Note - this is gonna be long. But only because stupidity needs to be nipped in the bud on both sides of the aisle, and perhaps all the more so on our side, since so much more is at stake now, when it comes to survival after these elections.
Dookie posted this nugget of an article:
Quote:Kerry Won. . .
Greg Palast
So lemme get this straight. Some 3% of votes are voided because they are "inconclusive". Palast has us count them after all. But they were inconclusive. How can you count inconclusive votes?
Like Palast says, there's always gonna be votes that were not properly cast. I remember joining my mum when she was a precinct officer, back when votes were cast with paper ballots and a red pencil. There would be ballots where two candidates had been crossed. Or where someone had written something on the ballot. Or put a cross where you couldnt really tell who it was for. Those ballots are discarded. Of course they are. They're invalid. Proposing that "if only you'd count the invalid votes" is a bit ... a contradiction in terms.
Furthermore, there's the assumption, apparently, that both those discarded and the provisional votes were overwhelmingly for Kerry. After all, Kerry has 140,000 votes less in the current tally than Bush. Palast is apparently assuming that the 250,000 discarded and provisional ballots break down into 55,000 Bush votes and 195,000 Kerry votes. Does that strike anyone else as somewhat unrealistic, even apart from the question of wanting to count discarded ballots?
Quote:As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
What's going on here? This is where the article makes its most revealing glitch. First off, exit polls might just have it
wrong. Exit polls are based on a selection of precincts that historically have turned out to be representative for the whole state. But there's never a guarantee that they will be representative this time. After all, different voter groups in different regions might suddenly turn out in larger or smaller numbers than usual. If Bush succeeded in mobilising the rural religious folk better than any Republican before, then the precincts they live in will weigh in heavier on the total than normal, and the "representative" precincts the exit polls rely on may not be representative at all.
But first, wait. Back up the truck. He's citing the CNN exit polls. But I have the CNN exit polls
in front of me now, and they dont say what Palast says they say. They say, in fact, that Ohio men voted for Bush 52% to 47%, and women split their votes equally 50%/50%. Advantage Bush. I'm guessing that when Palast refers to what "CNN's exit poll showed", he is referring to the numbers that came out during the day - preliminary numbers, based on incomplete samples, partly unprocessed. Anyone to take preliminary poll data for absolute fact and then complain that the actual result is a fraud if it doesnt line up with it, is - no offence - a fool.
Quote:The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
What else would you want them to do?
Thats true. And its a scandal. But its not because those devious republican election officials keep the black folks' votes apart so as to discard them more frequently. And its not because blacks are to stupid to cast their vote right, either (though the number of spoiled votes always is higher in districts with average low education). No, its mostly because minority districts tend to be poor districts, poor districts tend to be underfunded districts, and that goes for election equipment too. So yes, black and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods far more often have to vote using outdated, crappy equipment and election processes.
Thats a scandal. Every election district should be funded properly and equally. But what does it have to do with counting this year's votes? What are we to do? Count black district votes for 1,1? Approve a discarded ballot more easily if its from a poor district? Affirmative action in election counts? Do we really want to go there?
Quote:So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.
True, but why would they. As noted, Bush currently leads Ohio with 140,000 votes. I mean, I'm all for counting every provisional ballot - they should be. Every vote should be counted. But going beyond that and into the contesting-every-discarded-vote thing we saw in FL last time round is silly if there is nothing at stake anyway. Theres no way that 4 of those provisional and discarded votes are going to be for Kerry for every 1 that'll be for Bush. Bush voters cast provisional ballots too. There's gonna be some unbalance there, but not 1:4 or even 1:3. The Kerry campaign knows that and thats why they threw in the towel.
Quote:But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes.
Blackwell also got into a lot of trouble with his fellow Republicans by
standing up to them just days before the vote on exactly one of those election issues: whether to allow the Republicans to send in "vote challengers" to contest people's right to vote.
Quote:Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent.
I am an election freak, as you will know by now. I have followed elections and crunched election results as a hobby from Russia to Germany and from Bulgaria to my own country. 1 or 2 percent invalid votes is absolutely unremarkable. Are you really so incredulous at the notion that 1 out of 51 people might have made a mistake when they were using all those different and sometimes confusing ballots and ballot methods?
The system needs to be improved. Clearer ballots. More modern machines. Get rid of the punching ballots. But 1,96% does not suggest any kind of devious conspiracy.
Quote:First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls.
Note - this is what Blackwell, accused of being part of the big Republican plot above in this article, openly opposed a few days before the elections - something the article conveniently forgot to mention.
The challenger thing was malicious. But there are many other reasons why people were given a provisional ballot. People who showed up at the wrong precinct (something that apparently happens a lot) are given a provisional ballot. People whose name is missing in the election lists, for example because they forgot to notify the officials that they had moved, or just because there was some mess-up with the lists, were given a provisional ballot. There were a lot given out, for a lot of different reasons. Its a jump to conclude that all of them were due to the challenges and another jump to conclude that they all must thus have been for Kerry. The author just wants us to "count them up" with the Dem vote. And he wants us to do that in order to match them with preliminary, since-updated exit poll data that he apparently has no doubts in taking for the gospel truth.
OK, I'm going to give up now. This kind of article is doing the Dems the
worst service imaginable. Stoking up conspiracy theories on the basis of jumped-to conclusions of all kinds, some plain rhetorical or easily refutable, just makes the Dems look more wacko, and rightly so. I mean, this man takes the preliminary raw exit poll data, which favoured Kerry, as the absolute truth on how people actually voted, without a question or consideration of margins of errors et cetera. But when it comes to the actual results, he
does exercise every possible doubt and question. And then he assumes the worst on
every of those questions in order to arrive at a result that would give Kerry the narrow edge after all. That should tell you enough about the guy.
Bush lead in OH by 140,000. Kerry has only "won" if
all of the author's speculations and assumptions turn out to be true: the discarded votes are all really valid after all, and they are massively for Kerry, the provisional ballots are massively due to the challenges (even though those "were not overwhelming"), and also all fall to Kerry, and the total of all uncounted votes thus amounts to something like a 1:4 ratio in Kerry's favour, because anything less than that would not change the end result. And on the basis of this succession of hyperbolic assumptions he wants you to spend your energy on legal battles so as to revert an election which Bush won by a national total of 3,5
million votes.
Your energy is better spent on more constructive things.
(But according to Dubya that is NOT a result of global warming). I can't imagine San Francisco as cold.
