On today's show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann promulgated the myth that somehow results in Florida are tainted because certain counties that have more than 2-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican registrations overwhelmingly voted for Bush. Counties he cited on tonight's show were: Baker, Lafayette, Liberty, and some others. He repeats this on his blog, but with less detail here (the transcript of the show is not yet available. Will post as soon as it will be):
... huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.
So, I decided to go to the Florida Secretary of State's office webpage and look at the results for Lafayette, Baker, and Liberty, the three counties whose names I could catch, and see how they voted in 2000 and in 1996. Well, quite a fascinating result:
Election of 2000
Baker voted 5610-2392 for Bush against Gore.
Lafayette voted 1670-789 for Bush against Gore.
Liberty voted 1317-1017 for Bush against Gore.
Election of 1996
Baker voted 3684-2273 for Dole against Clinton
Lafayette voted 1126-899 for Dole against Clinton
Liberty voted 913-868 for Dole against Clinton
Game. Set. Match, Keith. I loved you on ESPN, but you should stick to what you're good at: sports. The reason these counties have such high Democratic registrations is because they likely still have traditional Southern loyalties to the Democrats, but being in Northern Florida and the Panhandle, they are all very very conservative. No wonder, they even voted for Dole! As soon as the transcript of his show is up, I will check the other counties for which he peddles the conspiracy theory. (UPDATE: I have a post above that considers the 28 counties where the disparity between Bush's 2004 totals and Republicans' share of registrations is the highest... Let's just say that Olbermann has a whole lot of nothing).
Why am I not surprised that the wacky left couldn't accept the results of this election?
UPDATE: Welcome Volokh Conspiracy and The Corner readers! Thanks to Prof. Volokh and Jon Adler (who is a former editor of The Yale Free Press) for linking. So, check it out and stay for a while. Also, see this post I made, doing a full county-by-county analysis of these "disloyal" counties, showing their totals for the 2000 and 1996 election. Also, check out the articles that have appeared in our print edition.
Yes, I do know I misspelled Olbermann's name in the title, but Blogger puts the title in the URL for the link and I noticed the problem only after people started linking to me. One thing I realized I didn't touch enough on is how this seems to demonstrate my previous point that the Left hates Bush no matter what. Even with this election, which was quite clean and free of controversy, they have to invent controversy because they cannot believe that they could lose to this simpleton. So much for uniting the country and healing the wounds.
UPDATE: Keith Olbermann still seems to stick to his story, while conceding that Bush won most of the counties Olbermann mentioned, in 2000. Olbermann just says that he mentioned mostly panhandle counties and should have presented a better mix of the other 24. I'll try to have a more thorough analysis of the other cases where the voter "disloyalty" phenomenon occurred, later. But on face, this seems like Obermann is seriously stretching the bounds of plausibility.
UPDATE: The myth is repeated here for Baker County. It also claims that a ballot initiative in favor of raising the minimum wage in Florida passed with more than 70% of the vote, while Kerry only got 48% (Olbermann mentioned this point on his show tonight as well). Does that mean that since the initiative to define marriage as that between a man and a woman was supported overwhelmingly in Oregon and Bush lost overwhelmingly there, that the election in Oregon was stolen? My understanding is that Southern Democrats tend to be economically liberal but socially conservative. They might vote for some populist measures, but on social issues and national security they will vote for the Republicans. Another interesting paradox of that sort is the success of trial lawyers like Dickie Scruggs in Mississippi, where they find some small-town jury and sue a big corporation in that small town, and almost always win because they can frame the debate in terms of David vs. Golliath. Mississippi overwhelmingly votes for Republicans for President, who tend to support tort reform, but still hold lawyers like Dickie Scruggs in high regard. One final point is that states like Indiana and North Carolina have Democratic legislatures, but also overwhelmingly vote Republican for President. Louisiana hasn't had a Republican Senator since Reconstruction (until this year, when David Vitter won to replace the retiring John Breaux), but also always votes Republican for President.
UPDATE: Similar, albeit more "scientific"-looking claims are made here. Still bunk because the analysis entirely ignores the vote from 2000 and 1996 in those counties. They compute an expected number of votes that each candidate should have received in various counties. Their expected number votes is entirely based on the voter registration by party in that county:
EXPECTED_VOTES REP = the percentage of registered REP * the total number of voters who voted in each county on Tuesday.
EXPECTED votes would normally vary from the ACTUAL votes due to increased voter turnout by one party, Independents voting REP or DEM or other factors. What seems very odd in these numbers is that the increase in ACTUAL votes from EXPECTED votes has a striking pattern of being so much higher for REPs than that for DEMs in counties using optical scan voting machines, even when smaller counties are excluded from the analysis.
And would their model of expected votes account for the election results in 2000 and 1996 for Baker, Lafayette, and Liberty? Most definitely not. Any good model ought predict at least past events before it can be used as a candidate for future events!
UPDATE: This is a thread at the Democratic Underground on precisely this issue. One post says:
If they have officials committing fraud, it's likely they had them then too. In fact, we know elections have been rigged in the deep south for generations upon generations.
Proof that the Republicans have ALWAYS won in a heavily Democratic area could perhaps be a strong case FOR fraud, and in fact that seems to be the case, prima facie. Your evidence may support the fraud allegations, in other words.
That doesn't make sense. I just checked on the Florida Department of State page and for example, Baker County voted for Jimmy Carter (a Southern Democrat) over Ronald Reagan in 1980 (the last Presidential Election for which data is available there) by a margin of 2606-2271. So, it seems that this long tradition of fraud for generations and generations doesn't make much sense. This is especially true of the South, which only until the last 25-30 years, had voted predominantly for Democrats for President. So, sorry, this won't cut it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by stupidity being promoted on the Democratic Underground site.
105 comments:
Thanks for pointing this out. I've been trying to pound this into the heads of a few folks over at the Internet Infidels discussion forum, but they seem almost incredulous when I point out that maybe rural, southern Democrats are a tad more conservative than the national party.
Thanks for doing this. I'm a Floridian who had never voted for a republican for president until this election. One thing that really alienated me from the Democratic party was all the lies being told about the 2000 election (which I witnessed with my own eyes, living in Tallahassee, Florida) by Dems.
Catz
Did anybody hear Olberman cite high voter totals in Cuyahoga County, Ohio as evidence of Republican voter fraud? Apparently the number of votes in the county exceeded the number of registered voters. Of course, this should be a cause for concern. But a little elementary research would prove that Kerry waxed Bush in Cuyahoga County; in fact, his percentage of the vote this year exceeded Gore's in 2000. This is Cleveland, folks. And Olberman is claiming that Bush stole votes??
The times are changing, but for many years, for state and local offices, nomination in the Democrat primary in Florida was tantamount to election. Thus, if one wanted a say in who would be the next county commissioner, state representative or sheriff, one would register as a Democrat and vote in the primary, and then vote as one pleases in the general election. One thing that has contributed to this effect is that crossing party lines is not permitted in the primaries. Another is simple inertia. Many people simply haven't gotten around to changing their registration.
Looking at registration numbers makes no sense anywhere in the South. Where I live, in Kentucky, Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 600,000 in statewide registrations. Yet, Bush won by over 350,000 votes, we have two Republican Senators, a Republican governor, and an all-Republican House delegation save for one.
My message to Olbermann last night after watching his spew:
If you’ll check out the following map, you’ll see that every “Democratic” county in the Florida Panhandle that supported Bush in 2004 also supported him in 2000.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm
We have the same phenomenon in rural counties of Texas. Party registration (which is based on the primary in which you choose to vote) tilts heavily Democratic because that is where the down-ballot races are decided, but almost all of those counties vote for Bush and other Republicans at the top of the ballot in November.
I know that the MSM is having trouble comprehending that it can’t project its Bush-hatred past the coasts, but at least do a little research before you regurgitate what the tin-foil hat crowd feeds you.
Like the man said Keith, loved you as a sports guy on local LA tv and on ESPN - stick to what you're good at. By the way, you're not good at objective non-sports journalism, and the fact that you're rapidly becoming a caricature of the corrupted leftist media shows just that.
Read my updated post above where I have a chart analyzing every one of the counties and looking at their registration numbers and votes in 2000 and 1996.
Oh, actually just go to http://yalefreepress.blogspot.com/2004/11/more-thorough-analysis-of-tin-foil.html
Michael Moore has a similar claim on his site. I thought the same thing you did, Good job showing the conspiracy theorists wrong with the numbers. Their claims were just silly, even considering how Republicans hold both Houses of Congress in the State of Florida, the stolen election theory just wasn't holding up in my mind.
The Republican elite was ready and armed with thousands of lawyers read to allege voter fraud in Ohio and elsewhere IF BUSH LOST. They *suddenly* stopped expressing concerns about the "legitimate" voters whose voters were being cancelled out once they realized they had one.
Maybe Olbermann's Florida and Ohio examples were flawed, but don't do your "typical Republican elite . . use anecdotes for evidence,then demonize and belittle your opposition routine."
I will hand it to the Republican elite: they do a fabulous job demonizing their opposition; they know how to use anecdotes instead of real data, and they are unashamed of elevating their pursuit of power over any principle.
It may very well be the case that Olbermann's examples were flawed, but there are *many* MANY other examples of inequities in the voting process in this country.
Ohio's Republican party attempted -- before backing down after facing a *huge* backlash, even though they won a 3am order from the 6th Circuit -- to send thousands of their lawyers (what happened to all the trial lawyer hate, I wonder?) *primarily* to African-American precincts in the larger cities. They also sent notices to hundreds and probably thousands of citizens who thought they had already registerd to vote, telling them that they were being challenged and they should report for a pre-election day hearing. Those pre-election challenges were later struck down by two federal courts. You don't seriously think that that Republican elite challenge mailing did little to suppress the turnout, which in turn resulted in fewer recoverable provisional ballots? I hope someone calls each of those voters who received challenge notices to find out whether they did indeed go to the polls on Nov. 2.
The Ohio GOP had no serious evidence of voter registration fraud -- and they were asked by the media to hand over their evidence -- but the Republican elite were ready to pounce and run with those talking points if they lost Ohio.
It turns out that they didn't have to worry because Ohio is the last remaining bastion of the punchcard ballot, which political scientists like Henry Brady have shown in *systematic* studies will produce more lost ballots in African American precincts.
But go ahead - if you can live yourself: join the Republican elite. Do you really think the neo-cons in Defense, or Ann Coulter or William Kristol or David Brooks really give a damn about what a working class family in Warren County Ohio cares about? The Republican elite (with few exceptions, like Brooks and Kristol) appeals to its constituents in the most cynical and insincere way: use the language of faith on the stump, but don't implement compassionate conservativism in policies. Use fear of terrorism to support the Iraq invasion, continue to lie to the American people (at least those who you choose to admit to your "town meetings" on the stump) when the evidence demonstrates that you've been lying, use sarcasm and mockery of your opposition when Kerry is offering serious criticism during one of the most if not the most serious and dire eras in our nation's history, don't allow the press corp to ask you any questions, banish them from any access when they try to serve as watchdogs, or call in your Republican elite friends to label any serious empirically valid criticism as just another biased article by the liberal media.
John Kerry wasn't the best salesmen in American campaign history, but he is an honorable man who was willing to fight for the security of this country, and to stand up and criticize the Administration for their many failures and -- indeed -- demonstrable incompetence in handling the war in Iraq.
If you were at all intellectually honest, you'd recognize that those criticisms -- and the deep feeling of dread that half the country is feeling right now -- does indeed have a firm basis in reality. Remember, it was your party's strategist who said that empirical facts don't matter, the "reality-based community" will find things to debate, and meanwhile we'll go on "creating a new reality." (Suskind, NYT 10/17/04) The strategy of the Republican elite: Lie, conceal, and persuade. It's worked. Welcome to America's 21st century. God help us all.
Please, as a liberty oriented person who finds no upside to the continued existence of the Democratic Party as it is, and no improvement in any evolution it is likely to undertake--do not disabuse them of the notion their opposition is kept in power by fraud. Please encourage them to keep their illusions.
Yours, Tom Perkins
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patriae
Whoever posted that gobledy-gook about Republican voter fraud, give me a break!
First, the punch-cards discriminating against blacks is a stupid argument. The punch-cards don't discriminate against blacks! Punch cards have no consciousness, mind, free will, qualia, soul, will to power, etc. What you are trying to say is that blacks tend to not be able to use them disproportionately to whites. So? Voting = making a complete punch through the punch card.
As for the claims of voter fraud in Ohio, please... whose party ran the mayorship of Chicago in 1960? Whose party ran the governorship of Texas in 1960 which gave the election to Kennedy? Who was caught on camera giving homeless people in Milwaukee cigarettes if they voted for Al Gore? Who was arrested this year for getting crack in exchange for fraudulent voter registrations? How is it that more people voted in Cayahuga (the home of the most heinous Democratic Get Out the Vote/Fraud effort I've ever heard of) than there were registered in that county? Who are the election officials in Cayahuga, Democrats or Republicans? Please, give me a break.
ErnieG touched on this breifly. My family was registered as a Democrats for years in Texas. The democratic party controlled the political machine in most counties. So if you wanted to have any say in how the local political scene was shaped you were registered as a Democrat even if you were an independent or had Republican leanings.
ErnieG touched on this breifly. My family was registered as a Democrats for years in Texas. The democratic party controlled the political machine in most counties. So if you wanted to have any say in how the local political scene was shaped you were registered as a Democrat even if you were an independent or had Republican leanings.
MSNBC management has clearly made the conscious decision to aggressively counter-program against Fox, and that, essentially, they do not want conservative viewers. I used to really like Olbermann, but he was outrageously partisan in the most recent election cycle, and is quickly speeding up the shark-jumping ramp. His low point came on in August when he cheered loudmouth jerk Chris Matthews after he'd sandbagged blogger and author Michelle Malkin. To Matthews he said something like "I've never been prouder of you." Shame on him.
Mobius Strip,
If I had a dime for every time in the past month I've heard worried Republicans mention Chicago in 1960 . . .
You're just helping to prove my point. Demonize, belittle, and dismiss all you want; it still won't add up to a empirically valid argument about either voter registration or voter fraud.
All Democrats that I've seen discussing this issue have argued that all cases of voter registration should be prosecuted -- and that includes the miniscule numbers of impoverished workers who signed up Superman and Minnie Mouse. In any case, that is an isolated example of voter registration fraud -- no one has demonstrated was widespread, and in any case that type of *registration* fraud could not be translated into *voter* fraud. No one is going to sign up at a precinct and sign in as Minnie Mouse without causing a stir.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Republican operatives like Nathan Sproul ran in numerous states paid voter registration outfits, where workers repeatedly threw out the Democrats' registration forms while sending in the Republican forms. Now *that* is registration fraud that will actually matter on Election Day.
Sproul's organization is in fact under criminal investigation for violations far more widespread and consquential than the handful of Acorn volunteers who tried to earn an extra 10 bucks. I haven't heard of any Republican elites attacking Nathan Sproul, however.
Oh, and for your information, nothing in my first post suggested that I tried to anthropromorphize a punch card ballot. The point - and it is a serious one for those *truly* concerned about the fairness of the voting process in this country -- is that the choice of election technology can have a distorting effect in registering the actual intent of all legitimate voters.
Keep on truckin'. Lie, Conceal, Persuade some more. It seems to be working for you.
For my part, if appeals to reality will no longer work in a country where most people believe the current Administration and Bill O'Reilly are honorable men and women telling them the truth, then I'll continue praying for the future of this country. The Framers of our Constitution never conceived of the likes of the current Republican elite.
Mobius Strip,
If I had a dime for every time in the past month I've heard worried Republicans mention Chicago in 1960 . . .
You're just helping to prove my point. Demonize, belittle, and dismiss all you want; it still won't add up to a empirically valid argument about either voter registration or voter fraud.
All Democrats that I've seen discussing this issue have argued that all cases of voter registration should be prosecuted -- and that includes the miniscule numbers of impoverished workers who signed up Superman and Minnie Mouse. In any case, that is an isolated example of voter registration fraud -- no one has demonstrated was widespread, and in any case that type of *registration* fraud could not be translated into *voter* fraud. No one is going to sign up at a precinct and sign in as Minnie Mouse without causing a stir.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Republican operatives like Nathan Sproul ran in numerous states paid voter registration outfits, where workers repeatedly threw out the Democrats' registration forms while sending in the Republican forms. Now *that* is registration fraud that will actually matter on Election Day.
Sproul's organization is in fact under criminal investigation for violations far more widespread and consquential than the handful of Acorn volunteers who tried to earn an extra 10 bucks. I haven't heard of any Republican elites attacking Nathan Sproul, however.
Oh, and for your information, nothing in my first post suggested that I tried to anthropromorphize a punch card ballot. The point - and it is a serious one for those *truly* concerned about the fairness of the voting process in this country -- is that the choice of election technology can have a distorting effect in registering the actual intent of all legitimate voters.
Keep on truckin'. Lie, Conceal, Persuade some more. It seems to be working for you.
For my part, if appeals to reality will no longer work in a country where most people believe the current Administration and Bill O'Reilly are honorable men and women telling them the truth, then I'll continue praying for the future of this country. The Framers of our Constitution never conceived of the likes of the current Republican elite.
you are correct. i live in duval county (Jacksonville). This county has always had more registered democratic voters. the last time this county actually voted democratic in a presidential campaign was jimmy freaking carter. obermann is an idiot and knows nothing about the south. hell, every state in the south has more registered democrats. obviously the conspiracy is more widespread than he first thought.
Sproul & Associates investigation: http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe
Another criminal investigation of Sproul & Associates: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/14/politics/main649380.shtml
I haven't heard any Democratic elites attacking Mayor Dailey or Joe Kennedy who together orchestrated the grand larceny of the election of 1960. Ok, so if the allegations against Sproul are true, then that's bad and Sproul should be fined or go to jail or whatever the appropriate remedies are.
But, you pretending like just a handful of Acorn volunteers trying to make a few extra bucks doesn't matter is preposterous. Look at the *on the record* remarks made by Democrats themselves about the 2002 Senate election of Thune v. Johnson in South Dakota. There is serious and substantial evidence that the Democrats were paying Native Americans to vote and to register to vote.
Look at Cayahuga County in Ohio, where the Democrats attempted to engineer an election victory. It turns out that there were more voters in some heavily Democratic precincts than registrants. This isn't just minor here and there problems at Acorn. This looks like a systematic attempt by a major political organization to influence the election. Are you willing to go on the record condemning this and Johnson's behavior in the 2002 Senate race and things that were happening in Philadelphia and Chicago this year (where certain precincts mysteriously wiped Republicans off of their lists of registered voters and then didn't even have provisional ballots to let them vote)?
native Floridian here....Lived in Leon County( a FL county which actually voted for Kerry) I am now confined to South Florida ( another county for Kerry). The "liberal ballot initiative" theory doesnt hold water. The amendment was placed on the ballot to spur liberal voters to go to the polls (The backer admitted this fact). GOP knew this and avoided the issue. I cant recall a single ad on the amendment. I'd wager that most people first heard of the measure when they were reading it in the voting booth....Sounds great! Bigger paychecks! No sense of economics, no problem! I bet lots of "fiscal conservatives" were duped into voting "yes". God Bless America FURLEY OUT! ralphfurley.blogspot.com
And some people will never believe there weren't UFOs at Area 51.
I wonder what the conspiracy theorists would make of North Carolina politics, where in this year's election Bush won by a margin of 56% to 44% while Democratic Governor Mike Easley won by a margin of 55% to 43%. Now, some might explain the contradictory results by pointing to the fact that, by national standards, Easley is fairly conservative. But the more likely explanation, I think, is that the ominipotence Karl Rove simply rigged all the ballot-counting machines to count a Bush vote as a Kerry vote and vice versa. That would better explain the mirror image results, don't you think?
Hey Anonymous, I'll be the first to say that GWB's upsides are only a little bigger than his downsides. I looked at Kerry, and he seemed to me to violate the laws of topography, he was all downside.
So Monday night I drove 6 1/2 hours from No. Va. to Columbus, OH to volunteer in the GOP GOTV campaign. I say the 20,000 fake voter registrations, they are real. They are opportunities for Democratic voter fraud which should be investigated.
In the process of calling households with both Rep. and Ind. registered voters and a Dem. in the household, I came across three instances of the people who answered the phone having no idea the Democrat in the household was, three opportunites for pro Democrat voter fraud that I encountered personally. If unchallenged person showed up at those precincts and voter under that name, no one would be the wiser. I never called a Rep. household where such problems were found. At 9:15pm, I drove home to go to work Wednesday.
Tell you what, if the Democrats drop their objections to state issued photo-id only voting, and a network making it impossible for someone to vote twice, then I'll drop all objections to triplicate voter-verified paper balloting records (one copy to each major party, one to the county clerk, and an "I voted" record number issued to each voter).
How's that sound?
Yours, TDP
ml
msl
pfpp
I was a presiding official in a precinct in Warren County, Ohio, you know, the one that was "locked down." My car was checked by bomb-sniffing dogs as I dropped off the ballot box at the Bd of Elections. I can't say whether or not Homeland Security issues were overplayed (probably), but that does not equate with voter fraud.
Warren Co. is about as Republican as you can get. Every county office up for grabs last week was won by an unopposed Republican. Bush outgained Kerry by a little less than 3-1, with about the same percent turnout as four years ago. Now, some sceptics would say that that's a perfect scenario for tampering, but I would say that if you are looking for enough hidden votes to overturn a 140,000 decision, you ought to look elsewhere; they aren't here.
I had six provisional ballot situations. I am confidant there were all legit; recent moves were involved. Procedures were followed. Chances are pretty good that Bush was tabbed on three, four, five, or maybe even all six. No hidden Kerry votes there, I'd bet.
The notion that election officials acting within the boundaries of good discretion is a tipoff to some kind of vote fraud is ridiculous. Keep spinnin', Keith, and you'll end up with Phil Donahues ratings.
rastajenk
To add to your point about Mississippi - the overwhelmingly Republican Gulf Coast keeps re-electing Gene Taylor, Democrat, to the house of Representatives with large vote margins.
You know, you're absolutely right about the makeup of northern Florida and the panhandle. About ten years ago, I worked as an intern for Earl Hutto in DC, who was at the time the representative for the first district of Florida. That was pretty much the panhandle. And there were five military bases in that district, so there were a LOT of retirees.
He called himself a Conservative Christian Democrat. And he was, definitely. He was too conservative for me, to tell the truth; I consider myself to be quite moderate. He was mostly a democrat for the social issues that are important to many retirees. But we knew, without a doubt, that the district was Republican.
More on the statewide gains in Florida:
Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
Consortium News
Tuesday 09 November 2004
George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.
While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.
Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.
By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.
Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide - statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote - and losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.
[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html].
Exit Poll Discrepancies
Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country - especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent - have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.
Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states - Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa - was virtually inconceivable.
"Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "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. … 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."
But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering - as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe - Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves "more scrutiny and investigation." [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]
Erroneous Votes
Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.
In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.
Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.
If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.
In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.
Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.
For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.
What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.
What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.
Bush's Gains
But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?
While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.
Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.
The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]
According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.
However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.
Registration Up
While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.
From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear - maximize Bush's support among social and economic conservatives - including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives - and turn them out by driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's leadership credentials.
This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.
But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.
Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.
You're doing a great job, mobius strip, but I couldn't let this pass without correction. A quote from the contrarian earlier in the thread:
"If you were at all intellectually honest, you'd recognize that those criticisms -- and the deep feeling of dread that half the country is feeling right now -- does indeed have a firm basis in reality. Remember, it was your party's strategist who said that empirical facts don't matter, the 'reality-based community' will find things to debate, and meanwhile we'll go on 'creating a new reality.' (Suskind, NYT 10/17/04) The strategy of the Republican elite: Lie, conceal, and persuade. It's worked. Welcome to America's 21st century. God help us all."
This whole "reality-based community" meme has been really tightly embraced by the left. It's a very effective balm for their badly scorched egos, especially in the wake of their dismal failure in the recent election.
But what do we know about this alleged quote? First, it's anonymous, attributed to a "Bush aide." Nothing about the aide being the Republican "party's strategist," as the poster quoted above alleges. I can only assume that he means Karl Rove, the MSM's favored bete noir of conservative politics. Nothing in the original Times article suggests that, so we see that the meme is evolving (or devolving) further, until eventually, I predict, some Internet denizens will insist that it emerged from Bush's own lips. "Lie, conceal, and persuade," indeed.
And what do we know about the New York Times? We know that it bent every effort in the final months before the campaign to tear down Bush and raise Kerry up. We know that it has a history of making things up (does the name Jayson Blair ring a bell?) and bending the news to suit its political allies (Walter Duranty, anybody?). Its fellow travellers in the mainstream media have been equally guilty of manufacturing stories that dovetail with their preconceptions -- Dan Rather, Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke are just a few names in the rollcall of journalistic shame. An anonymous quote like the one in Susskind's article just sounds too good to be true, from the perspective of a Bush-hater. And you know what they say about things that are too good to be true....
But let's take the Times at its word. Isn't what the anonymous staffer saying what the po-mo crowd in the academy have been telling us for decades now? There is no such thing as objective truth.
Look at some of the language in the quote: ''[W]hen we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.'' Wow, that could be straight out of a Cultural Studies master's thesis.
Maybe the real scandal isn't that a Bush aide is discounting reality. Maybe the real scandal is that a Derrida acolyte has infiltrated the Bush White House. Somebody call Homeland Security stat.
It would be nice if they taught American history in high school, then maybe Keith Olbermann might understand the Florida country registration. The South was predominately Democratic, not because they necessarily espoused Democratic party values, but because LINCOLN was a REPUBLICAN. After the Civil War, most blacks voted (when they could) for the Republican party and whites voted for the Democratic party (who would want to vote for the candidate of the party that defeated them? That's not human nature.) It wasn't until John Kennedy and his outreach to blacks that they started coming into the Democratic party. Lyndon Johnson never would have been able to pass Civil Rights legislation without the Republican support in Congress because many Southern Democratic legislators were against desegregation, etc.
During the '60's, black started voting Democratic and left the Republican party. During the '70's and '80's, many whites began making the switch to the Republican party, a party they were always much more in tune with on the national level in terms of gun issues, role of government, etc. Once Reagan made it okay to be a southern Republican, the stranglehold the Democrats had had since Reconstruction was gone.
Someone send Keith a high school textbook. Please.
"Do you really think the neo-cons in Defense, or Ann Coulter or William Kristol or David Brooks really give a damn about what a working class family in Warren County Ohio cares about?"
This is (to coin a phrase) rich, given that the only thing people could be certain about with Kerry was that he modeled his adult life on a Hall and Oates song. Toss in his $8000 bicycle and 5 mansions and it's pretty clear who the out of touch candidate was.
Mobius Strip,
All allegations of voter misconduct should be investigated by the proper authorities. If I had been alive in 1960, I would have said the same thing. How is 1960 relevant today - are you suggesting there is some cross-generational predilection for election tampering ONLY in the Democratic party? That's absurd. My point is that allegations of voter fraud were going to be the cynical Republican talking point du jour on November 3. It turned out it wasn't needed. Fox News ran a false single story all day on Nov. 2 concerning machines in a Philadelphia precinct that allegedly had votes already added before the precinct opened. The authorities were called, and they announced in a public statement that the Republican lawyers had looked at the wrong part of the machine where the machine keeps a running log of the total number of votes cast throughout the history of the machine. After that press release was issued, Fox kept reporting the same allegations for at least 4 more hours. My impression is that Republicans were cynically manipulating the voter fraud anecdotes to delegitimize a Kerry victory - then they dropped the subject altogether when Bush won by large margins.
I don't like that Keith Olbermann used a few county-level anecdotes to cast doubt on the Florida results, but that is what Republicans do all the time to drum up interest in a certain controversy. If Olbermann's comments lead to a press FOIA request and a more complete, systematic study of the Florida returns, as well as inspire the media to keep up interest in the Ohio count of its remaining provisional ballots, then those more comprehensive studies will clear up a lot of lingering doubts. No tin foil hats required, just a commitment to transparency and more willingness to adhere to the principles that all *legitimate* votes should be counted and all allegations of voter registration or voter fraud that are borne out by further investigation by the proper authorities should be prosecuted.
In my view, for the Republican elite, it's not about principle; it's about power. They won, now they want everyone to "shut up and stop whining" or to put away their so-called "tin foil hats." It's still about denigration and mockery for the Republican elite. I find it disgusting, all the more so when I see smart people like Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds condoning such behavior.
From the long tinfoil post above:
"Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number."
While it is anecdotal, this is a perfect example of the stupidity and/or blindness of the Left: numerous posts above making essentially the same (and almost certainly correct) case for the difference between registered Republicans and actual Republican votes in the South (Southern party registrations are a historical artifact and no longer correlate presidential voting patterns) yet someone nevertheless posts a long, fevered story based on the already discredited hypothesis.
I guess we don't need to bother with with the whole voting thing next time around. Nope, we'll just look at voter registrations and a few polls and declare a winne, after all, voter registrations and exit polls are sooo much more reliable than actual vote counts.
This is gonna save so much time and money! Awesome!
I'm sure you're right, but wouldn't it be nice if you could actually prove the vote was honest, by having a system of real ballot papers that could be counted? Then you could really shut up the tinfoil-hat brigade.
Voter-verifiable, recountable paper ballots should be a cross-party demand for 2006.
I may be Anonymous, but I'm also brain dead!
Urg. Glug glug. Sputta sputta.
A) The exit poll argument by Dick Morris (a "Republican" pollster who worked for Clinton) is bunk. The Exit Polls that are almost always right showed Kerry carrying (at mid-day) North Carolina and Virginia, with South Carolina too close to call. But this is clearly ridiculous since the exit polls showed a Kerry 51-48 victory nationwide and a Bush loss in NC and Va and a close election in SC would be evidence of a Kerry rout on the order of 56-43.
B) The vote for Bush far exceeding Republican registration argument is also bunk, as evidenced here (that this happened in many places in 2000 and in 1996).
C) The thing about voter turnout is idiotic. In 1996, you had a third candidate, Ross Perot. In many parts of Florida, he got between 8 and 15%. Is it entirely inconceivable that the people who would vote for Perot would also vote for Bush? If you factor in Perot, then it doesn't seem all that odd that Bush was able to increase voter turnout.
D) The point isn't for us to prove that there wasn't voter fraud (that's impossible! see above post (on the blog not comments section, where I show why it's impossible to prove a negative). The point is for you to prove that it was fraudulent. Unless you have direct evidence of fraud, you need to provide a coherent model of voting behavior that not only predicts the vote totals for this election, but also the one for 2000 and 1996 and 1992, to a reasonable degree of accuracy. The model of using voter registrations has clearly proved to be a failure. The model of exit polls has as well, since they clearly predicted incorrect results for states that no one doubted were safe Bush states (like NC, Va, SC, etc).
E) No, we're not telling you to shut up and quit whining we're just asking you to double check your own theories for logical coherence! If you present a theory that claims to explain why voter fraud happened in 2004, but does not explain why the same results appear for non-fraudulent elections of 2000 and 1996, there is a problem and it means that you guys are hysterical.
F) No, the Philadelphia thing involved a City voting machine technician telling the Republican lawyers that the votes were already registered. So, it was a city representative misreading the machines.
G) If you bring me direct verifiable evidence of voter fraud on the part of the Republicans, I will condemn it. But this doesn't even pass the coherence test.
Speaking of anecdotal, from the long post above: "Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush."
A couple weeks ago my son showed me a web animation that did exactly this. It was pretty funny, with a cursor chasing the Kerry box all over the screen, and when it finally caught up with it, the mythical voter got a message that said, "you voted for Bush...confirm? yes or no....click on no...."thank you for voting for Bush" I wish I had the url.
Anyway, seeing as how this is supposed to have happened last week, it sounds an awful lot like a life imitates the Onion kind of thing. I'm sure it's worth investigating, but I bet the investigation comes up empty.
rastajenk
I analyzed the data a couple days ago here.
I looked at the presidential races from 1980 to 2004, and I found that Bush II's results were actually down - in some cases by 10 or more points - from the highpoints for Reagan's second term and Bush I in most Florida counties.
However, note the disclaimer: that doesn't explain everything in the ustogether chart, only the Dixiecrat factor.
I wouldn't pin all your hopes on discrediting one Olbermann broadcast. There's all those other cases of possible fraud or at least irregularities to consider. See this category.
Anonymous writing at 3:21 pm offered some sharp responses to my earlier posts.
I agree that the use of unnamed sources is a plague in the Gang of 500, but they'll tell you that they would be banished from the press corps and/or would receive no information at all from the Republican elite in the Bush White House, if they required all for the record comments.
Moreover, the reason why Suskind's piece resonated with me (BEFORE Kerry lost the election) is that I have seen numerous polls showing likely Republican voters still believed the U.S. HAD found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Bin Laden and Saddam were active collaborators. That suggests to me there is some evidence that, among some groups, there is more trust of authority and willingness to believe the lies Dick Cheney shamelessly told supporters at his closed-door session, and EVEN during the Vice-Presidential debate. How can that behavior be defended? It's so cynical, it is mind-boggling.
In addition, I think the mainstream media - including the New York Times - is so cowed by these memes regarding "liberal bias" that they *rarely* are willing to go after the Administration's policy arguments. Their coverage, especially Judith Miller's reporting, of the case for war in Iraq was roundly criticized because it blindly accepted all the Government's sources, which, it turns out, was Chalabi, a notoriously unreliable character.
I also entirely agree with your claim that there is a distinct PoMo flavor to the strategies of the neocons and other strategies in the Bush White House. It's cynical brilliance, but it's working -- see Franklin Foer's devastating argument to this effect in the 7/05/04 issue of the New Republic.
Let's face it both parties cheat. They don't call each other on it so they can get away with it next time.
It also make for good excuses when you lose.
Is it just me or in 2000 did the losing party complain about the paper ballots (hanging chads, disenfrachisement, butterfly ballots, too complicated, voted for Pat Buchanan) and now they lose again and it's because we didn't use paper ballots?
Now with editing (I must remember, always throw out your first draft).
Hey Anonymous, I'll be the first to say that GWB's upsides are only a little bigger than his downsides. I looked at Kerry, and he seemed to me to violate the laws of topography, he was monotonic--all downside.
So Monday night I drove 6 1/2 hours from No. Va. to Columbus, OH to volunteer in the GOP GOTV campaign. I saw the 20,000 fake voter registrations, they are real. They are opportunities for Democratic vote fraud which should be investigated.
In the process of calling households with both Rep. and Ind. registered voters and a Dem. in the household, I came across three instances of the people who answered the phone having no idea who the Democrat in the household was, three opportunities for pro Democrat voter fraud that I encountered personally. If an unchallenged person showed up at those precincts and voted under that name, no one would be the wiser. I never called a Rep. household where such problems were found. I handled about 30 pages of about 40 households each (obviously I didn’t call even half of them). Bottom line is, from personal experience, 1 of 50 Democratic registrations are opportunities for fraudulent voting. At 9:15pm, I drove home to go to work Wednesday.
Tell you what, if the Democrats drop their objections to state issued photo-id only voting, and a network making it impossible for someone to vote twice, then I'll drop all objections to triplicate voter-verified paper balloting records (one copy to each major party, one to the county clerk, and an "I voted" record number issued to each voter).
How's that sound?
Also, I also direct your attention to Mr. Farhad Manjoo’s essay ruling out widespread vote fraud. Mr. Manjoo writes for Salon.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/04/touch_screen/index.html
Yours, TDP
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I cannot believe the postings I have just read. I thought I lived in a country where sanity ruled but not anymore. Accusations of massive voter fraud and rigged elections? Give me a break.
Speaking as one who voted with the Red States, I did so with a clear conscience and without hatred or accusations against those who voted with the Blue States. I thought we were exercising our right to support our candidates and cast our votes in the manner we chose.
I am liberal on some issues and conservative on others. Most of the voters in feel the same way I do. When it is close, I make my decision on how close a candidate is to my views. I supported Bush because of his stance on the war in Iraq and abortion.
Having the benefit of working in the Middle East years ago, I know first hand that they have hated us for a much longer period than post 9/11. They have wanted to destroy us for decades now and finally found the person who was willing to take the war to our homeland. Bush made the hard decision to invade Iraq based admittedly on bad information from intelligence agencies. Yet, anyone who is willing to open their minds to an opposing viewpoint and rationally evaluate the information provided, I believe most would come to the same conclusion.
Yet, some will attack my viewpoint with venom and hate. Not willing to accept my viewpoint as anything but wrong. Not having enough civility to admit that I have the right to my opinion nor enough conviction to defend my right to say it.
I also voted for Bush not because of Roe v Wade but the partial birth abortion issue. I don't agree with abortion but to have one is legal and the law of the land. I believe life begins at conception and using abortion as a means of birth control is wrong and not ethical. But, partial birth abortion is murder no matter how you try to spin it, defend it, or justify it. The procedure is heinous and if someone were to kill children using the same technique, they would be branded as a monstrous killer. Yet, because partial birth abortion is considered a medical procedure, it is legal. If you think and in your heart believe it is acceptable for a physician to remove the body of a child out of the womb up to the neck, then insert a needle into the base of the brain and use a suction procedure to remove the brain, thereby killing the child, then you need to examine your heart.
If you want to call me a religious, right wing neanderthal because I find this procedure murder and totally out of touch with any morality, go ahead. If my views define me as such, I will wear the badge with honor.
Keith Obermann and his cronies on the left have become so obsessed with the fact that Kerry did not have what it took to unseat Bush, they are trying everything they can to soil the victory by Bush. Liberals will not accept defeat because they simply cannot understand how anyone outside their political realm can exist? There must be something wrong with over 59 million voters because they voted for Bush.
If Kerry had won, I would have been disappointed but not to the point of actually supporting efforts to leave the country. When you place your political preferences above the will of the voters, that is a sure indication that you don't appreciate the United States and what we stand for.
So, all Blue State voters, continue to spew your venom against Red State voters until the next election. Your numbers will continue to decline and it won't be because of our attacks but you shooting yourself in the foot, over and over again.
From the catbird seat on SportsCenter to the murky nether reaches of a ratings Dagobah in record time. Who the hell watches Countdown anyways?
Keith Obermann told a big fib as far as Cuyahoga County.
Fairview park had 8542 regular ballots cast. The total
vote count on the tally sheet is misleading as stated on the county's web site.
"In even-numbered years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections tallies absentee ballots by Congressional, House, and Senate district combinations. Because of this, the ballots cast totals for municipalities on this web page and on the summary report needs to be derived by using the following technique: For municipalities with wards, find the ballots cast total for each ward and total them. For municipalities without wards, please refer to the contest of interest on the canvass report. "
In other the absentee votes that got added in to make the "18,472" votes included absentee votes outside of
Fairview Park and including Fairview Park.
Those absenteee ballots got added in once after all of the affected precinct votes were tallied.
In other words Fairview Parks absentee ballots were lumped in with other ballots form other nearby areas. Those ballots were added into both Fairview park and into the ajoining areas. THis in effect inflated the "vote count for both" . Those absentee ballots in reality were counted once!
MNSBC did not do their homework.
I'm not sure who the "you" is in the anonymous post about partial-birth abortion.
I sincerely doubt that you would find ANY Democrat who would cheerily defend the procedure. As I'm sure you know, those who voted against the federal bill did so because the bill did not include an exception to protect the life & physical health of the mother.
I understand that many voters rate abortion as the single most important issue when they compare candidates, and that is their absolute right to do so.
I supported John Kerry because his preference was to strive for true reproductive freedom, which would make abortions as rare as possible. What would reproductive freedom demand: allow sex education in schools, inspire young girls to say no and withstand peer pressure when they are not truly ready for an intimate relationship (feminists and social conservatives can agree here), improve access to health care, and provide more opportunities for jobs with real benefits. IF these policies were pursued, there would have been a dramatic drop in the number of abortions in the country. Under Bush's so-called compassionate conservative regime, however, the numbers of abortions in this country have risen. Is that because more women are using abortions as birth control? I think it's because we have failed as a country to pursue the policies that would make abortions as rare as possible.
I'm a blue state voter who believes abortion is a moral wrong, but I also believe that as a matter of law, early abortions (or even late abortions to protect the life of the mother) should remain legal.
Why is it that a property owner in some states has a perfectly valid defense if he shoots and kills an intruder on his private property, but some people believe that women should be forced to carry a child to term even if it might literally kill her. Honestly, I don't understand the position.
Nor do I understand the view that a mass of cells (within 2 weeks of conception or the cells left behind after infertility treatments) should be equated with a fully formed fetus or a child. The morning after pill is opposed vehemently by those who believe that life begins immediately with conception, but its availability could make later-term abortions far more rare. Isn't that what we should all be striving for?
I certainly respect religious voters, but I think the Republican elite is cynically manipulating many of you, because they are confident that many of the voters concerned about abortion will ignore their own economic interests (and perhaps, as I've been arguing, the national security failutes of the current Administration) in order to vote their conscience on the abortion issue. I don't think Democrats have made the case about reproduction freedom well enough. Clinton's articulation of "safe, legal, and RARE" was a good one, but it was buried in a lot of other heated rhetoric about abortion on demand and "choice."
I'm not sure who the "you" is in the anonymous post about partial-birth abortion.
I sincerely doubt that you would find ANY Democrat who would cheerily defend the procedure. As I'm sure you know, those who voted against the federal bill did so because the bill did not include an exception to protect the life & physical health of the mother.
I understand that many voters rate abortion as the single most important issue when they compare candidates, and that is their absolute right to do so.
I supported John Kerry because his preference was to strive for true reproductive freedom, which would make abortions as rare as possible. What would reproductive freedom demand: allow sex education in schools, inspire young girls to say no and withstand peer pressure when they are not truly ready for an intimate relationship (feminists and social conservatives can agree here), improve access to health care, and provide more opportunities for jobs with real benefits. IF these policies were pursued, there would have been a dramatic drop in the number of abortions in the country. Under Bush's so-called compassionate conservative regime, however, the numbers of abortions in this country have risen. Is that because more women are using abortions as birth control? I think it's because we have failed as a country to pursue the policies that would make abortions as rare as possible.
I'm a blue state voter who believes abortion is a moral wrong, but I also believe that as a matter of law, early abortions (or even late abortions to protect the life of the mother) should remain legal.
Why is it that a property owner in some states has a perfectly valid defense if he shoots and kills an intruder on his private property, but some people believe that women should be forced to carry a child to term even if it might literally kill her. Honestly, I don't understand the position.
Nor do I understand the view that a mass of cells (within 2 weeks of conception or the cells left behind after infertility treatments) should be equated with a fully formed fetus or a child. The morning after pill is opposed vehemently by those who believe that life begins immediately with conception, but its availability could make later-term abortions far more rare. Isn't that what we should all be striving for?
I certainly respect religious voters, but I think the Republican elite is cynically manipulating many of you, because they are confident that many of the voters concerned about abortion will ignore their own economic interests (and perhaps, as I've been arguing, the national security failutes of the current Administration) in order to vote their conscience on the abortion issue. I don't think Democrats have made the case about reproduction freedom well enough. Clinton's articulation of "safe, legal, and RARE" was a good one, but it was buried in a lot of other heated rhetoric about abortion on demand and "choice."
If anyone carries to look---check out Oklahoma. Every county here voted for Bush, but registered Democrats double (approx) Repubs. BTW, Oklahoma has the most advanced system of voting anywhere in the country. We have a paper ballot that is optically scanned. Thus, you have a computer total for quick tabulation and a "paper" trail to refer too, if someone wants to protest/contest. All counties use the same system because the state controls it, so none of this punch ballots here, computers there, etc.
Note: Dems have ruled the Senate and House since state hood (except 1922-24) when Reps controlled the house. We have a Dem governor and Dem controlled Senate and FINALLY we took over the House. BTW, Oklahoma, for the last decade or two, has been sending a majority of Reps to the federal level, while sending Democrats to the State level.
My point, any claims that 2000 people are reqistered Dem and 1000 are registered Reps so Reps can't get 2000 votes is assinine.
And Dems, it has been 4 years. Improve the voting systems or quit complaining. Both parties are to blame for the systems in use, but no one wants to spend the money to update the systems.
"Keith Obermann told a big fib as far as Cuyahoga County.
Fairview park had 8542 regular ballots cast. The total
vote count on the tally sheet is misleading as stated on the county's web site.
"In even-numbered years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections tallies absentee ballots by Congressional, House, and Senate district combinations. Because of this, the ballots cast totals for municipalities on this web page and on the summary report needs to be derived by using the following technique: For municipalities with wards, find the ballots cast total for each ward and total them. For municipalities without wards, please refer to the contest of interest on the canvass report. "
In other the absentee votes that got added in to make the "18,472" votes included absentee votes outside of
Fairview Park and including Fairview Park."That's an interesting explaination, but I'm not sure it jibes with the facts; If you go to the county's website, and look at the listing, you'll see that they distinguish those municipalities with and without wards. And Fairview Park doesn't have wards. In fact, I went down the list, and didn't see excess votes in any of the municipalities with wards.
I think the Cuyahoga County elections board is going to have to do some explaining.
To those who complain that all voter fraud in Chicago is historical and not relavant -- I've actually read voter fraud in Cook County Illinois was 6.1 % in 2000. I've been trying to find out what it was this election but haven't seen any stats. To put this in perspective, there are about 1 million voters in Cook County so this is about 61,000 fraudulent votes.
About the partial birth abortion ban--the "life of the mother" argument is a load of bull. There are other procedures if the mother is truely in danger, but these are procedures that are only performed in hospitals. If you think about it, if the mother's life is in danger a hospital is exactly the place she should be.
I'm pro-choice and I think civil unions for gay couples are fine (not quite sure how I feel about gay marriages). I have never voted for a Republican until last week! Four years ago I said that even if the Dems nominated a monkey I'd vote for him -- but it was a different world then. And besides 9/11 I have my own business now...the Republicans support me more.
That didn't come out quite right. To be more accurate, if you go to their website, you see this listing:
"REGISTERED VOTERS - FAIRVIEW PARK 13342
REGISTERED VOTERS - FRPK WD1 2691
REGISTERED VOTERS - FRPK WD2 2487
REGISTERED VOTERS - FRPK WD3 3000
REGISTERED VOTERS - FRPK WD4 2670
REGISTERED VOTERS - FRPK WD5 2494"
Five wards, and their total registered voters agree with the list for Fairview Park as a total. However, under ballots cast:
"BALLOTS CAST FAIRVIEW PARK 18472
BALLOTS CAST FRPK WD1 1656
BALLOTS CAST FRPK WD2 1566
BALLOTS CAST FRPK WD3 1895
BALLOTS CAST FRPK WD4 1744
BALLOTS CAST FRPK WD5 1663"
Now, it's entirely plausible that the absentee ballots were all counted under the total for Fairview Park, which certainly explains why the total votes under Fairview Park is much greater than the wards that comprise it added together. BUT, you can't evade the fact that that total IS substantially greater than the number of registered voters in Fairview park. And that's got to be explained.
The Perot Factor
Mobius' point about Perot voters (in an earlier post) is very important.
Perot's strongest "sound bite" during both campaigns was that he was going to address excessive government waste/spending. Who do you think he was referring to - Republicans?
Voting trends and statistics from the 1992 and 1996 elections were skewed because of the large number of voters that turned out for Perot - those vote would most likely have gone to Republicans.
BTW, for all the whiners who are talking about the "slim" margin in Bush's electoral vote victory, take a look at the numbers from 1992 - over 58 million people voted for a candidate *other than Clinton*, and in 1996 Clinton only received less than 120,000 more popular votes than his compaetition - I don't remember anyone from the left going to great lengths to point that out at the time
I'm in Butler Co. Ohio, next to Warren. I'm not sure why they locked out the media and frankly, don't care. What I do know is that the local press here was begging for people to report problems. They wanted problems. They were everywhere and had their "hotlines" open well after the election. Maybe their chance at the national spotlight? Another thing, Kerry could not have come close to winning either county if he was the only one on the ballot, a paper ballot, even with hanging chads. As for Cuyahoga County. I hope they do investigate further because they may just find out it was their party cheating. ACORN had massive complaints and the NAACP in Toledo was involved with paying a woman to recruit people to register voters. She was paying the recruits with crack cocaine and apparently the NAACP knew about it.
My guess it that with the last minute decision to let the poll watchers in and the rain, the people they counted on to cheat just got cold feet and didn't turn out the numbers they expected. Or maybe they were just too high.
I love the commentary on "Republican elites" and "Republican lawyers," as if this is proof of fraud. Or as if there wasn't an army of Democrat lawyers waiting in the wings to challenge the Ohio or Florida result.
The reality is that the Kerry campaign did a calculation and realized that even in a best-case scenario, it couldn't overcome Bush's margin. That's why the DNC's lawyer army wasn't activated in the field. If the margin in Ohio had been only 10,000, you would have seen all those lawyers in action.
On gratuitously named Fox All Stars tonight, Juan Williams started spouting about his e-mail which has all these conspiracy theories about voting fraud by Bush. They are all losing it!
The total count in the Fairview Park is meaningless.
The county website clear said go add up the counts of the individual wards.
WHere you agetting overcounts is with the absentee ballots. They are being lumped in with ballots form other nearby areas. They are included in the totals of each of those areas. The number is decieving. THe website says so. Lets sya that there were 11,000 absentte votes included in Fairview Park totals. Those same 11,000 votes were added into the totals for neighboring communities also because the 11,000 combined votes came from Fairview park, and whatever is next door. In otherwords the absentee ballots were not broken out in the same way as the votes cast on election night. They were tallied separtely. They were grouped together by congressional district, etc as said on the web page.
Msnbc did not read what the data means.
Absentee voters vote in local elections. Their votes HAVE to be assigned to the correct municipality! The reason their votes aren't broken up into the separate wards is simply because the wards are just subdivisions for voting purposes, and don't have different issues being voted on.
Sorry, but there IS something that has to be explained here. It may be that the county is doing something really goofy in the way it counts ballots, but an explaination is needed.
I haven't read any Democrats on this comments page *defending* claims of widespread vote tampering, durng the counting stage, in Florida or Ohio.
In Ohio,the Republican lawyer elite hypocrites *were* ready to use lawyers to challenge voters at the polls. The Democratic lawyers were *not* there to challenge legitimate voters whose names were on the rolls and whose signatures matched the official books. Instead, their lawyers were going to monitor the *Republicans* to make sure they did not intimidate voters or slow down the lines and discourage voters from staying in line. Other Democratic lawyers were on standby (as were Republican lawyers) in order to file a request a hand count if the final finish was sufficiently close. In sume, one side was attempting to challenge voters, the other was trying to prevent voter supression. There can be no moral equivalence here.
This tawdry episode was the lowest moment in the history of the Ohio GOP. To think that *this* is the heir to the "party of Lincoln." In the 1860s and 1870s, Ohio Republicans led the fight against the KKK, fought for the passage of the 15th Amendment, and participated in the drafting and passage of Reconstruction-era civil rights statutes. Would Bingham, or Shellabarger, or Sherman recognize their contemporary counterparts? I seriously doubt it.
The only way the Republican elite can defend what their lawyers were trying to do is to *hype* allegations of voter fraud - and they certainly were prepared to delegitimize the election if Kerry took Ohio by playing up a few scattered anecdotes of voter *registration* fraud in Ohio and elsewhere.
There was no evidence of widespread - or even significant - voter registration or voter fraud in Ohio. The main "evidence" the Ohio GOP offered was thousands of returned postcards that had been sent out via *registered* mail to all new voters. When some of that registered mail was not accepted or languished at a post office, it was sent back to the GOP. Obviously, there are many explanations for this - many voters had moved from one apartment to another withn a precinct, others simply refused to pick up the mail from the post office. These are just a few of the valid explanations that were offered in media interviews given by legitimately registered citizens who had been notified to appear at the GOP-led pre-election challenge hearings.
The NAACP worker in Toledo who was accused of filing approximately 100 fictional names in exchange for crack cocaine is currently the target of a criminal investigation, and properly so.
There is, however, no evidence of *widespread* voter *registration* fraud in Ohio. To repeat, any allegations should be investigated and, if true, prosecuted, by the proper authorities.
The Republicans, however, sought to use *anecdotes* to undermine the legitimacy of thousands of voters, and especially African-American voters. But only until they realized their grasp on power was secure. Then suddenly . . . silence. . . .
Cynical and shameful.
The democratic legislature in Indiana will soon be just a bad memory. A Republican sweep of the State offices. After 16 years of Dem rule, our state is a shambles. Daniels has his work cut out for him.
The GOP was going to use anecdotes of fraud to challenge results of elections. Well, what's better: that, or using imbecile statistics to create the appearance of widespread fraud? The Dems have been throwing out all kinds of charges that make the election "look" bad, but as in the case of Florida that I have uncovered right here on this blog, this is a load of crap. The Dems are just throwing things out there to see what sticks. They're relying on the fact that people won't have the time nor energy to research EVERY one of their claims. People will just throw their hands up in the air and say, "I don't know, I remember there were allegations of blacks being disenfranchised" whether it was ever proven or not.
So what's better anecdotes of ACTUAL voter fraud, or insinuations of nonexistent voter fraud.
In regards to the crack incident... sure, that guy got caught. How many didn't?
No one is saying that no voter fraud occurs in an election. It certainly does and it's terrible and undermines our democracy. But you have no evidence to claim that the Republicans commit fraud more than the Democrats do (see Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit... all of which are Democratic strongholds and always have massive voter fraud problems).
Voter fraud is serious and must be dealt with (I recommend that everyone read John Fund's new book on the topic). But to be hysterical about it is terrible. Olbermann and the Democratic Underground types have been making so many voter fraud accusations, reasonable or not (in the case of this particular one about Florida it's not), that it will make it harder for people to take voter fraud accusations that are legitimate and well-founded and well-researched less seriously. People will just throw their hands up and say, "Yeah, it happens... nothing to do about it. Happens all the time, etc." So if you really care about voter fraud, allow poll watchers and research your claims before you make them.
"[T]he people they counted on to cheat just got cold feet and didn't turn out the numbers they expected. Or maybe they were just too high."
By Anonymous, at 6:53 PM
Good God, do you even understand how callous and unreasonable this sounds?
by less seriously, I meant seriously in the last post. Sorry, rules of logic are just social constructs.
John Fund's book was cited repeatedly by Republican elites in the weeks leading up to the election. Part of the priming that was being done before the GOP realized that the vote margin appeared to be wide enough to make unnecessary all their advance work to delegitimize a Kerry victory.
Suddenly, references to the Fund book are far less fashionable.... Wonder why?
Mobius, don't use individual bloggers or Keith Olbermann and then state "the Dems" this and "the Dems" that.
When I've mentioned the challenge effort in Ohio, I *was* referring to a well-publicized strategy of the Ohio GOP.
The Ohio Democratic party has issued press releases to reassure voters that the votes are being counted. "The Dems" aren't responsible for claims of vote tampering.
Also, from the few comments I've read by the Florida State Democratic Party Chairman, Scott Maddox, in the past week, it appears that he is already looking forward and not advancing claims regarding vote tampering.
Maybe some of Kerry's disappointed supporters are raising these questions - which doesn't bother me if they are phrased as questions and if they lead to a careful review of the returns - but it would be a mistake to sweep so broadly that you generalize about "the Dems" or try to attribute these charges to party leaders.
Well publicized? I never read a press-release that said, "The GOP hereby plans to use small anecdotes of voter fraud in isolated cases to undermine the results of any election."
I apologize, not Democrats, just their handlers at MSNBC and NPR (re: Juan Williams). Sorry, my bad. Next time every time I think Democrats, I'll just say "The Media." Deal?
Fact checking John Fund http://mediamatters.org/items/200411010001
(via Media Matters, a well-documented fact-checking project recently launched by David Brock, a former member of the so-called "vast right-wing conspiracy")
I think you should reexamine the meanings of the data in the Cuyohoga total votes cast piece.
The numbers make it appear that more voters cast ballot than registered voters. THe county webiste has warnings about how the votes are tabulated for this election.
Here is the raw data:
Their was a Congressional/State House/State Senate District area that had 9948 absentee ballots cast. This "area" is labled as 10-16-24 in the canvas report.
Some of the areas that includes Firview PArk, North Olmstead, and Westlake.
Here is a table that you might think is interesting:
Location Registerd Election Day Total
Fairview 13,242 8,524 18,472
Westlake 25,627 15,225 25,173
North Olmstead 25,794 15,939 25,887
If you take the values in second column and add 9948 to them , you get the values in the third column. What is happening in the total votes cast is that the absentee ballots are tracked by these "districts" based upon congress, and state legislature boundaries and not necessarily according to the city where the vote resides. Those 9948 absentee ballots were added in to the total vote count for each of the cities that they include. But not all of the 9948 votes were from Fairview park, or all from Westlake, or all from North Olmstead.
Those ballots were added in to the total for each area, but for terms of tabulating the votes for each candidate, they were treated like a city and added in the tally one time.
So the total votes cast for Westlake, Olmstead, and Fairview Park combined would look something like:
8,524
15,525
15,939
9,948
_________
49,936
and not
18,472
25,173
25,887
---------
69, 532
You are looking at the wrong place for voter fraud. The quick knee jerk, sarcastic remarks about the election and shooting down the results without looking into what the numbers mean provide fodder for people like Michael Moore. It misinforms the public. It does a disservice for the country and the Democratic party.
I am just saying things are not what they appear on the surface. These numbers come from the county's canvassing report.
A further exposition by Mr. Farhad Manjoo to the effect that, no, it wasn't a stolen election.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/10/voting/index.html
Tom Perkins
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I'm sure the moonbat anonymous is right, the dastardly Republicans are the ones committing massive voter fraud. There are many infamous locales where, in fact, massive vote fraud routinely occurs. An earlier commenter mentioned Detroit, Philly, and Cleveland; you could add San Francisco, St. Louis and the South Florida chad-hanging counties so well-known from 2000. The truly amazing part is how those Republican cheaters only seem manage to do their foul deeds in precints and cities controlled entirely by Democrats!
Well, I think we should heed Olbermann and take vote fraud very seriously. We could cut down on it nationwide by insisting on valid ID, paper ballots, cleaning up voter rolls to only include legal voters. That would be a good start, anyway, and then I'm sure that Olbermann, anonymous and all their ilk would be very happy with the results...
You're an idiot if you read any criticisms of Republicans above as defending a claim of "massive Republican voter fraud."
But continue with the mockery and denigration - to wit, "tin foil hats," "moonbat" and "their ilk" - it just supports what I've argued above about the uncivil and coarse rhetoric of the Republican elite. They've taught their followers well. If you think that your brand of insult and mockery honors the best of this Nation's civic discourse, then so be it.
Fine, Anonymous at 4:34pm, you don't like Republicans. What do you think of the notoriously left-wing Salon.com's Mr. Farhad Manjoo proclaiming--with anslysis and evidence--that the result of the election was not the result of fraud?
Yours, TDP
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RE: Olberman and the rest of the looney left claiming fraud in Florida re high Bush count in areas with high Democrat affilieated voter registration
Registered Democrat Zell Miller of nearby Southern state, Georgia, voted for Bush. --Time to rest case and stop wasting time on Olberman, who: 1) strikes me as silly at best 2) in each of maybe five times I tuned him in over the last nine months took at least one snide, resentful shot at Fox News Channel each time. 3) Is so hard put for material that he was basically "all O'Reilly, all the time" for about a week or two while O'Reilly of Fox News Channel was having his law suit problem, and 4) has about a 0.5 (= 0.5% of households)or so tiny share of audience last time I saw audience numbers listed on Drudge.
JB
rastajenk:
Here's the voting machine link you were looking for:
http://www.boomchicago.nl/Section/Latest-News/BoomChicagoVotingMachine
Enjoy!
Olbermann's not the problem, I agree. If he were more important, he would be. But Olbermann is a reflection of the accusations emanating from the fever swamps in the Democratic camp, and even what seem to be more respectible quarters like Rotten Denmark (see above).
I apologize for how long this post is, but there were so many errors to correct, and I quoted the whole thing so everyone could follow.
>Maybe Olbermann's Florida and Ohio examples were flawed, but don't do your "typical Republican elite . . use anecdotes for evidence,then demonize and belittle your opposition routine." I will hand it to the Republican elite: they do a fabulous job demonizing their opposition; they know how to use anecdotes instead of real data, and they are unashamed of elevating their pursuit of power over any principle. Ohio's Republican party attempted -- before backing down after facing a *huge* backlash,<
The huge backlash this election was against "anything goes," no-standards, liberalism that was personified by the gay marriage proponents.
>even though they won a 3am order from the 6th Circuit -- to send thousands of their lawyers (what happened to all the trial lawyer hate, I wonder?)<
90% of all lawyers never see a court room, and are not trial lawyers. Trial lawyers have a large monetary incentive to create problems and victims so they can sue wealthy doctors and businesses. Many other lawyers perform useful legal servies without being a drain on the society. There is no inconsistency here.
>*primarily* to African-American precincts in the larger cities. <
Those living in cities have a much higher rate of moving residences, one of the main reasons for the challenges. A voter must register in the precinct he or she lives in. Many large cities in the industrial Northwest, e.g. Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinatti, have very large African American populations. Cleveland's population is 51% African-American, so any challenge if evenly applied would be primarily in African American districts, because the African American population is the majority in those urban areas.
>They also sent notices to hundreds and probably thousands of citizens who thought they had already registerd to vote, telling them that they were being challenged and they should report for a pre-election day hearing. Those pre-election challenges were later struck down by two federal courts.<
And they were reinstated by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on the early morning of Nov 2, as you yourself said above. Would you like to see illegal immigrants voting in Ohio? Or French people on vacation in the states? Why not just give every person in the world a vote? Yes, let's make sure not to contest any voter registrations, and maybe all the America-hating muslims can vote absentee too. I can already see the campaign signs: Moqtata Al-Sadr for President!
>You don't seriously think that that Republican elite challenge mailing did little to suppress the turnout, which in turn resulted in fewer recoverable provisional ballots? I hope someone calls each of those voters who received challenge notices to find out whether they did indeed go to the polls on Nov. 2.<
It could just as easily created greater turnout if people perceived there to be a vote suppression attempt. In fact, one tactic used by the Democratic party to bring out the African-American vote was to claim massive vote suppression prior to the election.
Also, they were all allowed to vote provisionally. In any case it would not change the outcome. Bush's margin of victory in Ohio was 140,000 votes. There were less than 10,000 challenged voters, and certainly not all of them would have voted for Kerry.
>The Ohio GOP had no serious evidence of voter registration fraud -- and they were asked by the media to hand over their evidence -- but the Republican elite were ready to pounce and run with those talking points if they lost Ohio.<
Both sides were ready to pounce if there was room for debate over who won. But Bush's margin of victory was too large, and was unambiguous.
>It turns out that they didn't have to worry because Ohio is the last remaining bastion of the punchcard ballot, which political scientists like Henry Brady have shown in *systematic* studies will produce more lost ballots in African American precincts.<
Henry Brady is a political science professor at UC-Berkeley, one of the most liberal institutions in the entire country. I doubt you would believe a political science professor from Bob Jones University if he did a study on it.
>But go ahead - if you can live yourself: join the Republican elite. Do you really think the neo-cons in Defense, or Ann Coulter or William Kristol or David Brooks really give a damn about what a working class family in Warren County Ohio cares about?<
How about decency on the airwaves for those parents who care what their children are exposed to? Low taxes, anyone? What about self-sufficiency and self-responsibility? Making people support themselves instead of taxing the capable to support the incapable? This is a perfect example of how the liberals just don't get it in terms of most of America.
>The Republican elite (with few exceptions, like Brooks and Kristol) appeals to its constituents in the most cynical and insincere way: use the language of faith on the stump, but don't implement compassionate
conservativism in policies. Use fear of terrorism to
support the Iraq invasion,<
I am writing from 10 miles east of Fallujah, Iraq right now. The threat is real. Not to mention a Harvard study from yesterday (www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html) that found that relative political freedom is the only correlating factor to how many terrorist acts are committed by a country's citizens. Democracy in Iraq will be an exceptionally powerful long-term method of lowering terrorism.
> continue to lie to the American people (at least those who you choose to admit to your "town meetings" on the stump) when the evidence demonstrates that you've been lying, use sarcasm and mockery of your opposition<
As if the entire litany of Democratic columnists this week calling "Red America" stupid, ignorant, and bigoted isn't mockery? GW Bush has been one of the most mocked presidents in a long time, largely by the liberal media.
>when Kerry is offering serious criticism during one of the most if not the most serious and dire eras in our nation's history, don't allow the press corp to ask you any questions, banish them from any access when they try to serve as watchdogs, or call in your Republican elite friends to label any serious empirically valid criticism as just another biased article by the liberal media.<
Journalists self-described as Democratic or liberal outnumber those self-described as Republican or conservative by from 2-to-1 to 3-to-1 depending on which poll you look at. The liberal bias is real.
>John Kerry wasn't the best salesmen in American campaign history, but he is an honorable man who was willing to fight for the security of this country, and to stand up and criticize the Administration for their many failures and -- indeed -- demonstrable incompetence in handling the war in Iraq.<
As I said before, I am writing from Iraq right now. The soldiers over here do not think there is incompetence, and neither do I. Certainly to make a claim of "demonstrable incompetence" you are obviously a member of the military, so you would be credible about military operations and handling of wars, and not just parroting what you've heard on TV. What is your military rank? How many soldiers have you commanded? What operations have you analyzed?
>If you were at all intellectually honest, you'd recognize that those criticisms -- and the deep feeling of dread that half the country is feeling right now -- does indeed have a firm basis in reality. <
Is this the same feeling of dread that conservatives felt during the Clinton administration?
>Remember, it was your party's strategist who said that empirical facts don't matter, the "reality-based community" will find things to debate, and meanwhile we'll go on "creating a new reality." (Suskind, NYT 10/17/04) <
I see -- there is only one reality, and you have access to the most accurate version of it. What the person was saying is that the presuppositions that filter people's experiences are the key, not the actual experiences themselves. This is basic psychological theory. I swear, sometimes the insistence of secularists and liberals that they have the only true reality makes the most fundamentalist Christian seem open-minded.
>The strategy of the Republican elite: Lie, conceal, and persuade. It's worked. Welcome to America's 21st century. God help us all.<
Hmm. How about John Kerry meeting TWICE with Veitnamese communists in France? Did the "objective" media bring this out to light?
If you continue to write such blatant fictional propaganda, I will have no choice but to recommend that you go work for the New York Times.
All talking points present and accounted for: a few liberal media/NYT references, bashing of systematic empirical work because - GOSH(!) - it's a Berkeley professor, the "out of touch" jab, etc. Nice work, but predictable.
If you think Bush & co. developed ANY plan to secure the borders and to maintain order in Iraq after the invasion, then maybe you can send some of that Kool-aid from Iraq. It might cheer me up during the next few years.
I doubt that the best way to respond to the Republican elite's derisive mockery is to respond in kind. I'll search for a better way next time. Meanwhile, carry on. It's working well for you.
You know, the whole "Republicans put challengers in African-American districts" argument is smoke designed to obscure, not to enlighten. Believe it or not, the Republican Party (like their counterparts) has limited resources. Where do you think those armies of Democratic observers and lawyers were concentrated? Do you think they would do the most good spread out over sparsely populated rural districts, or in large cities where far more voters are concentrated?
And where do most of the African-Americans in Ohio live? In farm country, or in the larger cities? Put your strategic hat on, please, if you have one. Pretend for a moment that you're a Republican. Were would you as a party position your trained challengers? In sparsely peopled Republican-heavy districts, or in densely-populated districts with lots of Democrats (which tend to have more African-Americans)? Why would Democrats be inclined to put more of their challengers in, say, mostly white suburbs with lots of middle-class Republicans? And do you think that it's perfectly acceptable to cast an illegal vote if you happen to be an African-American but not if you are white?
Anonymous of 11:46 PM -- why is it that Republican arguments are "talking points"; but your arguments aren't? Such as the one about the Bush administration having no plan to secure Iraq's borders -- why, that's an original thought no one else ever uttered during the campaign. Too bad Kerry never thought of that one, that'd have swung 100,000 Ohioan votes his way.
And Kerry, if he were in charge, by gum, those Iraqi borders would be so tight a mosquito couldn't get through without his say-so. Because he had a plan. We're not quite sure what the plan was, but he had one. And it was a great one, but now that he lost the election, he's so angry at us for not voting him in that he's going to punish us by keeping it a secret.
Oh, wait, he did tell us part of the plan. He was going to get France and Germany to do our heavy lifting for us. Yeah, that would work. They're just champing at the bit to get started. If only that darn Bush didn't get re-elected, they'd be flying thousands of troops over there right now. Thousands of troops they don't even have. But because Bush scowls a lot (and he wears a cowboy hat sometimes! Brrr...) while Kerry smiles more (and he speaks French!), they'd definitely be there for us. C'est la vie....
Iraq is the size of California. We can't even secure the Mexican border on one side of that state, let alone the entire perimeter of a foreign country 9,000 miles away. It's absurd to think that even a million soldiers would be able to "secure" Iraq's borders.
So let me see if I got this straight: Republican arguments/ideas = talking points; "marching orders" (preferably issued by evil genius Karl Rove"); spin; far-right; ultra-conservative; divisive; (or my personal favorite) "wedge issues."
Democratic arguments/ideas = fresh; change; logical; uniting, not dividing; reasonable; consensus; bipartisan; moderate; centrist; (or if they're downright Marxist) left-of-center.
Yup, makes sense to me. Democrats never use talking points memos. Uh-uh, don't believe in 'em. Every argument, every thought must spring forth from your head fresh as a daisy, in the moment. No wonder it's so hard for Republicans to out-debate Democrats. They're constantly coming up with new ideas we've never seen or heard before. Every argument, we're busy cutting and pasting our talking points memos into the comments window, while they're free-associating like newborn babes in a brainstorming session. Those darn Dems have so many new thoughts, our memos are obsolete the day after Karl Rove faxes them to every Republican in the country (those of us with our VRWC membership cards, anyway). Makes it very hard on the poor devil....
Or wait a sec: Maybe the reason we can keep using the same tired stale ol' arguments is because the Dems keep using the same tired stale ol' arguments too! Nah, that makes too much sense. And we all know Republicans are too stupid to make any sense.
Check out the Ann Coulter article for N0v.10th
The difference between the policy critique offered by Kerry and his supporters (as well as some intellectually honest Republican senators like Luger and Hagel) is that those policy critiques were based on factual arguments.
Republican "talking points" by contrast, are efforts to obfuscate by focusing, not on factual rebuttals, but rather by demonizing and derogatory attacks about the messenger.
Examples:
1. Oh, it's a BERKELEY professor, so WHATEVER, we all know (wink, wink) that he's unreliable. Apparently, there is no need to bother reading his articles that have been published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in political science.
2. Or, all well-researched reporting -- and granted not all is well-researched, but SOME is -- unfavorable to the president is dismissed because, hey, the media is all BIASED.
For more on this strategy, see Foer's article in the New Republic, if you don't like the Suskind article's blind quote about the faith-based presidency in the NYT. Foer develops the case for why I think the Republican elite is a cynical group that has deliberately chosen not to fight over the facts but instead cares only about the pursuit of political power.
I don't think the guy in charge of this blog, who is doing good work to answer some of the questions that have been raised about the votes in Florida and Ohio, is intellectually dishonest. At least he's putting together a factual rebuttal. What I resent is his apparent eagerness to jump on the Republican elite's bandwagon of derogation and name-calling.
And about the Ohio GOP: If they want to help lobby for more funding to modernize the system of voter registration verification in this state, I'd support it. What this recent episode suggests to me, however, is that they only cared about filing their lawyer-challengers into the polls when they thought their pursuit of power required it. Like I said above, it's not about the timeless principle that every *legitimate* vote should count, it's about "getting the job done" when needed.
Give me a break. What, the Left never demonizes people for their affiliations?
Let's see, let me think... Oh yeah, John Lott (B.A., Ph.D. economics UCLA) (for all of his faults) at the beginning of his career was demonized for holding an Olin Fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School. Obviously, that means he rigs his statistics.
Or, Peter Keisler (B.A. Yale, J.D. U of Chicago) who was Borked for a federal judgeship a couple of years ago because he was one of the founders of the "far-right", "extremist" Federalist Society. Never mind that Akhil Amar, Guido Calabrese, and Jack Balkin, all liberals, have presented at Fed Soc conferences. But, Keisler, well, he must be an extremist right-wing nut.
Let's see, Harvey Mansfield (Prof. of Gov't @ Harvard), oh yeah, he's an evil racist because he thinks that Affirmative Action at Harvard led to grade inflation.
Charles Murray (B.A. Harvard, Ph.D. poli sci MIT) must be into eugenics and social darwinism (besides the usual smear of racist) because he said that there is a statistically significant difference in IQ test scores between blacks and whites.
Donald Kagan (Sterling Prof. of Classics @ Yale) is a racist imperialist mysoginist because he dares to suggest that maybe, just, maybe, American college students should first learn about Western Civilization and culture before they start reading "I Rigoberta, Menchu."
If these aren't smears I don't know what are. Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky is running around defending Pol Pot to anyone willing to listen.
Sure, the Berkeley thing was a poor argument on the part of that guy but the Right doesn't hold a monopoly on smear-attacks. Look at every speech given by Chuck Schumer about judicial appointments. Or every statement made by Ralph Neas, who knowingly lied about Michael McConnell. Or Dianne Feinstein who helped bork Miguel Estrada and Priscila Owens, and smeared their good names. You want some academics? Look at Glenda Gilmore and her hubby Dimitry Gutas at Yale. Or how about Cornell West at Princeton. Catherine McKinnon at Michigan. All of them have at one point or another called Republicans either racists or fascists or mysoginists.
You want facts? Facts don't work with you guys. Before the election, Republicans said, "look, we have evidence of voter fraud and fraudulent registrations. There need to be poll watcher." And there was evidence: see the crack for registrations NAACP scandal in Ohio (documented fact). Look at the cigarettes for votes case in Wisconsin in 2000 (the Democratic fund-raiser from New York was caugh on camera doing it and paid a fine to avoid jail time). Instead, Democrats attacked Republicans for wanting to disenfranchise black voters. Who's peddling in innuendo and who's presenting facts?
Do you know how many times I've been labeled a racist, a fascist, a mysoginist, etc. when I was at Yale? Because, you know, we libertarians take our marching orders from Uncle Adolph, Jerry Falwell, and Generalissimo Franco. That kind of rhetoric, I usually hear on the Left, and from the esteemed academics who publish in your esteemed peer-reviewed journals. Give me a break about smears. You people hold conferences that describe George Bush as a Nazi and all Republicans as either idiots or evil fascists. We present allegations of voter-fraud and we're the race-baiters and name-callers. The Left, well, they just present the facts and make reasonable arguments.
Go back to your Critical Theory seminar. Maybe Angela Davis will listen to your whining over there.
Oh and one more thing. Regarding the tin-foil title for the blog. That was a direct quote of Olbermann in his poor attempt to be funny on Monday night's show.
Read the transcript I linked to in a later post.
"Foer develops the case for why I think the Republican elite is a cynical group that has deliberately chosen not to fight over the facts but instead cares only about the pursuit of political power."
A writer at the New Republic (an organ of the Democratic Party) "develops the case for why I think." This, from the guy who argued that Republicans do nothing but parrot the party line.
Let's have a show of hands: was the major body-English that Kerry practiced throughout his campaign -- zigging and zagging his way through all of the issues -- based on principle, or on the "cynical... pursuit of political power"? Just read the Newsweek (hardly a Republican rag) post-election analysis of the Kerry campaign if you harbor any doubts.
One example, if you please. Kerry's stance on gay marriage. Does anybody think he fooled the American public with his oh-so-nuanced straddle on that issue? This is a guy who expoused all kinds of personal beliefs (I believe marriage should be between a man and a woman; I personally believe abortion is wrong; guns are all right by me), none of which were supported by his public record on these issues. Putting on a hunting jacket (I think the price tag was still showing) for a day in a feeble attempt to gull rural voters into thinking he's "one of them" is NOT an extremely cynical act?
And what about Republicans, do they obfuscate the facts (or "LIE!") as your side so often claims? Let's take a favored hobbyhorse of the left, the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Didn't exist, say you. But actually, there were numerous contacts between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials. A branch of Al Qaeda operated in the northwest of Iraq. Some Al Qaeda people lived in and received medical treatment in Baghdad, etc.
Your side argues that these connections are irrelevant or insignificant or misreported for a variety of reasons. Fair enough. We can agree to disagree here. But you rise to the level of insufferability -- and yes, obfuscation -- when you argue that because you believe these ties to be insignificant, ergo there were no ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and any claim to that effect is a lie.
Or let's take the whole issue of WMDs in Iraq, shall we? Every major intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam had WMDs. Saddam acted just like one would expect a leader to act who was trying to hide WMDs from the world. But when none were found in Iraq (except for the entire infrastructure to create new WMDs, and a plan to do so once the inspectors gave up), rather than calling this one line of argument in favor of at the war a grievous error, the left called it a "LIE!" It was a good issue for the left, but they overplayed their hand. Most Americans could see it was a mistake in judgment, not a lie. Which is why the lie lie didn't fly. It might even have backfired.
But you know what, I'm not claiming that Republicans are without blemish. But I'm tired of seeing Democrats pretending to be in sole possession of facts and principle and reason, while Republicans are completely cynical and power-hungry and irrational. It's this tone of superiority that red-staters find so exasperating in the left.
Let's be honest, both sides crave power. But let's go a step further and admit that both sides want power in order to implement their agenda. You may vehemently disagree with the other side's agenda, but don't claim to be the only ones with the best interests of your followers at heart. As long as your side maintains this condescending and patronizing attitude, you'll never obtain the power you desire.
I certainly would never suggest that liberals never make unfair accusations. Certainly some do. In my experience, though -- and I've worked for years among most of the lawyers and academics (both the conservatives and the liberals) you mentioned in your comment Mobius -- I've never heard the kind of smearing you describe.
Keisler, for example, actually had many liberal law professors and colleagues writng letters on his behalf; he *was* treated unfairly by the MD delegation (only because of the power given to them by the Senate hold procedure), not because there was a liberal elite smear campaign against him.
On the other hand, there are many liberal academics at Yale who don't hide their hostility towards Bush - Jack Balkin is one example. BUT, he will almost always backs up his criticism with a lengthy explanation. If you read his academic or popular work, you would not just get all snark, all the time. You will also learn why he believes his vision of American constitutonalism is being dismantled by the Bush Administration. The denigration and name-calling doesn't do 90% of the work.
By comparison, the Republican elites in academia who've ventured into the public intellectual arena (especially those with blogs) *have* all too quickly embraced these tactics of dismissing opponents by name-calling, demonizing, or using anecdotes rather than real evidence. I think it is indicative of a bigger intellectual trend in contemporary conservative circles, and Foer describes it well. Calling The New Republic a "Democratic Party Organ" in order to dismiss entirely the arguments of that article - without even bothering to read it - or to describe a criticism that you disagree with as "whining" just provides more support for the arguments I tried to defend earlier.
I don't mean to sweep too broadly here - there are prominent conservative intellectuals who I think are morally serious cultural critics. They however are not fixtures on Fox, nor are they hyped on WSJ's Opinion Journal, or invited to serve as policy advisors in the White House. It's a whole different game now.
First, I must apologize for the tone in my post. I just don't enjoy being told that I'm repeating Republican party talking points and engaging in a smear campaign.
Yes, Jack Balkin is a real stand-up guy. As is Akhil Amar. Of course there are honest liberal academics. I would say Paul Kennedy, even, is one of those, regardless of the fact that he's been, in my view, wrong on almost every foreign policy and grand strategy question of the last 40 years. Steven Pinker at Harvard is another very honest liberal. I don't disagree with you there.
But there are MANY liberals in academia and the legal world that smear conservatives ALL the time.
You've never heard smears against Kagan, Mansfield, Murray, Lott, etc? I heard them ALL the time. Not just from whack jobs, but respectable academics. I could dig up some links for you, but don't have the time now.
As for conservatives in academia engaging in name-calling and smear campaigns, please... Who in particular? Can you name names? Every conservative academic I've ever run across has been nothing but serious and substantive in his or her critique of the left. Certainly, there are some who are not and I will not argue with you on that, but don't pretend like the Right mostly engages in smear campaigns and the Left usually presents facts and logic to back-up their claims.
You never see serious conservative academics on the editorial pages of the WSJ or in the Bush administration? That sounds to me like a smear that is clearly not supported by the facts.
Wolfowitz is most definitely a serious academic, who has been the subject of smear campaigns that have little basis in fact. Condi Rice, who was Provost of Stanford and one of the leading experts on Soviet politics and international strategy has been the subject of all kinds of inciminations and smears ("she only got her job because she's black", "she's a fascist", "she's a liar", "she's incompetent", "she's an idiot"... I've heard all of these from various organs of the left). As is John Yoo (now a law professor at UC-Berkeley) who authored the memo justifying torture as a matter of international law. Greg Mankiw is an important economist who has bore his share of unfounded criticism. Larry Lindsay is another serious academic economist who served in the Bush administration for a while. There are many other academics who have served in the Bush administration who are not hacks and partisans, but serious academic minds who have been published in peer-reviewed journals and are extremely thoughtful and intellectually honest.
Elliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Ruth Wedgewood, Michael Barone, Susan Lee, and others have all been a presence on the WSJ Editorial page. Edward C. Prescott, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in economics just had an op-ed in the WSJ a couple of weeks ago. And the WSJ publishes liberals as well (Al Hunt comes to mind).
Look, I don't know why you've labeled me as being in the tank for the Bush administration. Go look at the Yale Free Press archives (of the actual print edition). I've been as harsh of Bush and others as I have been of the Left (I've called the Bushies out on No Child Left Behind and the Patriot Act). I'm mostly a libertarian and will call the Republicans out whenever I disagree with them (and I have done so many times).
Your criticism seems to stem from your disagreement with me. Fine, you can disagree. But don't impugn my independence. I don't engage in smear campaigns against the Left. I don't appreciate people who do (like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, etc). But don't pretend like the Left doesn't have its own Ann Coulters (Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman come to mind).
In my view, the culture wars are far more intellectually respectable (aka not filled with "smear" campaigns) than the insults and name-calling in the elite press and media.
I've certainly seen liberal academics and students harshly - very harshly - criticize figures like Charles Murray, John Yoo. Sometimes these criticisms -- which were backed up with substantive arguments about why their work was empirically and/or morally wrong -- were even supplemented by protests, like holding signs up at a lecture or, in the case of Yoo, signing a statement of alumni disapproval. Is that a "smear"? If the action is based on a substantive disagreement about policy positions or arguments, and that disagreement is developed by the opposition, then I wouldn't call it a smear. In my view, a smear is to ridicule and dismiss the other side without actually bothering to engage the substance of the dispute.
As far as charges of misogyny and so on, I don't think conservatives like Harvey Mansfield have suffered very many dismissive insults or smears, especially compared to what I hear about Catherine "she thinks all sex is rape" MacKinnon. You may hear grumbling about Straussians or whatever, but Mansfield's always been a high-prestige academic. Same with Kagan.
To take another example, Condi Rice is a nice person, but she alienated many people at Stanford when she was provost (and it had to do with policy positions she took), and there are many more people who think she's not a good manager in the Bush Admnistration. Many lost respect for her when she was so uncandid during her testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and they criticized her for not being more forthcoming. Is that a smear? Although I can't deny it happened, I don't know of anyone who has (in private or in print) tried to demonize her instead of critique her peformance. Same goes for Wolfowitz, the criticisms are substantive.
As far as coverage on the WSJ pages, I was thinking of James Taranto's snide opinionjournal.com postings - not the op-ed pages of the print paper, which does include (obviously) many pieces by serious conservative scholars, as you've mentioned. Glenn Reynolds is an example of someone who is a professor, and also now an influential blogger, who tends to rely on mockery and denigration rather than careful substantive criticisms (not always, but A LOT more than someone like, say, Balkin). I also think his snark 'tude is the *primary* reason for his success, which makes me sad because I think our public discourse is far coarser than it was even in the 1980s, at the height of PC infighting and the big public fights like the Bork hearings.
Other conservative academic blogs like I read, like Bainbridge and the Volkh Conspiracy people, among others, often tend to link approvingly to snide and derogatory comments by the Natonal Review's The Corner bloggers or Ann Coulter.
Paul Krugman is a Bush-hater, but he is substantive (even if you think he is substantive and wrong). I agree with you that Maureen Dowd is irritating. She's a superficial person and her columns are a waste of space. But far more people in this country are influenced by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and even Ann Coulter.
Maureen Dowd doesn't "move" public opinion. Actually, she's not even influential among the "opinion leaders" on the liberal side. I know that she once won a Pulitzer, but even then she was writing cute coverage of Clinton, not spearheading a culture war. Dowd's main role seems to be providing damning quotes for the Republican journalists to use to bash all liberals.
Right now, I'm listening to Fox News, which is doing a report on the post-election rage of the "cultural elite" - here comes attacks on Barbra, Maureen, etc. etc. t's tiresome, but I also know it's effective.
One other thing: I wouldn't equate Maureen Dowd with Ann Coulter. I will never understand what makes so many people seek out Coulter's writings or even condone her usually unsubstantiated, and often exaggerated and deliberately provocative invective. What Coulter is evidently trying to provoke is not the sense of wry irony a la Dowd. The goal is to provoke contempt. And she's not alone.
Re: Krugman
A couple of months ago, he wrote a column claiming that those who are working for the reconstruction government in Iraq got their jobs because of nepotism within the Bush administration. That sounds like a smear to me, not just because it's false, but because it impugns the integrity of the people whose policies Krugman disagrees with.
You claimed that serious academics who don't smear people don't work in the Bush administration. I showed you those who do. Now, they certainly have their shortcomings (for example, whatever Rice's poor management skills might be), but this doesn't mean that they are not serious scholars who got their jobs not for being in the tank but for being very very smart and serious people.
Look, maybe the liberals that you know are much nicer, but I have personally heard people claim that Condi Rice is an idiot and a fascist. I have personally personally heard people call Paul Wolfowitz a Nazi. In fact, I've heard people standing on the street on the Upper West Side calling Cheney a Nazi (sure they were Lyndon Larouche supporters, but quite a few people stopped next to their stand and nodded approvingly) because he reads Strauss.
This brings Strauss to mind. Those rumblings about Straussians, well they're not just rumblings about "oh, Straussians are wrong for reasons X, Y, and Z." It usually involves some variant on "Strauss is a Nazi."
Re: Kagan
Why do you think he's no longer Dean of Yale College? He gave a speech at one freshman convocation, saying that Western Civ ought be the core of a Yale education. People got very upset and called him an imperialist, jingoist, etc. He was no longer Dean. Yes, Kagan is highly regarded in the academic world. But there is also a lot of snarkiness about his defense of Western Civ.
Re: Mansfield
I have personally heard him called a racist by several people. He came to the Yale Political Union once, and people called him a mysoginist because he had the gall to claim that feminism is bad for women. Yeah, people come and hold signs. What do you think those signs say? "Harvey Mansfield, you're wrong."? No, they usually say something along the Nazi/Mysoginist/Racist line.
Re: Yoo
Yes, people wrote that petition, asking him to renounce his memo or else resign his post. But there were others who claimed that Yoo was a Nazi for supporting torture. You may not have heard it. I have.
Re: Dowd
It seems like your only argument here is that the Right is worse than the left in terms of smears because more people listen to them. Just because Dowd isn't even funny, even when she smears and is being annoying doesn't mean that she doesn't smear. I'm sorry, but in objective terms, Ann Coulter really is pretty funny, if not annoying.
Re: Glenn Reynolds
Yeah, he takes his jabs at the left, but he also often links to them and agrees with them. I don't think that you can simply lump Glenn into the broad category of "smearer".
Re: Volokh
I have never seen anyone on the Volokh Conspiracy blog link to Ann Coulter. Sorry, I don't think it's ever happened. I've also never seen anyone link to a piece on The Corner that was somehow smear-ing. In fact, I've really only read condemnation by Volokh of smear campaigns and such. I would like to see examples of what you mean, because I think that Volokh and his co-bloggers are incredibly thoughtful and intellectually honest and not in the tank for anybody.
I don't read Bainbridge very often, so I can't comment.
Yes, Balkin is cool. Sure, of course. But, for every Balkin, there's an Atrios or a Kos. Even Jeff Jarvis can be snipy. It's not a big deal if you're snipy. It *is* a big deal if you go around calling people names, like "Nazis", just to discredit their work without engaging them or their points in any way.
If you want mainstream liberal media engaging in smear campaigns, try the Village Voice. I used to read it all the time because I wanted to hear the other side. But it has recently become unbearable with their smarmy attitude towards Christians (that turns even this atheist Jew off) that if not explicitly, then implicitly, smears them all as simpletons and fascists. Besides Nat Hentoff, I can't stand to read the Voice anymore.
As a perfect example... a Hispanic State Senator from East Harlem recently switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican one. Now, I think that I can usually count on The Voice to expose political corruption. That's something that they're usually good on. So, they run a hit piece on her campaign finance irregularities, a week after her party switch. But, they had known about those irregularities, as they admitted in the article, for more than a year. Well, why did they not run it before and only decided to run it now? Could it have anything to do with the fact that she now joined the dark side of Pataki and Bloomberg? Sure, this isn't exactly a smear campaign, but it's not very intellectually honest either.
How about The Nation, one of the most widely read liberal journals of public opinion. Yes, often it engages people. But so does National Review. More often than not, however, the Nation will smear the Bush administration either on its cover or in its articles.
I've never heard Katrina Vanden Heuvel say a single nice thing about any Republican, save possibly Arlen Specter and John McCain (I wonder why).
As for the more general complaint about me resorting to name-calling, etc in my blog post. If Keith Olbermann and the people in the Democratic Underground and Greg Palast and others of their ilk didn't constantly harp on "Republicans are evil and commit voter-fraud. They stole the election in 2000 and now stole it again in 2004" then I wouldn't have used the attitude. If their questions came in the same tone as that of Rotten Denmark (and even he got smarmy with his attitude towards myself and the Yale Free Press), I wouldn't have used the tone that I did (see my blog post later where I engage some of Rotten's substantive points). If you're hysterically calling the other side dishonest and evil without first checking the facts, you deserve to be called a tin-foiler, moonbatter, etc. I'm sorry, but that's true. Regardless, the tin-foil thing was a direct quote from Olbermann's broadcast.
If you think any of my posts have been hysterical, then you have some problems. And I can see why we disagree about what constitutes a smear that works through belittling and dismissing, and what constitutes criticism that is attempting to engage another substantive position (even to attack it as being foolish or dangerous).
"You" was a genreal "you" not a particular "you" referring to you. Does that make sense? Wow, I'm stating to sound like Heidegger. (Ed - Quick, fetch the cleaver.)
Brad Menfil is not my real name. I work for the RNC. I fear reprisals
if I'm found out.
The truth about this election is this: Florida and Ohio had to go for
Bush in order for him to "win" the election. In reality he lost both
states. In fact, he did not even win the popular vote. He lost the
national popular vote by at least 1,750,000. This shows you the scale
of the fraud.
The exit polls were not wrong. Kerry was the clear winner, but victory
was snatched from him.
Florida first. The 200,000+ margin of victory for Bush made this state
uncontestable. Everybody assumes that even with some fraud, Kerry could
never have made up the difference in a recount. But Kerry actually won
by about 750,000 votes. The numbers were changed by a computer program
(in both electronic and scan-tron voting systems) called "KerryLite."
"KerryLite" of course is not actual name of the program. The actual
name is 11-5-18-18 etc. For additional encryption, the numbers were
jumbled but I'm not sure in which order. The numbers replace the
letters of the alphabet. For example, K is the eleventh letter of the
alphabet.
So the if-then statement goes something like this: "if total true
Kerry>total true Bush, Bush x 1.04x (.04 is a random number)(total true
Kerry), total true Bush". The second part of the equation takes the
total number of votes cast and subtracts the new Bush total, subtracts
the third party totals and leaves the rest for Kerry.
Sometimes the program would also reduce third party votes and award
them to Bush. And even where Bush legitimately won, he was still
awarded additional votes. The big Democratic counties (Broward for
example) went to Kerry because it had to appear that everything was on
the up and up. It's interesting to see this unfold. Does anybody wonder
why the Republican counties were mostly counted after the Democratic
counties? You should wonder, and also know that this was no accident.
The Bush team had to make up the votes as the night went on.
In Ohio, computer voting fraud, vote tossing and voter suppression were
the main methods. Vote tossing was simply the removal of Kerry votes
and some third party votes. In some areas, the Bush vs. Kerry votes
were absurd. Nine to one, eight to two.
Voter suppression took the form of making voters stand in four hour
long lines. This of course took place in Democratic areas. The simplest
thing to do was to have too few voting machines. Sometimes that's all
it takes. People eventually lose patience and leave without casting a
vote.
In other states such as New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire,
Kerry's leads evaporated very quickly once the polls were shut down.
Kerry only won New Hampshire, but barely. As it turned out, the lead
was 6% for Kerry in that state and not enough fraudulent activity took
place to flip the state to Bush.
So this will all come out and be known to everyone. Nothing this
massive can be kept a secret. You're already beginning to see these
"irregularities" and the whisper will become a roar.
Hang in there!
Please,I want to remind all of those who post on this site that each of us, both right and left have to maintain some sense of skepticsm; our alliances can often skew the true reality of the situation. Olbermann is as guilty as any, to promote one side is to deny the other, so where is the "truth" in that sort of journalistic perception. Truely, if you step back and look at the big picture it is obvious that Kerry wanted to win, and Bush did what he had to do to win. Fair or unfair his gameplan for the election was obviously more reaching and in some cases underhanded but in the end he won the election in 2004. I maintain a bi-partisan stance in this ordeal and thank god for that; I do not think that either party has our (any of us) best interest in mind when running for president, just a party agenda that lacks even the slightest consitutional berring on the true issues that could make us a stronger nation. Count...recount and count again, the winner will be Bush, whether he cheated or not so just go live your mundane lives and hope that tomorrow comes just as yesterday did.
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Before our week's coverage goes any further, I should just come out and admit it: I love Yale. I love the educational mission, the academic philosophy, the rich traditions. I do not regret for one moment coming to Yale, and I hope that our reporting does not give readers the impression that I am unhappy here. Quite the contrary.
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