Full court press on vote fraud

Kerry: I've just heard from one of the most noteworthy soldiers in his campaign "army" (not a general, but not just a grunt) that the senator does not consider this fight over.

Recounts in Ohio: A federal judge has ruled that the recount effort must wait until Blackwell finishes his very, very leisurely tabulation of the provisionals. If, as promised, that occurs on December 6, the recounters have little time to finish their work: The electoral college votes on December 13. Don't listen to those who say we can wait until January -- a full vote of the House and Senate is needed to overturn any state's slate of electors.

Warren Mitofsky continues to mislead about the exit polls conducted by his own organization. His actions are understandable: The Republican party, which usually gets what it wants, hopes to shut down exit polling completely; if he wants to stay in business, Mitowsky must kowtow to Power. Once again, he tells Keith Olbermann that the exits should be compared to "the score at half time at a football game."

No, Mr. Mitowsky. They should be compared to the score at half time at fifty football games. Better analogy: Fifty tosses of a coin. Error should skew in both directions; if the coin keeps coming up heads, something is wrong with that coin.

Lawsuit: Black Box Voting has finally delivered its promised announcement. A Volusia county resident named Susan Pynchon, with the help of some local legal muscle, will sue the county with the aim of setting aside the election results. A major plank in the complaint concerns the pattern of non-compliance with Black Box Voting's record requests:

6. Some or all of the information requested on Nov. 2, 2004 by Black Box Voting is still missing from 59 of the 179 voting precincts, including portions of or all of the voting machine tapes for those 59 precincts, which are a vital part of official paper record of the election results from those precincts.

7. Complete information on problems with the voting machines prior to and during the election has not been provided.

8. Complete information relating to memory card failures during the election has not yet been provided.

9. Only a partial list of the transmission logs from the Accu-Vote optical scan server has been provided. Despite repeated requests, the Elections office has refused to provide to the Volusia County Democratic party the official election results, now stating that those results will not be available until December 1, 2004.

10. The Elections office has provided incomplete data regarding Early Voting and Absentee ballots. The Supervisor of Elections, for example, reported that the total number of absentee ballots and Early voting ballots, combined equaled 89,999 votes, yet the published figures for those totals is 84,100 votes, leaving over 5,800 votes unaccounted for.

11. In addition to the pattern of delay in providing the requested information, the true election results are in doubt because of numerous violations of election law procedure and unanswered questions concerning the results.

12. The polls were opened early and closed late during Early Voting.

13. Many public records, including one signed results tape from a voting machine were found in the trash. Many of the requested records not furnished by the Elections office have been found in the trash. Results from the tapes found in the trash do not match the results of the copies of tapes furnished.

14. An email from Mark Earley, of Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., to the Elections office was provided which asked the recipient for an explanation of why Volusia County had more memory card failures than all of their other Florida customers combined, and then asked why the 17 memory card failures which the Elections office reported on November 3, increased to 25 before November 12, 2004.

15. The reported memory card failures were significant and troubling and included reporting zero votes after one week of voting, requesting permission to upload votes before the voting began, and messaging whether the card should be reformatted.

16. According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections on November 17, 2004, the GEMS computer is not networked, and is "stand alone." The furnished computer logs show evidence of at least two attempts to remotely access the GEMS central tabulator, which is claimed to be secure. A computer screen shot printout on November 17, 2004 (found in the trash) shows that the GEMS computer at that time had two networked hard drives.

That last item is the real beauty.

Still more expert opinion! John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Pennsylvania, and he agrees with Dr. Freeman that exit polls are usually reliable and the current discrepancies are outlandish:

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.

Note that: "indefensible withholding."

With two words, Professor Paulos demolishes the conspiracy theory -- offered by Dick Morris and other G.O.P. disinformationists -- that the exit polls, not the final tallies, were intentionally skewed to depress Bush voters. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that we have not heard a single anecdotal report of a potential Bushie who skipped the election because of the exits. Simply concentrate on the phrase "indefensible withholding." Why would alleged pro-Kerry conspirators withhold this information?

Paulos goes on to make mincemeat of the "chatty Democrat" theory:

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.

He goes on to note that while some might fib about voting for (say) a David Duke...

...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.

Should we trust the Ukrainian exit polls? Colin "the compromised" Powell has announced that the United States does not accept as legitimate the recent vote in the Ukraine, citing "credible reports of fraud and abuse." Of course, the only real evidence of fraud comes from the exit poll disparities.

Bush apologists who have touted the party line -- "exit polls are not accurate" -- suddenly turn mum when the subject switches to foreign elections.

Let's view the events in the Ukraine in Morris-vision. What if the exits, not the final tallies, are at fault?

The exits favored pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. So did the Bush administration. So who paid for this exit poll information? According to the Los Angeles Times, the poll showing the widest Yushchenko lead was "financed in part by the U.S. Embassy and other Western diplomatic missions."

Freeze frame; reverse the image. What would most Americans say about the legitimacy of an exit poll financed by the Ukrainian embassy and other former Soviet republics? The answer is easy to guess.

So why should anyone in the Ukraine believe in an exit poll financed by foreign interests favoring one candidate?

Reuters tells us that the organizations conducting the most important exit polls were the Kiev International Institute for Sociology and the Razumkov Center. (Another poll, financed by the government, still gave Yushchenko a victory, albeit a much narrower one.)

Who supports the Razumkov Center? According to their website, they receive financing from various Ukrainian government institutions -- but also from the "Democracy Encouragement Foundation of the U.S. Embassy," as well as the Rand corporation (basically an adjunct to American intelligence and the DOD), Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies (which some have linked to MI6, and which appears to have helped provide questionable information on Iraq before the war), a mysterious entity known as the Brinkford company, and a number of other western sources of much-needed hard currency. (The list also includes non-western foreign associates, such as Iran.)

I have yet to look into funding for the Kiev International Institute for Sociology, but I would not be surprised if they had similar links.

"Follow the money," goes the famous dictum. The money behind the Ukrainian exit polls traces back to this administration and its allies, which were never disinterested observers.

So why are the Ukrainian exits considered valid, while many scoff at the exits conducted in the United States?

Much the same point is made in Pravda. This article is by no means unbaised -- but it does offer a few interesting quotes:

In this case, Viktor Yushchenko, the defeated centre-right candidate, is well known to Ukrainian society because he was already Prime Minister for two years between 1999 and 2001.

Where was this condemnation during the appalling electoral fraud committed in the USA on November 2nd?

And:

Mention of "electoral fraud and abuse" from an American observer was risible, after the two fiascos in the USA which saw the most flagrant examples of vote-rigging and electoral fixing in modern history.

And:

When the Republican Party deploys electronic voting machines bought from Republican Party fundraisers who promised before the election to help the President to win, the OSCE observers describe it as localised and insignificant incidents. However, when the incompent stooge Yushchenko fails to win in the Ukraine, it is fraud.

Finally: Previously, I've counseled readers not to yell at Salon, Josh Marshall, Kos and Atrios for their "hands off" attitude toward the vote fraud story. But the dogpile of new evidence -- particularly Bev Harris' discovery of fake poll tapes in Florida, as well as the studies by academics -- changes the landscape. If Harris' work holds up under scrutiny (and I am betting it will) then we no longer must ask if fraud occurred; the question is now how much.

Don't let anyone fob you off with false reassurances along the lines of: "Well, yeah, tampering may have happened, but not to a degree that would have changed the overall results." Harris was able to retrieve only a small number of the genuine poll tapes; the rest no doubt went into the burn bags or the shredders. Thus, any proof of intentional official tampering in any part of Florida renders the entire 2004 election invalid.

So now is the time to shout at our "liberal" media. But I advise you to shout politely. Be nice when you hit 'em upside their heads.

In case I don't get online again before tomorrow, happy Thanksgiving. My lady and I will probably visit our favorite haunted restaurant, the Big Yellow House in Summerland. Much recommended. Plenty of leftovers for the pooch.