conspiracy theories
Dick Morris, the political hack, wrote in an article in The Hill that the exit polls last Tuesday which showed Kerry winning in a landslide (winning not only Florida and Ohio, but Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and Nevada) must have been sabotaged to be so wrong. As he points out: "Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state." Given their reliability, "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 Morris ignores the other possibility, that the exit polls were guaging the votes that people had made and that it was the voting tabulators -- the counting machines -- that were having problems.
In Florida, for example, there are some very iffy numbers. According to Common Dreams, there are several counties in Florida where heavily Democratic counties went to Bush=. For example: "In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush." That, my friends, is fishy at the very least. Polls from the beginning of this election cycle to the bitter end have suggested that 90%+ of Democrats were voting for Kerry, and 90%+ of Republicans were voting for Bush. In Florida, it seems, that trend was bucked in an incredible way.
Even more interesting, however, is the fact that this phenomena is most apparent in areas using optical scanners to tabulate as opposed to e-voting. This chart shows how in many counties using op-scan counting, Bush's numbers were as high as 4-times higher than one might suspect given history and party registrations while Kerry often received less than half that expected (no numbers were more than 50% off in those using e-voting). This graphic shows how off the exit polls were in several states -- paper ballots are only off a percent or two while e-voting results are off by several percent. Sketchy.
Top all this (and the counts of irregularities that I'm trying to keep track of below) with the fact that all this "stuff" seems to favor Republicans.
I don't mean to flash a tinfoil hat here because it really doesn't seem to me that any fraud which may or may not have occured this year will ever be proven (because it all seems to be happening with machines that conveniently leave no paper trail to diagnose a problem), but it definitely is something that we may need to be concerned about. If there are problems in the way that we count votes in this country, it is vital that we fix those problems. We can't very well call ourselves a democracy if we don't count the votes of the people...
But Morris ignores the other possibility, that the exit polls were guaging the votes that people had made and that it was the voting tabulators -- the counting machines -- that were having problems.
In Florida, for example, there are some very iffy numbers. According to Common Dreams, there are several counties in Florida where heavily Democratic counties went to Bush=. For example: "In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush." That, my friends, is fishy at the very least. Polls from the beginning of this election cycle to the bitter end have suggested that 90%+ of Democrats were voting for Kerry, and 90%+ of Republicans were voting for Bush. In Florida, it seems, that trend was bucked in an incredible way.
Even more interesting, however, is the fact that this phenomena is most apparent in areas using optical scanners to tabulate as opposed to e-voting. This chart shows how in many counties using op-scan counting, Bush's numbers were as high as 4-times higher than one might suspect given history and party registrations while Kerry often received less than half that expected (no numbers were more than 50% off in those using e-voting). This graphic shows how off the exit polls were in several states -- paper ballots are only off a percent or two while e-voting results are off by several percent. Sketchy.
Top all this (and the counts of irregularities that I'm trying to keep track of below) with the fact that all this "stuff" seems to favor Republicans.
I don't mean to flash a tinfoil hat here because it really doesn't seem to me that any fraud which may or may not have occured this year will ever be proven (because it all seems to be happening with machines that conveniently leave no paper trail to diagnose a problem), but it definitely is something that we may need to be concerned about. If there are problems in the way that we count votes in this country, it is vital that we fix those problems. We can't very well call ourselves a democracy if we don't count the votes of the people...
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