Flamebait: Hacking The Vote

[theknife]

there's a lot of talk about the exit polls anomalies, particularly in Florida. according to pervert-turned-conservative flack Dick Morris:

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries."

so what happened? the exit polls showed Kerry substantially ahead in the significant states...so much so that "just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report."

So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible.

and here's an interesting coincidence;

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again -but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

so the official vote results are contradicted by both the exit polls and the party affiliations. now, the GOP naturally has a different spin on this - while they agree that there is something fishy, their talking points suggest that the networks skewed the exit polls in an effort to suppress the Bush vote in the West by calling the race early. that could be plausible...except the networks didn't call the race. in fact, CNN would not speculate on any state until it's polls had closed.

but everybody agrees something is not right here - which is it?

[RoBoBoy]

That's something I've been scratching my head about for a week now. The exit polls, all of them indicate kerry as the likely victor. The publicized sentiment of the US voters and the rest of the world simply don't add up to a bush win.

I suppose though, the election official don't lie. If the resulsts were based on exit polls, Kerry would have been the clear winner.

Could it mean the Bush patrons were ashamed to admit they voted for him?

[pod]

This new determination by the networks to not call anything until you can bet the house on it strkies me as very odd. The main problem is that this was applied evenly across the board, regardless of state. Must be affraid to be seen as discriminatory. That's not responsible reporting, that's just stupid. There are at least 2 dozen states in the US you can safely call before the polls even open. It was amusing to watch CNN as the pundits wring their hands because the electors are so close, all the while California (and the rest of the west coast) is still marked gray, when it's obvious to anyone with half a brain cell where it'll be going. I guess some people get their panties tied in a knot when you tell them their vote really does not count.

As for the exit polls, shame on anyone who believes anything any polls say. They may be good for gauging people's opinions on some things, sometimes, if they're done right. Should the country be run on polls? What was the exit poll margin of error? Confidence interval? How do they know they have a representative sample? What people say in public, to friends, to random strangers (ie, pollsters), and what they do in the privacy of the voting booth, may be completely different things.

The blatant ways in which Americans show their political and religious affiliations in all affairs frankly offends me, I just don't understand it. Which of course makes any promise by any president to be 'a uniter not a divider' completely laughable. The political climate, the rhetoric, the nearly even split, mixing in religion... it just means there'll be no middle ground, no debate, no compromise. Bush's attitude seems to be 'you're either with me or against me. If you're with me, god bless, we're united. If you're against me, you must be an evil unpatriotic terrorist.' If Bush was acting as if he had a 80% madate last term, just watch him this time around.

[RoBoBoy]

Originally Posted by pod

The blatant ways in which Americans show their political and religious affiliations in all affairs frankly offends me, I just don't understand it. Which of course makes any promise by any president to be 'a uniter not a divider' completely laughable. The political climate, the rhetoric, the nearly even split, mixing in religion... it just means there'll be no middle ground, no debate, no compromise. Bush's attitude seems to be 'you're either with me or against me. If you're with me, god bless, we're united. If you're against me, you must be an evil unpatriotic terrorist.' If Bush was acting as if he had a 80% madate last term, just watch him this time around.

It's scarey isn't it? I take, you don't live in the states.