05.10.2005 Jim Lampley (ABC sports)

The Biggest Story of Our Lives

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.

Posted at 02:32 AM | permalink

05.10.2005 Jim Lampley

With Apologies to Byron York

In an attempt to refute the logic of my previous post about the stolen Presidential election of 2004, Byron York compares http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/arch...to-jim-lam.html the handicapping of the Kentucky Derby to oddsmakers' responses to the exit polls which demonstrated John Kerry was the actual winner on November 4. This is typical neocon disingenuity, a shunt designed to ignore the real question.

Handicapping a horse race is sophisticated alchemy, the highest form of tea-leaf reading but tea-leaf reading nevertheless. To compare the data in the Daily Racing Form directly to the kind of scientifically disciplined information that comes from time-honored exit polls is intellectual garbage and York knows enough to know that.

Did Rep. Conyers' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/arch...-the-story.html hearings on ballot irregularities truly "fail" to turn up useful evidence of tampering, or did Republicans both in Ohio and on Capitol Hill successfully (at least for the time being)obfuscate, disinform and discredit the earth-shaking charge that a Presidential election was criminally currupted? Hey, what's the point of controlling both houses of Congress if you can't use that for the ultimate Machiavellian insurance?

York's posting proves nothing. Neither, for that matter, does mine, but I think I know who is warmer. What is needed is for legitimate news media, whether old style or new age, to commit to the investigative process of getting to the bottom of what happened in November. At this point in 1973 Watergate was still a brewing story, Alexander Butterfield was months away from revealing to Senate investigators that there was an audio-taping system in the Oval Office. But the truth emerged. So too will it emerge here, if only the fourth estate will do its job.

Byron York won't scare me off. Not with lightweight stuff like that.

Wow! Lampley is on fire. This is great links to the York and Conyers blog comments.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/arch...to-byron-y.html

05.12.2005 Jim Lampley

To Byron York and Other Ostriches

Byron York has treated me fairly and without rancor, and I am grateful for that. Certainly I am more in his wheelhouse than mine, and I'm honored that he saw fit to engage me in this little set-to we've conducted since Monday. I fired a lead right, Rep. John Conyers shouted encouragement from my corner, then York delivered a hook to the body. I shot back an uppercut, then he loaded up a right hand and attempted to bring an end to the discussion.

Byron York's most recent refutation of my charge that irregularities in the 2004 Presidential election demand criminal investigation cites quotes from the report of Edison/Mitofsky, the two-company partnership which provided exit polls to the major television networks, on the vast discrepancies between those polls and the official results of the election. The report, which Mr. York has helpfully highlighted in his second post and which runs to about eighty pages, essentially offered the conclusion that an five-and-a-half point gap between final poll numbers and the national popular vote tabulation-- a variance more than four times the statistical margin for error of 1.3%-- can be attributed to shy Republicans. The Washington Post summarized the conclusion: "procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John Kerry." With this, in effect, York dismisses the exit poll variance argument.

I could go on at length here about the curious disconnect between the actual data in the report and its guesswork conclusion, how Edison/Mitofsky systematically validate all their sampling choices and their methodology, in effect eliminating any logical underpinnings for their ultimate summation, all the while selectively ignoring the lopsided skewing of pro-Bush discrepancies in the most critical swing states. I could spend some time dissecting what I believe is an obvious whitewash, a delicate sidestep away from the potential public relations disaster of being tied forever to the most notorious election theft in history.

But none of that is necessary, because the entire Edison/Mitofsky report is irrelevant to the argument, given that it is based on the assumption the final official vote tally is accurate. Make no mistake: my argument is that the final official vote tally is anything but accurate, that it is the product of massive vote fraud carried out through the programing of Diebold voting machines and various other machinations aimed at suppressing, destroying or losing Kerry votes. My argument is that what were accurate were the exit polls. As one Ivy League research methodologist has noted, "Apparently the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy."

Various statisticians have reported that the odds on the occurrence of variances from exit polls to actual results such as were produced in this election range up to 959 000 to 1. Sounds like DNA. As US Count Votes notes in a statistical abstract, "No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance."

So let me put it in Foxspeak. If all the circumstantial evidence related to potential vote fraud in this election were gathered up into one big file for the Scott Peterson jury, they'd convict. The jury that might look at all this and acquit? O.J. Simpson. Politics make strange bedfellows.