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

["Vern Green" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

The point of this that I might have failed to clarify, I do that
sometimes is this.

The exit poll numbers are incorrect, something was wrong with them. If
people want to claim they have been correct in the past and this one
time they have been wrong, then it is important to look at the source
of the problem.

Conspiracy theorists want to say the election was stolen, they want to
say that somehow, after the votes were collected, they were tampered
with, but there are two problems with this theory.

First, the conspiracy theorists do not take into account all of those
precincts where DEMOCRATS are in charge of the process and the anomoly
still exists. So if this is some kind of vast right wing conspiracy to
steal the election, you would think that the discrepency between exit
polls and actual votes would not appear in these precincts. Yet it
did.

Second, the contractor hired to report the results of exit polls,
admitted they got it wrong. Is that some kind of conspiracy, well if I
were a conspiracy type person, I would argue that the democrats were
trying to influence the election by proclaiming an early Kerry win in
hopes of getting West Coast republicans to not go to the polls. There
has been a lot of talk about that, each election year in fact.

So the point here is that we can go on and on about how exit polls are
supposed to work and that over the years they have been accurate and
they continue to be accurate, but this last election proved that in
some point they are not accurate. Even if they were that accurate to
begin with.

> Obviously, but it's a newsworthy surprise that something changed.
> Personally, I think the answer is that people really did lie to the
> pollsters.
Or the pollsters made a mistake, all of the formuli used to determine
an early winner was incorrect. To be off in the numbers they were
talking about n the article, a lot of people would have had to lie. It
is possible, but I would still fall on the side of error.
> You know something, Vern?  You don't know very much about me.
> Specifically, you don't know my voting history.  So if you want to
> vent at somebody, I think it would be polite to choose somebody who
> wasn't the person who was being very patient last night explaining
> what exit polling really was in what was a pretty much non-partisan
> context.
The democrat statement was not directed at you in particular, I
apologize for making it seem that way.

> Both were/are undemocratic and both processes have lead to people
> winning who did not have the support of a pluarality of the voters.

The point of Senators in the early days were that they were NOT
elected by the people. That was the point. It was modeled after the
House of Lords in England and in the original consitution Senators
were appointed by the States in an effort to counter the "unwashed
masses" being elected to the House of Representatives.

One could argue that in true faith of the original constitution the
way we select senators now is incorrect. Yet the constitution left
selection of Senators to the states and if the state wanted to have a
popular vote for electing them, then so be it.

> Al Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000, but did not become president
> because of the Electoral College.  Abraham Lincoln essentially got
> more votes to be senator than Stephen Douglas in 1858, but did not
> become senator in Illinois because there was no direct election of
> senators.
Right, exactly as the framers wanted it to happen. The senate was not
selected by the people.

> There is no principled reason why somebody from Wyoming should have
> substantially more voting power for president than you have in
> California or than I have in Missouri.

Well, per person you would be correct, but that is whole point of the
electorial college. The idea is to create an environment where the
concerns of a smaller state are not overlooked for the concerns of the
larger state. I agree with this. Why should people in New York or
California have more power than you in Columbia Missouri?

> You would obviously object if
> we let some people from Wyoming or Vermont or the District of Columbia
> vote multiple times for president, or told you that, as a California
> resident, we wouldn't count all of your votes for the same office.
> Yet the EC has exactly this effect on your voting power.  If you must
> keep the EC for some reason, we could at least increase the number of
> representatives in congress so that the disparity is less large (and
> the districts themselves might be more representative).
I thought, and I might be wrong, but I thought the number of
electorial votes would change as population changed. This might be an
incorrect assessment or it might no longer be the case and if it is
not, then I would be in favor or realigning the number of votes each
state gets in an attempt to bring more parity back to the process.



--
Thanks
F Vernon Green

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