Brock,

Well said! I think Kerry folded too quickly in order to protect his 2008 prospects.

I have always advocated open source voting platforms both hardware and software that is open to audit from all interested parties… that provides a paper receipt. Here is a demo of one such possible system

Until we allow for open audits and paper trails, our voting system will become more and more malliable until it is a joke, moreso than it is now.

I am not trying to be a whiney lil’ bitch here, but pointing out things we need to work for next go round… we can work for candidates all we want, but until the vote is trustworthy, things will never change.

again! great post, interesting links too

Brock,

I too think that “black box” voting systems are a disaster.

Then again, after leaning towards interest in your post, I end up discounting it completely when you blow your credibility with pot shots at Kar Rove’s grandfather. Texbook example of an extremely good way to alienate anybody who doesn’t already totally agree with you.

Also, wouldn’t an analysis of electronic voting returns versus “analog” voting returns yield a trend toward bush in the Diebold states?

Think how easy it would be for someone to look at the precints using electronic voting and those using the old fashioned method, then compare results. It’s hard to believe no one has done this, especially dems eager to cry foul. The fact that no report has been made of a trend toward Bush in the e-voting precincts seems to be pretty solid evidence that there has been no such foul play.

Besides, look how incompetent the administration has been in Iraq. Do yo really think they are capable of perpetuating nationwide election fraud without getting caught?

I find myself strongly agreeing with Zach. You say it isn’t sour grapes, but certain parts of your post sounded like it was, and make me wonder if these were points you’d be making if Kerry had won the election. I think America is badly in need of electoral reform, yes, but this election is over and it’s time for America’s ‘liberal’ element to move on and think about where they go from here. Let the past be the past, no matter how recent it may be.

Brock:

You are on the right track. I am beginning to believe however, that the electronic anomalies are a smoke screen to cover up the other possible method to commit fraud with other diebold equipment (scanners). I read a news story with some precinct numbers from election results that show a consistent conflict between exit poll numbers and recorded votes.

I can’t pretend to know how scientific this is but the article did say that historically there is little to no significant variance between exit polls and recorded votes. This has been observed in states where the optical scanning is used as opposed to punched documents, and electronic tabulation.

Related to the evil doctors alledged heritage (I had never heard that before), GWB himself had a rather busy grandfather, Prescott Sheldon Bush, who was a banker (Brown Brothers Harriman) and created at least a portion of the Bush wealth that they are using against America today by financing Hitler’s militarization of Germany. Whether he personally was a symptathizer (as rumored, but usually dismissed as attacks on the family) or not, the fact remains that the family has some history of war profiteering.

Getting back to the present criminals, these creatures stole the 2000 election by a 5 to 4 SCOTUS vote (gotta love that wacky Antonin, he’s a caution, and his little buddy Clarence too).

These Snidely Whiplashes had four years to plan their insurance policy fallback alternatives. We all knew they needed one with junior at the helm. In actuality the entire Rovian Revolution began in the early ‘70’s as these creatures moved about through different administrations.

Check out this link on a PBS site:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/paths/

Getting back to the present criminals, these creatures stole the 2000 election by a 5 to 4 SCOTUS vote (gotta love that wacky Antonin, heﾕs a caution, and his little buddy Clarence too).

Of course, the major newspapers all went down there and recounted the ballots on their own. Their finding? That Bush won by a slim margin.

So, they could have recounted forever and Bush still would have won.

Of course, inconvenient facts like this don’t fit into the “we was robbed” or “we are persecuted” narrative of the left (whom I used to be a part of, but with whom I feel more and more disgusted with these days), so they are conveniently forgotten.

Just keep on telling yourself stories like this that feel good instead of actually performing introspection, and we can look forward to GOP hegemony of the White House for my whole lifetime. Yippee. 

If you buy into the attitude that Bush’s Boys are mainly incompetent, then you could come away thinking the crimes they would seek to commit could easily be revealed. I’ve seen this administration initiate things I never thought anyone with common sense would try and waited, impatiently, for the public en mass to call them on each of their ill-advised schemes. Yet, bad judgments were always forgiven and the country moved on; the criminals walked away essentially unchallenged. They might not be as inept as they seem on the surface and it sometimes only takes one well-fought, well-timed battle to win an entire group of spoils.

The tinkering that may have been done to voter totals would only need to be done in moderation and with certain precinct returns. A false re-election of Bush would be a far less difficult thing to achieve than the invasion of Iraq with it’s subsequent responsibilities of taming and reforming an entire Mideast region.

Bush had plenty of support from officials in positions to assist him, whether he would know of their machinations or not. In the end, the only people who understood the coding of those electronic machines understood their true potentials to misrepresent voter totals.

This election changed quickly toward the end and that is suspicious too. Why did Kerry choose to concede so quickly?

I think it’s a mistake to say “move on” without looking back extremely carefully at an election that had newly attempted elements to it. With one third of the nation voting on these machines for the first time, on machines the manufacturers could have designed receipt-giving aspects to and cheaply, but wouldn’t and weren’t required to for the most part, you should wonder why and you should want the results checked carefully. That isn’t sour grapes at all. It’s just good policing of a system that has been broken and is yet to be fixed by congress.

What if surrendering and moving on is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing?

And no Neon, I doubt I would be making these points if Kerry had won. Kerry wasn’t in the position, even if he had the inclination, to steal an election.

i thought kerry did the right thing in conceding.  like it or not, it was obvious he could not pull off the win.  this country could not have stomached another disputed election and he sensed this.  he did the right thing.

Thanks much for that link, Eggman. It provides answers to more than a few of the questions I’ve had.

Wally O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, Inc., is a biggie in the Ohio Republicans.  He promised to do “whatever it takes to deliver Ohio for the president.” Hey, his words, not mind.  I report, you decide.  Fair, and balanced.

You’re right, grey - Kerry did the right thing.  If a crime was committed, we’re going to have to set our sights in next time.

Sorry to double post, but I just caught Zach’s saying the newspaper counts called 2000 Florida for Bush.  Sure, if you ignore the huge number of votes misdirected by a badly designed ballot in W. Palm Beach.  It was more than enough to have thrown the election the other way, but the technical issues didn’t make for good sound bites.

Here is a good analysis of the ballot-design problem on AskTog. 

Funny thing is, the same design flaw worked in favor of a democratic candidate in a previous election.  All parties should have an interest in accurate voting technology.

Decrepit,

Everything you say is true, but immaterial. The ballot (designed by a democrat, if I recall correctly) was what it was. Given that ballot and all the other conditions on the ground, Bush incontrovertibly won more votes in Fla.

Hey, I wanted Gore to win too, and I think we need serious electoral reform in terms of ballots, machinery, the works.

However, that doesn’t mean I feel cheated or persecuted.

Off subject but - Way to hang in there, John - in a way that mattered most.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be dealt your cards.

Brock, The sense that I get now is that we may never really know. I have been collecting links on this subject for the last few days. Before I list them, I want to mention that, in another thread, etan reported the FOI request submitted by BlackBoxVoting.org. Also Ralph Nader is moving to challenge the results in New Hampshire. (I’m not really sure why he is doing it. Perhaps because of the dramatic discrepancy between Kerry’s margin in the exit polls and in the final machine tally - well beyond sampling error.)

Exit Polls. These have been in the news the last few days. The first link is to an article by Zogby. It discusses polls in general, so you have to scroll down to find the blurb on exit polls. Re these, Zogby says that (1)they predict landslides rather well, (2)they can be unreliable in calling close elections and (3) the insights gained have value beyond prediction.

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/election04/polls.htm

This Slate article, In Defense of Exit Polls, says that the exit polls were used properly by the networks. However, the early afternoon results were leaked to the Internet and the general audience read too much into Kerry’s small margin in several key swing states.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109186/

Conspiracy Theories.

1. Exit polls in states with and without e-voting

Quoting Cannonfire - “To recap: In three states with no paper trails, we have exit poll/final tally disagreement. In three states with paper trails, we have exit poll/final tally congruence.”

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/case-for-fraud-updated.html

In Rage Against the Machine, Slate disagrees with his finding.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109141/

I’m not convinced either way yet. These are opinions of journalists and bloggers and I’m just not sure that they have properly factored sampling error into their conclusions.

2. Op-Scan machines in FL

This article in Common Dreams discusses anomalies in the FL results. “While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida’s counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.” They do discuss the Dixiecrat effect (registered rural Dems voting for Republicans) and discount it to some extent.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

These graphs show the scope of some of the “anomalies”.

http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm

This is the article’s take on the machines.

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

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

Hanging chad in Ohio

Greg Palast, the journalist who reported the FL felon list affair in the 2000 election, maintains that Kerry won Ohio.

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage�? in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there’s no indication that Palast’s hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php

Ohio used the punch card system in predominantly black precincts. If a voter leaves a hanging sad or dimples the card, the machine doesn’t register the vote.

Votes that will probably never be counted and an unknown number of people who were discouraged by R vote challengers - Democracy in action.

Several posts since I started this. Hope I didn’t duplicate.

Of course, the major newspapers all went down there and recounted the ballots on their own. Their finding? That Bush won by a slim margin.

1. Did they do a recount of Florida or just the counties that Gore challenged? I’m hazy on that.

2. In the 2000 election they used the felons list to disenfranchise tens of thousands of black voters who were not felons. (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast)

Nope, you didn’t duplicate, but you did educate. Thanks for all those links - I’ve got a lot of reading to do now and I will.

BTW if reading books gets you brain, what does reading the Internet get you?

Tired eyes and bad posture.

At this hour of the night, blurred vision.

Bush won. Get over it…

I’m tempted to just say ‘screw it’ when it comes to the results of this election.. the whole ‘Bush won, get over it’ attitude. Not like this means ‘do nothing’, but rather, ‘you’ve got another good reason to keep fighting for the truth. At the same time, I feel compelled to respond to this. I’ve formed a substancial portion of my opinions from “The New Pearl Harbor” by David Ray Griffin, an overly suggestive but intelligently written book dealing with the Twin Tower attacks and their ramifications for international politics, but especially a critical account of the government’s inaction on that day.

When considering the possibilities on matters such as these, I don’t look for absolute inclusiveness, I look for exclusiveness; isolating those things that are almost certainly impossible. Granted, that leaves a lot of things to say “a lot could happen”, but if it’s important and it could happen, isn’t it worth investigating? I consider the following: does the entity in question have motive for a particular action? Do they have the capability, and can they do it while maintaining the currently observed circumstance? Correct me if I’m off-base, but doesn’t that make everything else superfluous? Lots of people would want the oil in Iraq, the weapons funding or whatever. So I guess the question is, does the US government have the people’s interests at heart, or the interests of other entities (especially those who could influence the vote - by release of information to the media, altering of evidence or stonewalling of investigations, gerrymandering, etc.)? That’s a serious question, and it deserves to be answered by an impartial investigation. It deserved to be answered before Bush got into office, but it deserves to be answered just the same.

Jeremy and others on various threads: there’s no need to post “Bush won, get over it”.  That is such a cheapass comment.  Why don’t you say something of value?

We are going to talk about politics and stuff.  Get over it.

I’m willing to admit that Bush stole this election and the last if only someone explains the meaning of the title of this post!

Zak@Raised to stand by my convictions....

I’m torn. On the one hand I’m perfectly willing to accept the idea that Bush has won for the time being, but on the other I do think that any credible issues of voter fraud need to be looked into even if they didn’t have any major impact on the election results if only because if they got away with it once they might try it again.

As a concerted effort on the part of the Bush administration I don’t think there was any real attempt to commit fraud, but that doesn’t mean that certain individuals or groups didn’t try to commit fraud on their behalf. Or the behalf of the Democrats for that matter.

Oh, and I totally agree with Grey. I think Kerry did the right thing in conceding.

Jeremy - what Shana said.
Zach - the horse isn’t in on the joke.  But it isn’t my perception that Bush stole either election.

2000 was a series of ineptitudes and small crimes that collided and sent the election spinning off in the wrong direction.  As close as it turned out, lots of things could have set it right, including if Clinton had kept his zipper up and been able to campaign for Gore.

This election was duped, fair and square.  Bush/Cheney/Rove went for the base of Maslow’s pyramid, fear. ("If we make the wrong choice, we could be attacked again") Kerry went for self-actualization ("Vote your hopes, not your fears") and lost by a small margin.

There were points of dishonesty on both sides, but by far the biggest was Bush’s portrayal of Kerry as being unconcerned with terrorists and unwilling to fight them.  (And his self-portrayal as a resolute warrior:  “I will never stop defending America,” etc.  Words of an old man safe in the big house.)

Bush continues to blow off our allies - a huge mistake.  He gave Iran a perfectly good rationale for its nuclear program - mistake.  He mired our military in a conflict that had little to do with fighting terrorists - mistake.  He simply has not turned in a competent performance at the job.  But he did manage to scare a small majority into voting for him.