Vote fraud: A new hero -- and new problems

Although a few commentators have expressed disappointment over Arianna Huffington's experiment in celebrity blogging, her new site has introduced us to an unlikely new hero -- sportscaster Jim Lampley, formerly of ABC and now with NBC and HBO. In his column, he unabashedly declares the fraudulent vote of 2004 the "biggest story of our lives."

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, that's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Dark doings in California. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley may have had a questionable management style, but he remained a staunch foe of Diebold and its cognates. Now that he has been forced out of office, Schwarzenegger's appointees are poised to create trouble. A post by "Liberty Belle" on DU deserves widespread attention, and not just by Californians:

A law requiring paper trails of some sort goes into effect in '06.

That's the good news.

Bad news is McPherson has a commission that includes a Diebold rep and another member or two tied in with $chwarzenegger fundraising.

There is a hearing May 19 at the Secretary of State's office to consider whether to buy more Diebold equipment, never mind that Diebold has broken every promise it ever made to clean up its act, and has been caught loading backdoor software in CA on multiple occasions, from what I've heard.

Expect a very big stink from a raucous crowd next Thursday. Hearing starts at 10 am; be there at 9 if you can.

In other bad news, CA will be making a decision in the next few days on whether to award a contract to Choicepoint, the outfit that helped steal Florida for W in '02. They purged tens of thousands of supposed felons, mostly black Democrats, off voting rolls in "error". This is also the company that sold off consumers data
and has been involved in major security breaches. Yeah, sounds trustworthy to me, right?

CA officials insanely are leaning toward this. There is talk of trying to get emergency legislation enacted to force them to consider more than just low cost--ie, criminal records, integrity, etc.

Trust me, Californians are screaming about this stuff. But it's being done through channels other than our Dem-controlled legislature.

I will add a couple of points: As noted several times in the past, "paper trails" -- while a step in the right direction -- provide little real protection. The paper receipts are not counted unless the margin of victory is so thin as to trigger a recount. Even in the case of a recount, we face the possibility of evidence tampering (i.e., old-fashioned ballot stuffing). These issues arose during the Ohio recount.

These problems can be met. The law could require the double-checking of paper ballots in all elections, and strict controls (including constant video monitoring) could help insure that tampering is nearly impossible.

Choosing the services of Choicepoint or Diebold is like asking Richard III to do the babysitting. Schwarzenegger's sagging poll numbers explain why his appointees want to turn California's electoral destiny over to proven scoundrels.

If you know anyone in California, please pass along this information.

Prediction. How will the Republicans explain away continuing disparities (in 2006 and points beyond) between the exits and the so-called actuals? Three mechanisms come to mind. Republican propagandists will:

1. Increase pressure to keep exit poll results secret until they have been "conformed" to the manipulated compu-vote.

2. Emphasize an inherent bias in polling methodology -- a bias allegedly in existence since 1988. (For the truth of the matter, re-read Lampley's words above.)

3. Mount a campaign to "punk" the exit polls. Limbaugh and company will tell their audiences that the exit pollsters represent the allegedly "liberal" media, and that Republicans should therefore lie to pollsters or refuse to participate.

Would such a campaign succeed? Success or failure doesn't really matter. In 2006, the mere existence of such a campaign will serve as a catch-all explanation as to why the exits do not tally with the official results.

Right now, a growing number of voices use a similar argument -- "Reluctant Bush Responders boycotted the liberal media!" -- to exlain away the 2004 disparity. That scenario has one obvious problem: The vast majority of people approached by exit pollsters surely had little idea as to who paid for the poll.

Rove also had pollsters in the field on election day, or so we are told. Are we to believe that potential respondents took the time to determine the polls' sponsors, and then said: "All right, I'll talk to you but not to you"?

Not bloody likely!