posted November 02, 2004 09:20 PM            

Pennsylvania 1%

Kerry 16,648 66%

Bush 8,317 33%

It looks like a landslide here in my state, when it comes to the popular vote!

posted November 05, 2004 10:23 AM            

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

posted November 05, 2004 03:57 PM              

But thanks for posting it.

posted November 05, 2004 06:56 PM              

By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.

Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.

Exit polls are almost never wrong. 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.

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. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.

But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s 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.

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.

The mistaken exit polls infiltrated all three networks and the cable news outlets and had a chilling effect on the coverage of election night.

While all anchors refrained from announcing the exit-poll results, it was clear from the context of their comments that they expected Kerry to win and wondered if Bush could hold any key state.

Indeed, one network hesitated to call Mississippi for Bush because of the uncertainty injected by the bogus exit polls. Dark minds will suspect that these polls were deliberately manipulated to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president’s candidacy was a lost cause.

The exit pollsters plead that they oversampled women and that this led to their mistakes. But the very first thing a pollster does is weight or quota for gender. Once the female vote reaches 52 percent of the sample, one either refuses additional female respondents or weights down the ones one subsequently counted.

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.

posted November 05, 2004 10:43 PM              

quote:

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should be prosecuted and jailed for attempting to fix an election..

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I agree, jwhop, we should prosecute and jail the Republican party for attempting to fix an election. Just following Bush's lead here and taking things out of context.

I think since there was such a large margin in the exit polls as compared to the votes we should demand a full investigation into those descrepancies. We should not ask the Democratic party to do that since the Republicans will whine that the Democrats are whining. The funny thing is that they took such caution in this election with those exit polls due to the mix up in them last time. Hmmmmmm seems like when Bush and Cheney are running for office the numbers just never match up no matter how much caution is taken to get it right. Sort of like how nothing else ever matches up in their administration, like their version and the real truth. ( my note: A proud citizen of a blue state. )

In the early voting, news commentators in most of the media saw ... and reported ... a clear advantage for Kerry in the voting, based on the exit polls. Yet somehow the official numbers didn't end up matching the exit polls in key states. Here is a commentary on that discrepancy:

quote:

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"In several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has Electronic Voting (but no paper trails) they have an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. In EVERY STATE that had paper audit trails on their Electronic Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls voting with audits vs. A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits.”

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The CEO of the Diebold company who makes those electronic voting machines (a big Bush supporter) was QUOTED in a letter to Bush saying he was going to deliver Florida and Ohio to him.

TERESA FEDOR, [via Greg Lestini, glestini@maild.sen.state.oh.us]
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment 'Issue 1,' and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

BILL MOSS, bmoss@hbcuconnect.com
Executive vice president of HBCU Connect, which works to connect historically black colleges and universities, Moss said today: "I stayed in line two and a half hours. I've never seen anything like this in my life. There were fewer voting machines in the highly concentrated black areas, creating the long lines so as to frustrate the voters. But we knew the Republicans -- many of whom became Republicans because they opposed equal rights for blacks -- would try to drive down black turnout. ... [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell was confusing things by raising issues like the paper weight of cards."

SUSAN TRUITT, susan.truitt@lexisnexis.com, www.caseohio.org
Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

DAN WALLACH, dwallach@cs.rice.edu, www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR062104.htm
Wallach is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston specializing in building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Wallach co-authored a groundbreaking study that revealed significant flaws in electronic voting systems. He appeared on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release in June entitled "Electronic Voting -- Danger for Democracy."

BOB FITRAKIS, rfitraki@cscc.edu
An attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, Fitrakis said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election -- like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

HARVEY WASSERMAN, windhw@aol.com, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810
Senior editor of FreePress.org, an Ohio-based web site, and co-author with Fitrakis of the recent article "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote," Wasserman said today: "There was a huge fight around ensuring that the electronic voting machines had paper trails and there was resistance by the secretary of state, so there is no paper trail. There were some victories to ensure a paper trial -- by 2006. There were limited numbers of voting machines in African-American districts. Some people had to wait up to eight hours, far more than in predominantly white areas."

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT:

On November 9, 2003, the New York Times reported: "In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's 'Rangers and Pioneers,' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Judging from Federal Election Commission data, at least 8 million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next November. ... Some people find Mr. O'Dell's pairing of interests -- as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican fund-raiser -- troubling." www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09vote.html

On November 3, 2004, Reuters reported: "Voters across the United States reported problems with electronic touch-screen systems on Tuesday in what critics said could be a sign that the machines used by one-third of the population were prone to error.... " www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1103-03.htm

On October 24, 2004, the Palm Beach Post reported: "A federal judge on Monday rejected U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's claim that paperless electronic voting violates the constitutional rights of Floridians...." www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/epaper/2004/10/26/c1a_wexler_1026.html

On November 3, 2004, Thomas Crampton wrote in the International Herald Tribune: "The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices...." www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The Institute for Public Accuracy also outlined various problems. Susan Truitt, co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, was quoted on its site saying that seven counties in Ohio had electronic voting machines without paper trails, and scientific exit polls showed Kerry with the lead. But verifying votes was impossible, she said.

“A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data,” Truitt said. “A poll worker told me [Wednesday] morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn’t be the case.”

Other problems include Ohio’s version of Katherine Harris

There were many other problems in Ohio. Like in Florida, the Ohio secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, made decisions on what could be counted and other important matters even as he shilled for Bush as a co-chair of his campaign. This raised serious conflict-of-interest concerns, said Ohio state Senator Teresa Fedor.

“There is a pattern of voter suppression; that’s why I called for Blackwell’s resignation more than a month ago,” she said. “Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional
amendment ‘Issue 1,’ and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won’t stand for it.”

The Ohio tally also included a version of the Florida butterfly ballot, said Bob Fitrakis, an attorney with Election Protection. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County,” he said. “Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry’s.”

There were also far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs, Fitrakis said. “I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas,” he said. “Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election - like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms.”

I heard a report that one Ohio voter had to wait in line 15 hours to vote. In one of the busiest precincts in Columbus, Blackwell only supplied it with three voting
machines. How many people gave up and did not vote there?
http://www.opednews.com/thoreau_110404_diebold.htm

posted November 05, 2004 11:31 PM              

But it would be a pleasant surprise if G.Dub had stolen the vote.

posted November 06, 2004 12:08 AM              

i wonder if jwhop would hand his vote over to a micheal moore owned company without getting a reciept?

*************

Ohio Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes
Nov 5, 7:34 PM (ET)
By JOHN McCARTHY

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

posted November 06, 2004 11:29 AM            

After throwing everything into getting Kerry elected, having every possible break in the world, lying and cheating on a massive scale, spending over $400,000,000 by 527 organizations to defeat Bush, having the major media and Hollywood crowd solidly in the Kerry camp and giving Kerry what amounts to a couple of Billion dollars of free advertising, having the Kerry press attempting to destroy Bush with phony stories, having the press ignore the very real record of Kerry, leaking the location of exit pollers to Kerry support groups so they could run down, vote and get polled, distorting the polling results and to still come up short would make me want to hang up the old jock strap politically speaking and take up ballet dancing or immigrate.

Given all the preceding, if the current crop of far left Democrats couldn't win this one, they just aren't going to win period. And Democrats didn't win this one no matter how the cheese is sliced. They lost more House and Senate seats as well and their favorite socialist Senator, Tom Daschle was ousted by his own state for obstructing the President's agenda.

Things are only going to get worse for Democrats who have not learned the lessons of this election and think they can move from their far left positions towards the center, the center where elections are decided, to fool voters into voting for them.

It's going to be fun to watch obstructionists attempt to obstruct the President's agenda, including judicial nominations without appearing to be the obstructionists they really are. In 2 years there will be another election with another 1/3 of Senators up for reelection, including Democrat Senators and Hillary Clinton.

The early exit polls were skewed for several reasons including being weighted about 60% women and giving entirely too much polling weight to precincts in heavily Kerry voter precincts. Anyone could do that to suppress and depress the Bush voters but it's a scandal you haven't heard the last of....yet. Some links to polling error stories are posted below.

The thing to keep in mind is that none of that worked or mattered in the end. Bush was reelected.

posted November 06, 2004 11:47 AM            

quote:

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i wonder if jwhop would hand his vote over to a micheal moore owned company without getting a reciept?

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posted November 10, 2006 07:09 PM            

It is not my fault that Bush Jr. represents a spoiled brat and Kerry represents some "other 'Rich Kid' on the same block" that believes in differently and it shouldn't even matter either...

...it is all about the American people and what the American people is to decide that is the best for them and us all!

That is all that really counts in all our cases overall anyway!

quote:

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...I can even tell you that tomorrow, the sun will be shining, the bees will be buzzing, the birds will be singing, the grass will be growing, the flowers will be blooming and the world will be a little better place and it will even be true.

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posted November 13, 2006 01:31 AM              

See my response in the thread of mine that Eleanore bumped up. lol

Our questioning the last presidential election and the 2000 election along with a lot of hard work has brought election reforms that made for a much smoother election process without many reported problems last Tuesday.

People who think you shouldn't question anything the government does don't bring about changes for the better in this or any other country. It is only in questioning and working towards change that any change has ever taken place.

You have those people like the ones here on this thread that did question the things that happened in the 2000 and 2004 elections to thank because that made the elections on Tuesday much, much smoother and without many reported incidents of voter intimidation and illegalities. And we aren't done. We have a lot to do before the 2008 presidential election like making it mandatory for all states to have a paper trail and making sure all electronic voting machines are free of programs that make it impossible to trace who tampered with the votes.

posted November 14, 2006 03:05 PM            

It was to demonstrate how rabid people like Mirandee get when they feel that their representatives have won in a landslide and start taunting others. Mirandee then pretended she was being gracious and we were being mean. I just bumped up the threads to show her what real cry babies like her look like..

posted November 17, 2006 11:50 AM            

I did not bump that thread up you referred to, Mirandee. pidaua did. Here's the link. http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/000899.html
Guess you missed that. I just replied there because I didn't have a chance to go through the countless strings on here that were bumped up (again, not by me) that showed the exact same behavior I referred to in the post I made there. But the point was clearly lost, anyway ... which was "graciousness" or the lack of it, and nothing more.

Anyway, nice to see this place and everyone on here again. See you soon, I hope.