Vote notes

First, grateful as I am for the kind words some of you have sent me, I admonish one and all not to castigate the more "mainstream" Dems (Franken, Kos, Atrios, you-know-the-rest) for their discomfort with vote fraud allegations. The circular firing squad never did any cause any good.

The Green recount in Ohio. Keith Olbermann is still doing the nation's best reporting on the vote. Today he discusses the Green party candidate, David Cobb, who seeks a recount in Ohio, a welcome task that requires some $110,000. I've never been crazy about the Greens (although I did once have a crush on Petra Kelly), but Cobb's is a worthy effort. If you want to know more, check out his site: www.votecobb.org.

UPDATE: The Libertarians have now joined the effort!

Petitions. If you want to express support for efforts to investigate this mess, try here and here. There's also this one from MoveOn.org, and still another one from People for the American Way.

Terror in Ohio: Olbermann gives us startling news on the "terror" alert that supposedly kept onlookers distant from whatever was going on in the election administration halls of Warren county. Turns out the "alert" came as news to the FBI! This whole business is fishier than Aquaman...

Olbermann also has some choice words regarding a classic Ann Coulter mis-quote.

A list of unlikely events: Yesterday, we quoted a list of all the hard-to-believe events that one must accept in order to accept the results of this vote. That list comes to us via actor Peter Coyote, and an expanded version of his missive can be found here. Pass it along!

Brad Friedman, a California writer, claims that his site has been under a DOS attack since he devoted his attentions to this story.

A $100,000 reward has been offered to anyone willing to rat out a vote fraud conspiracy. I've felt for a long time that the issue might explode the moment one person on the inside "turns" -- but will money fetch us some honesty? Perhaps. I hope so. Better still, though, would be a confession prompted by conscience.

North Carolina. As you know, this troubled state may have to conduct a revote. An interesting discussion of NC election laws (which require a paper ballot, apparently) can be found here.

Speaking of North Carolina -- it seems another one of those computer "accidents" put 22,000 votes into the Bush column. Although this error seems to have a reasonable explanation, I can't help but note that nearly every problem that has come to our attention has inflated Bush's numbers.

Time to repeat our mantra: Errors are not important. The pattern of error is important. Ian Fleming once said: "Twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action." We're way past three here, folks.

Cuyahoga county: Yesterday, in the spirit of generosity, we gave you not one but two "logical" explanations for the weird more-votes-than-voters situation. Some now would debunk the debunkers; see here. Bottom line: In a heavily Democratic County, those precincts with the most impressive turnout registered the fewest Kerry votes. Do we have any readers in Cleveland who could explain this oddity?

You can read much more on the Cuyahoga mystery at Democratic Underground.

Kerry's attorneys are heading toward Ohio. The initial reports are low-key:

Attorneys say they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted. They describe this effort, which began this week, as a "fact-finding mission."

Hmm...lawyers cost money, as perhaps you have heard. Would the Dems have sent expensive talent on a "fact-finding mission" unless they too noted the distinct odor of fish in the air?

Sociology: A new Boston Globe story discusses vote fraud allegations in the usual condescending "internet-driven conspiracy theory" terms, but the overall tone of the piece seems more sympathetic than one might at first expect. I was struck by this paragraph:

"The kind of thing that has to happen is a full-scale investigation," said Troy Duster, a New York University professor who is president of the American Sociological Association. "It sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but I think the data suggest that even if Bush won, he didn't win by the kind of margins that are out there. We have a crisis here of potential legitimacy with all the stuff going on the Web, and the way to deal with this is to do the research.

Florida, again: Let us return to the "blue dog" counties that voted for W even though the vast majority of voters in those areas are registered as Democrats. I had conceded to the conventional wisdom that party disloyalty represents a longstanding "Dixiecrat" shift, although I still have niggling doubts -- the "blue dogs" seem bluer than usual this time. In this light, Daily Kos readers have offered some interesting comments. There are still 24 counties outside the Dixiecrat panhandle area with substantial cross-party voting, always favoring Bush.

One reader argues that the Dixiecrats have been dying off, and that the new generation either votes Democratic or registers Republican. If that is true, then we would expect to see fewer blue dogs -- yet they seem to have registered an increase.

Why were the exit polls wrong? The Seattle Times opines: "Many voting experts say the theory that the exit polls were correct is deeply flawed because the polls oversampled women." Who the hell are these "voting experts," and what data makes them offer such a questionable pronouncement? Why would women be oversampled in battleground states but not in, say, Illinois or California? Why would women be oversampled in this election, but not in 1984 or 1988? Why wouldn't pollsters weight their results accordingly?

The same article includes this arrogant paragraph:

A high-ranking Democrat, mindful of balancing respect for the complainers and a desire to move on, summed up the conspiracy theorists with a line from Alexander Pope: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you must. Make those tired old jokes about black helicopters if you must. But how dare anyone accuse me, the Pessimist King, of being hopeful? In an earlier age, such an insult might prompt a duel...

The Senate, too? This fine piece by Kyle Jordan argues the Senate vote might well have been hacked as well. I must confess that I was particularly struck by the results in South Dakota, where Thune beat Senate Majority leader Daschle by the tiniest margin of any senate race.

When I finally hit the hay on election night, that race was still too close to call -- but since the outstanding precincts were primarily located on Indian reservations, a Daschle win seemed a fair prediction. Now we learn that not only did Thune receive a final surge, but that the senate race attracted more voters than did the presidential contest!

Gee -- why do you think Indians liked Thune so much more than they liked either Daschle or Kerry? Curious...

Wikipedia has put together an incredibly good piece on the strange election of 2004. Of particular importance is the discrepancies map:

Voting locations that used electronic or other types of voting machines that did not issue a paper receipt or offer auditability correlate geographically with areas that had discrepancies in Bush's favor between exit poll numbers and actual results. Exit polling data in these areas show significantly higher support for Kerry than actual results (potentially outside the margin of error). From a statistical perspective, this may be indicative of vote rigging, because the likelihood of this happening by chance is extremely low. A study of 16 states by a former MIT mathematics professor places the likelihood at 1 in 50,000.

Now that's the kind of analysis you should throw in the face of anyone who tries to insult you by calling you a conspiracy theorist. The professor in question, incidentally, is Dr. David Anick.