Good news on the vote fraud front

We have some positive developments regarding the growing evidence of voter fraud in the November 2 elections.

Recounts are on the way! Bev Harris has held a press conference with Ralph Nader (whom I still hate) regarding recounts:

They have teamed up with http://www.ballotintegrity.org/ and have set up a 527 special fund http://helpamericarecount.org/ to buy recounts. They worked with Bev Harris's lawyer who is an election specialist attorney. They have found a little used law that allows a recount if it's requested by five citizens who voted in that state and did not vote for the candidate who won.

Yeah, they're asking for money. Yeah, a lot of us are feeling tapped out. But look at it this way: A mere ten bucks buys you a whole precinct.

Big media have tried to serenade us to sleep on this issue, but the song ain't working. My humble responses to the New York Times and Salon have seen some circulation. Now we have Bob Parry's powerhouse reply to the mainstream press organs, which he places in the context of their historical pattern of protecting the Bush family.

Read that piece as a warm-up to Sam Parry's "Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis," which may be the single best piece yet on the Florida imbroglio. Excerpts:

In an example of their slipshod reporting, Roig-Franzia and Keating state that we focused our data analysis on rural counties in Florida. They suggest that Bush’s gains in these rural counties might be explained by the greater appeal of son-of-the-South Al Gore in 2000 than Bostonian John Kerry in 2004.

But we didn’t focus on rural counties in Florida. Rather we looked at the vote tallies statewide and zeroed in on Bush’s performance in the larger, more metropolitan counties of southern and central Florida, where Bush got the vast majority of his new votes over his state totals in 2000.

It was in these large counties where Bush’s new totals compared most surprisingly with new voter registration because Democrats did a much better job in many of these counties of registering new voters...

...Contrary to assertions in the flawed Post article, the most surprising numbers actually don’t come from small rural counties in the state, but rather from large counties, including Orange county (mentioned above), Hillsborough (Tampa), Brevard (Cape Canaveral), Duval (Jacksonville), Polk (next to Orange county), and heavily Democratic Leon (Tallahassee) and Alachua (Gainesville). These are not tiny Dixiecrat counties with longtime registered Democrats who haven’t voted Democratic in years.

Rather, these seven counties have large, diverse populations that collectively saw Bush turn out 1,025,493 votes, exceeding the 946,420 registered Republicans. In these counties, Bush turned out nearly twice as many new votes than the number of newly registered Republicans. In these same counties, Kerry got more than 200,000 new votes, meaning that Bush’s tally can’t be attributed to crossover Democrats.

You should also check out this fine response to the ghastly Washington Post and Boston Globe articles. The writer emphasizes one point I should have made days ago:

Second, the issue with long lines isn't just convenience- it is a suppression issue when people are told (wrongly) that because of heavy turn-out they can come back tomorrow, and a fraud issue when they know that the turn out will be out the door, around the block and down the highway and only put two or three voting booths in minority locations- that is also potentially a Voting Rights Act of 1965 issue.

Let's strike out that "potentially." Black people are being taxed without representation.

NPR has been doing an imitation of Fox News in recent months. Even so, you may want to check out this report.

Give him credit. James Galbraith of The Nation at least attempts to offer an explanation for the exit poll discrepancies:

If (as is usually the case) the polling places are operating below their capacity, then this technique will pick up two important aspects of the final total. First, it will accurately capture the relative vote for Bush and Kerry in each targeted precinct. Second, if turnout is higher than the past standard for that precinct, the poll will also show a higher count for that precinct, which gives the pollster a fighting chance to identify a turnout surge in one part of the state or another.

But suppose voting is much higher than expected. And suppose further that (for reasons to be discussed below), precincts are operating at their capacity--or, even worse, that their capacity has been reduced, relative to previous elections, because of a complicated ballot or shortage of machines. In that case, the exit pollster will not see the full increase in turnout during any fixed period of time. Instead, there will be a queue of voters, many of whom will actually vote only later, after the time window for the exit poll has closed. That element in the increased turnout will be missed. Since turnout did surge more in Florida's red than blue counties, this is a sufficient explanation for the failure of the exit polls there, unless something further and heinous comes to light.

And how do we know the turnout surged more in red counties than in blue counties? Because...er...um...the computer tabulated final results say so. Once again, we encounter circular reasoning: Galbraith's argument depends upon the assumption that the GEMS system provided reliable data. He asks us to accept as a given the very numbers we don't trust.

I question Galbraith's whole line of reasoning. I question the presumption that Kerry supporters were not every bit as motivated as their Republican counterparts, if not moreso. All the published reports I have seen indicate that the Democratic precincts had far, far more problems with long lines and insufficient voting machines. Things went much more easily in Bush country

And nothing in this fanciful scenario tells us why the exit poll disparities were greater in the swing states of Ohio and Florida than in, say, Illinois.

Ken Blackwell is at it again. The Ohio Secretary of State is changing the law at the last minute, doing his damnedest to toss out every provisional vote:

The new ruling in Cuyahoga County mandates that provisional ballots in yellow packets must be “Rejected” if there is no “date of birth” on the packet. The Free Press obtained copies of the original “Provisional Verification Procedure” from Cuyahoga County which stated “Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot.” The original procedure required the voter’s name, address and a signature that matched the signature in the county’s database.

Remember: Ohio will have a recount. Why would Blackwell (a rabid G.O.P. partisan who has made no secret of his ambition to reap the rewards Katherine Harris received) go to such lengths? Perhaps he knows something we don't. Perhaps he thinks Kerry still has a chance of scoring an upset victory in Ohio.

Moon men against Bush? The Washington Times has published a story on massive security holes in Diebold's software. For readers will be surprised to learn this. The strange thing here is the venue: The Washington Times is funded by the Reverend Moon to the tune of (some say) a hundred million bucks a year -- and only a child would believe that the money is clean. Moon is close to the Bush family, and the paper skews so far to the right it sometimes makes the NY Post look like an Emma Goldman production.

For a good discussion of the Diebold situation, visit this Daily Kos page. For the very best illustration of all that can go wrong with a Diebold voting system, see this classic piece by Bev Harris.