Wednesday, November 08, 2006

We wuz robbed!

Can I really complain about election theft after my party won both houses of Congress? Yep. I'm shameless.

The test of whether theft occurred is not "Who won?" but "How do the final numbers tally next to the exit polls?"

Exit poll numbers from National Review's The Corner, as reprinted in DU, as of 6:30-ish yesterday afternoon -- and remember, the Dems are on the left:

Va 52 37
Ri 53 46
Pa 57 42
Oh 57 43
Nj 52 45
Mt 53 46
Mo 50 48
Md 53 46

I think the "37" in the VA race should actually be 47, which is how it read elsewhere. Even so, compare those numbers to the onionskin-thin Webb margin of victory.

Now that we have majorities in Congress, we need investigations into vote fraud. More than that. We need prison sentences.

Alas, here we have a problem. The Dems will offer anything to Joe Lieberman to assure his stay in their camp. And Holy Joe will probably want to run the Senate Ethics Committee.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saint Joe wouldn't get near the Ethics Committee -- it's a toothless and thankless job. They'll likely give him a post which will keep him out of foreign policy but allow him to pursue his first love and render the service for which he's beloved by corporate America -- giving tax and regulatory breaks to the insurance and financial industries.

In any event I agree with Joe (*our* Joe): we wuz rubbed. The difficulty will be convincing these incumbent establishment Democrats, most of whom are less "liberal" than Richard Nixon, and flush with victory and the incipient arrogance of power, that they need to do something.

Anonymous said...

It is no coincidence that VA was the only Senate race with a 5% exit polling margin. Unfortunately, we now have to fight for at least 56% to win, not the 51% required in a clean election process.

Kim in PA

Anonymous said...

I posted here after the 2004 elections. Although I am a Republican (by default) and regarded the fabricated vote fraud charges as unworthy of serious adults, I must say that I was treated fairly in the ensuing debates. Now I return to you congratulate you on your side's sweeping win. The Republicans did not merit victory.

You will note that no angry protests will be staged over razor-thin Republican losses. That the final Virginia poll showed Allen winning by three points means, quite simply, that the poll was wrong.

It is sad to see that the exit poll madness continues. Mark Blumenthal, a Democratic pollster, has crossed every "t" and dotted every "i" in providing exhaustive, meticulously detailed explanations on his site, mysterypollster.com, of every aspect of exit polling.

Republicans may or may not demand a recount in a state they lost by 7,000 votes. Certain fringe Democrats screamed that they were robbed in a state they lost by 120,000, though the small army of statisticians and vote analysts working for the national party determined that the allegations were pure moonshine.

You guys won last night--my hat's off to you. You lost two years ago--get over it.

Anonymous said...

I gave the old address for Mark Blumenthal's site. The four-part series "Was RFK, Jr. Right ABout the Exit Polls?" is indispensable reading. Here is the correct address:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/

Anonymous said...

Oh, dear. Someone else who can't read. Or let go of the idea that the elitist misogynist authoritarian element of our social system which expects us to believe the election fraud in '04 was mythical have lead our civilization into total chaos. At this very, very late date that is just...so sad.

Pomeroo? Face reality. You'll make it a lot easier on yourself in the long run if you just give it up now and then start getting acquainted with the facts. Man, I know it's hard, especially when you are so desperately clinging to insecurity that is obviously deeply, deeply ingrained, to admit that everything you've believed about the world's power structure in the past is wrong, and that you were wrong to believe it. But please, work on that would you? Letting go is tough, losing whatever shred of Daddy's approval you still feel you need is tough, yet it is worth doing if you honestly want to start working for some sort of positive change in an effective way.

Even my own father, who is the last person I would have ever, ever thought could suck it up, could be man enough to admit that whitey's rightist, bigoted, oppressive, pro-war military-industrial complex has failed us all (particularly with regard to the gross lie that was the last presidential "election" and several others before it)--voted a straight Democratic ticket this time around. That was the first time in more than twenty years he'd been able to do the correct thing with his ballot, after admitting to me and my mother that he had finally accepted the valid research that substantiated the massive, systematic election fraud in 2004 that robbed our national and global society of a large part of our livability in the future. If he can do it, you can, too. If that's too hard for you, you might want to at least stop pushing your tragically inaccurate agendas on this site. You don't have an audience here.

Anonymous said...

Pomeroo, Jen in her soothing way was a bit hard on you, so I'll just say this: if you agree that that electronic voting machines in current incarnation COULD be hacked and MUST be gotten rid of, and the whole HAVA system re-tooled so that elections are AT LEAST as transparent as they were with lever machines, then I won't ask you to agree that the Rep's have hacked elections for eight years now. Fair?

Anonymous said...

Our friend Pomeroo fails to note that, in fact, Republicans (not Democrats) are the prime purveyors of outlandish and unfounded vote fraud theories.

His party "of default" has succeeded in several states in creating laws which (for example) make it a crime for a canvasser to submit a voter registration error (thereby making voter drives impossible) and has sponsored and enacted laws which betray a remarkable fear that tiny numbers of people not entitled to vote (say, some dastardly illegal immigrant, or an old lady who wandered into the wrong precinct because she got a helpful call from the RNC) might actually do so.

His party has undertaken voter purges which leave life-long voters in minority districts suddenly off the rolls, and demanded of the poor, the old and the infirm photo IDs which many of them don't possess, despite the utter absence of evidence that any unauthorized voting is actually occurring.

Meanwhile, when Democrats point to statistical absurdities in the vote count -- for example, divergences from exit polls with a chance of one in ten billion of actually occurring in the real world, or 332 consecutive votes for Bush -- they're bad loosers and conspiracy mongers, who really need to get over it.

Some people, of course, just can't get it; they die deluded and often enraged.

Do I know for an absolute fact that Bush stole the 2004 election? Despite a large body of evidence, I can't say "yes" with absolute certainty, because I can't offer absolute proof. Do I know GWB *tried* to steal the election? Absolutely, that's been conclusively documented, beginning with John Conyers. And isn't that the real issue?

Any Pomeroo, you're wasting everyone's time.

Anonymous said...

Hi, unirealist. Jen strikes me as highly emotional. My purpose is not to get her excited but to inject some reality into the discussion. Here's an interesting article by John Lott that addresses the issue of just how hackable those machines actually are:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2FmMjc2ZDAzMTZhMjJkY2VkMjNkYTIyOWJkYWJiNDU=

A poster who chooses to remain anonymous cites John Conyers fact-free screed. I don't give a rat's patoot about the Republican Party. It doesn't exist, for practical purposes, in my state (New York) and it has never put a dime in my pocket. Conyers, however, is an attack dog, plain and simple. Fitrakis couldn't sell his codswallop to the Kerry campaign, for a very good reason: they were pros who knew better.

Nobody has examined the issue of exit polls in greater depth than Mark Blumenthal. If you read his stuff and don't like the conclusions, you must understand that you have no interest in the truth. Blumenthal is a Democrat. If you're forced to construct a nexus between him and Karl Rove, well, you need to rethink your position.

Anonymous said...

Pomeroo, (pomeroo?) if you think you're making yourself look any less ignorant by implying my observations about you and the agendas you're pushing aren't valid because I'm female and therefore ruled by emotions instead of logic--you're wrong. (And dude? That's a sexist tactic that was considered passe in 1976, let alone 2006; at least get current.) Again: give it up. Wait...why am I bothering? You just go ahead and play it the way you need to. You'll either accept reality or your won't, I guess. In the meantime, I feel kinda sorry for you.

Unirealist--you have disappointed me. But you go ahead and play it the way you need to as well.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, Jen, your game is very old. It didn't interest me when it was new. Nobody is born with critical thinking skills, although logic seems easier for some people than for others. I'm talking about data and sound mathematical reasoning; you're giving me psychobabble. If I say that Steven Freeman's thesis was demolished by Mark Blumenthal, I couldn't care less whether you pity me or not. If you can show me errors Blumenthal is making, that interests me.

Anonymous said...

"A poster who chooses to remain anonymous cites John Conyers fact-free screed."

First of all, a "poster" who doesn't realize that everyone here is posting "anonymously" is somewhat wanting in the analytical department. Or would you prefer I called myself pom-pom?


"I don't give a rat's patoot about the Republican Party."

Glad to hear it, but the subject (which you brought up) is Republican election fraud. Should we throw out the substance of the argument for your convenience?

"Conyers, however, is an attack dog, plain and simple."

A meaningless statement. If you care to refute Conyers, and his meticulously documented report, point by point, get to work. Otherwise, kindly keep quiet.

"Fitrakis couldn't sell his codswallop to the Kerry campaign, for a very good reason: they were pros who knew better."

You have no idea what Kerry believes or doesn't believe (apart from his admission to Mark Crispin Miller, later retracted, that he thought the election was stolen from him), and the mechanics of the whole situation are far more complex than whether Kerry was "buying" or not. If you persist in believing that, despite historically low approval ratings, and the best efforts of Kenneth Blackwell and the RNC, GWB won fair and square, you're welcomed to it. But for god's sake, go to some other blog to proclaim this revelation.

Anyway, this is my last response. Really now, it's an utter waste of time and gastric juices.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, but it's your analytical skills that need some work:

People adopt nicknames in order to distinguish themselves from the amorphous group of "anonymouses." Jen, in other words, has achieved a measure of individuality, but "anonymous" is not necessarily, or even probably, the same person.

There was nothing "meticulous" about Conyers's tendentious blending of anecdote and myth. Top Democrats did not, you may have noticed, take him very seriously. Beyond provoking the usual empty rhetoric, his report failed to make a ripple.

I have written extensively about vote fraud in New York City. On Tuesday, I listened to complaints at my polling place that Democratic inspectors in the 63rd ED were opening provisional ballots before the scheduled time and had opened the back of one machine. Was this evidence of "massive Democratic vote fraud"? Well, there were no contested races in my area, so what does that tell you? Isn't it far more likely that three or four overworked and, to acknowledge the obvious, incompetent people didn't know or understand the rules?

Far-left internet denizens have chased their tails for years in search of imaginary Republican vote fraud. Their hopeless quest boils down to this: the candidate who was leading in the polls, Bush, won. For reasons that are ultimately incoherent, this constitutes an anomaly to them. To resolve the unresolvable, they have to invest notoriously flawed exit polls with a totally fabricated infallibility. As I have pointed out, Mark Blumenthal has explained the nuts-andd-bolts of exit polling in exhaustive detail and has shown exactly why they went wrong in 2004 (and to a greater degree, in 1992).
You can continue the charade by ranting about insufficient voting machines in inner city precincts, but the same shortages occurred in Detroit and Philadelphia as in Cleveland, and--the secret is out--you didn't care. I expect, when my investigation is complete, I will find the same pattern of allocation in this year's election.

The candidate for whom you have a pathological hatred won in 2004. Your side won this time. The great truth is, neither result will make a significant difference in your life.