[Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's nest.... (political)

[brad haslett]

O' Cheryl,

My ADD is starting to kick in and I'm very busy but
here's one more post (oh yeah, the wind is blowing
this week and I'm going sailing).  Attached is an
article from Salon.com on the 2004 election.  If you
don't read Salon, you should.  About 98% of what they
print is right up your alley (it ain't FOX News). 
This time they got it right.  As Herb pointed out, no
military goes to war with all the equipment or
intelligence they want.  Rumsfelt pointed that out and
was lambasted by the press.  This is common knowledge
among historians, especially soldiers, and well,
people with common sense.  Perhaps we declared the
"Peace Dividend" too early in the 90's and should have
spent more on equipment and research but we didn't. 
If it really bothers you, here's a website where you
can make a donation instead of blaming others.

 http://www.operation-helmet.org/

Now as to those Iraqi national treasures, that myth
(and liberal press favorite) has been debunked as
well.


http://jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com/2005/01/iraq-antiquities-revisited.html

OK, I'll go back into my hole now.

Brad

-------------------------------------------


Was the election stolen?
The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence
that Bush won because of voter fraud.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo



Nov. 10, 2004  |  Did John Kerry actually win the
presidency? If you've spent any time online this week,
you've no doubt heard this argument: The election was
stolen. Corrupt officials, rigged voting machines, a
sleepy media and a Democratic Party that's been less
than fully aggressive in its efforts to counter
Republican dirty tricks came together to subvert the
true will of the people. 

According to proponents of this theory, proof of
electoral fraud abounds. The journalist Greg Palast
argues that in Ohio, there were probably enough
"spoiled" punch-card ballots -- ballots tossed out by
counting machines -- to make up Bush's margin over
Kerry. Keith Olbermann points out that in some voting
precincts in Cuyahoga County, which includes
Cleveland, there were more votes cast than registered
voters -- for instance, in the Fairview Park area,
13,342 registered voters cast 18,472 ballots. Isn't
that odd? Then there's the analysis by a former high
school math teacher named Kathy Dopp, which seems to
show that in counties using optical-scan voting
systems in Florida, people registered as Democrats
voted for Bush at an usually high rate. Did they
really mean to do that, or did the voting machines
corrupt their votes? 

There are dozens of other points of concern. In
Broward County, Florida, the counting software has
been counting votes backwards. In Franklin County,
Ohio, Bush was somehow given 4,000 more votes than
he'd actually won. Citing vague security concerns,
officials in Warren County, Ohio, locked down the
vote-counting building on election night, preventing
the media from observing the count. And what about
those exit polls? Could it be that they were correct
in their prediction of a Kerry win? To judge from the
tone of the e-mail pouring into our in boxes here at
Salon, not to mention the panicky posts on lefty sites
like Democratic Underground, it's clear that many
online find these arguments quite convincing. For
many, it's difficult to believe that the election the
nation held last week was completely on the level. 

In fact, it probably wasn't; Election Day 2004, like
all national elections, saw its share of glitches,
ineptitude, fraud and intimidation. The Election
Incident Reporting System, a national database of
election irregularities compiled by volunteers working
with various voting-rights groups, lists 30,000 such
incidents for 2004. They range from the tragic (a
voter who "didn't know how to read") to the alarming
("Two African-American voters were arrested at the
polling place before they had the opportunity to
vote"). 

There's little question that the American election
process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But
even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it
was still most likely good enough for us to have faith
in the results. Salon has examined some of the most
popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making
the rounds online, and none of them hold up under
rigorous scrutiny. For instance, there's an easy
explanation for the odd results in Cuyahoga County,
Ohio, where Olbermann insists there were 93,000 more
votes than voters. According to Kimberly Bartlett, a
spokeswoman for the county, the reporting software the
county uses to display the unofficial summary of
election results on its Web site is simply buggy. For
some reason, the software combines absentee ballots
from several voting precincts into one precinct, and
therefore makes it appear as if there were more votes
cast in a particular area than there were registered
voters there. But this bug does not affect the final
election results, because the more detailed "canvass"
of all the votes cast in the county shows the correct
count, Bartlett told Salon. For example, this canvass
indicates that in Fairview Park, where Olbermann says
there were 18,472 ballots cast by 13,342 registered
voters, there were actually only 8,421 votes cast in
the presidential race -- fewer than the number of
registered voters. 

Other theories pointing to a Kerry win are similarly
brittle. It is extremely unlikely that there are
enough spoiled punch-card ballots in Ohio to hand
Kerry a victory there, as Palast asserts. Meanwhile,
there are reasonable-sounding sociological and
demographic explanations for the high number of
registered-Democrat Bush voters in some counties in
Florida. There is, in other words, simply no
compelling proof that there were enough irregularities
in enough areas affecting enough voters to cast doubt
on Bush's commanding popular vote count lead, or even
his thinner margins in key swing states such as Ohio
or Florida. 

"Given my current state of knowledge, it seems
unlikely there will be enough bogus votes found to
reverse the election," says David Dill, the Stanford
computer scientist who's been leading the charge
against paperless electronic voting machines for the
past two years. At the same time, though, Dill adds
that he's making "a highly qualified statement," and
that he does not want to "declare the election over
and done with." Odd things did occur last Tuesday, and
even if the results aren't overturned, "it's extremely
important that we seize this opportunity to review
everything we can about this election," Dill says.
"Having people comb through these results will give us
more confidence in the legitimacy of this election. We
shouldn't gain that confidence by resorting to the
head-in-the-sand method we usually employ in the
United States."

The 2000 presidential election prompted officials
across the nation -- including those in Ohio -- to
abandon antiquated punch-card voting systems in favor
of newer voting technology. But late in 2003, after
activists uncovered alarming security holes in the
paperless touch-screen electronic voting systems being
purchased by many jurisdictions, officials in Ohio
slowed their touch-screen plans. As a result, most
voters in the state cast their ballots on punch-card
systems this year, which, as Greg Palast points out,
was a cause for concern among officials there even
before Tuesday. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's
Republican secretary of state, once declared that "the
possibility of a close election with punch cards as
the state's primary voting device invites a
Florida-like calamity." 

The main reason Blackwell and other elections experts
worry about punch-card systems is that they lead to a
high number of "residual ballots" -- ballots that are
cast but, for various reasons, are not counted.
Ballots can be tossed out because voters choose too
many candidates in a certain race (they cast an
"overvote"), or because counting machines simply
misread a ballot as an overvote. Votes can also be
misread because the systems are confused by hanging or
dimpled chads -- selections that haven't been punched
through all the way. In 2000, according to a report by
Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, voting
systems in Ohio experienced a spoilage rate of 1.96
percent, meaning that for every 1,000 ballots cast
then, about 20 were thrown out. 

Since there were about 5.5 million votes cast in Ohio
this year, Palast estimates that at a 1.96 percent
error rate, there might be as many 110,000 uncounted
ballots in the state. On Nov. 4, however, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that there are only
about 93,000 spoiled ballots in Ohio. There were also
about 155,000 provisional ballots cast in the state --
votes cast as a last resort by people whose names
could not be found on registration rolls when they
went to the polls. Bush is currently leading Kerry by
about 136,000 votes in Ohio. For Kerry to win, then,
Ohio would have to have a way to count all 248,000
outstanding discarded and provisional votes -- which
isn't going to happen -- and then 77 percent of those
ballots would have to go to Kerry. 

Such an outcome is all but impossible. For one thing,
an overwhelming number of provisional ballots will
simply not count. According to Ohio's election rules
-- which were deemed legal by federal courts prior to
the election -- only provisional ballots that have
been cast in a voter's home precinct will be added to
the count. Nobody expects many provisional votes to
pass that test. 

But let's say that Kerry stands to gain 50,000 votes
from the provisional count, and that Bush doesn't get
any provisional votes -- a fantastical scenario, but
bear with us. If that occurred, Kerry would need to
get virtually every single vote from the discarded
ballots in order to approach Bush's margin.
Considering that Bush won 4 out of 10 votes even in
Ohio's most heavily Democratic counties, such margins
just aren't possible. 

There is an easier way to prove that Kerry couldn't
have won in Ohio: He conceded. Say what you like about
John Kerry, he's no shrinking violet. If there was any
chance that he could have beaten Bush simply by
calling for a hand count of tossed-out punch-card
ballots in Ohio, don't you think he would have done
it? "I think Kerry would have stuck it out if the vote
difference had been tighter," says Stephen
Ansolabehere, a political scientist at MIT and a
member of the CalTech/MIT Project, an electoral-reform
task force formed in response to the 2000 fiasco. The
margins, though, were simply too great. As Kerry
explained in his concession speech, "It is now clear
that even when all the provisional ballots are
counted, which they will be, there won't be enough
outstanding votes for us to be able to win Ohio. And
therefore, we can not win this election." 

A couple days after Election Day, Kathy Dopp, a
businesswoman and, more recently, a full-time activist
working against the widespread introduction of
paperless touch-screen voting systems in the U.S.,
began compiling a statistical analysis of the votes
cast in Florida. She was initially looking for odd
patterns in counties that use electronic touch-screen
systems in the state, but when Dopp plotted the data,
she found the weirdest results in counties that used
optical scan systems -- on which voters fill out a
paper ballot that is counted by machine, not unlike
the process you'd see on a standardized test in
school. 

Specifically, Dopp noticed that in many optical scan
counties, there were many more votes for George W.
Bush than you'd expect from the number of Republicans
registered in those counties. Although Dopp offered no
speculation as to why Bush seemed to have won so many
votes in apparently Democratic counties, her report
has been cited as proof that something may have been
amiss with the optical scan systems. Reporting on her
work in a widely circulated article in
CommonDreams.org, the journalist Thom Hartmann
concluded that Dopp's analysis shows that Florida's
"results seem to contain substantial anomalies." 

Dopp's analysis does give one pause. For instance,
about 70 percent of the 12,000 registered voters in
Baker County are Democrats, but of the 10,000 votes
cast there, more than 7,000 were for Bush. There are
11,000 registered voters in Holmes County, and 72
percent of them are Democrats -- but 77 percent of the
voters in Holmes chose Bush. Considering that most
voters across the country voted according to their
party -- 90 percent of Democrats chose Kerry, and 90
percent of Republicans chose Bush -- why did so many
Democrats in Florida's optical-scan counties go with
Bush? And why was such a startling pattern not seen in
counties that use touch-screen voting machines? 

For anyone who knows Florida politics, the explanation
is easy -- "Dixiecrats." Ansolabehere points out that
in Florida, optical-scan machines are mainly in "rural
areas or places with low population density, and those
counties happen to be more Republican," even if voters
there are registered as Democrats. These voters may
keep their Democratic registrations alive so that they
can participate in local Democratic primaries, but
when it comes to national races they would never vote
for the Democrat. Walter Mebane, a political scientist
at Cornell who's long studied Florida politics, echoed
this thought. In a rebuttal to Dopp's work that has
also been flying around over e-mail, Mebane -- working
with Jonathan Wand, another Cornell political
scientist, and Jasjeet Sekhon, at Harvard -- explains
that many of the counties Dopp considers curious have
been voting for Republicans for years. "The pattern in
which counties that have high Democratic registration
had high percentage increases in the vote for Bush
reflects the fact that all those counties have trended
strongly Republican over the past twelve years," he
wrote. "The counties are mostly in the Florida
Panhandle. Given the voting history and registration
trends, these counties seem to have many old-style
southern Democrats who have not bothered to change
their registration." 

Mebane is not one to hastily dismiss the notion that
voting irregularities affect elections. In 2001, he
authored one of the main studies explaining how Palm
Beach County's "butterfly ballot" led to Gore's
defeat, and just this fall he wrote a paper (PDF)
titled "The Wrong Man Is President! Overvotes in the
2000 Presidential Election in Florida," in which he
argued that Gore actually beat Bush in 2000. But in an
interview, Mebane dismissed Dopp's analysis. "If this
is evidence that they stole this election," he said of
Republicans, "they've been stealing elections for a
long time." 

To many Democrats, the most important bit of evidence
pointing to a Kerry win is the exit polling data on
Election Day. Although news agencies did not report
the Election Day polls during the day, and no networks
used the polls to call the race in close swing states,
the polls, which were conducted by a consortium of
news agencies called the National Election Pool, were
leaked all over the Web. Those leaks seemed to show
Kerry winning. And how could the polls have been so
spectacularly wrong? Democrats wonder. 

It's a good question, and at the moment, there's no
answer, says Joe Lenski, who led the exit polling at
Edison/Mitofsky Research, the firm that conduced the
survey for the media. But Lenski says it's absurd to
conclude from the surveys that the actual count is
off. An exit poll is a survey, and surveys can fail.
"The exit polls never said Kerry was going to win," he
says. "The exit polls might have showed that Kerry was
up in the national popular vote -- but it's still a
survey with a margin of error, and every paying client
knew from us that a 1- or 2-point lead is nothing that
anybody would go to the bank with." It's worth noting
that early exit polls in 2000 were also wrong, calling
the race for Gore or Bush in various states where the
other eventually won. 

This is not to say that nothing went wrong on Election
Day. The Election Incident Reporting System shows that
thousands of voters experienced registration problems
such as the mysterious disappearance of their names
from the voting rolls. In addition, David Dill points
out that all over the country, voting machines broke
down -- the most frequent mechanical problem seen on
Election Day. Another frequent complaint: Very often,
voters would attempt to select one candidate on a
voting machine and for some mysterious, as yet
undetermined reason, the candidate's opponent will
have been selected. These errors, and many more,
certainly contributed to one of the most pernicious
problems seen on Election Day, the unconscionably long
lines at the polls. 

Late last week, a handful of Democratic congressmen
called on the General Accounting Office to initiate a
thorough study of all that went wrong on Election Day.
In their letter to the GAO, the congressmen avoid
suggesting that the election was stolen. Instead, they
say, investigating all the irregularities is the only
way to give the public -- especially the dispirited
half of the nation that voted for the losing side --
confidence in the results. "We want to make sure that
the people who came out in record numbers and took
time out to vote -- we want to make sure the process
was fair for them," said Lale Mamaux, a spokeswoman
for Rep. Robert Wexler, one of the lawmakers calling
for the study. "We're not saying this election was
stolen. But people have serious concerns that need to
be addressed." 

Or, as Cam Kerry, the senator's brother, told
supporters in a statement this week, "Even if the
facts don't provide a basis to change the outcome,"
studying what went wrong in 2004 "will inform the
continuing effort to protect the integrity of our
elections." 




--- Cheryl O'Grady <cheryl.ogrady at mail.com> wrote:

> Herb, 
> How about the failure to provide personal armor or
> armored vehicles for our troops?  How about allowing
> the looting of national treasures, world treasures,
> from the national museum?  How about the failure to
> secure the peace after we took down the regime?  
> 
> I don't disagree that getting any kind of a vote is
> certainly laudable.  I don't disagree that a
> constitution is also a good thing.  But the total
> anarchy that reigned in many parts of Iraq because
> we didn't have enough boots on the ground (as
> recommended by the people who knew the area) seems
> to me pretty incompetent.  Despite the efforts of
> our troops, many areas were allowed to fall into
> anarchy, because we didn't have enough troops.
> 
> We have had the successes in Iraq, the election and
> the constitution, in spite of the incompetency of
> the administration in running this war, not because
> they are so terrific.
> 
> I think the intelligence of the late 1990s was as
> contradictory as the intelligence of 2002-2003.  I
> don't know, that has not been the point of the
> discussions I have been reading.  But if the
> intelligence was as overwhelming as the
> administration presented, surely we would have had
> as much support for this war as we did for the war
> in Afghanistan. 
> 
> Cheryl
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Herb Parsons" <hparsons at parsonsys.com>
> To: rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org
> Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's
> nest.... (political)
> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 11:35:30 -0600
> 
> > 
> > "intelligence presented to Congress included
> information that 
> > supported the administration's conclusions..."
> > 
> > Are you talking about the intelligence presented
> during the late 
> > 1990's? Keep in mind, many of those statements
> that Brad alluded to 
> > were made during the previous administration. Of
> course, there's no 
> > doubt in ANYONE's mind about that man's propensity
> for lying to the 
> > American people.
> > 
> > " I don't think there has been a more
> incompetently, ineptly led war..."
> > 
> > No doubt you and I will NEVER agree on this
> comment, but I AM 
> > curious as to what you use as a basis for the
> opinion? The lower 
> > death toll than your friends predicted? The
> success in removing 
> > Sadaam? The success in putting in place a new
> constitution? Do you 
> > have ANYTHING other than your disdain for war or
> this 
> > administration on which you base your opinion?
> > 
> > 
> > Herb Parsons
> > 
> > S/V O'Jure
> >    1976 O'Day 25
> >    Lake Grapevine, N TX
> > 
> > S/V Reve de Papa
> >    1971 Coronado 35
> >    Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana Coast
> > 
> > >>> cheryl.ogrady at mail.com 11/15/2005 9:04:26 AM
> >>>
> > Yes, and I feel these 'leaders' betrayed their
> constituents with 
> > these statements.  More information is coming out,
> however, about 
> > how the intelligence presented to Congress
> included information 
> > that supported the administration's conclusions,
> and left out 
> > information that contradicted.  are lies of
> omission really lies?
> > 
> > Regardless, the decision was made to go to war.  I
> don't think 
> > there has been a more incompetently, ineptly led
> war since, oh, 
> > maybe, the British war against colonial insurgents
> back about 220 
> > years ago.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "brad haslett" <flybrad at yahoo.com>
> > To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list"
> <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's
> nest....
> > Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:13:43 -0800 (PST)
> > 
> > >
> > > Cheryl,
> > >
> > > I've got just enough time before taking my
> daughter to
> > > school to make one poke at the hornet's nest. 
> Have
> > > you read these quotes from various 'leaders'?
> > >
> > > Brad
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > "Urges the President to take all necessary and
> > > appropriate actions to respond to the threat
> posed by
> > > Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass
> destruction
> > > programs."
> > > * Text of Senate Concurrent Resolution 71, Jan.
> 28,
> > > 1998, co-sponsored by Democrats Tom Daschle,
> Patrick
> > > Leahy, Max Cleland, John Kerry and Robert Byrd,
> among
> > > others
> > >
> > >
> > > "(Iraq) admitted, among other things, an
> offensive
> > > biological warfare capability * notably 5,000
> gallons
> > > of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000
> gallons of
> > > anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and
> 157
> > > aerial bombs. And might I say, UNSCOM inspectors
> > > believe that Iraq has actually greatly
> understated its
> > > production."
> > > * Text of President Clinton's address to Joint
> Chiefs
> > > of Staff and Pentagon staff, Feb. 17, 1998
> > >
> > >
> > > As a member of the House Intelligence Committee,
> I am
> > > keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical
> and
> > > biological weapons is an issue of grave
> importance to
> > > all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in
> the
> > > development of weapons of mass destruction
> technology,
> > > which is a threat to countries in the region,
> and he
> > > has made a mockery of the weapons inspection
> process."
> > >
> > >
> > > * Press release from Rep. Nancy Pelosi,
> D-Calif., Dec.
> > > 16, 1998
> > >
> > >
> > > Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction
> has
> > > proven impossible to deter and we should assume
> that
> > > it will continue for as long as Saddam is in
> power."
> > > * From an address by Al Gore to the Commonwealth
> Club
> > > of California, Sept. 23, 2002
> > >
> > >
> > > "The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of
> mass
> > > destruction is real, but as I said, it is not
> new. It
> > > has been with us since the end of that war, and
> > > particularly in the last four years ... he has
> > > continued to build those weapons."
> > > * Sen. John Kerry, Congressional Record, Oct. 9,
> 2002
> > >
> 
=== message truncated ===



	
		
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