Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/1/06, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> Mike Miller wrote:
> > You have to check out this article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  It was
> > just posted a few hours ago in the online Rolling Stone:
> >
> > http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/vote_fraud_2004.html
> >
> > That single-page version of it is much more convenient than the original
> > for printing (the original is spread across four separate pages).  It
> > also has clickable links in the reference section, unlike the original.

[snip]

> I would like to see both sides of the argument - how do those accused
> answer to these charges.  (I admit that I only read a small part of the
> article.)

Yup, that does make sense.  I did read the whole article, and I can
tell you that a lot of it was more rhetorical than strictly
meaningful.  The following points do seem fairly clear:

1) Blackwell (the Ohio Secretary of State) behaved almost exactly as
you would expect somebody who was trying to use all tactics legal and
illegal to drive down the vote for Kerry.  Clearly, he would claim all
his actaions were legal and only aimed to make sure the election was
fair, but the fact that he was simultaneously the co-chair of Bush's
re-election committee is troubling at best, while the fact that his
policies, which could in most cases obviously favor Bush, consistently
lost in court is quite remarkable.

2) There was something very deeply wrong with the correspondence
between the exit polls and the actual vote count.  What was news to me
was some of the analysis of the exit polling versus the actual results
from the exit-polled precincts.  That report might be more worth
reading than this account.

3) Contra the article, there is a reasonable hypothesis for why the
(overall) exit poll/real poll discrepancy could have appeared: some
voters who voted for Bush weren't completely comfortable with having
done so, and so told pollsters they had done something else.  A
leading issue Bush campaigned on, and which might have swayed the
votes of these people, was homeland security.  Since the election,
Bush has seen his populariy numbers really take a dive, which is
consistent with many of these reluctant Bush voters having felt
betrayed (in addition to other things).

But this hypothesis is less easy to hold up in light of some other
evidence.  In particular, the fact is cited that in landslide Kerry
precincts, the exit polls and eventual vote counts were very close,
while in in landslide Bush precincts, Bush tended to outperform his
exit polls by a large margin.  There are several possible explanations
for this, but vote shifting is obviously one of them.

> A complaint I have heard from the right is that it is too easy for
> illegal immigrants to vote, and that democrats tend to resist attempts
> to crack down on this (for example, demanding identity checks at ballot
> boxes).

I used to live in California, and I'm guessing that there are probably
too many illegal immigrants voting.  (By "too many", I mean more than
one should see with a reasonable but not burdensome voting policy.)
But I think people on the right are exaggerating this possibility.
Most of the illegals I remember from San Diego were actually not that
eager to draw attention to themselves, since they *know* their
situation is precarious.  At the same time, it's easy to make a policy
of identity checks and voting challenges into a system to slow down
the process and make it less likely that people will get to vote in
the precincts you target.

> Perhaps part of the reason that people tend to ignore these complaints
> is that the complaints are perceived as very one sided and partisan.

This article is pretty clearly both of those things.  But an issue
like "why did exit polling fail so horribly just this time" isn't
really a partisan one.  (Our) Election observers abroad routinely rely
on exit polling to detect vote fraud, so it is remarkable and not by
itself partisan to wonder why they went wrong here.  Certainly, you
can easily imagine elections being stolen by almost any party that
happens to hold that power in a locality.


> does surprize me that the mainstream media haven't picked up on this.

One point is that Kerry conceded almost immediately, so the
news-worthiness of the event goes way down.  Another point that I *do*
find more worrisome is that the MSM had nothing useful to say about
the discrepancies betwen their own exit polls and the certified vote
totals.  Two points not mentioned in the article that concern me are
the fact that both campaigns and some other pollsters (Zogby and at
least one other) did exit polling of their own, and as far as I can
tell, all such polls showed Kerry winning.  (The results from the GOP
polling effort were never announced that I know of, but I do remember
media reports of nobody at the White House wanting to talk about the
election or their polling on the day of the election, which is
unusual, since everybody usually claims they are going to win.)

> It does tend to make me doubt much of the truth of these stories, or
> think that they have been distorted, because if the evidence really is
> good, I just don't see the media leaving it alone.

I sort of do in this case.  Kerry doesn't contest the thing, the most
troubling stuff involves either a bunch of stuff in Ohio that is now
moot, or some fairly arcane stuff about MOEs of exit polls.

> One example - at the beginning of the article it says that exit polls
> suggested that Kerry should get a landslide victory.  But my sense at
> that time was that the nation was very divided, and that the election
> would be extremely close.

Yes, but the exit polls did show him 2-3 points ahead, and winning
states like Colorado and Virginia and Florida and Ohio, which would
have put him way ahead in the Electoral Vote.

> Generally I think it would be good to get more uniform standards in how
> ballots are counted, but the attempt to get it more accurate must be
> bipartisan.

I still like the way we vote in Boone County.  Big black markers to
color in nice big ovals on an uncrowded ballot.  Nobody has ever
convinced me that any system is better than this; it's clear, simple,
not subject to unfixable software problems (you have the ballots),
optical scanners are quite robust and not that expensive, and
provisional ballots aren't a problem; you just need a special envelope
to put them in and seal them.  The fact that this is exactly NOT the
kind of system beinf pushed these days is at least annoying.

jking

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