• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

election fraud

pomeroo said:
You are simply wrong. The major dailies in this country, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal are liberal-left. The shamelessness of the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times in blacking-out all good news from Iraq, while shouting bad news from the rooftops, serves the national interest very poorly.
Click to expand...

So who is behind this liberal bias? Why is it that people who deal with information be it reporters or educators tend to lean left while people who deal with money and power tend to lean right? Have conservative newspapers been illegally crushed by liberal forces or were they just not popular?
 
pomeroo said:
You are simply wrong. The major dailies in this country, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal are liberal-left. The shamelessness of the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times in blacking-out all good news from Iraq, while shouting bad news from the rooftops, serves the national interest very poorly.
Click to expand...
Take
It
To

POLITICS!
 
Brainster said:
Election fraud is probably generally only done on a local, even individual basis. Even if the Diebold machines were set to change a fixed percentage of votes to the Republicans from the Democrats, how many people would know about it? If they're sensible only a very, very few. This is the flip side of the argument that too many people would know and one would blab; if you're trying to arrange a conspiracy like this, you make darn sure that only a very select few know about it.

Of course, in machine politics (like Boss Tweed in NY or Papa Daley in Chicago) things can be different because there is such pervasive control of the levers of power.
Click to expand...
the most prevalent theories ive heard are simply that ballots from registered democrats were thrown in the garbage in florida and ohio, so we should impeach bush

now throwing ballots away i can see as an action taken by an individual or small group of individuals, but then you want to charge bush with the crime would mean the instructions to dispose of the ballots must have come from him, since i dont think he was communicating directly with people down the municipal level this automatically involves many more people, plus if it goes than high theres probably plans in place to be able to swing more than 1 or 2 counties, which leads to my questions in the OP

even with diebold machines, i work in a software company and we have over a hundred programmers that have access to our source code, since diebold is a larger company im sure they have more developers, how many would have to be in on it to keep it a secret?

if a bit of malicious code was inserted when the source reached the supervior level for approval how could it be certain this wouldnt cause unforseen problems? (surely the test department would notice if the machines were swinging to the right, so any modification must have been made above this level as well)

and when the software comes back for a bug fix, this mmalicious bit of code would have to removed before it goes back to the developers, then put back in afterward (with the same concerns as before)


its easy to say "if i were going to pull off this conspiracy id make sure only a handful of people are involved" but actually being able to pull something off with just a few people is very different
 
defaultdotxbe said:
its easy to say "if i were going to pull off this conspiracy id make sure only a handful of people are involved" but actually being able to pull something off with just a few people is very different
Click to expand...

Yep. Just like rigging the Twin Towers for demolition.
 
dudalb said:
This Thread needs to go to politics immediately.
Click to expand...
is organized election fraud that extends from the municipal level (where it would have to be comitted) to the office for the president (whom people want to punish over it) not a conspiracy theory?

i agree it has political implications, and im sure there are posts here that would be better off in politics, but my OP pertains to the conspiracy theories of the event
 
pomeroo said:
You are simply wrong. The major dailies in this country, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal are liberal-left. The shamelessness of the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times in blacking-out all good news from Iraq, while shouting bad news from the rooftops, serves the national interest very poorly.
Click to expand...
One thing to say on it: These newspapers wouldn't be popular is people didn't buy them, and people who buy them obviously enjoy how it is written, so is it fair to say that Righties assume the left-wing bias because left-wing media is more widly read? If people didn't like the left and liberalism, Fox's ratings would be through the roof, and the NYTimes would flop.

Arg sorry for the politics post.
 
Last edited:
Please keep on topic in this thread to the subject of conspiracies to adjust election results. If you don't, it will be moved to Politics.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: chillzero
 
JAStewart said:
One thing to say on it: These newspapers wouldn't be popular is people didn't buy them, and people who buy them obviously enjoy how it is written, so is it fair to say that Righties assume the left-wing bias because left-wing media is more widly read? If people didn't like the left and liberalism, Fox's ratings would be through the roof, and the NYTimes would flop.
Click to expand...

Fox ratings through the roof? Check.

NY Times flopping? Check.
 
chillzero said:
Please keep on topic in this thread to the subject of conspiracies to adjust election results. If you don't, it will be moved to Politics.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: chillzero
Click to expand...
Is this a promise? Can I hold you to that?
 
Disbelief said:
Did you note the author? I have trouble thinking that he could be unbiased. I have no opinion one way or the other on the matter, especially since there is zero we can do about who is in the White House at this point.
Click to expand...

I read it when it first came out and thought it was interesting.

For the other side here's a critique of his article...

http://www.salon.com//news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/index_np.html

And Kennedy's response to the critique (I haven't read these yet)...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/rfk_responds/
 
LastChild said:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
Click to expand...

Kennedy's article is really a classic of conspiracy theorizing. Manjoo does an excellent job of providing a point-by-point analysis of the claims, so I thought I might take a step back and look at the flaws that fit with the other conspiracy theories.

1. Ignoring the experts. Kennedy's section on the exit polls notes that:

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.
Click to expand...

But when it comes time to examine what went wrong with the exit polling, Kennedy discounts Mitofsky's explanation:

According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Click to expand...

In fact, as Manjoo notes, the exit polls over the last few elections have consistently overstated the Democratic percentage.

2. Calculation of the impossible odds. We've seen this type of claim in the conspiracy theory section quite often:

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000.
Click to expand...

Flaw, class? That's right, you cannot calculate the odds against a past event occurring and think you have proven the event could not have occurred. In addition, Freeman's calculation makes a core assumption that the exit polls must have been right. If you assume that the expert, Mitofsky, is right, the odds calculation is meaningless.

3. Claims of bias on the part of officials. This is of course not as ridiculous as it is in the conspiracy theories, but Kenneth Blackwell does perform something of the same role as Philip Zelikow for the Ohio vote conspiracy theorist. I also found this part particularly amusing. Talking about the "caging" claim:

Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.
Click to expand...
(italics in original)

Given that these were the supposed mailing addresses that the people had used when registering to vote, it hardly seems ridiculous to send the notices there; is there some alternative address that Kennedy would suggest?

4. Mysterious doings highlighted that essentially mean nothing, but they add to the "cumulative argument" so beloved by David Ray Griffin. We may not have a small amount of good evidence for our theory, but we have a lot of very poor evidence!

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.
Click to expand...

Cue spooky music. But regardless of how the vote was tallied in Warren County, any skullduggery would appear to be minimal. In 2000, Bush got 71.6% of the vote in Warren County (ignoring third party candidates) while in 2004 he got 72.3% of the vote (again, ignoring third party candidates) If we arbitrarily say that Bush should not have gotten a higher percentage in 2004 than in 2000 and we decrease Bush's vote count and increase Kerry's the result is a 1300-vote swing, about 1% of what Kerry would have needed to win the state.

6. More suspect "evidence". Kennedy claims that Kerry should have gotten 80,000 more votes and Bush 80,000 fewer in 12 rural counties. This is his "smoking gun" because almost all of the evidence he's come up with so far can't be quantified; a 160,000 vote swing would undeniably have resulted in Bush winning fraudulently. How does Kennedy arrive at this result?

One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)

Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
Click to expand...

All very interesting and very indirect. But Manjoo points out one flaw; that down-ticket candidates often do outperform the presidential candidates. Kerry was very well-known to voters; Connally, despite being black and "gay-friendly" may have been completely unknown to these people.

And a quantitative look at the numbers reveals that Kennedy's mistake here is very similar to his mistake in Warren County; the numbers just aren't there.

Let's take a look at the 12 "suspect" counties. First, in 2000, those counties voted for Bush by a large margin. Ignoring the third party candidates, Bush got 67.4% of the vote while Gore only managed 32.6%. In 2004, Bush upped that to 69.5% to Kerry's 30.5%. Very suspicious indeed. But looking at the big picture, what would it take to swing 80,000 votes to Kerry in those twelve "suspect" counties?

And that's where Kennedy's claim is exposed for the nonsense that it is. You see, these really are rural counties so the idea of shaking an 80,000 vote swing out of them is contrived. Bush got 382,000 votes in those counties, so we reduce that to 302,000. And we up Kerry's 168,000 to 248,000. So Bush got 54.9% in those twelve counties, as compared to his 67.4% the prior election a 12.5 percentage point decline in Bush's share of the major party vote in those twelve counties between 2000 and 2004. How does that stack up with the rest of Ohio? Well, actually Bush didn't lose 12.5 percentage points compared to 2000 in any other county. His worst performance was about a 5 percentage point drop.

7. Selective quoting. Manjoo points out that Kennedy's article draws heavily on a report prepared by the Democratic Party. But as Manjoo gleefully points out, Kennedy ignores the conclusion of that report:

And that same source -- the Democratic Party's report once again -- notes conclusively: "Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio." But Kennedy doesn't tell you that.
Click to expand...

Another terrific example provided by Manjoo:

The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June.

That report does indeed point out that many people -- 26 percent -- who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same -- a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.
Click to expand...

8. Backwards logic. As we never tire of pointing out with conspiracy theorists, Kennedy starts with a conclusion and sifts backwards looking for evidence to support that conclusion.

9. The media (including segments that seem unlikely to be Republican supporters) are in on it:

Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
defaultdotxbe said:
is organized election fraud that extends from the municipal level (where it would have to be comitted) to the office for the president (whom people want to punish over it) not a conspiracy theory?

i agree it has political implications, and im sure there are posts here that would be better off in politics, but my OP pertains to the conspiracy theories of the event
Click to expand...

Yes election fraud can be a legititmate conspriacy dicussion,but this particular discusion has deterioted into a political yelling match.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom