Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered

_________________
bigteXXX: An independent free thinker

 

Um, anyone care to separate the freepress article (biased) from the actual academic statistical report? I think the latter is worth discussing.

The study is supported by that non-profit from Utah. How many liberal non-profit organizations exist in Utah? About as many as Utah counties went for Kerry: 0. So let's look at the report itself. Anyone who wants to call a bunch of math profs from the likes of Notre Dame and Case Western liberal loonies is talking out of his bigasss.

I suspect the exit polling was the problem. On the other hand, when so much money for so many people is at stake, don't assume crooked things can't happen. That would be a very naive conclusion.

 

Sure Bob, because we all know that professors at universities are so overwhelmingly conservative... Nice try.

 

math is math, Jorge, regardless of one's politics, unless:
* you work for Enron,
* you work for Rove,
* you are an energy trader,
* you are trying to count WMD under immense pressure from the white house...
or...
* you were rejected from the SE path at Rice University.

 

I don't get what there is to discuss? Two possible conclusions:
1.) The exit pollers sucked at doing their job
2.) Republicans fixed the election

We all knew something was amiss on election day. The exit polls told us Kerry was going to win and the real election went to Bush. You don't need to do a statistical study to figure out someone screwed up or cheated. When a study comes out that has a reasonable hypothesis of which of the two happened, it's worth discussing. Otherwise, it's old news.

 

The exit pollers already admitted that they polled a disproportionately large number of women (up to 60 percent in some cases). They also admitted never reporting the late-afternoon returns.

 

In today's AM New york

The silent scream of numbers

The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don’t make sense (see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

And we might, no, we must, ask — with more seriousness than the media have asked — about those exit polls, which in years past were extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This swing is out of the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined pollsters to hypothesize a “shy Republican” factor as the explanation; and the media have bought this evidence-free absurdity because it spares them the need to think about the F-word: fraud.

And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry Neal wrote in the Washington Post about Bush’s inexplicably low approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval rating. This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a president’s second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” asks exit polling expert Jonathan Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush mustered low approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on Election Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media has no curiosity about this anomaly.

Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference — one of dozens of speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and dirty tricks from sea to shining sea — said, “When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death.”

In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

http://commonwonders.com/archives/col290.htm

 

I do think it would be nice if the machines left a paper trail of some sort - a receipt, at the very least. Transparency is almost always good.

I know you do have some worries about confidentiality at that point, but such concerns are secondary to the integrity of the overall system.

 

Of course most professors are liberal.

They think. They read. They have enough curiosity to actually look into something.

Conservatives get their news from Fox and the Bible (but they skip past the parts where Jesus decries hatred and violence; that part would just undermine them completely).

Oh, wait: am I being judgmental here?

 

Then again, some conservatives just want lower taxes.

 

Here is Josh's homepage:

Link

I'm a peace activist and an environmentalist, a long-time board treasurer at Pennsylvania's Clean Air Council before a dispute over financial integrity ended that relationship. I fight the deception, bribery, political and legal manipulation that keeps Big Tobacco profitable, as a past president of the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Pennsylvania and an active member of TEACH.

Since the 2004 presidential election, I've been part of a net-organized coalition of statisticians who analyze voting patterns for evidence of errors or fraud. The National Election Data Archive has recently released my analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky pollsters' disavowal of their own exit poll, and In These Times carried a more popular analysis.

I am sure his study was conducted without predetermined interest in the outcome.

I swear, this is almost as bad as the Matrix copyright infringement post in the Hangout. Some of you will believe any turd someone shoves under your nose no matter how badly it stinks, as long as it's polished the way you like.

 

Amazing, Joshua Mitteldorf is the Op/Ed writer for notghettomess.com ~ small world indeed.

 

Wait, are you talking about the POTUS, the 2005 congressional budget, the 2003-2004 Houston Rockets, or BMW automobiles?

 

There have been polling irregularities in the last two elections. On this there should be no debate to anyone who keeps up to date. Whether benign or malicious, these must end. For all republicans, imagine these irregularities occurred and bush lost. You would be asking for investigations, and rightfully so. The American majority should decide the president, (I don't want to get into the electoral college now).

This should be a concern to every American. Because if true, we no longer live in a democracy.