Comments | magicalspork: Democracy on a Silver Platter

magicalspork

Democracy on a Silver Platter

Nov 04, 2004 13:57

Deus ex Machina

BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast has laid the facts out on the table, and I'll take the liberty of posting the article on my LJ.

Kerry Won...
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004
Excerpted from TomPaine.com

---Kerry won. Here are the facts.---I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a ( Read more... )

Comments 8

cometgain November 4 2004, 23:00:59 UTC

I'm amazed that you think that what a random person on the street telling you they voted for (i.e."exit polling") is a better indication of who won the presidency that the actual ballots counted. you're really blowing my mind with this one!

I read an article on msnbc today that discussed how Kerry did not concede until he had all the information regarding the Ohio ballots. the conclusion was that he was trailing by over 136,000 votes and there did not appear to be enough provisional ballots to hold any prospect of victory.

I predicted that a fair-and-square election would get criticized by the losing party (because of what happened last year), luckily there's not enough basis to garner any sort of unnecessary media attention.

May I blow it even further? magicalspork November 5 2004, 02:26:29 UTC

Your optimistic faith in the electoral process is admirable, but it suggests a willingness only to examine on-the-surface mainstream reporting. Those provisional ballots are naught but the tip of the iceberg, as Palast reported. We're talking large-scale, selectively targeted voters being defrauded here; not a matter of Kerry throwing a tantrum over 136,000 sour grapes.

As for the exit-polls: whether you believe them or not, they tend to act as somewhat of a barometer of things to come. I have sincere doubts that the sampling was uniformly inaccurate for every poll. I think the more likely reason why our votes did not match up with exit-polling (or even recent opinion polling) is that our votes were not counted correctly in the first placeIf your claims of a "fair-and-square" election were at all substantiated, the international elections supervisors who oversaw the process would not have noted such remarkable vulnerability in our system. Sure, regardless of outcome, there would have been poor sports in the losers camp, but ( ... )

potential erection problems; polls won't go up cometgain November 5 2004, 02:52:04 UTC

When this travesty hits, I'll be sure to pay attention, and I'm sure "60 Minutes" will break the story. Until then all one can really do is speculate on the possibilities of foul play, unfortunately neither of us have the connections it would take to conduct a proper investigation ourselves. If nothing comes up before January 20th, I think it'll be safe to say that there wasn't a case to dispute the election results.

I agree that exit polls act as somewhat of a barometer of things to come, but as I said before, with an election as close as this one was, it just makes it that much harder for those polls to be accurate.

Gripping the Base magicalspork November 5 2004, 22:58:20 UTC

There are very real possibilities of foul play. The hard facts are as follows:

1.) The likelihood of partisan operatives exploiting e-vote hacks was understood before the election. The notion was becoming so widely disseminated that "Diebold" was a household name before any of this happened.

2.) Many steps were taken, on behalf of activists, to ensure that these machines were fully auditable. However, there is evidence that in some counties (consisting of a peculiarly left-leaning demographic), those machines were allowed - loopholes and all.

3.) Exit-polling in Ohio showed Kerry in a 6% overall lead. After the state was called by all of the networks, the "official" count had Bush in a 2-3% lead. Considering the actuality of statement #1, tell me which is easier to believe: the exit-polls were inaccurate, or that the final vote count was inaccurate?

4.) Neither you nor I have the connections to investigate, per se, but there are some groups who are taking up the burden of exposing this fraud. These things take time, and ( ... )

fyi cometgain November 5 2004, 20:55:04 UTC

After reading this article several times (and seeing it posted by some of my other lj friends) I kept wondering where Paine was getting his facts from (i.e. "Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio") I finally clicked on his reference link to Cleveland Plain Dealer and the article seems to only be about the provisional ballots, it gives no mention to the number 247,672, and after doing a google news search of that stat, the only thing that came up was Paines article.

Okay, I admit it... magicalspork November 5 2004, 23:22:03 UTC

You are correct: the article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer never states the final total of 247,672 votes outright. However, the number provided by TomPaine.com via Greg Palast is still supported by the article.
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From the article:

"Democrat John Kerry decided not to wage an uphill battle to close a 136,000-vote gap, and he conceded defeat to President Bush - though Kerry still insisted that Ohio's 155,000 provisional ballots be counted."
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From the same article:

"Kerry also had an opportunity in Ohio to follow the Al Gore playbook and demand a recount of some 92,672 discounted votes for president, including 12,953 in Cuyahoga County."
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From the TomPaine.com article:

"Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.(all emphasis mine ( ... )

Re: Okay, I admit it... cometgain November 5 2004, 23:56:51 UTC

Thanks for the math. I realized that shortly after my response, I've been going over the articles over and over trying to put this all together.

These numbers are starting to make me dizzy so I'll open up a new question to you:

Why would Michael Moore, as informed as he is, with all his resources, with the hundreds of videocameras he sent out to capture this election and report fraud, the man who has dedicated the last 4 years of his life to unseating the president, acknowledge Bush's victory on his website today? I'd figure he would be spearheading this entire investigation or at least allude to his fans that something fishy has happened.

Premature Ejaculation? magicalspork November 6 2004, 01:26:26 UTC

Well, if anything, his cameras would only be capturing suspicious behaviour at polling places. It has been demonstrated that all it takes is a single line of malicious code within the machine - one that only becomes active for the duration of the voting - to swing a county from blue to red; to swing a state from Kerry to Bush ( ... )