Bad dreams...

A lot has happened on the vote fraud front, yet I've been so lax in writing about the topic that last night I had bad dreams, in which visitors from the future chided me for failing to do my duty.

Well, I can't properly fulfill that duty right now, due to a heavy work load. But I do have time to direct your attention to writings elsewhere. In particular, you should visit Brad Friedman's site.

Remember the chasm of disparity between the final polling and final results in the Ohio propositions -- the election in which Kenny the kapo oversaw the results for an initiative designed to replace his own lying self? Max Blumenthal has attempted to set our fears to rest by explaining that the polling must have been at fault.

Like Brad, I encourage everyone to read Blumenthal's piece. But I see in it no convincing explanation as to why polls always seem to worsen when the voting machinery gets Diebold-ized. And I've never understood why the errors must always favor the conservative side.

Moreover, I have disdain for an analytical approach which presumes as a given the very matter under question. If you presume that the tabulation was clean, then of course the flaw must rest within the polling. But what grounds have we for such a presumption?

This election was overseen by the same Ken Blackwell accused of criminal conduct by the heroic John Conyers -- and Conyers compiled much much courtroom-quality evidence to prove the point:

In many cases, these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

Given this man's perfidy, and given the "Dieb-throat" revelations of the electronic vote's hackability, common sense dictates that we must be more suspicious of the tabulation than of the polling.

Friedman makes a similar argument:

Our point, however, is that when you've got two different suspects for one murder case, one suspect with a long rap-sheet filled with all manner of homicides, theft, and general malfeasance, and the other is a Priest, an Eagle Scout, and a 4-Star General, we'd take a good long hard look at the known Criminal before presuming that the Saint must have done it. Even while either of them could have done it, Blumenthal presumes, without reason, that the Priest was likely the guilty party.

His final point is also worth quoting:

We suspect Blumenthal wouldn't put much stock in a similarly "faith-based" polling methodology where pollsters tell him "trust us, the methodology we use is very very good, you don't need to actually examine any of it to have complete confidence in our results." So we'd hope that he -- as much as anyone -- would understand that the results of an election where the methodology is allowed to be held as a secret "proprietary trade secret," should be similarly suspect and taken for what it's worth.