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<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>again, I take issue:</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>1. Maybe my earlier take on people giving false exit poll answers
was wrong, but maybe some people just refused to answer. I know I
wouldn't. None of their damn business.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>2. In my limited experience, aren't most "hackers" who would tamper
with such things be more left leaning, therefore swinging the vote Kerry's
way? Heck, I watch movies, those hacker people for damn sure aren't
Republicans.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>3. Seems a real stretch to think someone would perpetrate such a
"fraud". Maybe I'm just overly honest, and like to think others are as
well.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>4. maybe the liberals/democrats should take a cue from one of the
biggest anti-Bush sites out there, and MoveOn. There's always
2008.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=906502020-17112004><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" color=#800000
size=2>DC</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left><FONT
face=Tahoma size=2>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B>
vision2020-bounces@moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces@moscow.com] <B>On
Behalf Of </B>Tbertruss@aol.com<BR><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, November 17, 2004
11:59 AM<BR><B>To:</B> vision2020@moscow.com<BR><B>Subject:</B> [Vision2020] I
Smell a Rat<BR><BR></FONT></DIV><FONT face=arial,helvetica><FONT lang=0
face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10"><A
href="http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10414">http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10414</A><BR><BR></FONT><FONT
lang=0 style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" face=arial color=#ff9900 size=3
FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="12" BACK="#ffffff"><B>I Smell a
Rat<BR><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0 style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" face=Arial
color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10" BACK="#ffffff"></B>I smell
a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species
Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and
never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming
distressingly apparent. The first sign of the rat was on election night. The
jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states
fell one by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a
Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to
go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a
flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio. <BR><BR>By 3 AM,
conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those
two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. Suddenly,
a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.
<BR><BR>"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively.
"Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only
needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world
a better place. Victory was at hand. <BR><BR>The morning told a different
story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry - Bush had a decisive margin of
nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that
all the votes be counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four
more years and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers - next stop,
Tehran. <BR><BR>Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics <BR><BR>I work with statistics
and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the
exit polls for Florida - all wrong. CNN's results indicated a Kerry win:
turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for
Kerry. <BR><BR>Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is
itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual
results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by
identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000
respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.
<BR><BR>The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who
conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and
compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total
votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this
gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result.
<BR><BR>Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in
excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations
in that county. They key phrase is "certain counties" - there is extraordinary
variance between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line
with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but
some differ wildly. <BR><BR>How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp
found one over-riding factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen
voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of
those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her
expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties
with optical scanning. <BR><BR>The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are
scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a
county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral
totals. At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is
vulnerable to external hackers. <BR><BR>It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method
seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data. In each
county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors
based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and
independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely
number of Republican votes per county. I compared this 'expected' Republican
vote to the actual Republican vote. <BR><BR>The results are shocking. Overall,
Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting
than expected. In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This
16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less
evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the 'actual' Bush vote was at
least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies
50 - 100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of voters are
registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote - three times
more than predicted by my model. <BR><BR>Again, polling can be wrong. It is
difficult to believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test
how wrong it would have to be to give the 'actual' result. <BR><BR>I tested
two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to
explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off
the mark in the turnout figures - i.e. far more Republicans and independents
had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares were
completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach
voters from the Democrat base. <BR><BR>In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of
Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by
Democrats. This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to
within 5%. However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only
51% in the optical scanning counties - barely exceeding half of Republican
turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties.
7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are
at least 100% higher than predicted by the model - an extremely unlikely
result. <BR><BR>In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got
100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN
polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough
votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of
Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by
CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how
many Democrats would have to vote for Bush. <BR><BR>In 41 of 52 counties, this
did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted
14% of Democratic ballots - not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However,
in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected
to Bush to account for the county result - in four counties, at least 70%
would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely. <BR><BR>The
Second Rat <BR><BR>A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus
cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters
to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was
preparing an army of enforcers to keep 'suspect' (read: minority) voters away
from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the
effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in
fact only wanted to encourage people to vote. <BR><BR>They did their job too
well. According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of
precincts had voter turnout well above the national average: in fact, turnout
was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the
total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or
so. <BR><BR>In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were
registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast
their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty
precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote - this
out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences -
this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%.
One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one
astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the
fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.
<BR><BR>What to Do? <BR><BR>This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either
the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or
something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system - again. Like many
Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida
recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one
thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how
unjust it might appear. <BR><BR>With this acceptance, we placed our implicit
faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it
would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the
majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus
wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we
believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding
importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing
the bruised faith of both constituencies. <BR><BR>This faith has been
shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and
division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have
been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous
insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper
context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let
alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily
bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.
<BR><BR>The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one -
massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004
presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously
and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu
Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign
accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when
no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George
Bush is still, and will remain, the 'Accidental President' of 2000. One of his
many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two
illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a
fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world
has known. We must not permit this to happen again.
<BR><BR><BR><BR><I>(11/15/2004)</I> <BR> - By
Colin Shea, <I>The Sierra Times, Freezer Box</I> </FONT><FONT lang=0
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" face=Arial color=#000000 size=3
FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="12"
BACK="#ffffff"><BR><BR>---------------------------------------------------------------<BR><BR>V2020
Post by Ted Moffett<BR><BR><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></FONT></BODY></HTML>