The empire strikes back: Data and disinformation

Just when Professor Freeman's study gives new weight to the argument in favor of vote fraud, the New York Times and other major media outlets cover the story in a demeaning and unfair fashion.

The Times piece castigates bloggers as poor investigators, yet ignores Dr. Freeman's work, which we must now consider the key piece of research. How deceptive is writer Tom Zeller jr.? Here's an example:

And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated.

So much for the exit polls. We see no discussion of the historical reliability of exit polls (as opposed to predictive polls), both in our own past elections and in other countries. We see no mention of the fact that Georgia (the one Stalin came from, not the one Jimmy Carter came from) experienced the ouster of its president when the populace became furious over the disparity between exit polls and final results.

Look at that smarmy wording: "early Election Day polls..." This is a lie. To repeat a quote from Freeman I've used in a previous piece:

Regarding time of day variation, this paper does not refer to mid-day reports, but rather end of day data, which happened to be still available at midnight. But even if there were an early voter bias, is there any reason to believe that early votes would be skewed Democratic?

Folk wisdom used to hold that Democrats tended to vote after work.

The Times hopes to dismiss fears about the final tally by calling the exits "inaccurate." The only proof that they were inaccurate? The exit results did not agree with the final tally! Reasoning, thy name is circular -- at least at the NYT.

To reiterate a point I've made many times: Even if the exits were inaccurate, why did the errors work in only one direction?

The piece devotes much time to Kathy Dopp's well-known data on Florida's optical scan counties, which is something of a diversionary issue. We have been saying for a number of days now that the real problem concerns the GEMS central tabulator (mysteriously unmentioned by the Times), not the "Dixiecrat" counties. (As noted below, some have argued that the "blue dog" areas of Florida should have been less blue this election.)

Focusing on Dopp while ignoring Dr. Freeman constitutes a damnable attempt at misdirection. Zeller scores the bloggers for sloppiness, yet refuses to finish his own homework.

And if you thought everyone at MSNBC would function well on this issue, prepare for the shock of cold water on your face. NBC's latest, by Chip Reid, follows the NYT down the deception trail.

Voting irregularities are reduced, once more, to the blue dog counties in Florida and the infamous 4000-vote discrepancy in that one Ohio precinct. Reid refuses to note any number of other oddities in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina (which may have to offer a revote) and elsewhere. Needless to say, this piece makes no reference to the 50,000 "accidentally lost" absentee ballots in Broward county, Florida.

Reid refuses to see the importance of pattern. As I keep saying: An individual problem can be dismissed as a glitch. But when error after error after error favors Bush and not a single "accident" favors Kerry, we've left glitch-land.

Note this beauty of a paragraph from Reid:

How about those reports of a vote for Kerry getting Bush? Election experts say it happened both ways, and in most cases it was voter error. And as for the early exit polls they were just that, early, and election officials say, wrong.

"Voter error"? The first-hand reports cited in previous posts detail how voters pressed "Kerry" repeatedly only to see the name "Bush" pop up. People don't make such simple errors eight or nine times in a row. I've yet to discover a single published report of the opposite scenario, in which a repeated attempt to vote for Bush kept coming up Kerry. The letter by Representatives John Conyers, Jr, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler to the GAO refers to over a thousand cases across the country in which an unwanted Bush flashed on screen.

And just who are these enigmatic "election experts"? Funny thing -- the experts offering evidence of fraud tend to have names (not to mention credentials): Dr. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. David Anick of M.I.T., and Bill Hawkes, the former A.C. Nielsen Co. statistician. By contrast, the "experts" cited in pieces telling us to trust the tallies remain nameless phantoms.

To repeat: The exits were not early, and you can't call them inaccurate simply because they conflict with the final result. The fact that the disparities went in but one direction (and have done so in three consecutive elections) indicates that the so-called "actuals" are anything but.

There's a word for a piece on potential vote fraud which stipulates a priori that the final results are unimpeachable: Propaganda.