Project Censored - No Paper Trail Left Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Election

[Guest guest]

S

Tue, 6 Dec 2005 22:05:58 EST

In order to believe bush won 2004, you must also believe...

 

 

 

We can't get rid of the e-voting machines until we get rid of the

politicians that put them there and we can't get rid of the

politicians that put them there till we get rid of the e-voting

machines. Whatever are we to do...

 

Why am I sending this now - way after the election?

 

 

BECAUSE IT IS STILL NOT FIXED.

 

 

#14 refers to CNN. As it says -- MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Yet CNN

'xplains it away... #18 also makes you wonder about CNN reporters

intellect. LOL

 

Make sure to check out the footnotes.

 

****

 

 

 

No Paper Trail Left Behind:

 

The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election

 

By Dennis Loo, Ph.D.

Project Censored

 

" Alice laughed: " There's no use trying, " she said; " one can't believe

impossible things. " " I daresay you haven't had much practice, " said

the Queen. " When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a

day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things

before breakfast. " (Through the Looking Glass)

 

 

 

In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004

presidential election, you must also believe all of the following

extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)

 

 

 

1) A big turnout and a highly energized and motivated electorate

favored the GOP instead of the Democrats for the first time in history.(2)

 

 

 

2) Even though first-time voters, lapsed voters (those who didn’t

vote in 2000), and undecideds went for John Kerry by big margins, and

Bush lost people who voted for him in the cliffhanger 2000 election,

Bush still received a 3.5 million vote surplus nationally.(3)

 

 

 

3) The fact that Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida

Republicans’ votes that he got in 2000, receiving in 2004 more than

100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida

counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300%

of registered Republicans in 4 counties, merely shows Floridians’

enthusiasm for Bush. He managed to do this despite the fact that his

share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did

not increase over 2000 and he lost ground among registered

Independents, dropping 15 points.(4)

 

 

 

4) Florida’s reporting of more presidential votes (7.59 million)

than actual number of people who voted (7.35 million), a surplus of

237,522 votes, does not indicate fraud.

 

 

 

5) The fact that Bush got more votes than registered voters, and the

fact that by stark contrast participation rates in many Democratic

strongholds in Ohio and Florida fell to as low as 8%, do not indicate

a rigged election.(5)

 

 

 

6) Bush won re-election <sic -- he didn't win the first time so it is

not a

RE-election> despite approval ratings below 50% - the first time in

history this has happened. Truman has been cited as having also done

this, but Truman’s polling numbers were trailing so much behind his

challenger, Thomas Dewey, pollsters stopped surveying two months

before the 1948 elections, thus missing the late surge of support for

Truman. Unlike Truman, Bush’s support was clearly eroding on the eve

of the election.(6)

 

 

 

7) Harris' last-minute polling indicating a Kerry victory was wrong

(even though Harris was exactly on the mark in their 2000 election

final poll).(7)

 

 

 

8) The “challenger rule†- an incumbent’s final results won’t

be better than his final polling - was wrong;(8)

 

 

 

9) On election day the early-day voters picked up by early exit polls

(showing Kerry with a wide lead) were heavily Democratic instead of

the traditional pattern of early voters being mainly Republican.

 

 

 

10) The fact that Bush “won†Ohio by 51-48%, but this was not

matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and

provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote

doesn’t cast any suspicion upon the official tally.(9)

 

 

 

11) Florida computer programmer Clinton Curtis (a life-long

registered Republican) must be lying when he said in a sworn affidavit

that his employers at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) and Tom Feeney

(general counsel and lobbyist for YEI, GOP state legislator and Jeb

Bush’s 1994 running mate for Florida Lt. Governor) asked him in 2000

to create a computer program to undetectably alter vote totals.

Curtis, under the initial impression that he was creating this

software in order to forestall possible fraud, handed over the program

to his employer Mrs. Li Woan Yang, and was told: “You don’t

understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the

manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the

vote in south Florida.†(Boldface in original).(10)

 

 

 

12) Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell’s declaration in a August 14, 2003

letter to GOP fundraisers that he was " committed to helping Ohio to

deliver its electoral votes to the president next year " and the fact

that Diebold is one of the three major suppliers of the electronic

voting machines in Ohio and nationally, didn’t result in any fraud

by Diebold.

 

 

 

13) There was no fraud in Cuyahoga County, Ohio where the number of

recorded votes was more than 93,000 larger than the number of

registered voters and where they admitted counting the votes in secret

before bringing them out in public to count. [see appendix †"

attached herein]

 

 

 

14) CNN reported at 9 p.m. EST on election evening that Kerry was

leading by 3 points in the national exit polls based on well over

13,000 respondents. Several hours later at 1:36 a.m. CNN reported that

the exit polls, now based on a few hundred more - 13,531 respondents -

were showing Bush leading by 2 points, a 5-point swing. In other

words, a swing of 5 percentage points from a tiny increase in the

number of respondents somehow occurred despite it being mathematically

impossible.(11)

 

 

 

15) Exit polls in the November 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections,

paid for in part by the Bush administration, were right, but exit

polls in the U.S., where exit polling was invented, were very wrong.(12)

 

 

 

16) The National Election Pool’s exit polls (13) were so far off

that since their inception twenty years ago, they have never been this

wrong, more wrong than statistical probability indicates is possible.

 

 

 

17) In every single instance where exit polls were wrong the

discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us

that any survey errors should show up in both directions. Half a

century of polling and centuries of mathematics must be wrong.

 

 

 

18) It must be merely a stunning coincidence that exit polls were

wrong only in precincts where there was no paper ballot to check

against the electronic totals and right everywhere there was a paper

trail.

 

 

 

The Emperor (and the Electoral Process) Have No Clothes

 

 

 

The preceding list recounts only some of the irregularities in the

2004 election since it ignores the scores of instances of voter

disenfranchisement that assumed many different forms (e.g., banning

black voters in Florida who had either been convicted of a felony

previously or who were “inadvertently†placed on the felons list

by mistake, while not banning convicted Latino felons(14); providing

extraordinarily few voting machines in predominately Democratic

precincts in Ohio; disallowing Ohio voters, for the first time, from

voting in any precinct when they were unable to find their assigned

precincts to vote in; and so on). A plethora of reasons clearly exists

to conclude that widespread and historic levels of fraud were

committed in this election.

 

 

 

Indeed, any one of the above highly improbables and utterly

impossibles should have led to a thorough investigation into the

results. Taken as a whole, this list points overwhelmingly to fraud.

The jarring strangeness of the results and the ubiquity of complaints

from voters (e.g., those who voted for Kerry and then saw to their

shock the machine record their votes as being for Bush), require some

kind of explanation, or the legitimacy of elections and of the

presidency would be imperiled.

 

 

 

The explanations from public officials and major media came in three

forms. First, exit polls, not the official tallies, were labeled

spectacularly wrong. Second, the so-called “moral values†voters

expressed in the now ubiquitous “red state/blue state†formula,

were offered as the underlying reason for Bush’s triumph. And third,

people who brought forth any of the evidence of fraud were dismissed

as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists†while mainstream

media censored the vast majority of the evidence of fraud so that most

Americans to this day have never heard a fraction of what was amiss. I

will discuss each of these three responses, followed by a discussion

of the role of electronic voting machines in the 2002 elections that

presaged the 2004 election irregularities, and then wrap up with a

discussion of these events’ significance taken as a whole.

 

 

 

 

 

Killing the Messenger: the Exit Polls

 

 

 

Exit polls are the gold standard of vote count validity

internationally. Since exit polls ask people as they emerge from the

polling station whom they just voted for, they are not projections as

are polls taken in the months, weeks or days before an election. They

are not subject to faulty memory, voter capriciousness (voters voting

differently than they indicated to a pollster previously), or

erroneous projections about who will actually turn up to vote.

Pollsters know who turned up to vote because the voters are standing

there in front of the exit pollsters. Because of these

characteristics, exit polls are exceptionally accurate. They are so

accurate that in Germany, for example, they are used to decide

elections, with the paper ballots being counted in the days afterwards

as a backup check against the exit polls(15). Exit polls are used, for

this reason, as markers of fraud.(16)

 

 

 

Significant, inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and

official tallies only started showing up in the U.S. in 2000 and only

in Florida (and notably, nowhere else). The discrepancy was not the

exit polls’ fault, however, but in the official tallies themselves.

Although the mainstream media fell on their swords about their

election’s evening projections calling Florida for Gore in 2000,

their projections were right. In analyses conducted by the National

Opinion Research Center in Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court

aborted the vote recount, Gore emerged the winner over Bush, no matter

what criteria for counting votes was applied(17). The fact that this

is not widely known constitutes itself a major untold story.

 

 

 

Exit polling’s validity is further affirmed by GOP pollster Dick

Morris. Immediately after the 2004 election he wrote:

 

 

 

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…

 

 

 

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.(18)

 

 

 

Confounded and suspicious of the results, Morris resorted to

advancing the bizarre theory that there must have been a conspiracy

among the networks to suppress the Bush vote in the west by issuing

exit poll results that were so far off from the final tallies.

 

 

 

A number of different statisticians have examined the 2004 election

results. University of Pennsylvania statistician Steve Freeman, Ph.D.,

most notably, analyzed the exit polls of the swing states of

Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida and concluded that the odds of the exit

polls being as far off as they were are 250 million to one(19). Exit

polls in Florida had Kerry leading by 1.7 points and by 2.4 points in

Ohio. These exit poll figures were altered at 1:30 a.m. November 3,

2004 on CNN to conform to the “official†tally. In the end, Kerry

lost Florida by 5% and Ohio by 2.5%. This is a net shift of 6.7 points

in Florida and 4.9 points in Ohio in Bush’s favor, well beyond the

margin of error. By exit poll standards, this net shift was unbelievable.

 

 

 

A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by

sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in

which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that

used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would

indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes

where past voting patterns held.(20)

 

 

 

The Edison-Mitofsky polling group that conducted the National Exit

Poll (NEP) issued a 77-page report on January 19, 2005 to account for

why their exit polls were so unexpectedly far off.(21) Edison-Mitofsky

rule out sampling error as the problem and indicate that systemic bias

was responsible. They concluded that their exit polls were wrong

because Kerry voters must have been more willing to talk to their poll

workers than Bush voters and because their poll workers were too young

and inexperienced. Edison-Mitofsky offer no evidence indicating that

their conclusion about more chatty Kerry voters actually occurred,

merely that such a scenario would explain the discrepancy. In fact, as

nine statisticians(22) who conducted an evaluation of the

Edison-Mitofsky data and analysis point out, Bush voters appeared to

be slightly more willing to talk to exit pollsters than Kerry voters.

This would make the exit polls’ discrepancy with the official

tallies even more pronounced. In addition, the Edison-Mitofsky

explanation fails to explain why exit polls were only exceptionally

wrong in the swing states.

 

 

 

Red State, Red Herring: the “Moral Values†Voters

 

 

 

A plausible explanation still needs to be offered for the startling

2004 election outcome †" how did Bush, caught in a lie about why we

went to war with Iraq, racked by prison abuse and torture scandals at

Abu Graib and Guantanamo, bogged down in Iraq, failing to catch Osama

Bin Laden, badly embarrassed during the debates, caught sleeping prior

to 9/11, and so on, manage to win a resounding victory? Enter here the

“moral values†rationale. As Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York

Times wrote in a November 4, 2004 article entitled “Moral Values

Cited as a Defining Issue of the Election:â€

 

Even in a time of war and economic hardship, Americans said they were

motivated to vote for President Bush on Tuesday by moral values as

much as anything else, according to a survey of voters as they left

their polling places. In the survey, a striking portrait of one

influential group emerged - that of a traditional, church-going

electorate that leans conservative on social issues and strongly

backed Mr. Bush….

 

 

 

In the same issue, another article by Todd S. Purdum entitled

“Electoral Affirmation of Shared Values Provides Bush a Majorityâ€

cited 1/5 (more precisely, 22%) of the voters as mentioning “moral

values†as their chief concern. This was echoed throughout major

media.(23) The only person in the mainstream media to challenge this

was New York Times columnist Frank Rich, on November 28, 2004 in an

opinion piece entitled “The Great Indecency Hoax:â€

 

The mainstream press, itself in love with the " moral values " story

line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map,

is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family

Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British

publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of

American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern

is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).(24)

 

 

 

As Rich correctly points out, no American media outlet repeated this

statistic. Instead, the widely mentioned and oft-repeated “moral

values†vote took on the status of an urban †" or in this instance,

suburban/rural - legend.

 

 

 

Shocked by the election results, many people took out their anger at

the perceived mendacity of Bush voters, especially those in the

so-called “red states.†This fury, while understandable given

Bush’s record, badly misses the point. Voters did not heist this

election. As others have pointed out eloquently, many of the people

who really did vote for Bush did so primarily because they were misled

through systematic disinformation campaigns.(25)

 

 

 

“Spreadsheet wielding conspiracy theoristsâ€

 

 

 

In November 2004 major U.S. media gave headline news treatment to the

Ukrainian Presidential election fraud, explicitly citing the exit

polls as definitive evidence of fraud. At the very same time major

U.S. media dismissed anyone who pointed out this same evidence of

likely fraud in the U.S. elections as “conspiracy theory†crazies.

A November 11, 2004 Washington Post article, for example, described

people raising the question of fraud as “mortally wounded party

loyalists and … spreadsheet-wielding conspiracytheorists.â€(26) Tom

Zeller, Jr. handled it similarly, writing in the November 12, 2004

issue of the New York Times (“Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs,

Are Quickly Buriedâ€): “[T]he email messages and Web postings had

all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster.

‘Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,’ trumpeted a

headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. ‘Fraud took place in the

2004 election through electronic voting machines,’ declared

BlackBoxVoting.org.â€(27)

 

 

 

Neither of these articles bothered to address even a fraction of the

evidence of irregularities. They did, however, both dismiss the 93,000

excess votes in Cuyahoga County, Ohio as merely an error in how the

votes were reported, the Washington Post article offering the strange

explanation that in “even-numbered years†the county posts vote

totals from other districts outside the county in the Cuyahoga totals.

The Washington Post passed off the exit polls discrepancy as “not

being based on statistics†since the exit polls “are not

publicly distributed.†Both of these statements were untrue. The New

York Times article for its part failed to even mention exit polls.

Both articles explained away the glaring and unbelievable totals for

Bush in hugely Democratic districts as due to the “Dixiecratâ€

vote. This would be plausible except for two things: first, Bush did

not win over any more crossover votes in 2004 than he did in 2000, and

second, these votes far in excess of Republican registered voters

numbers occurred primarily in non-rural areas. In just one example of

this, Baker County, Florida, out of 12,887 registered voters, of whom

69.3% were Democrats and 24.3% Republicans, Bush received 7,738 votes

while Kerry only received 2,180.(28) As Robert Parry of

Consortiumnews.org points out:

 

 

 

Rather than a rural surge of support, Bush actually earned more than

seven out of 10 new votes in the 20 largest counties in Florida. Many

of these counties are either Democratic strongholds †" such as

Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach †" or they are swing counties,

such as Orange, Hillsborough, and Duval.

 

 

 

Many of these large counties saw substantially more newly registered

Democrats than Republicans. For example, in Orange County, a swing

county home to Orlando, Democrats registered twice as many new voters

than Republicans in the years since 2000. In Palm Beach and Broward

combined, Democrats registered 111,000 new voters compared with fewer

than 20,000 new Republicans.(29)

 

 

 

The only person in major media to treat these complaints seriously

and at any length was Keith Olbermann at MSNBC who ran two stories on

it, citing Cuyahoga County’s surplus 93,000 votes over the

registered voter count, and the peculiar victories for Bush in Florida

counties that were overwhelmingly Democratic scattered across the

state.(30) For his trouble, media conservatives attacked him for being

a “voice of paranoia†and spreading “idiotic conspiracy

theories.â€(31)

 

 

 

 

 

The Oh-So Loyal Opposition: the Democratic Party

 

 

 

An obvious question here is: why haven’t the Democrats been more

vigorous in their objections to this fraud? The fact that they

haven’t objected more (with a few notable individual exceptions) has

been taken by some as definitive evidence that no fraud must have

happened because the Democrats have the most to gain from objecting.

In part the answer to this puzzle is that the Democrats don’t fully

understand what has hit them. The Kerry campaign’s reaction to the

Swift Boat Veterans attack ads that damaged them so much are a good

illustration of this. The right-wing media hammered away at Kerry

through their by now very heavy presence over talk radio, the

Internet, Fox News, and other outlets. The mainstream media such as

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and major newspapers and magazines, still adhering

to the standards of “objective†journalism, which the right-wing

media consider “quaint,â€(32) legitimated these false allegations

about Kerry by presenting “the two sides†as if one side made up

entirely of lies and half-truths could be considered a legitimate

“side.†The Kerry campaign concluded that these ads were all lies

and wouldn’t have any effect, thus they took too long to respond to

them. By the time they did, the damage had been done. In a CBS/NY

Times poll taken September 12-16, 2004, 33% said they thought that the

Swift Boast Veterans’ charges against Kerry were “mostly

true.â€(33) A remarkable feat given that Kerry volunteered and was

multi-decorated for heroism while Bush used his father’s connections

to dodge real service.

 

 

 

The Democrats’ meek acceptance of other races’ extremely peculiar

outcomes prior to the 2004 elections illustrates this point further.

As a result of the 2000 Florida debacle, Congress passed the “Help

America Vote†Act in October 2002. While this act introduced a

number of reasonable reforms, it also resulted in the widespread

introduction of paperless electronic voting machines. This meant that

there was no way to determine if the votes recorded by these computers

were accurate and tamper-free. Efforts subsequently by a few

Democratic Congresspeople, led by Michigan Rep. John Conyers, to

rectify this and ensure a paper ballot, have been blocked by the GOP

majority.

 

 

 

The following is a partial list of 2002 discrepancies that can be

understood as dress rehearsals for the stolen presidential election of

2004:

 

 

 

On Nov. 3, 2002, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed

Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49-to-44 point lead over Republican

Rep. Saxby Chambliss. The next day, Chambliss, despite trailing by 5

points, ended up winning by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. This was, in

other words, an unbelievable 12-point turn around over the course of

one day!

 

 

 

In the Georgia governor's race Republican Sonny Perdue upset

incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes by a margin of 52 to 45 percent.

This was especially strange given that the October 16-17, 2002 Mason

Dixon Poll (Mason Dixon Polling and Research, Inc. of Washington,

D.C.) had shown Democratic Governor Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent,

with a margin of error of ± 4 points. The final tally was, in other

words, a jaw dropping 16-point turn-around! What the Cleland

“defeat†by Saxby and the Barnes “defeat†by Perdue both have

in common is that nearly all the Georgia votes were recorded on

computerized voting machines, which produce no paper trail.

 

 

 

In Minnesota, after Democrat Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crash

death,(34) ex-vice-president Walter Mondale took Wellstone’s place

and was leading Republican Norm Coleman in the days before the

election by 47 to 39 percent. Despite the fact that he was trailing

just days before the race by 8 points, Coleman beat Mondale by 50 to

47 percent. This was an 11-point turn around! The Minnesota race was

also conducted on electronic voting machines with no papertrail.(35)

 

 

 

Welcome to a world where statistical probability and normal

arithmetic no longer apply!(36) The Democrats, rather than vigorously

pursuing these patently obvious signs of election fraud in 2004, have

nearly all decided that being gracious losers is better than being

winners,(37) probably because †" and this may be the most important

reason for the Democrat’s relative silence - a full-scale uncovering

of the fraud runs the risk of mobilizing and unleashing popular forces

that the Democrats find just as threatening as the GOP does.

 

 

 

The delicious irony for the GOP is that the Help America Vote Act,

precipitated by their theft of the Florida 2000 presidential vote,

made GOP theft of elections as in the preceding examples easy and

unverifiable except through recourse to indirect analysis such as

pre-election polls and exit polls.(38) This is the political

equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. Or, more precisely:

stealing elections, running the country, and aggressively, arrogantly

and falsely claiming that “the people†support it.

 

 

 

Flavor Flav of the rap group Public Enemy used to wear a big clock

around his neck in order to remind us all that we’d better

understand what time it is. Or, as Bob Dylan once said: “Let us not

speak falsely now, the hour’s getting late.†To all of those who

said before the 2004 elections that this was the most important

election in our lifetimes; to all of those who plunged into that

election hoping and believing that we could throw the villains out via

the electoral booth; to all of those who held their noses and voted

for Democrats thinking that at least they were slightly better than

the theocratic fascists running this country now, this must be said:

VOTING REALLY DOESN’T MATTER. If we weren’t convinced of that

before these last elections, then now is the time to wake up to that

fact. Even beyond the fraudulent elections of 2000 and 2004, public

policies are not now, nor have they ever been, settled through elections.

 

 

 

The Role of Mass Movements and Alternative Media

 

 

 

What can be done? The Eugene McCarthy campaign of 1968 and the George

McGovern campaign in 1972 didn’t end the war in Vietnam. The

Vietnamese people and the anti-war movement ended the war. Civil

rights weren’t secured because JFK and LBJ suddenly woke up to

racial discrimination. The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power

Movement galvanized public opinion and rocked this country to its

foundations. Men didn’t suddenly wake up and realize that they were

male chauvinist pigs - women formed the Women’s Movement, organized,

marched, rallied, and demanded nothing less than equality, shaking

this country to the core. The Bush administration is bogged down and

sinking deeper in Iraq not mainly because the top figures of the Bush

administration consist of liars, blind (and incompetent) ideologues,

international outlaws and propagators of torture as an official

policy, but because the Iraqi people have risen up against imperialist

invasion. Prior to the war, the international anti-Iraq war movement

brought out millions of people into the streets, the largest

demonstrations in history, denying the U.S. imperialists the UN’s

sanction and leading to Turkey denying US requests to use their land

as a staging area. These are major, world-historic feats.

 

 

 

The 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections fraud underscores the critical

importance of building a mass movement, a movement of resistance that

doesn’t tie itself to the electoral road and electoral parties. In

addition, as Robert Parry has eloquently argued, a counterforce to the

right-wing media empire must be built by the left and by

progressive-minded people. As it stands today, the right can get away

with nearly anything because they have talking heads on TV, radio, the

Internet and other outlets who set the tone and the political agenda,

with mainstream media focusing on sex and sensationalism and taking

their political cues to a large extent from the right.(39)

 

 

 

Like a bridge broken by an earthquake, the electoral road can only

lead to plunging us into the sea †" which is precisely what happened

in the 2004 election.

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES:

 

 

 

(1) Several of the items in this list feature Ohio and Florida because

going into the election it was universally understood that the outcome

hinged on these swing states.

 

 

 

'TruthIsAll' on the DemocraticUnderground.com offered a list that is

similar in format to my highly improbables and utterly impossibles

list of the 2004 election results and I have drawn directly from their

list for items #7 and 8. (

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.phpaz=view_all & address=203x\

22581

), retrieved June 4, 2005.

 

 

 

(2) High turnout favors Democrats and more liberal-left candidates

because the groups who participate the least and most sporadically in

voting are from lower socio-economic groups who generally eschew more

conservative candidates.

 

 

 

(3) Seventeen percent of election 2004 voters did not vote in 2000.

This includes both first-time and lapsed voters. Kerry defeated Bush

in this group 54 percent to 45 percent. (Katharine Q. Seelye, " Moral

Values Cited as a Defining Issue of the Election, " The New York Times,

November 4, 2004). This data contradicts the widely held belief that

Bush owes his victory to mobilizing conservative evangelicals and

getting out the Republican base.

 

 

 

(4) Gore carried the 2000 Florida Independent vote by only 47 to 46

percent whereas Kerry carried them by a 57 percent to 41 percent

margin. In 2000 Bush received 13% of the registered Democratic voters

votes and in 2004 he got the virtually statistically identical 14% of

their votes. Sam Parry, " Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies, "

Consortiumnews.com, November 9, 2004.

 

 

 

See also Colin Shea's analysis: " In one county, where 88% of voters

are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two-thirds of the

vote--three times more than predicted by my model. In 21 counties,

more than 50% of Democrats would have to have defected to Bush to

account for the county result; in four counties at least 70% would

have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely. "

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=321

 

 

 

(5) " [C]ertified reports from pro-Kerry Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County,

[showed] · precincts with turnouts of as few as 22.31 percent

(precinct 6B), 21.43 percent (13O), 20.07 percent (13F), 14.59 percent

(13D), and 7.85 percent (6C) of the registered voters. Thousands of

people in these precincts lined up for many hours in the rain in

order, it would appear, not to vote.

 

 

 

" Meanwhile, in pro-Bush Perry County, the voting records certified by

Secretary of State Blackwell included two precincts with reported

turnouts of 124.4 and 124.0 percent of the registered voters, while in

pro-Bush Miami County, there were precincts whose certified turnouts,

if not physically impossible, were only slightly less improbable.

These and other instances of implausibly high turnouts in precincts

won by Bush, and implausibly low turnouts in precincts won by Kerry,

are strongly suggestive of widespread tampering with the

vote-tabulation processes. " Michael Keefe, " The Strange Death of

American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio, "

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE501A.html , retrieved May 31, 2005.

 

 

 

(6) " Bush's job approval has slipped to 48% among national adults and

is thus below the symbolically important 50% point. " " Questions and

Answers With the Editor in Chief, Frank Newport, Editor in Chief, The

Gallup Poll, November 2, 2004,

http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/?ci=13948 & pg=1 , retrieved on May

27, 2005.

 

 

 

As Newport further notes, referring to the final Oct. 29-31, 2004

CNN/USA Today /Gallup poll, " Among all national adults, 49% now choose

Kerry as the candidate best able to handle Iraq, while 47% choose

Bush. This marks a significant pickup on this measure for Kerry, who

was down nine points to Bush last week. In fact, Kerry has lost out to

Bush on this measure in every poll conducted since the Democratic

convention. "

 

 

 

" Bush's margin over Kerry as the candidate best able to handle

terrorism is now seven points. 51% of Americans choose Bush and 44%

choose Kerry. This again marks a significant change. Last week, Bush

had an 18-point margin over Kerry, and the 7-point advantage is the

lowest yet for Bush. " In other words, momentum was on Kerry's side,

with Bush losing 9 points of support on Iraq and 11 points on handling

terrorism over the course of one week! This was hardly a sign of

someone about to win by 3.5 million votes.

 

 

 

(7) http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=515 ,

dated November 2, 2004, retrieved on June 1, 2005: " Both surveys

suggest that Kerry has been making some gains over the course of the

past few days (see Harris Polls #83

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=512 , and

#78 http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=507

). If this trend is real, then Kerry may actually do better than these

numbers suggest. In the past, presidential challengers tend to do

better against an incumbent President among the undecided voters

during the last three days of the elections, and that appears to be

the case here. The reason: undecided voters are more often voters who

dislike the President but do not know the challenger well enough to

make a decision. When they decide, they frequently split 2:1 to 4:1

for the challenger. " For Harris' last minute poll results before the

2000 election, see

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=130 ,

dated November 6, 2000 in which they call the election between Bush

and Gore too close to call and predict that the result will depend

upon the turnout.

 

 

 

(8) As Gallup explains, challengers tend to get the votes of those

saying they are undecided on the eve of an election: " ased on an

analysis of previous presidential and other elections there is a high

probability that the challenger (in an incumbent race) will receive a

higher percentage of the popular vote than he did in the last

pre-election poll, while there is a high probability that the

incumbent will maintain his share of the vote without any increase.

This has been dubbed the 'challenger rule.' There are various

explanations for why this may occur, including the theory that any

voter who maintains that he or she is undecided about voting for a

well-known incumbent this late in the game is probably leaning toward

voting for the challenger. " " Questions and Answers With the Editor in

Chief, Frank Newport, Editor in Chief, The Gallup Poll, November 2,

2004, http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/?ci=13948 & pg=1 , retrieved on

May 27, 2005. See also footnote 7 herein.

(9) Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, " Ohio's

Official Non-Recount Ends amidst New Evidence of Fraud, Theft and

Judicial Contempt Mirrored in New Mexico, The Columbus Free Press

31 December 31, 2004, at

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1057 , retrieved

June 6, 2005.

(10) Curtis states in his affidavit that he met in the fall of 2000

with the principals of Yang Enterprises, Inc., - Li Woan Yang., Mike

Cohen, and Tom Feeney (chief counsel and lobbyist for YEI). Feeney

became Florida's House Speaker a month after meeting with Curtis.

Curtis says that he initially thought he was being asked to make such

a program in order to prevent voter fraud. Upon creating the program

and presenting it to Yang, he discovered that they were interested in

committing fraud, not preventing it. Curtis goes on to say: " She

stated that she would hand in what I had produced to Feeney and left

the room with the software. " As the police would say, what we have

here is motive and opportunity - and an abundance of evidence of

criminal fraud in the Florida vote, together with Feeney's intimate

connection to Jeb Bush. Curtis, on the other hand, as a life-long

registered Republican - as of these events at least - has no

discernible motive to come forward with these allegations, and only

shows courage for the risk to himself by doing so. For his full

affidavit, see

http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2004/12/affidavit-of-vote-fraud-software\

..html#110243131597922449

, retrieved June 1, 2005. (sharin's note..Clint Curtis testified at

the House hearings UNDER OATH and also passed a lie detector test ---

he is a life-long republican with no reason to lie -- yet the other

side took no such lie detector test.)

(11) Michael Keefer, " Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2

Exit Poll Scam, " http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html ,

retrieved May 31, 2005.

(12) In the Ukraine, as a result of the exit polls' variance from the

official tally, they had a revote. In the U.S., despite the exit polls

varying widely from the official tally, we had an inauguration!

(13) The NEP was a consortium of news organizations that contracted

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to conduct the

national and state exit polls. Warren Mitofsky created exit polling.

(14) While blacks went to Kerry by 90 to 10, Latino voters were much

more likely to vote for Bush.

(15) I owe this example to Steven Freeman, " The Unexplained Exit Poll

Discrepancy, " November 10, 2004, election04.ssrc.org/research/ 11_10,

unexplained_ exit- poll.pdf.

(16) " 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. (but here we are to

believe that only Bush voters were embarrassed to say who they voted

for lol) When I worked on Vicente Fox's campaign in Mexico, for

example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the

election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct

exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to

foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the

[exit] polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the

streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the

actual counting impossible. " GOP consultant and pollster Dick Morris,

" Those Exit Polls Were Sabotage, "

http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx , dated November 4, 2004,

retrieved June 4, 2005.

(17) " Gore Won Florida, " http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm

?id=181, retrieved May 28, 2005.

(18) Dick Morris, " Those Exit Polls Were Sabotage, "

http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx , dated November 4, 2004,

retrieved June 4, 2005.

(19) Steven Freeman, " The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, " November

10, 2004, election04.ssrc.org/research/ 11_10, unexplained_ exit-

poll.pdf .

(20) Ian Hoffman, " Berkeley: President Comes Up Short, " The Tri-Valley

Herald , November 19, 2004. The Berkeley report itself is at

http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ , retrieved June 7,

2005.

(21) Evaluation of the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared

by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National

Election Pool (MEP), January 19, 2005,

http://www.exit-poll.net/faq.html , retrieved April 2, 2005.

MSNBC publicized this report (inaccurately) under the headline " Exit

Polls Prove That Bush Won. " (Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf, " A

Corrupted Election: Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls

were right, " February 15, 2005, In These Times ,

www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970/ , retrieved April 4, 2005.

(22) Warren Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Temple University Statistics

Department; Kathy Dopp, MS in mathematics, USCountVotes President;

Steven Freeman, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; Brian Joiner, Ph.D.

Professor of Statistics and Director of Statistical Consulting (ret.),

University of Pennsylvania; Frank Stenger, Ph.D., Professor of

Numerical Analysis, University of Utah; Richard Sheehan, Ph.D.

Professor of Finance, University of Notre Dame; Paul Velleman, Ph.D.

Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Statistical Sciences, Cornell University;

Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D., Lecturer, Dept. of Mathematics, Case Western

University; Campbell B. Read, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Dept. of

Statistical Science, Southern Methodist University.

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes Re

Mitofsky-Edison.pdf.

(23) An alternative theory which was advanced by a few was that fears

about terrorism and the ongoing war in Iraq made many reluctant to

kick out a sitting president. This theory has the benefit, at least,

of having some evidence. However, while it explained why so many

ignored the fact that WMD was never found in Iraq, the given rationale

for launching war on a country that had not attacked us, and a host of

other scandals such as torture and murder at Abu Graib, and why Bush

did manage to receive a lot of votes, it didn't explain why he won by

a 3.5 million margin

(24) The Economist, The triumph of the religious right, November 11,

2004

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=33755

43, retrieved April 5, 2005.

(25) See, for example, ex-conservative David Brock's The Republican

Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy and

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., " How Washington Poisoned the News, Vanity Fair

, May 2005.

(26) Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, " Latest Conspiracy Theory

-- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether, " Washington Post, November 11, 2004,

A-02, reprinted at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html ,

retrieved June 7, 2005

(27) Available in its entirety at

http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/VoteFraudTheoriesNixed.html

, retrieved June 6, 2005.

(28) Greg Guma, " Election 2004: Lingering Suspicions, " United Press

International, November 15, 2004,

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20041112-010916-6128r , retrieved

June 7, 2005.

(29) Robert Parry, " Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis, "

consortiumnews.com, November 12, 2004 at

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111204.html , retrieved June 7, 2005.

(30) " Liberty County - Bristol, Florida and environs - where it's 88

percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for

President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises

(Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the

other 24. " at http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111004B.shtml#1 ,

retrieved June 7, 2005. See also David Swanson , " Media Whites Out

Vote Fraud, " January 3, 2005:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405Y.shtml for a good summary of

this media white out.

(31) Media Matters for America, " Conservatives rail against MSNBC's

Olbermann for reporting election irregularities, "

http://mediamatters.org/items/2004111600006 , retrieved June 7, 2005.

(32) The Fairness Doctrine governed broadcasters from 1949 to 1987. It

required broadcasters, as a condition for having their FCC license, to

provide balanced views on controversial questions. The elimination of

the Fairness Doctrine was successfully lobbied for by well-heeled

conservative groups during the Reagan administration and paved the way

for the creation of a right wing media empire that operates free of

any need to provide opposing viewpoints to their own.

(33) LexisNexis Academic database, Accession No. 1605983, Question No.

276, number of respondents 1,287, national telephone poll of adults.

(34) Wellstone voted against the authorization to go to war on Iraq

requested by the second Bush administration.

(35) I owe this summary to " The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip

Away, " Thom Hartmann, AlterNet. Posted July 30, 2003, retrieved

February 8, 2005: http://www.alternet.org/story/16474 .

Chuck Hagel's story is worth mentioning here as well. As former

conservative radio talk show host and current Senator from Nebraska

Chuck Hagel (who is seriously considering a run for the White House)

demonstrated back in 1996, being the head of the company that supplies

the voting machines used by about 80% of the voters in Nebraska does

not hurt you when you want to be the first Republican in 24 years to

win a Senate seat in Nebraska. The fact that Hagel pulled off the

biggest upset in the country in the 1996 elections by defeating an

incumbent Democratic governor, that he did so through winning every

demographic group, including mainly black areas that had never voted

Republican before, might have nothing to do with the paperless trail

generated by the electronic voting machines his company provides,

installs, programs and largely runs. But then again, maybe it does

have something to do with his stunning and totally unexpected

victories (Thom Hartmann, " If You Want to Win An Election, Just

Control the Voting Machines, " January 31, 2003,

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm , retrieved April 10,

2005).

(36) This is in keeping with Lewis Carroll's Red Queen's logic. The

Bush White House sees itself as part of the " faith-based community, "

consciously rejecting empirical reality and inconvenient facts,

considering these to be the province of what it calls the

" reality-based community. " As New York Times journalist Ron Suskind

chillingly recounts: " In the summer of 2002 I had a meeting with a

senior adviser to Bush. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what

we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who

'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of

discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about

enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not

the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an

empire now, and when 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. We're history's actors . . . and you,

all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''' (Ron Suskind,

" Without a Doubt, " the New York Times Magazine , October 17, 2004.)

(37) By contrast, the GOP has decided that being " sore winners, " as

John Powers so aptly puts it in his book Sore Winners (and the Rest of

Us) in George Bush's America, beats the hell out of being gracious losers.

(38) Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie, in remarks to

the National Press Club on November 4, 2004, took the next logical

step, calling for the elimination of exit polls on the grounds that

the 2000, 2002 and 2004 exit polls showed the Republican candidates

losing. See http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html ,

retrieved June 11, 2005.

(39) Robert Parry, " Solving the Media Puzzle, " May 15, 2005,

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/051305.html , retrieved June 7, 2005.

For a listing of current censored news stories see

http://www.projectcensored.org/

[Guest guest]

No, CNNs willigness to fabricate an " explanation " for the 2004 election, is not

evidence of their intellectual poverty, but of their deceit and their

determination to manipulate the public mind.

JP

-

califpacific

Tuesday, December 06, 2005 8:37 PM

Project Censored - No Paper Trail Left

Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Election

 

 

S

 

We can't get rid of the e-voting machines until we get rid of the

politicians that put them there and we can't get rid of the

politicians that put them there till we get rid of the e-voting

machines. Whatever are we to do...

 

Why am I sending this now - way after the election?

 

 

BECAUSE IT IS STILL NOT FIXED.

 

 

#14 refers to CNN. As it says -- MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Yet CNN

'xplains it away... #18 also makes you wonder about CNN reporters

intellect. LOL

(snip)