Today's vote notes

There are many issues other than vote tampering demanding our attention.

Fallujah is appalling, a stain on our national honor. Condi Rice lied under oath, but will replace Colin Powell nonetheless -- proof, once more, that Republicans may do that which Democrats may not. The dollar seems poised for collapse. And those of us still concerned about the Crime We Dare Not Mention (the one that took place 41 years ago) are stunned to learn that the neocons now consider Arlen Specter and the CIA unacceptably liberal.

But many another page will cover those topics, and my time online is short. So here is today's news about vote tampering...

Ohio: The Cleveland Plain Dealer offers a good summary of the meeting (noted earlier in this column) in which citizens complained of the ghastly way they were treated on election day, particularly in minority areas.

In case we haven't mentioned it before, you should check out this detailed report of 93,000 "extra" votes in Cuyahoga county. I'm told the Daily Kos has tried to explain this anomaly as absentee ballots. Visit the site and judge for yourself.

Tom Lohrentz has written some fascinating pieces on Ohio irregularities. This page will direct you to a pdf file outlining the statistical anomalies in various precincts in Cuyahoga County: "These range from over 200 votes cast for candidates Badnarik or Peroutka; voter turnout rates of under 10 percent; and over 30 ballots cast per precinct with no Presidential tally."

Similar anomalies appear in Athens and Mahoning counties, as well as Beachwood, Ohio.

A website belonging to a heavy Bush contributor published Ohio results before they were official or made public.

Scary Indiana. Computers transformed a straight party vote for the Dems into a vote for the Libertarians. The error was caught, and the results of a local race changed. The important points: This story proves that the software has a serious potential for accident, and that these "accidents" always seem to hurt the Democrats.

Brad Friedman has a lot more to say about ES&S shannigans in Indiana.

The series of reports from WISHTV earlier this year tell of ES&S employees surreptitiously installing illegal, uncertified software, into the voting and tabulating machines in Marion County, Indiana. They then ordered their regional ES&S project manager to lie about it to county officials. She refused. As had her husband in a previous ES&S incident, where he was also a project manager, in a different Indiana county. He was fired for his refusal.

ES&S, you will recall, is run by the Ahmanson family, which is heavily linked to Christian Dominionism. (The least we should expect of the people involved with running our elections is that they believe in democracy.)

Jeff Fisher: In the preceding post, we noted this letter on Fisher's page which purports to name the names of the individuals involved with Florida vote fraud. Allegedly, drug rehab centers were used as main offices by those hacking into the central system.

Fisher also personally asked Ken Blackwell to recuse himself in Ohio. That won't happen. Blackwell is partisan and ambitious, and Bush rewards his servants well.

The media. According to ReDefeat Bush:

Most television viewers, newspaper readers and radio listeners (except those watching one particular program on MSNBC at 8:00 each night) remain clueless. Today there was a glimmer of a clue in Brian Faler's Politics column in the Washington Post. Despite the tiny margin in the state that decided the presidency Faler's top story is that New York Senator Chuck Schumer is not going to run for governor in 2006. This comes as reports of voter fraud circulate widely through the Washington Post newsroom, mysteriously incapable of making it into the newspaper except to be derided as Internet rumors.

The Faler column referenced above simply notes the upcoming Ohio recount. Hell, even Drudge does that.

You may also want to read this response to an unfair piece on voter fraud published in the New York Daily News.

Demonstration against vote fraud. It takes place in DC on November 19th, at noon. For details, visit the We Do Not Concede Coalition.

Exit polls and Florida: The afore-cited website also has an excellent discussion, by one Jonathan Simon (whose work bears watching). Simon concentrates on both the exit poll anomalies (note in particular his comments concerning the issue of weighting for gender) and the brouhaha over those odd party shifts in Florida. Here are a few samples:

We ask why there would be an enormous red shift in election day voting only and only in Senate and Presidential races but no others? The early voters were one-third of the electorate, an enormous "sample" size. It was not skewed by party or down the political spectrum, as evidenced by the fact that it tracks the total vote very accurately in all races other than Senate and President. There were no last minute gaffes by Kerry or Bowles, or other explanation for the extreme difference in the preferences of the two groups of politically similar voters (early and election day). So why did the election day voter and early voter groups match for every other race and ballot question, but not for Senate and President?

This critique also goes on to counter the charges that Dixiecrat counties in Florida have a historical record of voting Republican. Some would-be debunkers have apparently salted the evidence by counting all Perot votes in 1992 and 1996 as "Republican" -- not at all a fair presumption. Especially in 1992, Perot attracted quite a few Democrats.

In response to a debunker who denounced the "many historical errors" of exit polling, Simon says:

We ask why there would be an enormous red shift in election day voting only and only in Senate and Presidential races but no others? The early voters were one-third of the electorate, an enormous "sample" size. It was not skewed by party or down the political spectrum, as evidenced by the fact that it tracks the total vote very accurately in all races other than Senate and President. There were no last minute gaffes by Kerry or Bowles, or other explanation for the extreme difference in the preferences of the two groups of politically similar voters (early and election day). So why did the election day voter and early voter groups match for every other race and ballot question, but not for Senate and President?

Damn, I've been trying to make much the same point!

The Black Commentator offers a good response to those who argue that Bush's win was in accordance with the predictive polls (not the exit polls):

BC calculated that Kerry was penalized up to three percentage points by flawed commercial polls in the lead-up to the election, especially the Gallup Poll, whose electoral model projected that Blacks would make up only 7.5 percent of the turnout. Black participation had hovered around 10 percent in the last two presidential elections, and reached 11 percent in 2004. When the exit polls came in, we felt vindicated.

Also worth noting, from the same article:

The digital vote tricksters are the same people who created a day-long Hell for voters in the mostly Black Broward County, Florida precinct where Marsha Johnson, an African American attorney from New York City, was assigned as a voter protection volunteer:

"I saw an incompetent poll clerk telling approximately 1 in every 5 registered voters (who voted at the very same polling place last year and who's voter registration cards indicated that they were at the correct polling site) that they had mysteriously been ‘reassigned’ to other sites but failing to tell them where to go, or worse, giving them incorrect information."

And so on, at thousands of locations, thefts of awesome dimensions and howling arrogance – the humiliation of African Americans in order to secure George Bush another chance to destroy the planet.

I offer this quote because I'm still pissed off by James Galbraith of The Nation, who based his argument on the inane proposition that lines were longer in Florida's red counties.

Finally: Greg Palast vs. Farhad Manjoo. Root for your side.

That's it folks. I don't know whether the subject matter has gotten to me, or whether those fifteen-or-so Advils I took last night are still playing havoc with my guts. But I must now lie down. Thanks to all who have sent me links, criticisms, and kind words.