Baker's dozin': Russ Baker has posted a piece on Tom Paine which attempts to debunk allegations of vote fraud. Pretty weak stuff, if ya asks me. No attempt to rebut the Conyers report. And dig what he has to say about the US Count Votes report:
Although many of the USCV people have degrees in statistics and math, those are general skills that constitute only a part of the toolkit needed to design and deconstruct complex polls. That's not to say they don't have some legitimate points, just that they don't have the chops for such a powerful conclusion."General skills"...?
In the meantime, he accepts without question the expertise of Elizabeth Liddle ("Febble") although he makes no real attempt to reconstruct or summarize her analysis, probably because he can't understand it. I'm not saying that Liddle should not make a contribution, but why does she count as a specialist, while all those USCV PhDs are just everyday nerds with "general skills"?
Baker repeats what is becoming the standard line on the "chatty Dem" (or RBR) hypothesis: Bushites mistrust the "liberal media." The problems are obvious: The pollsters do not identify themselves by saying "Hi, I work for the liberal media" -- as far as Charlie Anybody knows, the poll might be backed by Fox News, the UN, or the government. I simply refuse to believe that large numbers of Republicans refuse any opportunity to bleat their opinions.
Oh...and does Baker make any reference to the damning fact that the allegedly Kerry-heavy selection of voters announced a preference for Bush over Gore in 2000? Nope!
John Kerry, in a speech given last month, warned that our right to vote is being eroded. Even so, he claimed that no "smoking gun" existed to prove that the compu-vote had been hacked.
Reluctant Bush Responder: Regarding the quasi-official theory as to why the exits veered so sharply away from the actuals in 2004, "Truth is All" on Democratic Underground found a money quote in an older piece by the Mystery Pollster (a supporter of the RBR thesis):
When a voter refuses to participate, the interviewer records their gender, race and approximate age. This data allow the exit pollsters to do statistical corrections for any bias in gender, race and age that might result from refusals.We should be able to tell from this just what sort of person refused to participate in the exit polls -- and whether that sort of person was more likely to vote for Kerry or Bush.
Get back to where you once belonged. A USA Today story outlines the nationwide push to do away with paper-free computer voting. But there is now evidence that the addition of Paper may not do the trick...
Adding to the confusion is a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study that found problems with paper backup for electronic voting machines.
In the study, 36 "voters" used electronic machines to pick candidates and were asked to double-check their ballots using a paper printout. Then they were asked to go through a similar exercise in which their vote choices were played back to them by a computer-generated voice through headphones. Errors were interspersed in the ballots. Only 8% of those using the paper backup caught the errors, compared with 85% using the audio system.Yes, but this addresses only the question of double-checking the choice made in the voting booth, which is not the real issue. The issue is the central tabulators.
Ted Selker, an authority on human interaction with machines who oversaw the MIT research, said the study supports observations he made of voters using paper backups during recent elections in Chicago and Nevada. "I have lost confidence in paper trails," he said.
Paper receipts are of value only in the case of a recount. Alas, if the margin of announced victory is not so thin as to trigger a recount, then the compu-vote will go unchecked.
Incidentally, according to a story published last month (which came to my attention only just now), Miami Dade county, which made an expensive transition to the compu-vote, is now thinking of going back to paper.
4 comments:
Looking at TBR News a while back I saw that the Webmaster at one time was listed as Walter Storch. Storch is either a close associate of or an alias of Gregory Douglas who is associated with Liberty Lobby and is well-known as a forger of documents. Also, the TBR in TBRNews refers to The Barnes Review--a holocaust revisionist journal.
One measure of the absurdity of this "debate" is that the technology for scrupulous audits of machine transactions already exists -- in Las Vegas.
No bank, and certainly no gambling establishment, would accept equipment whose accuracy couldn't be cross-checked on an ongoing basis, eliminating virtually any possibility of fraud *as it was occurring* -- not merely after the fact (which is also beyond current the current capacity of most voting machines).
And yet these people pretend that the answer is unknown, and insist that the best solution is hopelessly insecure technology which no cash or credit business in America would find acceptable.
My home state of Oregon mails out all ballots, and counts them as they are returned. Which means that any manipulation of totals has to be ONGOING, not compressed into a few hours on election night. There is also, obviously, a perfect paper trail.
We are the only state in the Union that does this. For the life of me, I can't understand why all the national debate about machines and tabulators just IGNORES us--and ignores what happened here in the 2004 Presidential election. Which is that the Dem's picked up five percentage points over the 2000 election totals. A similar phenomenon occurred in Vermont, where the Dem's picked up TEN percentage points over 2000 totals. Vermont just happens to be mainly HAND-COUNTED.
So, did Oregon and Vermont shift party preference in the opposite direction from all the rest of the country? Or, did the rest of the country get counted wrong?
Screw the machines, whether they leave a paper trail or not! Vote ON paper, and count BY HAND.
How hard is that to understand????
I suspect the national ID things will be used in a way similar to the old Jim Crow, Vote-Tax, etc laws.
They just need to call its legitimacy into question and *BAM* no vote for you. Or if they cost money then *BAM* a whole swarth of the population locked out of the voting booth, etc.
LamontCranston
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