A call to investigate the 2004 election
El_Kabong
Posts: 4,141
plz spare me the 'you lost, get over it' mantra and reply to the actual posts within the article and debate intelligently
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/26/a_call_to_investigate_the_2004_election/
A call to investigate the 2004 election
By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss | June 26, 2006
WE'VE ALL heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.
But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.
In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary of State Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented, first in January 2005 by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and in June 2005 by the Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: ``More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience."
Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate under the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with new, unproven technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that ``could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to . . . the integrity of the voting process."
A reasonable person could thus argue that a well-conducted exit poll that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would have to believe the results of such an election. Without an audit or a recount to verify the official count, those of us who suspect that the presidential election was stolen do so based on the information now available.
In the days after the election, the media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. When it was mentioned, it was only to report that the exit polls -- based on a confidential, 25-question written survey of 114,559 voters in 1,480 precincts -- were flawed. The discrepancy, however, was real and beyond the statistical margin of error. On that, there is widespread agreement. What is still being debated is only the reasons for the discrepancy.
In January 2005, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, the two men who conducted the 2004 exit poll, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, released their promised explanation. Their report began: ``The inaccuracies in the exit-poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted." In other words, the precincts they sampled were representative of the nation, so the discrepancy was not the result of choosing unrepresentative precincts.
The data they released allows researchers to correlate voter characteristics (race, age, sex, etc.) with voting preferences -- but it was not the data that identified specific exit poll results with specific precincts. That data remains the property of the media consortium (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and the AP) that commissioned the polls. No one has provided a coherent account of how polling error could explain the discrepancy. We have only the pollsters' blithe assertion that Kerry voters must have disproportionately participated in the polls. Yet the available state-level data contradicts the pollsters' explanation, also termed the ``reluctant Bush respondent" theory. The data does show that key variables -- racial makeup of a state, partisan control of governorships, whether a state is a swing state, and reports of Election Day complaints -- all correlate with the magnitude of the poll discrepancy.
The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts -- the only ones where comparable data does exist -- the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone. If we had access to the withheld precinct-level data, we would be able to investigate whether the size of the exit poll discrepancy correlates with the voting technology used.
For these reasons and more, it is imperative that our newspapers of record as well as our governmental oversight bodies now investigate the question people continue to ask: Was the 2004 election stolen?
Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman are authors of the book ``Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/26/a_call_to_investigate_the_2004_election/
A call to investigate the 2004 election
By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss | June 26, 2006
WE'VE ALL heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.
But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.
In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary of State Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented, first in January 2005 by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and in June 2005 by the Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: ``More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience."
Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate under the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with new, unproven technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that ``could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to . . . the integrity of the voting process."
A reasonable person could thus argue that a well-conducted exit poll that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would have to believe the results of such an election. Without an audit or a recount to verify the official count, those of us who suspect that the presidential election was stolen do so based on the information now available.
In the days after the election, the media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. When it was mentioned, it was only to report that the exit polls -- based on a confidential, 25-question written survey of 114,559 voters in 1,480 precincts -- were flawed. The discrepancy, however, was real and beyond the statistical margin of error. On that, there is widespread agreement. What is still being debated is only the reasons for the discrepancy.
In January 2005, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, the two men who conducted the 2004 exit poll, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, released their promised explanation. Their report began: ``The inaccuracies in the exit-poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted." In other words, the precincts they sampled were representative of the nation, so the discrepancy was not the result of choosing unrepresentative precincts.
The data they released allows researchers to correlate voter characteristics (race, age, sex, etc.) with voting preferences -- but it was not the data that identified specific exit poll results with specific precincts. That data remains the property of the media consortium (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and the AP) that commissioned the polls. No one has provided a coherent account of how polling error could explain the discrepancy. We have only the pollsters' blithe assertion that Kerry voters must have disproportionately participated in the polls. Yet the available state-level data contradicts the pollsters' explanation, also termed the ``reluctant Bush respondent" theory. The data does show that key variables -- racial makeup of a state, partisan control of governorships, whether a state is a swing state, and reports of Election Day complaints -- all correlate with the magnitude of the poll discrepancy.
The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts -- the only ones where comparable data does exist -- the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone. If we had access to the withheld precinct-level data, we would be able to investigate whether the size of the exit poll discrepancy correlates with the voting technology used.
For these reasons and more, it is imperative that our newspapers of record as well as our governmental oversight bodies now investigate the question people continue to ask: Was the 2004 election stolen?
Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman are authors of the book ``Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
standin above the crowd
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
some disagree with that...this one does for sure.
And Ohio just didnt seem right, that was another place that predicted Kerry would win, I also remember hearing about a "glitch" the day after that accidently gave Bush several extra thousand votes..
This entire adminstration is disgusting and corrupt, it is a f---g shame what has happened to the US,, when Bush was declared president another 4 years back in November of 2004 I just knew it was a dark day in American history, I know this country will never be the same and things will get ALOT worse before they get alot better...
Wasn't that one boring enough the first time?
-Dick Cheney
"Are you taking over or are you taking orders"
-Joe Strummer 1952-2002
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
-George Orwell
Absolutely. I've had some trouble sleeping lately.
So instead of counting sheep you count Bob Doles falling off podiums in succession.
-Dick Cheney
"Are you taking over or are you taking orders"
-Joe Strummer 1952-2002
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
-George Orwell
key word being "could." where is the evidence that they did allow such abuse? cos ive seen no real hard evidence to indicate there was this sort of epidemic.
im sorry, but exit polls not being spot on with voter tallies is NOT convincing evidence to me. you poll 100,000 people and then insist that obviously there was cheating becos the 100,000,000 other voters didnt fit the exact same pattern? if exit polls are so accurate, why vote at all? from now on, let's just do representative polls and pick our president based on those, since they're just as valid and accurate right? save us all a lot of time and money.
shit, we invaded iraq on more convincing evidence than this.
there is plenty of evidence that has been posted in numerous threads - what is consistent amongst the naysayers is that they have no interest in finding out the truth ...
secondly, your key word "could" is critical because something as important as the voting process should be fraud proof ... if i put a tax loophole out there - do you think someone is gonna take advantage of it?? ... either way - the voting process should be held to the highest level of integrity and it clearly isn't ... acceptance of a flawed process just beckons corruption ...
I think dems should be more focused on the elections ahead instead of the ones that are beind us.
i agree it is a problem that ought to be fixed, but that isnt proof that it had a decisive impact on this election. i live on ohio. i remember all the speculation well. but ive seen little more than hearsay evidence of wrongdoing and as far as im concerned the problem is in the past. we're not going to remove bush and install kerry at this point. so i feel our energy would be best directed towards making sure there is no controversy in the future.
I have said before that none of these calls have anything to do with ensuring the integrity of the voting process.
...are those who've helped us.
Right 'round the corner could be bigger than ourselves.
Somehow, JFK is still listed as President in the history books. The alleged problem there has yet to be rectified as well.
right ... but how do you ensure it doesn't happen in the future if you don't find out what the heck happened just now? ...
obviously, your level of evidence is subjective but i think there is enough to warrant an investigation from a legitimate 3rd party ...
also subjective ... we are talking about the most divisive and hated president for some time now ... obviously, motives can be extremely biased however, it still does not mean action should not be taken ...
and like i've said before - this should not be a partisan issue ...
fair enough. but that would be rather expensive and when it's phrased as a partisan thing EVERY time, it really weakens the support for the cause. you have to convince moderates and republicans that the discrepancies are worth looking into.
well ... that is where the media comes in ... hence articles like the original ... until people from both sides demand some integrity - no one will get any ...
so ... demand an independent inquiry - no democrats, no republicans ... but, if we allow for this to just slide - everyone loses ...
This article does not call for an independent inquiry. It does not call for the investigation of alleged voting irregularities that supposedly helped Kerry in Wisconsin. It does not call for an investigation into illegal voting practices in California that defeated Dornan. It calls solely for the investigation into the perceived irregularities in Ohio. It starts off with the question "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?" This is not the way to start an independent inquiry and would be nothing more than a million dollar partisan endeavor. A better question, and one that would actually get the independent and honest answers that these authors pretend to seek, would be "have voting irregularities existed in recent elections, what effect do they have and what can be done to ensure that these problems are fixed?" The sample elections would have to be over a longer period of time and would have to be conducted in all states rather than picking one state because the researchers did not like the outcome of one election.
jfk over nixon
you have every right to call for investigation in all those cases ... but its gotta start somewhere ... picking out things like the headline and stuff really isn't productive either ...
the election was stolen in plain daylight...but americans would never believe it...especially when Kerry succedes so quickly... always remeber that these guys might be on differnt teams, but they play in the same league...in other words the eagles hate the cowboys...but they both need the NFL to prosper to be succesful themselves
I picked that line from the conclusion. I am only pointing this out because I do not believe that any of these calls are being honest. Many of those making the calls for investigations are trying to participate in voter fraud of their own. This endeavor can not be undertaken in pieces like this without becoming part of the problem.
it's mroe than exit polls..it's the voting machines in NC that 'accidentally' erased a couple thousand votes, it's about the ppl who say they voted for another option but the confirmation screen kept saying bush/cheney, it's about the programmer who worked for the company that said they developed a backdoor and a porgram to switch votes, it's about one county testing one of the machines and finding it was easy to hack into the system and change votes thru a backdoor, it's about a republican rep (peter king) saying at a party that it's already over, they already won, it all comes down to the counting and they have that...
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
And the voting practices in the Dornan/Sanchez election have been investigated. The investigation found that there was fraud - only Sanchez herself wasn't found to be personally involved, and was allowed to keep her seat. As for the 2004 election, no one believes that if fraud is found, Bush will be removed and Kerry appointed president (O.K., maybe not "no one" - but you get my drift). It's too late for that. What it would do is show that yes we have problems with our voting system, yes they can be exploited, and yes it actually affected the outcome of a presidential election. Fraud becomes more difficult when voters know how it's done.
Exactly. It doesn't matter how much people bring this subject up, the results are in, and even then it doesn't matter if you agree with them or not, there's nothing anyone can do. A lot more will be accomplished if everyone looks to FUTURE elections and not past ones.