The vote-fraud controversy continues (updated)

Today's news offers many a juicy nugget about voter fraud, and I finally have a few spare minutes to write on the subject.

Clinton Curtis. The spotlight is now on this whistleblower, whose affidavit may become perhaps the most-discussed aspect of the election. I understand that newspapers are now looking into the story. Naysayers argue that he has no credibility because -- get this! -- "he wrote a book." Hell, by that logic you can toss out everything written by Mark, Matthew Luke and John.

Incidentally, Curtis says that hours after the internet publication of his affidavit, his healthy German Shepherd was found dead. I don't doubt that the dog was killed. The Republican party has no shortage of sick, zealous maniacs within its ranks, as anyone who has ever seen the Freepers in action can confirm.

The Nation's David Corn has compiled a skeptic's brief on the issue.

Alas, much of this controversy rests on the issue of exit polls, which undervalued the Republican vote in state after state, primarily those states with electronic voting machines. Corn never really addresses that issue. His sole relevant comment: "Exit polls that differ from reported vote counts are not necessarily proof of foul play."

Really, Mr. Corn? What other proof can we ever hope to have in this modern age of paperless ballots and hackable software?

This is the third election in a row in which the exits undervalued the Republican vote. As one wag has put it: "Last time when we said next time, we meant this time!"

The time for patience has passed. We need a damn good explanation right this minute for this continuing pattern of error -- and not just in the most recent election. Absent such an explanation, we should all confess that democracy has ended in the United States, and that any further contributions to the Democratic party would be pointless.

Corn lays into the controversial Kathy Dopp analysis without giving any space to those who have attempted to debunk the debunkers. (See, for example, here.) Instead, he concentrates on a recent study conducted by the Miami Herald.

The Miami Herald focused on three counties -- Suwannee, Lafayette and Union -- which supposedly fit the "conspiracy theorist" profile. The paper looked at the optical scan ballots, then trotted out the old "Dixiecrat" theory. I'm not at all sure the optical scan study solves the matter -- Florida is notorious for ballot stuffing of this sort, and much depends on whether we can trust the chain of custody. For the same reason, I'm not sure I trust arguments based on historical patterns. Some have argued that by this point, the Blue Dogs should have either died off or made the party switch official.

Corn then goes to relay the findings of the Hout report, and of those who would question it:

Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University, also examined the Berkeley study and found that the statistical anomalies only were significant in two counties--Broward and Palm Beach--not all of the 15 e-voting counties. On his weblog, he notes that the Berkeley researchers "make some pretty strong causal claims which I would think should be studied further, but with some skepticism."

Corn says that Hout's work is not a "slam dunk." Fair enough; I expect to read more back-and-forth on this topic.

But what is completely unfair is Corn's treatment of Bev Harris's work in Volusia county:

When Bev Harris, a prominent critic of electronic voting who runs www.blackboxvoting.org, showed up at the elections office of Volusia County--where Kerry won by 3,723 votes--in mid-November seeking poll tapes for the optical scan voting machines used during the election, she found a set of the poll tapes discarded in a garbage bag. Was this part of a cover-up? Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that these election records were backup copies destined for a shredder. Harris and others fear there is more to the tale.

What Corn has done here is the equivalent of leaving out the twist ending of an O. Henry short story.

The entire point of the Harris find lies in the fact that these so-called "back-up" copies were obviously the originals. Worse, these originals differed from the copies the election officials tried to palm off on her. Even worse than that, the discrepancies always showed Bush receiving additional votes in the tapes produced later.

Now, maybe Harris is wrong. Maybe she is lying. Maybe Corn feels he has good reason to disbelieve her. None of that changes that fact that Corn shouldn't tell this story -- either to debunk it or to uphold it -- if he is going to leave out the most important details.

Greg Palast responds to Corn's piece here. Palast begins with a few witticisms on the theme of black helicopters:

And all because I wrote that the uncounted ballots in Ohio -- more than a quarter million designated "spoiled" or "provisional" -- undoubtedly contain enough votes to overturn George Bush's "victory" margin of 136,000.

Corn says, "Palast wrongly assumes that an overwhelming majority of these ballots contain votes for Kerry." Now why would I think such a thing? Maybe because the precinct-by-precinct analysis of "spoiled" votes (those which machines can't count) by Professor Mark Salling of Cleveland State University, the unchallengeable expert on Ohio voting demographics, concludes that "spoiled" punch cards in Ohio cities come "overwhelmingly" from African-American neighborhoods.

The Republican Secretary of State of Ohio does not disagree, by the way; he intends to fix the Jim Crow vote-counting problem in Ohio -- sometime after the next inaugural ball.

The second group of uncounted ballots, "provisionals," were also generated substantially in African-American areas, the direct result of a Republican program to hunt down, challenge and suppress the votes cast in black-majority precincts.

What happened in Ohio is one-fiftieth of a nationwide phenomenon: the non-count of African-American votes, about a million of them marked as unreadable in a typical presidential race.

Those provisionals were, alas, counted -- by the untrustworthy Blackwell, who took his sweet time. (Do you think the term "Kenny the kapo" is over the top?) A recount may increase the Kerry vote, but right now the margin numbers look grim.

Hanging Chads: I just discovered this brief note on an MSNBC groups page:

Norton Ohio: a male guest of WNIR said that Norton voters were handed cards already hanging with chads.

And that's all. Does anyone else have further information?

Votescam: The Collier brothers wrote the original book on voter fraud -- which, they claim, goes back decades. If you've been wondering about their reaction to the 2004 election, check out their page.

The Associated Press is the group that pays Warren Mitofsky, the exit pollster who will soon tell a congressional committee that the pattern of exit poll disparity is nothing to worry about. We may fairly surmise that Mitofsky's views could be colored by the fact that his firm was hired by A.P. -- which is not an unbiased news service. As this piece by Lynn Landes explains:

The AP is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members. Their board of directors is elected by voting "bonds". However, it is not clear who controls the bonds. AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative.

Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S).

The connection to Ahmanson's highly questionable company is not direct, but neither is it tenuous.

Show me. We have good reason to be skeptical of the vote in Missouri, according to writer Matthew Fox:

Matt Blunt won the race for governor in Missouri while he was Secretary of State. I question the conflict of interest.

As we say here in not-so-sunny California: Like, duh.

But wait, there's more. First, some context. Matt Blunt is son of Roy Blunt, current House Majority Whip, whose job, as George Bush likes to say, is "to count the votes," i.e. he is the guy who whips up formal support for party-backed measures and legislation. Blunt Sr. is also one of George Bush's close buddies, and Bush was in Missouri several times during the campaign drumming up support for Matt Blunt's governor's race and other GOP candidates. Towards the end, Bush just started referring to Matt, even before the election, as "Governor Blunt."

Perhaps because he was the official vote-counter, the younger Blunt did not feel the need to spend as much on the election as his opponent did.

"In a full 80% of Missouri's counties," writes Fox, "both urban and rural, Matt Blunt underperformed George W. Bush, often by discouraging margins." Since Bush received a not-so-stellar 53.3% of the vote, and since Blunt did substantially worse than the president did in many conservative-leaning counties, how did Blunt manage to eke out a win?

But this poor showing was, according to the final numbers, made up for by an incredible performance compared to Bush in the other 20%. In 23 counties Matt Blunt outperformed Bush, sometimes miraculously so. In Clark County, up in the state's northeast corner, Bush just barely took the county with 50.8%.

Not Matt Blunt, he walked away with 67% of the vote!

Imagine that, 17% of Clark county residents who voted for the "liberal Massachusetts senator," crossed the ticket and cast a vote for the son of one of George Bush's closest buddies.

Interesting. Looks as though we should contemplate the possibility that the Blunt boys decided to jerry-rig the vote only in the less-conservative counties.

Fox goes on to outline startling oddities involving voter turnout. Seems that turnout increased in those counties where Blunt did best. Stranger still,

...in precincts countywide, it seems that voters with names A-L turned out to vote in far greater numbers than voters with names M-Z. I checked with the county BOE , and these were voters who went to the same polling place. The only difference was A-L names were in one poll book, M-Z in another.

Hmm. You think more than one fraudster had a go at the MO vote? Such a situation would resemble two independent sets of robbers showing up at the same bank at the same time. Many will argue that the Bush vote in that state is valid, but the younger Blunt sneaked into office with a little help from his friends Hanky and Panky.

Incidentally, the FBI is looking into vote fraud allegations in the "show me" state. The actual nature of the alleged crime is a bit vague right now:

East St. Louis precinct committeemen who were subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury 2 1/2 weeks ago say the investigation centers on voter fraud during the Nov. 2 election. The search warrant used to raid City Hall five days after the grand jury convened supports that but also indicates that the case is bigger than allegations of paying for votes or counting ballots from people who have died or are otherwise not qualified to vote.

The search warrant served by FBI special agent John Jimenez to City Manager Robert Storman is worded to give the federal government great latitude in its investigation. It cited specifically three crimes that the U.S. attorney's office is looking at: election fraud, mail fraud and "obstruction of an official proceeding by the destruction of records."

A close reaqding of the article indicates that the FBI is engaging in a "get-the-Democrat" effort directed at Mark Kern, running for office as a County Board chairman. The feds don't seem to care much about Blunt.

About the FBI: Some of you are pinning hopes on the FBI, which has (for example) shown some provisional interest in Jeff Fisher's allegations. But the Bush-appointed head of the FBI is Robert Mueller, who was the Justice Department's key man looking into BCCI during the reign of Bush the elder. Mueller did everything he could to stymie the investigations into BCCI instigated by...(drum roll)...John Kerry.

Kerry's actions in those days were more courageous than most realize, since his BCCI probe forced him to take on Democratic elder statesman Clark Clifford -- who had previously contributed to Kerry campaign.

The Bush Justice Department obstructed Kerry at every turn. Kerry was finally able to get New York D.A. Robert Morgenthau interested in the world's biggest bank fraud case. From A Full Service Bank by Adams and Frantz:

In Washington, Asistant Attorney General Robert Mueller III, the Justice Department official who had taken over the fderal investigations in BCCI in July, issued a statement saying that the department had "fully supported" the work of Morganthau and provided substantial information. Yet shortly before, senior officials at Justice had tired to stop the Federal Reserve from coordinating a major announcement of its own with Morgenthau's indictment.

That is but one instance of Mueller in action -- or rather, inaction -- on the BCCI front. Why the foot-dragging? One possible reason: A truly searching investigation of BCCI would have uncovered its interactions with James R. Bath, the financier who funded Dubya's oil ventures with Saudi money -- some say Bin Laden money.

With Mueller at the head of the FBI, don't expect any help from that agency on the vote fraud issue. They will target Democrats, and Democrats only.

The overview. Every few days, the gods of the internet deliver a new overview article designed to educate newcomers to this topic. Perhaps the most comprehensive of all is the new cornucopia of linkages compiled by Michael Keefer. This is a companion piece to his early work, "Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam." He even details the hints of abuses-to-come that made the press before the election. He also offers an appendix detailing the media reactions to allegations of vote fraud in Venezuela and the Ukraine.

Florida: If you want to get beyond the Dopp controversy and if Hout doesn['t seal the deal for you, you'll want to read this piece on statistical oddities in Florida.

I suggest you read not just the main articles, but also the additional postings offered by a fellow who calls himself (hee hee) "Tinfoil Beret."

Similar work can be found here:

As previously noted in a study by Univ. of California-Berkeley researchers, there are some big unusual patterns in the big touchscreen counties and a few of the big optical scan counties. They had a big Repub vote swing that was not consistent with the 2000 vote and the Dem and Repub registration increases between 2000 and 2004...

The touchscreen counties with unusual Republican vote increases include: Broward, Hillsboro, Indian River, Lake, Martin, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Sarasota. I don't know whether the provisional ballots were included in the data I used or the extent that they were, so this could be a smaller issue. Charlotte, Lee, Miami-Dade also had similar patterns but to a somewhat lesser degree...

The only explanations for this pattern other than irregularities would be that the Repubs hugely beat the Dems in get out the vote or a lot more Dems voted for Bush in 2004 than in 2000. I haven't confirmed that either of those happened. I heard the Dems thought they had a record get out the vote effort in Florida.

Click the link if you want to see the numbers.