Krugman has a column today reminding us that polls showing Republicans in potential trouble as a result of George W. Bush once again fucking up everything he touches don't mean anything as long as they are willing to win by any means necessary -- including cheating.
Dennis Loo, Ph.D. at Cal Poly Pomona, has more:
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 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.
I'm not looking to re-fight the 2004 race, though I sure wish we could. What I am doing is looking forward and I don't like what I see. Republicans are in serious trouble, and in a nation with a voting apparatus that isn't rigged, they wouldn't stand a chance of retaining power.
We have now had three elections in which the results were questionable. In 2002, commanding leads for Max Cleland and Erskine Bowles when I went to bed at 11 PM were replaced by victories for their opponents by morning. Even in the recent 2nd district Congressional race in Ohio, results from Jean Schmidt's home precincts were delayed for the most preposterous of reasons -- "humidity makes the optical scan ballots stick together."
I'm not saying that Paul Hackett won that race, but this is part of a pattern that ought to disturb anyone who believes that votes should be counted as they are cast. (Of course our resident troll here believes that as long as Republicans win, it doesn't matter, so he needn't bother to comment here.)
I too believe they should be voted as they are cast, and that obstacles should NOT be put in the path of eligible voters who want to vote. If that means Republicans win, then so be it. Then we'll at least have an accurate vote count that people like me can't question. But if you really believe your side is right, you should trust the people to vote for it. And if you don't, then stop talking about freedom and democracy, because you don't believe in it.
UPDATED to delete the screen name of our resident troll, since he's just enough of a prick to try to sue me.
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