Newspapers are starting to take notice of the voting problems. I only wish that the TV news outlets would do so as well.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/ed...al/10258265.htm

Errors in exit polls still a puzzle to many
By John Allen Paulos
Posted on Wed, Nov. 24, 2004

Why did the exit polls on Election Day in the battleground states differ so starkly from the final tallies in those states? As my crosstown colleague, Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, has demonstrated in his paper, "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," the pattern is unmistakable. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, the differences between Bush's final tallies and his earlier exit poll percentages were, respectively, 6.7 percent, 6.5 percent, and 4.9 percent.

Similarly, huge differences between the final tallies and the exit poll percentages occurred in 10 of the 11 battleground states, all of them in Bush's favor. If the people sampled in the exit polls were a random sample of voters, Freeman's standard statistical techniques show that these large discrepancies are way, way beyond the margins of error. The odds against them occurring by chance are almost 1 million to one.

Since exit polls historically have been quite accurate, and the differences as likely to have been in one candidate's favor as the other's, we're confronted with the question of what caused them. Given the indefensible withholding of the full exit-poll data by Edison Media Research, Mitofsky International, the Associated Press and various networks, we can only hazard guesses based on what was available election night. The obvious speculation, alluded to above, is that the exit samples were decidedly nonrandom.

Earlier voters across the country might have differed significantly from later voters. More women might have voted then or angrier partisans did or unemployed people walking their dogs wanted to cast their ballots sooner rather than later. This is hard to credit, however, without any supporting evidence for such an effect in other elections.

Another possible explanation is that a fraction of the Bush voters were ashamed of their vote for him and lied to or avoided the exit pollsters. This happens regularly in polls on personal matters, but rarely in political polls. One example is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan wizard running for governor of Louisiana several years ago, who received many more votes than exit polls suggested because people didn't want to admit their preference for Duke and be labeled racists. Bush is certainly no Duke, and very few of his supporters seemed in the least shy, but an attenuated version of this phenomenon may be behind the difference. Who knows?

Absent any proof or compelling reasons for the differences between the final tallies and the exit polls in the swing states, I don't understand why these gross discrepancies are being so widely shrugged off. After all, the procuring of random samples is far more of a problem for ordinary telephone polls, where the minority of people who cooperate with pollsters presumably differs in some way from the majority who don't. Still, these polls are not dismissed with the same impatient nonchalance as this year's exit polls.

What makes these discrepancies more than a technical problem is that there is a much less likely, much more ominous explanation: massive fraud. Fraud is hard to believe for many reasons, one being the widespread nature, extending over different states and regions, of the shift to Bush. The difficulty of concealing a conspiracy grows very rapidly with the number of conspirators.

Another disturbing possibility is that there was no coordinated conspiracy, but rather many people working independently to subvert the election. The election has prompted extensive allegations of fraud, some of which have been debunked, but many of which have not. In several cases, nontrivial errors have been established and official tallies changed. One other scenario doesn't require many conspirators: the tabulating machines and the software they run conceivably could have been dragooned into malevolent service by relatively few operatives. Without paper trails, this would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to establish.

Hard evidence? Definitely not. Nevertheless, the present system is such a creaky patchwork, and angry suspicions so prevalent, that there is, despite the popular vote differential, a fear that the election was tainted and possibly stolen. (If 68,000 Ohio Bush supporters - only about a half dozen voters per precinct in the state - switched their votes, Kerry would be president-

elect. Considerably fewer switches would be required if, as is likely, most provisional and spoiled ballots were good and went for Kerry.) A high-level commission should thoroughly examine the exit poll discrepancies and our electoral apparatus in general.

This is not a partisan issue. People differ about whom they want in the White House, but almost everybody wants whoever is there to be seen by all as having been rightfully elected.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University
The Web site address for John Allen Paulos is www.math.temple.edu/paulos.

Another op-ed in another local newspaper (Eugene, OR Register-Guard) questioning the integrity of the election process.

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/11/...lobes.1123.html

Guest Viewpoint: Integrity of America's voting system is in danger
By Dianne Lobes
November 23, 2004

It's the story you're not seeing in the mainstream media yet. You learned the basics of it in first grade, though. This is a country of "one person, one vote," and the sanctity of your vote is a sacred trust between you and the United States of America. You have the right to vote, and to have that vote counted.

We need to protect this sacred trust. Democracy cannot be maintained on blind faith, though our first-grade hearts believe otherwise. The proclamation of a sacred trust and its reality are two different things.

"We have a republic to defend," said Bev Harris, executive director of www.blackboxvoting .org. But according to the mass of evidence she and other voting experts have accumulated, our republic and its much-vaunted voting system are in grave danger.

Harris, a savvy investigator from Seattle, is not referring to terrorism, but to the growing cascade of voting irregularities that have been reported across Ohio, Florida and the country as a whole.

Ohio is the home of Diebold Election Systems, a major purveyor of touchscreen voting machines that, unlike the ATMs the company also manufactures, have no paper trail. Without a paper trail, no recount is possible. The voting machines - the "black boxes" of Harris' Web site - feed into a central tabulator run by secret Diebold software.

That tabulator can easily be hacked, inside and out. Anyone having access to the computer can change, in a minute, results compiled by the secret software and remain undetected. The democracy in this process is undetectable, too.

Many, many reports of miscounts by computer voting machines have been heard at several public hearings organized by grass-roots groups in Ohio. Sometimes, the machines registered the wrong candidate for president, or counted votes backward.

In Ohio, an analysis of the Franklin County Board of Elections' allocation of voting machines consistently showed that far fewer machines were provided to the Democratic city of Columbus, with its large ethnic population and increased voter registration, than to the primarily Republican, white, affluent suburbs.

Freepress.org states, "The Columbus Board of Elections' own document records that, while voters waited in lines ranging from two to seven hours at polling places, 68 electronic voting machines remained in storage and were never used on Election Day." Reports of 11-hour waits were common.

Many of the available machines broke down or didn't work at all, and poll workers were reported to be unconcerned about requests for help. "Observers" and local law enforcement officers intimidated some voters. It's estimated that tens of thousands of voters were driven away. The national election may have turned on this disenfranchisement.

A study of Florida's 2004 vote by the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence that electronic-voting counties could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to George Bush. The study was replicated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and checked by seven UC professors, without finding a flaw in the model.

Berkeley sociology professor Michael Hout, who oversaw the research, called on Florida election officials for an investigation. "Something went awry with the voting in Florida," he stated.

Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties - the same heavily Democratic Florida counties involved in the 2000 election fiasco - showed a "small, unexplained boost" in votes going to Bush. Their touchscreen voting machines came from Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, which along with Diebold sells the majority of electronic voting systems. The CEOs of Diebold and ES&S are brothers.

Recounts are currently under way in Ohio and New Hampshire, requested and funded by the Green and Libertarian parties and grass-roots organizations, including TruthinVoting.org here in Eugene. Election lawyers are filing suit in Ohio. Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa, among other states, are being scrutinized for similar discrepancies in voting patterns.

We cannot allow a company such as Diebold, with a track record of errors and a growing history of voting irregularities, to "ensure" our sacred trust. We the people must be asking questions, getting answers and involving ourselves in the process every step of the way. We must oversee and self-ensure our right to vote.

Josef Stalin said, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." That's the part we didn't learn in first grade.

We must demand investigations and appropriate recounts of the 2004 election now.

Dianne Lobes of Eugene is a member of Truth in Voting in Eugene (www.truthinvoting.org).

The Philadelphia Inquirer is right on.



Bingo. This is the hardest part: actually getting more people to believe that fraud occurred.



Bingo again. People believe that Bush’s fraudulent victory couldn’t have taken place because they’re focused on the 3.5 million national votes or the 350,000 plus Florida or the 136,000 Ohio votes, when in actuality only a small number of stolen votes here and there swung the election.

Some of the other point are similar to what Zogby said on Keith O’s show.

Also the exist poll were taken at face value for all the other races and to justify the reason why votes were cast for one candidate or another, but the polls in the presidential race were deemed inaccurate. That’s illogical.

With all that there is this, another anomaly that swings for Bush:


http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/2004votefraud_review.html

The 2004 US Elections: The Mother of all Vote Frauds

When the would-be-voters were asked whether the nation was headed in the right direction, about 52-55% people have replied negatively. Under this scenario, the leadership change is all but assured. Mr. Bush and his campaign team may project an optimistic outlook as they spoke before the media tonight, but I feel that while Bush’s number is hovering around 47-48%, which is the same number for Kerry, it does not bode well for the Republican candidate. [11/01/2004]

You wouldn't steal George, would ya?

http://whatreallyhappened.com/steal_election.html
Incumbents never make surges from their last horse race number.

Examples:

1956 Eisenhower's final horserace projection 59.5%, his actual vote total 57.8%
1964: Johnson's final horse race projection 64%, his actual share of the vote 61.3%
In 1972 Nixon's final horse race projection tally 62%, his actual vote total 61.8%
In 1976 Ford's final horse race projection number 49%, his % share of the vote 48.1%.
In 1980, Carter's final horse projection numer 44%, his real % of the vote 41%.
In 1984 Reagan final horse race projection tally 59%, his real share of the popular vote 59.2%.
In 1996 Clinton's final horse race number 52%, his actual share of the vote 49.2%

The alleged miracle comeback of incumbent Harry Truman can not be included in this study because Gallup issued it's "final" result 2 weeks before the election.

In 2004 President Bush defied both public opinion and history to win the election 51 - 48.

How was this done? Simple...

Vote suppression/voter intimidation and deception. Shortages of voting locations and ballot forms. Foreign monitors barred from polls. Unmatched exit polls/actual results - actual results always skewed to Republicans. Masses of e-Voting "glitches". Computers lost votes. Presidential votes miscast on e-Voting machines throughout the US. More recorded votes than voters. Republicans gained 128.45% in Florida counties using optical scan voting machines while Democrats lost 21% - some districts showed gains of over 400% while one, Liberty County, gained over 700% for Republicans. Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns. Bush had 'incredible' vote tallies. 7% turnout reported in Cleveland precinct. In Cuyahoga County different towns had the exact same number of "extra" votes. And on, and on...

Another op-ed on the election problems, this time from Newsday:

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpn...0,3650425.story

Fundamental flaws put our voting system at risk
BY RALPH G. NEAS
November 24, 2004

The notion that the 2004 presidential election ran "smoothly" is a myth. In fact, the system is flawed, and significant barriers to the ballot box remain, especially for minorities and the poor.

Particularly in urban districts with too few voting stations, lines were up to 10 hours long. These excessive bottlenecks disenfranchised untold thousands who could not afford to wait that long and had to return to their jobs or children before reaching the voting booth.

Antiquated, faulty and insufficient equipment was also common in minority and low-income precincts. These problems were frequently compounded by inadequate training and short-staffing of poll workers.

Many hoped we had seen the last of the punch-card machines after their disastrous role in the 2000 election, yet they were used widely this election in Ohio and elsewhere. Punch-card machines are notorious for a high percentage of "spoiled" ballots.

A study found that in the 2000 election voters in predominantly African-American precincts in Ohio - which mostly use punch-card machines - had their ballots discarded at three times the rate of voters in predominantly white precincts, where newer voting equipment is often available. Every indication suggests that voters who used those machines this year were concentrated more heavily in minority and low-income precincts and experienced similar levels of disenfranchisement.

Problems were by no means restricted to punch-card machines. Many electronic voting machines failed to start in the morning and others malfunctioned throughout the day, often resulting in lengthy delays.

Suspicion and confusion surrounding electronic voting machines was widespread. Many voters believed that the machines did not accurately record their choices, or did not record their votes at all. Without a voter-verified paper trail in most places, they were forced to trust the machines, and election officials were left without a means for verifying voter intent in recounts. News that a "glitch" in an electronic voting machine gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in an Ohio precinct where only 638 voters cast ballots highlights the problem.

Voters were largely uncertain about how to properly cast provisional ballots, and with good reason. Rules on the use of provisional ballots and recording of such votes varied widely from state to state - even from one polling place to the next - and many poll workers were as confused as the voters they were trying to assist.

Many voters requested absentee ballots that arrived too late to use or never arrived at all. To add insult to injury, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican, issued a directive to election officials to turn away such voters if they arrived at the polls to cast regular ballots. A judge overturned Blackwell's directive but not before many voters were disenfranchised.

In other cases, voters received voter registration cards and other official materials with inaccurate polling place information. And many voters, new and longtime registrants alike, found that their names were not on the voter rolls.

Election Day was especially trying for voters with disabilities. Many polling places lacked the necessary materials, assistance and accessibility to ensure that disabled Americans could vote.

The good news about this election is that turnout increased substantially - and that tens of thousands of Americans were eager to volunteer time and energy to help voters overcome obstacles to voting and to document continuing problems. Nevertheless, untold thousands were deprived of their right to vote by intimidation, inequities and systemic problems at the polling place and decisions made by election officials that placed barriers between people and the ballot box.

Democracy requires better. Every American should be alarmed by a system that creates or permits voter disenfranchisement, no matter the outcome of any particular race. It is time to find the bipartisan will to ensure that every eligible voter can cast a vote that counts.


Ralph G. Neas is president of People For the American Way Foundation, a founding member of Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition formed to monitor the election and advocate for electoral reform

The Inquirer article was the best I've seen because it appeals to people's common sense. I find it so ironic that the administration is sending investigators to the Ukraine to look into the election there because the exit polls did not agree with the vote and they think fraud may have been committed. Hmm...... they are unbelievable and actually believe their lies!!

Thanks for posting the GOOD NEWS that people are speaking out about the red shift phenomenom!

But, maybe the red shift really was due to this:

"Another possible explanation is that a fraction of the Bush voters were ashamed of their vote for him and lied to or avoided the exit pollsters"

That's about as plausible as the red shift being due to the 'morals votes' theory which was disproven of course.

We all should continue to email the media and write letters to the editor.