Some take comfort in the swelling tide of voters+óGé¼Gäó disgust with President Bush and the low regard in which the public generally holds the Republican Congress, but there is absolutely no guarantee that these sentiments will be translated successfully at the polls in November into a victory for the Democrats.
Not only is there the usual concern that Democrats have a downright eerie ability to shoot themselves in the foot, matched by a Republican ability to motivate excessively their base and to play the terror card (with the usual help from Osama), but there is the fact that Republicans are very slick at stealing elections. Yes, +óGé¼+ôfact.+óGé¼-¥ It is way past time to do anything about it now, but increasing evidence and documentation of their shenanigans in 2000 and 2004 are piling up to convincing levels. Expect them to ruthlessly repeat their past successes, probably with a few more clever tweaks.
The best succinct documentation of the thievery and underhanded manipulation is to be found in Michael Parenti+óGé¼Gäós article on 11 July 2006 in the Columbus Free Press, much of it based on the article by Robert F. Kennedy in Rolling Stone.
In the first place, says Mr. Parenti, +óGé¼+ôthe numbers don+óGé¼Gäót add up.+óGé¼-¥ Approximately 105 million votes were cast in 2000, and 122 million in 2004; pre-election surveys showed the record 16.8 million new voters broke heavily for Kerry (something the mass media overlooked), and 2 million Nader voters from 2000 switched to Kerry in 2004. Nevertheless, the final tally gave Bush 62 million votes, or 11.6 million over his 2000 mark, while Kerry was credited with only 8 million more than Gore got in 2000+óGé¼GÇ¥ to have this happen, Bush would have had to hang on to his 2000 tally of 50.4 million, taken a majority of the new voters (contrary to pre-election polls), and also grabbed a major share of the progressive former Nader voters. There was no indication of such a +óGé¼+ômajor crossover+óGé¼-¥ in opinion polls--- +óGé¼-£twas an unlikely miracle, in other words.
Remember those exit polls? All through election day 2004 exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, +óGé¼+ôyet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election.+óGé¼-¥ How could that happen? Through a combination of outright fraud in counting votes, the use of contemptuous voter suppression tricks and just plain intimidation. Here are documented examples:
1) Democratic registration forms disappeared in large numbers in some areas, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots
2) Overseas ballots, +óGé¼+ônormally reliably distributed by the State Department+óGé¼-¥ mysteriously were distributed by the Pentagon in 2004, and some 3 million civilian American voters abroad (many of whom formed anti-Bush organizations) either did not receive their ballots, or got them too late to vote. Military officers, more likely to vote Republican, had no such problem, although many black enlisted personnel found themselves scrubbed from voter rolls because they had no local address, having been deployed (Greg Palast refers to this phenomena as a +óGé¼+ômassacre of the Buffalo soldiers+óGé¼-¥).
3) Voter Outreach of America, funded by the Republican National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in Nevada and then destroyed those from Democrats (but not Republicans).
4) Literally tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rolls in several states based on +óGé¼+ôfelonies+óGé¼-¥ never committed or committed by some one else, or even for no reason, and Democratic precincts did not have up-to-date or complete registration books.
5) Democratic precincts, +óGé¼+ôenjoying record turnouts,+óGé¼-¥ did not have enough voting machines and those they did have frequently broke down, creating such long lines for so many hours the working class voters had to leave without voting while more affluent Republican districts almost always had adequate voting machines and no long lines.
6) Student populations suffered the same fate: students from notably +óGé¼+ôconservative Christian colleges+óGé¼-¥ had short lines and a quick vote, while students from liberal arts colleges waited, sometimes for as long as ten hours to vote, causing many to leave without voting.
7) In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened because the voting machines were locked up and no one could find the key; in Hamilton County John Kerry+óGé¼Gäós name had been +óGé¼+ôaccidentally+óGé¼-¥ lost when Ralph Nader was removed from the ballot.
8) In Miami County, Ohio, a conservative station in an evangelical church had an unlikely 98 percent turnout whereas some in Democratic inner-city Cleveland had an impossibly low turnout of 7 percent, despite the generally record turnouts in Democratic areas
9) New Mexico+óGé¼Gäós Kerry voters from Latino, Native American, and African American precincts were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials, and then their provisional ballots were never counted..
10) +óGé¼+ôCadres of rightwing activists... financed by the Republican Party,+óGé¼-¥ were sent to key Democratic precincts and passed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls+óGé¼GÇ¥ all of which was untrue. They went from door to door, offering to deliver absentee ballots to the polls (but did not), and also announced that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (the actual election day), and Democrats on Wednesday.
11) Cadres of GOP thugs, like Stormtroopers, menaced and shut out Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states when they tried to monitor election night vote counting (just as the Republican +óGé¼+ôactivists+óGé¼-¥ flew to Miami in 2000 and rioted until the panicked election officials halted their count).
12) In Warren County, Ohio, Republican officials announced a +óGé¼+ôterrorist attack+óGé¼-¥ alert as soon as the polls closed, and kicked the press out, moved all ballots to a warehouse and conducted the counting in secret. This method produced +óGé¼+ôan amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000.+óGé¼-¥
13) The number of votes Bush received in Perry and Cuyahoga Counties in Ohio exceeded the number of registered voters, +óGé¼+ôcreating turnout rates as high as 124 percent.+óGé¼-¥ In Miami County, Ohio, after all precincts had reported, another 19,000 votes suddenly appeared in Bush+óGé¼Gäós column. And there were 4,258 votes recorded by the touch screen machines in a tiny conservative precinct in Columbus Ohio+óGé¼GÇ¥ but there were only 638 registered voters.
14) In New Mexico, in almost half the counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and it always tallied out in Bush+óGé¼Gäós favor, but the Republican Secretary of State dismissed it as an +óGé¼+ôadministrative lapse.+óGé¼-¥
15) In some counties in Texas, VIRGINIA, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat+óGé¼Gäós name on the touch screen machine saw that the Republican was chosen. In Cormal County, Texas, three Republican candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, almost a statistical impossibility.
16) In New Mexico Kerry lost all precincts which used touch screen machines, +óGé¼+ôirrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns.+óGé¼-¥
17) In Florida in counties using touchscreen machines Bush enjoyed sharp jumps in his vote in 2004 compared to his vote in 2000.
According to Robert Kenney, +óGé¼+ôIndeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. 'Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,+óGé¼Gäó Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. +óGé¼-£You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.+óGé¼Gäó"
Consider those exit polls. +óGé¼+ôExit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world.+óGé¼-¥ In Germany, for example, exit polls in the last three elections were never off by more than three-tenth of one percent. Bush himself, in places like the Ukraine, has used exit polls to call an election valid or invalid.
But the exit polls in 2004 showed Kerry to have won, so the Republicans have consistently and nastily denigrated them, and engaged in fanciful explanations of why those particular polls were so far off, all without any solid evidence. Isn+óGé¼Gäót it strange that the +óGé¼+ôdiscrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush+óGé¼Gäós advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush.+óGé¼-¥ Moreover, in non-swing states the exit polls were very accurate+óGé¼GÇ¥ Utah predicted a Bush victory of 79.8 to 26.4 percent, and the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. Exit polls in Missouri predicted Bush by 54 to 46 percent, the actual result was 53 to 46 percent.
Touch screen machines clearly contributed to the mysterious differences, consistently favoring Bush over Kerry regardless of exit poll. In non-presidential elections for House and Senate and for state legislatures in 2000 and 2002, touch screens have produced puzzling upsets by Republicans over Democrats in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and other places. Touch screen machines can be programmed easily to go dead on election day, throw votes to the wrong candidate, or make votes disappear+óGé¼GÇ¥ all while giving the impression everything is fine. The entire computer network can be easily hacked through one machine and thus change the votes at will, and verifiable counts are impossible because there is no reliable paper trail.
Even more alarming, the companies that market touchscreen machines are +óGé¼+ôowned by militant supporters of the Republican party,+óGé¼-¥ companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S. +óGé¼+ôIn effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system;+óGé¼-¥ the software running our voting machines is proprietary, and the courts have upheld the notion that corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights.
Mr. Parenti+óGé¼Gäós conclusion: +óGé¼+ôGiven this situation, it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny.+óGé¼-¥
Message to Democrats: don+óGé¼Gäót count your chickens before they are hatched.
This doesn't solve all problems, but it does help with many of them.
But here it is used in reference to advocacy fair elections and practices at the polls. That's pretty sad and doesn't really make good sense.
*Argumentum ad antiquitatem (the argument to antiquity or tradition). This is the familiar argument that some policy, behavior, or practice is right or acceptable because "it's always been done that way."
*Argumentum ad hominem (argument directed at the person). This is the error of attacking the character or motives of a person who has stated an idea, rather than the idea itself.
*Argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument to ignorance). This is the fallacy of assuming something is true simply because it hasn't been proven false.
*Argumentum ad nauseam (argument to the point of disgust; i.e., by repitition). This is the fallacy of trying to prove something by saying it again and again. But no matter how many times you repeat something, it will not become any more or less true than it was in the first place.
*Argumentum ad populum (argument or appeal to the public). This is the fallacy of trying to prove something by showing that the public agrees with you.
*Red herring. This means exactly what you think it means: introducing irrelevant facts or arguments to distract from the question at hand.
*Straw man. This is the fallacy of refuting a caricatured or extreme version of somebody's argument, rather than the actual argument they've made.
Anyway, enjoy your logical fallacies while we in the "reality based community" try to deal in the realm of evidence and fact.
It's too late to change things for 2006 but God knows we absolutely must get paper trails that are RELIABLE (they can be hacked, too) or just go back to tedious paper ballots hand marked. This spooks election officials, including honest ones: it places a terrible strain over an exceedingly long day on what are often elderly poll workers.
Then there's the problem that invertebrate Democrats have not stood up and insisted on fighting even when the fraud is self-evident.
So, no they don't sit in a room, they sit in their rooms and scheme. This is a well known fact. Do you think it is by accident they all use the same strange phrases and froth over the same (non)issues.
Bottom line, you are being played BIG TIME.
How do you explain the sudden appearance of 19,000 "over votes" like that in Miami County, for example? Some one has to plan tricks like throwing away registrations from Democratic voters in Nevada (which, by the way, was reported elsewhere by an upset Republican who observed the trashing and complained). Some one has to fund the transportation for the thugs who stormed the vote count in Miami, and so on.
In other words, the Republicans couldn't plan more than one move ahead in Iraq but they sure could plan to defraud the American voter.
Why do you suggest that these statements are mutually exculsive? These guys are veterans in the practice of the latter but neophytes in the former. The results are not surprising.
2) as far as nationwide totals, let's go back. In 2000 the Bush campaign had expected to win the popular vote and possibly lose the electoral vote and they were prepared to challenge the election on the basis of the will of the people and also to go and try to persuade enough electors to be faithless to flip the electoral college. Because Bush's legitimacy was challenged on precisely the same basis, they were determined not to let that happen again. So if you know you have the electoral college locked down, where do you make up the votes? How about manipulating the margins in states where your guy is going to lose by a lot, so instead of losing by 20% he only loses by say 15%? And if it is a very large state, say NY or CA, can't you easily add a million or so to your national totals?
3) I am not aware of anyone who has taken figures recorded at precinct levels and walked them up all the way through the state levels to ensure that manipulation did not occur at accumulating (county or higher) collection points. Even in cases where there were paper trails at the precinct level, if the diebold software was being used at the accumulator level, my memory is that it was based on some database package that was so insecure you could bypass the minimal security and manipulate the data by going in at the operating system level - when Howard Dean was sitting in on one of the cable tv shows, someone from blackbox voting showed how easy it was to do.
4) this issue is quite old. I used to be a subscriber to Washington Monthly. I have memories of an article from probably the early 1980's which made it clear that if we voted by computer it would become far easier to steal an election.
5) Several states now do all their voting by mail - I know WA does and I think OR does as well. And yet they have no trouble counting all their ballots, and there is a hard copy ballot for recounts. Canada does a nationwide voting by paper ballot and gets all of its ballots counted in one evening.
6) All of this presumes that there will be elections. If this crew thinks that they might lose control, they will not go quietly. Right now, the bill Specter is proposing would effectively grant tyrannical powers to the administration, strip Americans of their right to judicial recompense for violations done against them by telecommunications companies, and close off any meaningful Congressional oversight of what the administration wants to do about any communications. With that as a precedent, what limits would there be?
If anyone thinks this administration is willing to play by the Constitution as it has been interpreted (Scalia notwithstanding) and laws as passed overwhelmingly by Congress, I think you might soon expect a visit from the DEA of ingesting or smoking prohibited substances.
Teacherken is quite correct when he says this gang will not go gently. They truly cannot afford to have even one House go to the control of the Democrats because they fear the investigations and subpoenas that might result. They've already raised that flag, and there are those invertebrate jelly fish Democrats who cave in and promise in advance there will be no such investigations or oversight, partly because the Democrats fear that the country can't survive another series of endless investigations and gridlock when we are at war. However....
Since when does the "convenience" of voting officials take precedence over a fair, and accurate tally of votes?
It looks like Virginia House Bill (HB 1243) has been continued into the 2007 session. This is the Virginia legislation that will provide VVPT. So the Republican controlled House of Delegates had time to screw around with every manner of silly legislation - state song, anti-gay amendment, etc... (but not transportation), and couldn't get around to assuring the sanctity of our vote.
You can track the issue here:
http://www.vavv.org/
My personal take on this is that having a shamelessly partisan hack--a generous description of Ohio's then secretary of state Ken Blackwell (who co-chaired Bush's re-election committee in 2004!)--oversee a contentious presidential election is an open invitation to controversy.
If Blackwell was a man who took his office seriously, he should have refrained from openly affiliating himself with one of the candidates. There was a clear conflict of interest involved that any student of Ethics 101 should have immediately recognized. The man's moral compass clearly doesn't extend to the public sphere--which is doubly a shame since he has entrusted himself with the public's trust and confidence. His lack of judgment in this matter defies any reasonable bounds of common sense--although from a purely self-interested perspective, the man made an interesting gamble to further his public career.
If Ohio voters elect this man as their governor in 2006 it will be a shameful day for Ohio, America, and the champions of representative government. I hate to use the words, but you literally have to be a drooling-idiot to select a man like this as a representative. Blackwell is to Ohio what Marion Barry was to DC in his post prison run for mayor--which is to say an invitation to disaster. Ohio will get what it deserves if it selects him. No tears from Virginia. I sincerely hope Ohio voters chose wisely.
In any event, to the contrarian argument . . .
Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo makes a yeoman's attempt to rebut the Kennedy article. I think he raises some valid points about the reliability of exit polls generally--and takes Kennedy to task on his interpretation of some of his citations . . .
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/print.html
In response to Manjoo's article, as expected heated disagreement from readers. A defense by the Salon.com editor-in-chief of the article . . .
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/salon_answers/index.html
A defense of his polling analysis by Steve Freeman (not a contrarian perspective, but a response to Manjoo's arguments).
http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/FreemanAnsFarhadManjoo.html
One reservation that I have about these election theft claims is that the DNC doesn't seem to have pursued this matter more vigorously through the courts (as it did in the case of the 2002 voter supression in NH).
The DNC has everything to gain from showing that the Ohio and 2004 presidential election were fixed--and to put election officials who were engaged in illegal activity behind bars. It may be that legal actions will be forthcoming; however, two years after the election we have yet to see a wide spread legal challenge of the result.
I have no doubt if the GOP was on the other side of two contentious presidential elections that we would be hearing the same arguments from them.
The civil rights issues may obscured by the partisan politics, but voter suppression was very real. The confusion and chaos tactics due to reduced number of voting machines alone was bad enough.
Just as one example this site has some plots of reported voter problems in Cuyahoga County.
These videos demonstrated that the reports are not just people complaining to hear the sound of their own voices:
Video 1
Video2
I've been precinct captain before and I've seen some votes get tossed, a few hear a few there, by the GOPers' who were working the polls--no biggy but across the state it adds up.
I agree with Teddy, all this landslide talk about Dems taking back the houses, etc should be muffled a little. Not saying that it couldn't happen, but lets be realistic. Heck if we can make some gains that's great--cause like Teddy said, the certain sect of the GOP has been at this a while, and you can't stop it over night.
Democrats are great thinkers and doers, but traditionally the dems are just not as organized as the Right wingers to be able to them from taking over America--believe me that's what they want to do. Contrary to what the GOP wants people to think the media does side with the GOP on most issues, especially now, and that will make it even harder to get this subject credability. Listen I believe in my gut, we're up against some GOP shananagins when it comes to voter fraud, listen to your gut if you think this too, and spread the word.
We will not have to tolerate the carping of Wingnutistanians - laying the blame for Iraqi Civil War on John Kerry. George Bush and his one-party rule did it on their own. And George Allen was with him every step of the way.
We will not have to wonder where George Bush would lead the Middle East. We know now - straight to regional war. And George Allen was with him...in every failed judgement.