For those of you who didn’t look at the Wikepedia entry on the 2004 election irregularities that I linked to last week, you really should… If you won’t read that, however, at least do me a favor and go to this site and download the new analysis of the exit polls done by University of Pennsylvania professor Steven Freeman. Here, for those of you who won’t follow the link, in spite of my polite request, is a short quote:
As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error… The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one.
And, before you write in to me and suggest that I go and get fitted for a tinfoil hat, at least download the document and look it over. The guy’s a Ph.D. from MIT and he makes a pretty persuasive case (which I’ve yet to see discounted anywhere).
Also, while we’re on this subject, you should know that the folks at Black Box Voting have just launched a fraud audit in Florida.
And, here, for those of you who are still with me, is a link that will take you to a directory of complaints filed by election officials across the US.
So, like I’ve said on a few occasions already, I don’t know that there was intentional fraud. And, even if there were intentional fraud, I don’t know that it would necessarily have been enough to change the outcome of the election. What I do know, however, is that we need to understand what went wrong in this election (with the electronic voting machines, voter supression efforts, etc) so that it never happens again. This nation of ours is built upon the sanctity of the individual vote, and we need to ensure that people are confident that when they do cast their vote, that it will be counted… One last thing, if you think that John Kerry should come out and comment on this rising tide of doubt, send him an email and tell him that we need for him to see this through to its end, even if it might make him look like a sore loser. We need to put this issue to rest once and for all, and reestablish trust in this electoral system of ours. We need to fight the Republicans on this, and make election reform a central plank of the Democratic platform.
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LA Times article on the Ohio recount.
I recently spoke with a friend of mine who told me that a few weeks before the election she received in the mail a letter from the “Brooklyn Minority Voters League” that ended as follows: “So mark your calendars and remember, on November 9th 2004, get out and vote!” It also included incorrect directions to the voting place.
[steph]
Cobb has raised the money to do a recount in Ohio. Also, he is asking volunteers to go to Ohio to help with the recount.
A new, pretty clever, flash piece on the possibility – some might say reality – of election fraud.
Here is a good, up-to-date, well-referenced list of the voting irregularities discovered thus far. (On the same site, you can also find a new article on what happened in Ohio by British reporter Greg Palast.)
(from Metafilter) Ian H. Solomon, the Dean of Yale’s Law School, was a poll-watcher in Florida during the election, and now he feels as though his presence helped legitimize the theft. In his words-
“Could we have been so naive?….by my presence, along with other Democratic lawyers, I lent an air of legitimacy to the voting process….We should have had trained observers – computer scientists, not lawyers! – verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step….I realized that I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud….The time is now for voters from all states that used electronic voting machines to request an audit of results and a manual recount of ballots if possible.”
And Ralph Nader, it seems, is getting the recount in New Hampshire that he
BREAKING NEWS: A research team at UC Berkeley will report (today at 1:00 EST, if this isn’t an internet hoax) that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 – 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election.