow down or threaten selected voters. It is reported that 3000 Republican challengers were sent to Ohio. The manufacturer of the e-voting machines runs two companies making different machines that are used in 80% of the e-voting for the country. He is also a contributor to Bush's campaign. Can someone tell me there is no conflict of interest?
People said it is a landslide since 1988. A big factor is e-voting was not available then.
Another way to legally control voting is by districting. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, is well known in his 're-districting' technique to minimize the weight of Black votes. He has been investigated on this scheme.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41782-2004Oct18.html
It is quite appropriate to call these people law-makers. They can make up the laws to fit the interest. Whose interest? That is a different question.
I judge in a precinct different from the one I live in. So, I had to vote absentee ballot. But my ballot was never counted in this election. So were 250,000 other votes, including provisional ones. Goodman says Kerry has to win 77% of these votes to win Ohio. Winning Ohio means winning the election. Can we ever assume that Kerry could not get 77%? Can we ever guess the results? Absolutely NO! Every vote counts. How can one 'predict' Kerry cannot win 77% of the 250,000 votes? A lot of the absentee ballots were casted by Kerry supporters who don't trust the electronic voting machines. Now their distrust has actually voided their votes. Do you think this is fair and square? I certainly don't think so.
Kerry will always be blamed for his premature concesion. This is the biggest flip-flop ever for him - by asking votes and not wanting to count them.
SL Lee
http://www.asiawind.com/forums/read.php?f=3&i=142346&t=142337
Author: SL Lee
Date: 11-03-04 10:18
There is another controversy for Ohio - the voting machines are supplied by Diebold, which has campaigned for Bush.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm
"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."
http://www.electoral-vote.com/#news
See the exit polls here:
http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2109053&lMSID=FFE5A62B46734856AA79B2749488D58E&MSID=4B87E23350F84B6CB8945CF59DF2FA03
Updated Late Afternoon Numbers
Mucho flattering to Kerry; plus Nader makes an appearance.
By Jack Shafer
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 4:28 PM PT (7:28pm USET)
Florida
Kerry 51
Bush 49
Ohio
Kerry 51
Bush 49
Michigan
Kerry 52
Bush 46
Nader 1
Pennsylvania
Kerry 53
Bush 46
Iowa
Kerry 50
Bush 49
Wisconsin
Kerry 51
Bush 48
Nader 1
Minnesota
Kerry 52
Bush 46
Nader 2
New Hampshire
Kerry 54
Bush 44
Nader 1
New Mexico
Kerry 50
Bush 48
Nader 1
SL Lee
http://www.asiawind.com/forums/read.php?f=3&i=142365&t=142365
Author: Greg Ting
Date: 11-03-04 11:42
Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported
By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.
The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.
But there were also several dozen voters in six states ? particularly Democrats in Florida ? who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.
In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry (news - web sites) but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush (news - web sites), the group said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=738&e=1&u=/ap/20041103/ap_on_el_pr/eln_electronic_voting
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