URGENT: BBVers needed to debunk NYT article

[hedda_foil]

Hi all,
A team of fairly high level people are willing to put together a PR push to debunk the debunkers in the MSM. Particularly, we need a pushback on this New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: November 12, 2004

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

<more>

What's needed, ASAP, is a thorough DU point-by-point refutation of this piece, using the very latest statistical analyses that have been posted or undertaken by DUers. I don't just need the links, but some actual verbiage that refutes each point, with hard reference to the actual data (including the links). I hope that's clear.

I promised these folks that DU would come through on this quickly, accurately, and brilliantly. We don't need evidence of fraud per se, but hard stats on the major irregularities that have been uncovered to date.

Thanks in advance to everybody. DUers are gonna crack this thing!

hedda,

(Don't forget to contribute to the recount fund: http://www.helpamericarecount.org.)

[JudyM]

1. I posted this on 2004 Election Results and Discussion forum

good luck!

[BevHarris]

64. Zeller is a shill

This particular NYT writer, Tom Zeller, is an apologist. He actually attended the Washington D.C. press conference, watched Dr. Herbert Thompson blow holes into the GEMS system you could fly a 747 through, and then forgot to mention anything about it in his so-called reporting. Dr. Thompson was the keynote speaker at the world RSA convention in Barcelona. He analyzes security for Fortune 500s and the NSA. He's a professor. He used to do security for Microsoft.

But Zeller didn't think it was relevant. I know from talking to others inside the NYT that Zeller caught hell for that piece of fluff (but we liked it that Baxter, the chimp, got nearly a half-page photo in the New York Times).

Zeller is pretty much showing his true colors. Some of these guys don't deserve much of a response, since they are obvious shills.

[hedda_foil]

82. You bet he's a shill, Bev.

You know it and I know it. (After all, I was at the press conference too and had the honor of speaking along with you.) Unfortunately, the shill and his buddies in the MSM has influence. I've had donors ask me about this article, and I'd like to get an informal PR campaign in place to debunk the debunkers. The editorial in today's NYT is helpul, but DUers have the info to hammer the nail into their coffin.

hugs and cheers!:toast:

hedda

[jdj]

84. here's my "Media Whining, A One Act Play" from another thread

this isn't a debunk, but it is my attempt at translating motive.

Media Whining, a one-act play.

"Dear Diary:

I used to be the most popular girl in school...I had access to all the football players. Then this new girl, Bloggerina, moved here, and she is prettier and younger than me, and she is getting alot more attention. I've lived here all my life, and everyone knows me and my dad is the preacher at the First Baptist church, so I pretty much have to watch everything I say and do, and stay within the lines.

But this new girl, nobody knows her, or anything about her, and she doesn't owe anything to anybody. She can do or say whatever she wants, and nobody has any expectations of her one way or the other. She gets away with things that if I did them I'd have this whole town breathing down on me. It's just not fair. I hate this bitch, I just hate her."

The End.

[Logansquare]

96. LOL, you should send the link to Atrios

It's really the attitude in a nutshell

[JudyM]

86. That sounds great! We're waiting with baited breath

to see what you folks come up with.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. On it.

But I am moving very slowly, due to a major muscle spasm event, centralized in my neck. I can hardly move and the pain is...diverting.

But I do what I can do.

[indigolady]

99. Oh, yah, that neck thing, too much comupter time! me too.

[Philostopher]

3. Check out this thread in the Ohio forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=172x4369

Poster WhiteKnight1 had an interesting analysis about the count screw-up and what would have/could have happened. Don't know if it'll help you or not, but it might!

[BevHarris]

4. Nice that they start with a misquote from BBV

There was a big push to debunk any thought of voting machine fraud -- picked up by ABC News and Salon.com and VerifiedVoting.org, too.

I will send them a towel to wipe the egg off their faces when the time is right. And there is also tremendous pressure to make us put what we have out to the public prematurely.

And if I hear one more person tell me we need to have the entire case cracked with evidence wrapped neatly into a package topped off with a bow, in exactly the form to win a court conviction, and of course, we were supposed to have all this done last week -- well, I've developed a standard response for these idiots. "Fine, you want a white paper and numbered exhibits for every county in the country? Let me know when you'll be sending your top personnel to our office to join us in doing that. And by the way, do your job."

Because of course, it is the very people who should be doing their job, investigating this, who are looking the other way as hard as they can.

One of my favorite non-explanations that supposedly "debunks" the idea of fraud -- the Cuyahoga County explanation for wrong numbers, stating it was due to a computer glitch. When asked why it didn't appear last year when they used the same system, they said, uh, because it only appears in even-numbered years.

Gimme a break.

Dog at my homework.

OK, gotta get busy. Great job, Hedda, on http://www.HelpAmericaRecount.org -- folks, this is the place to donate to buy recounts in Ohio. Donate directly to Black Box Voting (.ORG) for Florida recounting, as we are doing that under our own nonprofit organization, using the Florida sunshine laws. We have to pay for sheriffs to stand there and county officials to handle the ballots themselves. We requested examination of the ballots in Brevard County yesterday, and we are ready to do the same in Volusia and four other counties on Monday.

Bev

[Gelliebeans]

9. Thanks Bev

to you and all the other DU'ers for your great work. I sent what I could but I hope it helps to http:www.HelpAmericaRecount.org
(I sent it to everyone in address book)
Do you know how close we are to reaching our goals for Ohio?

[savetheuniverse]

54. Is HELPAMERICARECOUNT DOWN????? ALERT

I can't get in there , just went to donate. No Luck, someone please check.

[Gelliebeans]

74. nope no problems when I went

and PAYPAL account made it easy, as of this reply I checked site again and no problems

[distantearlywarning]

16. Even numbered years???

Um...Isn't every presidential election held in an even-numbered year?

[ailsagirl]

51. For what it's worth because you probably know about it

voteprotect.org has an interactive map of the U.S. with breakdowns of 33,619 incidents (reported as of 11/13 6:24 p.m. PST).

https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation&tab=ALL

This map shows TEN states as having more than 1000 incidents: California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, New York, and tiny New Jersey.

You can click on each state to get a thorough (in most cases) breakdown of each incident.

And you can also search all the incidents for key words, etc.

[laheina]

94. Wow!

This was a great link. I didn't know about it, and I thought it was really interesting. Thanx :)

[Jo March]

98. Wow!

I haven't been there but will definately check it out tonight.

I'm linking to stuff on my website. This is great.

[jdj]

58. who are the "experts" debunking the theories???

I've read journalists claiming the theories are false, that's not a debunk

I've heard local officials explaining the minutae of "glitches in their area, but nothing about the situation overall, and some have not even been able to explain their own malfunctions.

Many of the canvasses aren't even done yet...

This journalist must be a $50 a week CIA whore...or something...

[savetheuniverse]

59. REPLY TO THE NYT: DIFFERENT ANGLE

An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by implication) the Rest of the US Press:

Dear New York Times (etal)

As a long-time subscribed reader of your publication—one I have always staunchly defended one of the best in the world--I am incensed by your dismissive handling of what is one of the most significant breaking news stories since Watergate.

Here I am, seated at my computer, submerged in the nefarious bowels of the internet—reading a New York Times article with all the “twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust” of booking an airline ticket, making a hotel reservation, a bank transfer or reading the Washington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, ABC, NBC, and CBS headlines—things most of us do on a regular basis in the “parallel universe” that is the internet (citing another derogatory and patently absurd quip by NBC News’ Chip Reid).

I am neither internet enthusiast nor blogger: the term blogosphere did not even enter my vocabulary until several weeks before the 2004 election when these citizen journalists, some more legitimate than others, began emerging as a powerful political force in the election. I am not unlike most of your readers: educator, writer, editor, translator with a PhD and a two-page publications list under my belt, in German and English. I volunteer for my local park district, where I offer performing arts programs for children and youth. All in all, I’m pretty average—not unlike the now nearly 40,000 people who’ve signed the electronic petition to Congress requesting an investigation of the 2004 presidential election. (Note: I do not argue for the legitimacy of all these signatures—what’s a few thousand plus or minus in the greater scheme of things?). The internet is not a distant planet: I would venture to guess that it is “inhabited” or at least visited by 99.9% of your readers.

These readers don’t appreciate their entirely justifiable concerns about the accuracy of the electoral process being discredited and dismissed as conspiracy theorist-quackery—as eight out of nine responses printed in today’s evidence.

One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way this story began: you claim that it emerged from the ether “in the course of seven days” as mysteriously as the creationist version of human evolution. But that is not the case.

So how did thousands of Times’ readers get swept up in the maelstrom of the “online market of dark ideas surrounding the last week’s presidential election”? What really happened to spawn the internet hysteria?

The stage was set on election night, with worldwide shock and disbelief over Bush’s “overnight sensation” victory: observers throughout the country and the world who had been following the election closely tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident that “help was on the way.” This logical assumption was based not only on early exit polls: it was based on the worldwide public perception, particularly salient in the United States, that the only way a Republican victory could be secured was through a dubious fiat similar to the one we witnessed in 2000. As one astute reader responding to your front-page coverage of this highly significant media event succinctly stated: “If George W. Bush had won the 2000 election honestly, people would not be so quick to assume that he did not win this one fair and square either.” Of course, that was in the letters section, A30. So many readers may have missed it.

Years before the election—perhaps it was with the quiet passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act which mandated the use of Diebold and ES&S machines notorious for “tamperability”--concerned citizens from various walks of life--professors, computer scientists, systems analysts, even grandmothers and literary publicists from Seattle--had been attempting to sound the alarm: the Diebold voting machines are not secure; the democratic process itself is in jeopardy, seriously so. Inspired partly by a John Hopkins University study, Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer protection organization Blackboxvoting.org, co-authored the book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, published by Plan Nine Publishing. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Hopkins Security Information Security Institute was the author of that study. Rubin is a qualified expert with years of practical experience in the field of cryptography, network security, Web security and secure Internet services who was employed by such companies as AT&T and Bellcore prior to accepting his appointment at Johns Hopkins. On Wednesday, October 27, 2004—one week before the election, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast an alarming segment covering electronic voting, which featured not only Rubin, but David Jefferson of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who described the system currently in place as the “electoral weapon of mass destruction” which could easily be manipulated by a rogue programmer. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University and author of several “legitimate” books on American government published by Norton & Company, also pointed out the potential for problems with the machine-voting systems—and these are but a few of the “minority report-esque” voices who attempted to sound the alarm before the most recent election scandal broke loose on the internet. Are we to discredit these experts as “internet conspiracy theorists”?

In the hours since you posted your disparaging report, the bloggers have lashed backed faster than you could flog them: As Joseph Cannon’s Friday blog points out, even as you discount the “early” reports that began appearing just two days after the election, you neglect to take into consideration Dr. Stephen F. Freeman’s (University of Pennsylvania; degree: MIT) study published on November 10, which—two days prior to your biased and poorly researched report—lent support to the bloggers’ “conspiracy theories.” Instead, you invoke the imprimatur of Harvard, Cornell and Stanford, citing an email by three unnamed political scientists posted to the website ustogether.org (a study that has since been revised and is now being referred to in the scientific community as the Dopp and Liddle report). According to your account, there was not sufficient “concrete support” to merit the investigations sought by the three Congressmen (John Conyers. Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler). The “Dixiecrat” theory has, in fact, since been de-debunked by solid research findings, not by anonymous emails shot off from prestigious schools. At present, the three primary studies circulating on the net are the Dopp and Liddle report, the Caltech report and the Freeman’s MIT report. Dr. Freeman’s report concludes that while “Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate," and that furthermore that, "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 of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." Freeman concludes that the odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one.

These studies do not involve a the kind of fuzzy math implied by the Times’ report of “blog-to-e-mail-to-blog”—they involve a diligent, however frenzied, study of the actual data produced by exit polls versus actual results. These so-called “internet conspiracy theorists” are credentialed professionals engaged in hard research--most of which is beyond my grasp as a classically literary-minded PhD, but which clearly reflects solid research conducted by people who, by virtue of their professional training in precisely the fields required to analyze this data, are hard at work doing the job of the entire nation right now. They are doing your job, and they deserve your support and gratitude, not disdain, derision and dismissal. The fact of the matter is, the situation we face as a nation is far too complicated to be figured out without the aid of sophisticated independent scientists who can analyze the data. The jury is still out on this one: the fact of the matter is, there are three well-researched statistical analyses that will need to be studied, compared and analyzed by highly discerning and well-trained minds. That is likely to take some time—consider the stakes involved, we’d best just hold our breath waiting for the research to be complete. In the meantime, these three studies alone provide enough evidence of “anomalies” to merit a thorough, time and cost intensive investigation.

Let’s not even begin to ”discuss” or otherwise dismiss the most recent findings of investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of those internet-conspiracy-theorist-bloggers charged with snowballing rumors in cyberspace: in his BBC report (also available online) he states that “documents from the Bush campaign's Florida HQ suggest a plan to disrupt voting in African-American districts.” Is it the BBC that is spreading rumors, or Germany’s highly regarded Spiegel (also available online), which rightly identifies Palast as an “investigative reporter, documentary film producer and best-selling author” and the remaining “internet conspiracy theorists” as “watchdog groups” (in most democracies, this is a positive moniker not a pejorative).

I must confess, Mssrs. Zeller, Fessenden and Schwartz, in my professional capacity as a translator of German historical and literary texts, I often have the unpleasant task of researching “internet conspiracy theories” and subjecting myself to the horrific rantings of stark-raving lunatics on the net. One classic example can be found at this site: http://www.regmeister.net/verbrecher/verbrecher.htm. This, sirs, is an “internet conspiracy theory”—the remaining sources I have cited here are highly legitimate studies and reports conducted by credentialed scientists and respectable journalists.

Had you done your research, you’d have recognized the difference. Perhaps you got your internets confused: I see from today’s headlines that the “Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War”—Tim Weiner reports that “the Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats—a ‘God’s-eye view’ of battle.” Maybe that was the internets you had in mind—I’m quite content with the God’s eye-view I’m getting right here and now on this ol’ fashioned democratic internet.

The story is bigger than Watergate. Your dismissal of it is on a par with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Lilian Friedberg
Reporting from the Democratic Mandate of the United States of America

[hedda_foil]

83. WOOHOO!!! This is spectactularly effective.

Thanks, catastrophicsuccess (Dr Friedberg, I presume?), for this brilliant slam of the nonsensically dismissive Zeller, Fessenden and Schwart article. I hope you're broadcasting it far and wide, and would appreciate your permission to publish it at http://www.ballotintegrity.org and http://www.helpamericarecount.org.

Beautiful work!

[burn the bush]

5. has anyone seen this article? PLease Look

http://search.netscape.com/ns/boomframe.jsp?query=vote+fraud+poll+canada&page=1&offset=0&result_url=redir%3Fsrc%3Dwebsearch%26requestId%3D521c540c24feedd%26clickedItemRank%3D2%26userQuery%3Dvote%2Bfraud%2Bpoll%2Bcanada%26clickedItemURN%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.globalresearch.ca%252Farticles%252FKEE411A.html%26invocationType%3D-%26fromPage%3DnsBrowserRoll%26amp%3BampTest%3D1&remove_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.globalresearch.ca%2Farticles%2FKEE411A.html

[intheflow]

7. Link isn't an article, it's a search. I get an "unable to display" msg.

Can you find the article again and post the link of the article?
Or, give us the title and author of the article so we can search it for ourselves?

Thanks.

And welcome to DU! :hi:

[Eloriel]

11. Link here --

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

[Eloriel]

15. THIS TOO IS EXCELLENT -- in fact, it has more info re exit polls

than I've seen elsewhere:

snip

There appears to be evidence, however, that the corporations responsible for assembling vote-counting and exit poll information may also have been complicit in the fraud.

Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium known as the Voter News Service for vote-counting and exit poll information. But following the scandals and consequent embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002 elections, this consortium was disbanded. It was replaced in 2004 by a partnership of Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International known as the National Election Pool.

The National Election Pool’s own data—as transmitted by CNN on the evening of November 2 and the early morning of November 3—suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.

It is important to remember how large the discrepancy was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m. EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 45 percent.

At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06 p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women’s votes (54 percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men’s votes (46 percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.

The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern to the good people at the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14 percent between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire confidence in the legitimacy of an election.

One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were issued. The election-massagers working for Diebold, ES&S (Election Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of black-box voting machines may have been told to go easy on their manipulations of back-door ‘Democrat-Delete’ software: mere victory was what the Bush campaign wanted, not an implausible landslide. And the number crunchers at the National Election Pool may have been asked to fix up those awkward exit polls.

Fix them they did. When the national exit polls were last updated, at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3, men’s votes (still 46 percent of the total) had gone 54 percent to Bush, 45 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader; women’s votes (54 percent of the total) had gone 47 percent to Bush, 52 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader.

But how do we know the fix was in? Because the exit poll data also included the total number of respondents. At 9:00 p.m. EST, this number was well over 13,000; by 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3 it had risen by less than 3 percent, to a final total of 13, 531 respondents—but with a corresponding swing of 5 percent from Kerry to Bush in voters’ reports of their choices. Given the increase in respondents, a swing of this size is a mathematical impossibility.

The same pattern is evident in the exit polls of two key swing states, Ohio and Florida.

-- even more -- MUST SEE --

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

[intheflow]

36. Thanks for the link.

And thanks for all the great work you do here at DU, Eloriel. You give me hope for humanity! :thumbsup:

[Awsi Dooger]

42. I would caution not to rely on early national vote tallies

They do not reflect the national mood, or even close, based on geography alone. The first states that close the polls and begin to report numbers are overwhelmingly Southern GOP strongholds. I have the 2000 election night on tape. Gore was significantly behind in the national vote in the first 5 or 6 hours, even while the networks were projecting him as winner of the key states.

[Roger_Otip]

10. direct link is here

It is important to remember how large the discrepancy was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m. EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 45 percent.

At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06 p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women’s votes (54 percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men’s votes (46 percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

[The Bear]

6. Rebuttal of NYT article

Have you seen this rebuttal article by Joseph Cannon, "The empire strikes back: Data and disinformation," on the Cannonfire blog? It's got some pretty good arguments.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/empire-strikes-back-data-and.html

[Eloriel]

8. EXCELLENT -- Hedda, DO see this article

thanks -- and welcome to DU!

Check it out, hedda and Bev.

[John Q. Citizen]

14. That's a well written rebutal, IMO, BethP

The only thing missing is the fact that the biggist crackpot conspiracy theory foisted on the American public in the last 20 years was the one propagated by the NYT that the Baathist Government was conspiring to hide and produce WMDs including on going nuclear weapons programs. By the time their tinfoil fantasy fell apart thousands of lives had been wasted. Has the NYT donated their profits from there orgy of dis-information to the famlies of the dead?

Not that I've heard.

[Eloriel]

19. GREAT POINT!!

That oughtta hit where they live. :evilgrin:

[mom cat]

97. Please send that along to the times. n/t

[althecat]

45. This is VERY excellent indeed.. the best piece I have seen yet by far...

From the report..

"And just who are these enigmatic "election experts"? Funny thing -- the experts offering evidence of fraud tend to have names (not to mention credentials): Dr. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. David Anick of M.I.T., and Bill Hawkes, the former A.C. Nielsen Co. statistician. By contrast, the "experts" cited in pieces telling us to trust the tallies remain nameless phantoms.

To repeat: The exits were not early, and you can't call them inaccurate simply because they conflict with the final result. The fact that the disparities went in but one direction (and have done so in three consecutive elections) indicates that the so-called "actuals" are anything but.

There's a word for a piece on potential vote fraud which stipulates a priori that the final results are unimpeachable: Propaganda."

It does not mention one important point that I make in my post below -and which I repeat for emphasis:

The Freeman and Caltech studies are based on different data. The NYT has the original real data. They could have checked the theory themselves but apparently didn't. It seems that they were too lazy to do so and relied instead on an authorless report from a pro-voting machine research house to debunk the central cause of blog outrage.

[Cronus Protagonist]

69. Damn! Good and straight, BethP - Simple too

Very good work.

Show your support for the president, wear a FUCK BUSH button!

http://brainbuttons.com/home.asp?stashid=13
(We usually ship same or next business day by first class mail)

[Eloriel]

12. FL Dixiecrat rebuttal -- and another interesting post

***** Busting the Dixiecrat myth
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=44792&mesg_id=44792

The media wants us to believe that there are 1000's of Zel Millers living across North Florida, who voted for Bush, but otherwise usually vote Democratic.

However, this myth is not necessarily based in reality. A look at the counties that are in the Heart of Florida's Dixieland, you will see actually voted for KERRY!

So next time someone claims Bush won Florida because of the Dixiecrats, here's evidence that they didn't. Besides even if they all did vote for Bush, there isn't enough of them to have given this state to Bush. Not with his big lose in the Hispanic vote.

Gadsden
6,253/Bush
14,629/Kerry

Jefferson
3,298/Bush
4,134/Kerry

Leon
51,594/Bush
83,830/Kerry

plus Madison was very close

Madison
4,196/Bush
4,048/Kerry

All four counties are in North Central FL on the FL/GA border.
-----

(also see additional data for 2000 etc in posts downthread)


===========================================

LATINO VOTES (just in case this may be of interest somewhere along the line):

***** Bush wins by 5% in Florida yet his Latino vote in Florida was down 15%!!!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x42375
Link: http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/6081/1/240

[hedda_foil]

31. Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

Keep it comin'

[flpoljunkie]

46. Except Leon County is home of Tallahassee, FSU and votes Democratic.

Gadsen County borders Leon County and its population is very heavily African American. Jefferson County borders Leon County and Madison County borders Jefferson.

[Eloriel]

13. CAL TECH STUDY -- "Defenders of Voting Technology

Didn't go look for myself, but new DUer pointed this out:


dbonds (96 posts) Thu Nov-11-04 10:22 PM
Response to Reply #11

56. Defending Voting Technology
Look at the rest of the reports on that site. They are advocates for the technology. I don't think there agenda is for the outcome of the election, I think it is to keep the technology from getting a bad name.

in this thread:

Caltech Study On Exit Polls - Is This Why The Media Backed Off?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x43258#43515

[distantearlywarning]

20. Removed to post in a different place in this thread.

Sorry! I hit reply to the wrong message...

[Eloriel]

23. Another point re the Cal Tech study -- can someone verify?

(For some reason pdf files hang my new Windows XP -- can't access them at all.)

Anyway, don't know whether in the above thread or another, but a DUer pointed out that the CalTech'ers were NOT including optical scan in their "electronic" machines -- they considered it paper. We all know that's foolish and ill-informed (at best).

Further, this point of theirs struck me as terribly unprofessional from the get-go:

4. We conclude that there is no evidence, based on exit polls, that electronic voting machines were used to steal the 2004 election for President Bush.


Like, for academics, aren't there supposed to be a few steps in between point a and point "guilty"? Jumping from "exit polls" to "voting machines used to steal the election," and asserting NO possible fraud just strikes me as far too ambitious. Even the phrasing seems unprofessional to me: "steal the 2004 election for President Bush." The word steal jars on the nerves -- coming from academics. Also, what if there were fraud but Bush (would have) won ANYway? They don't seem to take this possibility into account, or be the least concerned with it.

Finally, all the exit poll discussions I've seen are linked to here -- and there are some dynamite threads and data, in case it's seen as advantageous for someone with a little more time and more familiarity with the issue in some depth to do some reading/research:

VOTE FRAUD Links - a DU Compendium
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=201&topic_id=1984#

VOTE FRAUD Links Compendium - Thread #2
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=201x3223

[distantearlywarning]

26. That DUer you mention was me....

And I stand by my statement that the Caltech people counted OPScan states as "paper" states, which, given the recent flurry of accusations surrounding OpScan ballots/machines in Florida, NH and other places, seems like a serious methodological flaw to me. OpScan machines, while they count paper ballots, can have their tallies hacked (see the NY state senate race story).

Also, you are correct, academics should never claim that their evidence provides unassailable proof of their or anybody else's hypotheses. And IMO, their evidence is not nearly good enough to even come close to suggesting that they "proved there was no fraud". In my field, you only start bragging after 15 years of research and hundreds of studies supporting your theoretical claims.

Both sides need a few more studies to start really claiming anything.

[Eloriel]

27. Thank you, distantearlywarning

And I SO apologize for not being able to credit you. I have this terrible tendency for really important points to register as "really important" well after I've forgotten where I even saw them. Sometimes I do better, but this is a flaw of mine.

Thanks too for the validation re how academics should behave.

Since we're talking about "proof," I'm having trouble figuring out, sans a confession or inside whistleblower, just what would constitute proof in all this. Seems to me we're going to have to be satisfied (or not, as the case may be) with the armloads and truck and boatloads of indicators of "something real damn fishy" going on. Kinda like many criminal trials were the "evidence" is all circumstantial, yet overwhelming in its implication for guilt.

[althecat]

33. Agreed, the whole Optiscans vs Touch Screen issue is rather thorny

There are many ways to skin a cat and we do not know what techniques have been used to steal elections.

Searching for correlations with machine type is always going to be a bit premature - until we have a better idea of where votes were stolen. Which is why the Ohio effort holds so much potential... techniques of manipulation elsewhere are likely to be similar. But first we need to dig and find what is there.

So far what we know of what has happened both in 2004 and earlier has tended to come exclusively from mistakes that were noticed.

For all we know there are other greatly effective methods of stealing votes that we know nothing about. I am particulary interested in the ubiquitous DANAHER Shouptronic machines and would love it if Bev could tell us what she knows about em.

Your point on OPSs is well made as the Volusia experience shows it is definitely possible to mess with the tabulation of OPS votes using GEMs servers. But it may even be possible for the computerised OPSs themselves to flip votes as the count.

There is some evidence of this that I heard from somewhere where straight Dem votes were turned into straight Rep votes by a scan machine (think ES&S but not sure) - but again we only know about this because someone noticed.

al

[Eloriel]

38. Al

You probably just misspoke, but Touchscreen = DRE (Direct Recording E-something).

Also, you may have forgotten, or perhaps didn't catch those age old threads where it was discussed, but any DIEBOLD optical scan machines and systems use the same software that the touchscreens do. The optical scan software was used to build on or modify for the touchscreens. SAME vulnerabilities, across the board. Only difference in that arena is, as you well know, the optical scan system at least starts with a voter-verified paper ballot.

[althecat]

40. Oops.. and no I didn't know that about Diebold Opti-Scan software

I guess that sort of reinforces the point in a way. That said searching for correlations in machine types with trends is still in my view a poor place to start.

The thing that struck me about the Florida Opti-scan counties was not the Kathy Dopp analysis which always confused me a little - and which annoyed me a little as it seemed to be giving the DREs a pass.

In fact there is some very strange vote trends in the DRE counties - i.e. in straight numeric terms seven out of the top ten bush vote gaining counties used Touch Screens. In many of these the Bush vote gain was double that of the Kerry vote gain. Yet we know that the Democrat GOTV in those counties was huge.

The victory in Florida hinges as much on this as it does on the spectacular - in several counties 60% plus gains experienced in some Opti-Scan counties.

*****

Cut and pasted from
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x21834

FINDINGS

INTRODUCTION
1. As we already know Bush gained 1,042,733 votes in Florida, more than 300,000 more than his next biggest gaining state Texas. As a percentage of his 2000 vote this represents a 36% increase. (compared to an average 17% increase over the entire nation)

2. Gore also made substantial gains in Florida in total 663,461 votes or a 23% increase.

3. Bush's majority after all this was 381,396 votes.

BIGGEST GAINS IN NUMERIC TERMS
4. The biggest single county contributions to Bush's gain came from Miam- Dade with 69,000 new votes (24% increase). This was closely followed by Duval with 68k (44% increase), Broward with 66k (37% increase), Hillsborough with 64k (35%), Palm Beach with 59k (39%) and Orange with 57k (42% increase).

5. The top six counties account for 382,000 votes in Bush's new vote tally or 37% of his total gains. The top ten account for 533,323 votes and 51% of his total gains.

TOUCH SCREEN USAGE & BUSH VOTE GAINS
6. With the exception of Duval and Orange counties four of the top six vote gain counties used Touch screen voting. It is notable howeveer that Duval and Orange both show higher levels of new Bush vote than the TS counties.

7. Three more of the top 10 bush vote gaining counties used Touch screens meaning 7 out of the top ten bush vote gaining counties used Touch Screens.

8. Overall TS counties in Florida account for 480,304 of bush's total vote increase.

BIGGEST GAINS IN % TERMS
9. Three counties Osceola, Dixie & Sumter recorded bush gains of over 60%. A further eight Flagler, Columbia, Levy, Pasco, Wakulla, St. Johns, Gilchrist & Lake showed increases of over 50% over 2000.

10. Together these 11 counties account to 125,000 of bushes gained votes. Howevr most are small and four of them Osceola, Pasco, St. Johns and Lake are responsible for 95,600 of these gains.

BUSH VOTE GAINS IN KERRY VOTING COUNTIES
11. John Kerry won the vote in 11 counties.

12. Bush made nearly as much voting gains in these counties as he did overall 34% vs 36% for the state as a whole.

13. In all Bush gained 324,918 votes in Kerry counties. The big five were Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Orange, Volusia. Between them providing 280,000 new bush votes.

[Eloriel]

49. AHMANSON Fdn and CAL TECH -- funded restoration of

"historic" Dabney Hall:

originally posted in this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x48149

David Baltimore and Howard Ahmanson Jr

http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12380.html

Caltech to Renovate Historic Dabney Hall

PASADENA, Calif. -- The elegant but aged Dabney Hall of the Humanities at the California Institute of Technology will be renovated this year, thanks in part to funding from the Ahmanson Foundation. Adjacent to the university's chemistry, math, and physics departments, Dabney Hall bridges the humanities and sciences, both physically and figuratively, on Caltech's campus.
>
The project donors to date include the Ahmanson Foundation, Caltech alumnus Martin D. Gray, BS '71 engineering and applied science, Caltech staff member Evelyn J. Cederbaum, and Dabney family members Tom and Diane Kettering.
>
The project includes renovation of Millikan Library where staff and administrators will move to from Dabney; the total cost is $12 million.
>
The renovations will "not only help reclaim the beauty of an extraordinary building invigorate the humanities for students through space enlivened by study, research, lectures, and performance" said Caltech's president David Baltimore.

A longtime friend of Caltech, the Ahmanson Foundation has supported the Institute's capital projects, student financial aid, and endowment for academic research and a humanities fellowship. The foundation concentrates its funding on cultural projects supporting the arts, education at the collegiate and precollegiate levels, medicine and delivery of health care services, specialized library collections, and programs related to homelessness. Most of the foundation's philanthropy is directed toward organizations in the Los Angeles area.


http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

>

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

>

Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold’s original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States.

An in-depth study of the role Howard Ahmanson Jr in national and California politics can be found at:

http://www.politicalamazon.com/cr-ahmanson.html

[althecat]

17. Dealing with the CALTECH vs FREEMAN data discrepancy issue

Reporting for duty... posted this in the wrong thread...

THE FOLLOWING IS DRAFT FROM AN ARTICLE I AM WORKING ON ON THIS...

On Friday morning the NYT came out with its attack on Blogs.

At the bottom of the story are these two paras:

"A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."

Tonight (your Friday my Sat afternoon) Keith Olbermann broadcast a critique of this report. He put up a graphic showing that according to the Caltech report the exit poll error rate had 31 states swinging towards Bush and 20 swinging towards Kerry after the polls. It is on this basis that the unamed CALTECH/MIT report writer makes the conclusion the NYT printed on Friday morning.

Also featured on Olbermann's show was the Buzzflash distributed Freeman Report ( the 250 million to one chance report). Freeman's data shows 37 states swinging towards Bush and 10 towards Kerry – he doesn't have data for the remaining three.

Clearly they are based on different Data which begs some very serious questions about the CALTECH/MIT VTP report. The CALTECH/MIT people while they did not say where they received their data clearly had it from the source Edison Mitofsky.

The VTP meanwhile is a far from non-partisan player in this game - they are promoters of technology in voting. They were exceedingly quick off the mark in producing their original report to debunk theories that had at that time only really appeared on RAWSTORY, DU and Scoop. This in itself is a bit odd.. I.E. that they should be so trigger happy to shoot down this story. But for them to do so with the wrong data is really really odd.

Olbermann didn't seem to pick up this point unfortunately. Probably a little subtle for TV.

The NYT however should have known that the VTP was a player and if they didn't they should have checked.

More significantly as subscribers to the Exit Poll the NYT had access to the original data. So they could have in fact checked the analysis had they cared to do so.

It seems that there is one of three possibilities either:
1. they did not check the CALTECH/MIT claims (probably)
or
2. they did and they are also in possession of the wrong data.
or
3. the Jonathan Simon data is wrong.

Clearly someone involved in this affair has a considerable amount of egg on their face. And it is deeply ironic that in a report that criticises the Blogosphere for not checking their facts before going to print the Old Grey Lady concluded by doing exactly that herself.


*********

BACKGROUND LINKS

Scoop actually beat Buzzflash to the punch and published the Freeman data a day before his report was released. It can be found in raw form along with a note on where it came from (which in itself is kinda interesting) here..

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm

It can be found as a graphic here.



Jonathan Simon – the source of the data for Freeman's report missed three states, and got the data very late in the day. In the above graph anything over 2% is statistically significant and as you can see there is a very marked trend in favour of bush in the data.

The Freeman report is here:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/pdfs/TheUEPDv00l.pdf
&
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discrepancy_v00k.pdf

A copy of the CALTECH report in HTML is here

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0411/S00140.htm

and the original is

http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Reports/VotingMachines3.pdf

also interestingly while they have now had more than 48 hours to reply to Freeman they haven't yet.

[althecat]

25. This thread was devoted to debunking the CALTECH /MIT REPORT...

The guts of the debunking start here

This Paragraph is Key
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=43258&mesg_id=43394&page=

and ends here... tis very similar to the Freeman analysis

And here is the FULL ARM LOCK PULL YOUR HEAD OFF CLINCHER
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=43258&mesg_id=43523&page=

But there is also great research in this thread about Baltimore the VTP and its background from numerous DUers.

[hbouma]

32. Caltech/MIT research is based on unverified data

>>
Clearly they are based on different Data which begs some very serious questions about the CALTECH/MIT VTP report. The CALTECH/MIT people while they did not say where they received their data clearly had it from the source Edison Mitofsky.
<<

The Caltech/MIT report states they used CNN's final exit poll information for their report. However, since the poll numbers changed a number of times during election night for unexplained reasons, I would say their reesarch is nonconclusive until the exit poll information can be verified.

Hal

[althecat]

35. The final exit poll info... where does it say that?

I missed that.

And what does it mean anyway? The final exit poll data after 1am had actual ballot information incorporated into it. I.E. it was not exit poll data at all.

[althecat]

18. Pobeka has been doing some detailed research into the dixiecrat

...issue. Specifically concentrating on addressing the VTP's dixiecrat report.

I have invited him to join us.

al

[althecat]

39. From Pobeka's Thread in voting issues...

http://tinypic.com/ljevd

It doesn't show up for me automatically in my browser window, but here's what you are looking at in that link:

This is a vector plot which connects the results of the 1996,2000, and 2004 elections, and each line is a single county.

For example, let's look at Broward county.

In 1996, the registered democrats accounted for about 80% of all registered voters, and the results of the election showed about 70% of all votes went to Clinton/Gore.

In 2000, the % registered dems dropped to about 62%, but had negligable impact on the voting % that when for Gore/Lieberman.

Now look what happened in 2004 (with the uncertified results). There is now a small increase in the % democrats registered, but that causes a dramatic decrease (relatively) in the % vote going to Kerry.

---

These are the same counties, and presumable represent the same percentage of population, so the effect of the dixiecrats (or any subvoting population) should give the same trend with regard to the % registered democrats.

So, the interpretation for graph like this, is when the slopes of the lines are continuous, the trend of %register dem vs %vote for dem canidate was identical in the 3 elections. but where the line segments from 1996-2000 and 2000-2004 appear to be at right angles to each other, it means something else had a strong influence on one of the elections. That something else could be a number of things, as we all know, from just better campaigning, to voter suppression, to vote fraud. The outstanding question is, if it was better campaigning, then we should see the same change in trend represented in all counties, and we don't.

Stare at this graph for a while. There is a lot of information in it.


Other take home messages:

In general, the loss of %registered dems from 2000 to 2004 had much less of an impact on the results than it did from 1996 to 2000 (look at the slope of the line segments).

While we lost more votes as a percent of the total from 2000 to 2004, we lost them at less of a rate as compared to the 1996 to 2000 elections.
---

[distantearlywarning]

21. LONG ANALYSIS of Dopp & Liddle + MIT Stuff

QUOTE: “But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists from Cornell, Harvard, and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp’s findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida, has, at least for now, little concrete support.”

True….and false. There is no doubt, when looking at polling data from 2000 and previous years, that many of the OpScan counties in Florida vote heavily Republican even though they may have voter registration patterns similar to counties that tend to vote Democrat.

However, the original Dopp & Liddle report (with revisions) http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.html , used data from 26 mid-size counties with populations of 80K-500K. A few of these counties were from the panhandle/N. Florida area, but much of the overall data was collected from the “Florida mainland”. For these 26 counties, the type of machine used was not related to the number of registered voters, or to the proportion of registered Republicans/Democrats, which mitigates some of the concerns raised about the confounding factor of “small rural counties = OpScan = Republican and/or “Dixiecrat” voters”.

Furthermore, analyses performed to see if county size affected “party shift” showed no significant results. However, the relationship between VOTING TECHNOLOGY and party shift (as reported on DU and other places) was very significant (less than a .002 percent chance that the results were obtained accidentally).

A weakness of these analyses (IMO) can be shown in an additional analysis at the end of the original (link above) in which the same analysis was performed on 2000 voting data for the same counties. In the year 2000, this voting technology was not available; nevertheless, the results are similar. County size has no effect on “party shift”, but 2004 voting technology does. What could this mean? This WOULD point towards at least a partial “Dixiecrat” explanation (although it is still not clear why medium sized, mainland Florida OpScan counties are “Dixiecrat” and similarly sized counties with ETouch machines are not).

A very recent re-analysis conducted on the same counties http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/MITCaltechvtp-response.htm
as a response to the MIT Voting Technology Project criticisms of the Dopp & Liddle study http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Election2004.html
, shows that the 2000 party shift in these 24 counties strongly predicts the 2004 party shift (towards Republican candidates), but that voting machine type is a similarly strong predictor. One explanation of this could be that a smart statistician at Diebold, or ES & S, or somewhere else committed fraud in a very sophisticated way by changing OpScan counts in counties where it might not be noticed as easily (bigger counties that tend to shift slightly Republican anyway). Personally, if I had spent years as a Diebold statistician thinking this one through, I think I might have tried to hide abnormal vote counts in “Dixiecrat” counties myself. Another explanation could be that a third factor accounts for both Republican “party shift” and the adoption of OpScan technology between the years 2000 and 2004. (What would this be? Something about government in those counties?)

All of this begs a few questions: 1) If county size doesn’t match party shift or adopted voting technology, what constitutes a “Dixiecrat” county? How could this term be better defined? 2) It STILL has never been adequately explained by the naysayers WHY “Dixiecrats” live in OpScan counties. The rural vs. urban explanation is only adequate at the ends of the scale – very small counties use OpScan voting machines and very large counties use ETouch voting machines, and the ones in the middle use both. Why then, do you see the Republican-favoring “party shift” only in mid-range counties using OpScan machines (which this study looked at)?

My overall opinion: I do not think that this study has been “debunked” by any stretch of the imagination (and even if it had been, the news media certainly has NOT provided any reasonable evidence to support that conclusion! Get some statisticians on your program, guys – freethinking Americans demand science!) I DO think it has a few weaknesses that should be accounted for theoretically, chief among them the similar results from the year 2000. That study would point me TOWARDS the “Dixiecrat” explanation, not away from it. At the same time, I absolutely do not believe that the “Dixiecrat” explanation adequately accounts for other results in this study (such as the aforementioned fact that voting technology STILL is as a much of a predictor of odd party shift as previous year polling results).

I would also like to see a much better operational definition of “Dixiecrat County” from both sides – perhaps the next study could compare counties which have not had a history of Democrats voting Republican over time but who differ in terms of voting technology? That would probably clear this “scholarly debate” right up. In general, both sides really need to conduct some additional tests (and the media really, really needs to back off of the “debunked” claims – I haven’t seen a reasonable first analysis yet, much less a adequate “debunking” of said first analyses, and the voters deserve a better explanation of everything than they are actually getting!)

I also wanted to bring to everyone’s notice the recent MIT Voting Technology Project study titled “On the discrepancy between party registration and presidential vote in Florida”, http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Election2004.html. For some unknown reason, the news media has seen fit NOT to quote this in support of their “conspiracy theory” spin – I have no earthly idea why they haven’t done this yet, since it seems to support their ideas. But just in case they do, don’t be disheartened. I won’t go into an in-depth analysis of this paper here, but essentially the MITers did a similar study to the Dopp & Liddle report, but comparing data from 1996 and 2000 to show that these “party shift” counties have historically gone Republican over time, and that when you include historical data, the Dopp & Liddle analyses can be accounted for by the “Dixiecrat” phenomenon. The problem? They used ALL the counties in Florida to conduct their analyses, not just the 26 mid-size counties used by Dopp & Liddle. Historical voting records of northern rural Florida counties (not used in the Dopp & Liddle study) skew their conclusion in favor of the “Dixiecrat” theory. While the Dopp & Liddle people need to redo their analyses, the MIT people do too (using the same data the Dopp & Liddle people did). Both studies are methodologically flawed.

I know this was probably not what was asked for here (still too technical, probably). But maybe someone else could take this analysis and distill it down to something the average American TV watcher or newspaper reader could understand?

Also, unfortunately, I don't have any real credentials - I'm only a graduate student in the social sciences. (Of course, that hasn't seemed to stop mainstream media from saying whatever they feel like about these studies either, so I thought I'd put this out there anyway...)

[althecat]

43. Fantastic distantearlywarning.. But can you do a bullet point version?

This seems to make sense, as I understand it your bottom line is:
1. There is something suspicious evident in the Dopp analysis
but 2. Both the Dopp and Caltech studies are flawed and we need a third (independent) opinion.

To be honest I am not sure if I fully understand everything you say.

And for the purposes of PR people and the media - both of whom operate on very short attention spans - it would be good if you could summarise what you are saying here in a set of bullet points.

Meanwhile I would also be very interested in what you think of Pobeka's analysis - I copied and posted in a post above. Does this shed any light on your questions. He has created a very interesting looking graphic.

al

[althecat]

90. For the sake of completeness - KATHY DOPP'S note to press on NYT

From: "Kathy Dopp"

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for the overwhelming response to
http://USTogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

If you wish to UNsubscribe from our "press" announcements email list,
please do so yourself by following the instructions at the bottom of
this
email.

I apologize for anyone I've offended in the last week from crabbiness.
I've tried my best to use the responses to my work to collect a list of
volunteer mathematicians and programmers and others in order to organize
a
project to systematically mathematically study the 2004 election to
pinpoint counties/precincts where vote counting errors may have
occurred,
and to provide evidence that can be used in court for persons
investigating this election. It will be a two year project and we will
need your help.

Right now, I simply need you to let people know that there is one
incorrect conclusion in the NY Times article today called

"Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried"

Are we going to let them "Quickly Bury" the truth?

I think Not.

Please counter the one incorrect statement in it about our statistical
study, and thank the author Tom Zeller for mentioning me so often in it.
That is really good for us.

http://ustogether.org/election04/dopp/dopp_response.html

The one small mis-statement was:

QUOTE:

the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and
the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete
support.

ENDQUOTE:

Tom based his statement here on the online analyses of social scientists
from Princeton and Cornell that were difficult to understand.

Please point people to this thorough rebuttal of the criticisms of our
group's mathematical study of Florida's voting patterns:

http://ustogether.org/election04/dopp/dopp_response.html

so that the the truth stays out there.

We are making progress in database design and obtaining a business
structure (nonprofit business) to begin this operation and will let you
know how you can help.

Again, thank you for the overwhelming response. It is so good to know
that
there are an army of people who want to make sure that the 2004 election
was counted correctly and put in place a system for letting candidates
mathematically analyze the patterns to see where votes may have been
miscounted. Our group has much work to do to set up a database on a
server, collect and input all the data, write programs to access it and
display it, develop our methods, test our methods against recounts, etc.
I am convinced our methods will work.

Please ask people to read this response to our detractors:

http://ustogether.org/election04/dopp/dopp_response.html

Thank you very much for all your work covering this.

--
Kathy Dopp
US Count Votes
http://USTogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

[althecat]

22. This might be useful... a link to 2000 exit poll resources and analysis

http://members.cox.net/fweil/ExitPolls2000.html

[Carl Brennan]

24. CIA involvment in vote tampering isn't point for point, but

it certainly sheds some light on historical precedent. Kind of like Operation Northwoods and 9/11.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x47274


If you want somebody to discuss this please p-mail me. :hi:

[greenmutha]

28. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

29. Kick! n/t

[hedda_foil]

30. Terrific work all!!! DUers take a bow and KEEP IT UP!!

This is exactly the hard data and verbiage I was looking for. Bravo!!!
:grouphug: :yourock: :wow: :bounce::grouphug: :yourock: :wow: :bounce: :grouphug: :yourock: :wow: :bounce:

[althecat]

41. Bonza Hedda ... I hope your PR people are clued up....

Tis very easy to get lost in some of this stuff.... which is why I kept my criticism of the NYT in #17 as simple as possible.

[savetheuniverse]

52. no hard data, but

I can't give yout hard data , but am looking at "credentials" as relevant to the NYT article (i.e. who are the unnamed "political scientists from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford" who posted an *email which presumably contained the now DEBUNKED dixiecrat -theory). since when does an email trump stats and sophisticated analysis, however flawed it may or may not be in this "heat of the moment" situation

The tack I am taking is that while you all are out here conducting the most amazing research project I have ever seen , these sobs are trying to discredit your work by invoking ivy league schools but no names--dismissing hardcore research on the basis of an EMAIL.

Wo.

The other angle I'm taking is talking about all the research and reports that went on BEFORE election (i.. this story did not start on the internet, it started LONG ago)--again citing credentials of people who conducted it


I intend to conclude by implying that the problem with the media is: they can't keep up with what you all are doing.

To that end: questions--

has the BOOK blackboxvoting won any awards and what year did the print version actually appear (did it even appear as print version?)

also, is this BH quote a reference to the Rubin study or some other?

“When we saw that Johns Hopkins study , part of us thought, ‘Gee, maybe we shouldn’t go ahead until we figure all of this out,’” says Sullivan. “But then we thought, ‘And wait one more election where people who’ve never been able to vote independently don’t get a chance to vote?’”

(I almost hate to ask these things because my article seems trivial by comparison to what you are doing, still i think it important to pt out that the Times is trashing some heavily "credentialed" people--myself included,as internet conspiracy theorists).


If they blow up the world tomorrow, I stand in AWE of what you have just done here.

[althecat]

72. The book was published early this year. I have two copies...

There are two editions. One of which is a bit controversial. The correct thing to do around here is to say that you can order a copy at www.blackboxvoting.org. For reasons far to hard to explain the book has not yet been picked up and distributed by a major publishing house.

[greenmutha]

34. Kick! n/t

[milkyway]

37. The author says the exit polls proved inaccurate. But no evidence

of this is offered, other than the unstated implication that the exit polls were "proved largely inaccurate" because they did not agree with the actual vote tally.

This is totally illogical on its face. We are using the discrepancy between the exit polls and vote count to show there is a problem with the vote count. The author is suggesting, however, that the exit polls are inaccurate and shouldn't be used as evidence. And the reason? Because they don't agree with the actual vote count! But that's exactly our point.

The author says the early exit polls were inaccurate, but he does not discuss at all what the late exit polls showed. Certainly the NY Times had access to these numbers. So why doesn't he use the late exit polls? Why does he make no mention that the final reported exit polls were "calibrated" to coincide with the actual vote tally?

The exit polls are perhaps the most important evidence that problems with the vote count were systemic, not just innocent, isolated incidents that did not affect the election. There have been several statistical studies by Steve Freeman and DUers to show the exit polls could not possibly have been this far off purely by chance. Either the exit polls' methodology was wrong, or the vote count did not accurately reflect the electorate.

Yet the author offers no mention of why he thinks the exit polls methodology was wrong, or why this happened this year but not in past years when exit polls were used. And again, why did he not use the final, raw exit polls (before being caliebrated).

Also, the NYTimes author uses the flawed CalTech/MIT study that uses revised exit poll numbers that were changed to coincide better with the actual vote counts. This study doesn't explain what exit polls they used, or even bring up the issue of the revised polls.

Their only reference to the exit polls was to say, in reference to Blue Lemur's study, "First, it is not clear where the exit poll numbers used in the analysis came from. Presumably they were from the initial exit poll results that were leaked on slate.com early in the afternoon of Election Day. These are the same numbers that immediately appeared suspicious to many analysts who saw them, since the respondents were too female, too Western, and too Democratic."

It's also not clear where the CalTech/MIT numbers came from. Then they throw out unsubstantiated spin that there was something wrong with the early exit polls which was "immediately suspicious to many analysts." If so, then why did Karen Hughes inform bush on election night that he had lost the election? (as reported by AP). Even the republicans believed the exit polls.

Near the end of the CalTech/MIT study is this totally bizarre statement:

"This episode of trying to rely on the exit polls to verify the truthfulness of voting machines illustrates the weakness of this approach --- an approach that had gained currency among electronic voting opponents before the November election. Even when they work well, exit polls are too imprecise to lay against the official count, unless every voter is included in the exit poll."

HUH? Isn't this what probability and statistical sampling is all about? Are they saying that if we had an election with one hundred million votes, an exit poll of 99 million voters would not be useful in verifying the truthfulness of voting machines? What kind of nonsense is this-- every single voter would need to be included in the exit poll?

[Eloriel]

50. Validity of exit polling -- an article on the Zogby site

By Sheldon Drobny (name ring a bell? Sheldon Drobny is CPA and Venture Capitalist and co-founder of Air America Radio.)


snip

As a former C.P.A and auditor, I have used statistical sampling throughout my career with great confidence. With electronic record keeping, it's easy to create a program to falsify the books. But there are ways to uncover that. Auditors have developed statistical ways to cut right through corruption in companies. You don't even need a paper trail. These statistical approaches can be used with almost 100% accuracy to uncover fraud.

snip

There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive poplls, but rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results should be practically “bullet proof.”

It is important that people know how accurate random sampling of historical events can be in order for them to understand how unlikely it is that the exit polls were wrong. So if you want to fight the battle correctly, you must get more statisticians and forensic accountants involved as well as the lawyers. These statisticians can show with great credibility the probability of manipulation within the computer programs used for counting the ballots. They do this kind of work all the time to uncover fraud based upon computer manipulation in commercial and corporate activities. And these types of expert analyses are admissible in a court of law.

snip



I can't imagine Zogby would have that piece on his website if he considered it bunk or bogus.

[Eloriel]

61. And another -- I Smell a Rat

http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10398

snip

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.

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.

snip

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.

snip

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-- and more yet at link, please read --

[greenmutha]

44. Kicking.

[greenmutha]

47. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

48. Kick! n/t

[Eloriel]

55. My turn

:kick:

[greenmutha]

53. Kicking!

[Eloriel]

56. Sun NYT Editorial -- About Those Election Results

MAKING VOTES COUNT
About Those Election Results

Published: November 14, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/opinion/14sun1.html?oref=login&oref=login

here have been a flood of reports, rumors and theories over the last 12 days about problems with the presidential election. The blogosphere, in particular, has been full of questions: Why did electronic voting machines in Ohio add nearly 4,000 phantom votes for President Bush, and why did machines in Florida mysteriously start to count backward? Why did the official vote totals for Ohio's largest county seem to suggest that there were more votes cast than registered voters? Why did election officials in yet another part of Ohio lock down the building where votes were being counted, turning away the press and public?

Defenders of the system have been quick to dismiss questions like these as the work of "conspiracy theorists," but that misses the point. Until our election system is improved - with better mechanics and greater transparency - we cannot expect voters to have full confidence in the announced results.

Electronic voting proved to be, as critics warned, a problem. There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale. But this country should have elections in which the public has no reason to worry whether every vote was counted properly, and we're still not there. In Franklin County, Ohio, one precinct reported nearly 4,000 votes for President Bush, although the precinct had fewer than 800 voters. In Broward County, Florida election officials noticed that when the absentee ballots were being tabulated, the vote totals began to go down instead of up. Voters in several states reported that when they selected John Kerry, it turned into a vote for President Bush.

-- more --

A good editorial except for "no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale." Gotta hew a LITTLE to the official story line, eh?

[Eloriel]

57. MUST READ -- new DUer "solves" the Franklin Co. computer error

Brilliantly:

The 3893 extra Bush votes in one Ohio Precinct--by WhiteKnight1
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x48519

[Eloriel]

60. Aaargh -- I cross posted this to another forum

and people replied THERE instead of here.

That link is here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=48130

I wish I had the energy to cull some of the better responses (and there are some -- see esp. the CAL TECH posts #23 adn #25 and catastrophicsuccess's post, response to this very NYT article. Very nicely done, and worth looking at. There may be others-- just can't go through it further tonight.

[nolabels]

63. Thanks, you have already done too much and thanks again

Some Info on this thread is a real YIKES, and still it getting closer to bone all the time. Some real sharp cuts deep into the meat to be graphic about it.

The barbecue will need to warmed up soon :-)

[BevHarris]

62. Guys. The best debunk is bad-ass proof.

I've been wondering whether they'll use farm-fresh eggs for their facials, or just any old egg.

Bev

[savetheuniverse]

67. hard boiled

btw, I know you wanted hard proof--but my piece might "speak" to "humanities" readers and get you some support (all my friends at the big Us are STILL ignoring this)--but they're not WATCHING you guys work like I am

completely idiotic question what does kick mean--send it up in the list? If so, with my response, please first confirm this paragraph, and give me the YEAR the book appeared in print ( did it never actually appear?)

"Inspired partly by a John Hopkins University study, Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer protection organization Blackboxvoting.org, co-authored the book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, published by Plan Nine Publishing."


then let me send you a new one (y'all know how dangerous TYPOS can be:)

You people are awesome, whoever you are.

Dr.L.

[BevHarris]

68. I have no idea where that quote came from

"inspired by a Johns Hopkins study?"

I began writing the book on Oct. 10, 2002, and the Johns Hopkins study appeared July 24, 2003.

I am not a "co-author." I am the author. Chapter 16 was written in collaboration with David Allen.

The book is published by Talion Publishing, with rights ceded to the Black Box Voting Inc. nonprofit in June 2004. Plan Nine used to have rights to publish an Internet version, but never paid the monthly royalties or sent sales reports, and their rights are now defunct, though we'll need to pry loose two seconds to take them to court on that, something that profoundly bores me, since we're working on a takedown of the first order here.

The year the book first appeared in print was 2004. An earlier version, 50 pages longer and less informative, was put out on the Internet in October 2003.

And "kick" means you do a meaningless post in order to bump the thread back up to the top.

Welcome to DU!

Priorities, you know.

Bev Harris
Executive Director
Black Box Voting, Inc.

[savetheuniverse]

70. thanks for the corrrex

Just goes to show, as one MSM editor recently "informed" me , "not everything you read on the net is true"

I'm still not sure whether you all think this is relevant, but here is the corrected version in case you do--
Sorry to be so net illiterate.


An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by implication) the Rest of the US Press:

Dear New York Times, etal,

As a long-time subscribed reader of your publication—one I have always staunchly defended one of the best in the world--I am incensed by your dismissive handling of what is one of the most significant breaking news stories since Watergate.

Here I am, seated at my computer, submerged in the nefarious bowels of the internet—reading a New York Times article with all the “twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust” of booking an airline ticket, making a hotel reservation, a bank transfer or reading the Washington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, ABC, NBC, and CBS headlines—things most of us do on a regular basis in the “parallel universe” that is the internet (citing another derogatory and patently absurd quip by NBC News’ Chip Reid).

I am neither internet enthusiast nor blogger: the term blogosphere did not even enter my vocabulary until several weeks before the 2004 election when these citizen journalists, some more legitimate than others, began emerging as a powerful political force in the election. I am not unlike most of your readers: educator, writer, editor, translator with a PhD and a two-page publications list under my belt, in German and English. I volunteer for my local park district, where I offer performing arts programs for children and youth. All in all, I’m pretty average—not unlike the now nearly 40,000 people who’ve signed the electronic petition to Congress requesting an investigation of the 2004 presidential election. (Note: I do not argue for the legitimacy of all these signatures—what’s a few thousand plus or minus in the greater scheme of things?). The internet is not a distant planet: I would venture to guess that it is “inhabited” or at least visited by 99.9% of your readers.

These readers don’t appreciate their entirely justifiable concerns about the accuracy of the electoral process being discredited and dismissed as conspiracy theorist-quackery—as eight out of nine responses printed in today’s edition evidence.

One glaring omission in your coverage involves the way this story began: you claim that it emerged from the ether “in the course of seven days” as mysteriously as the creationist version of human evolution. But that is not the case.

So how did thousands of Times’ readers get swept up in the maelstrom of the “online market of dark ideas surrounding the last week’s presidential election”? What really happened to spawn the internet hysteria?

The stage was set on November 3, with worldwide shock and disbelief over Bush’s “overnight sensation” victory: observers throughout the country and the world who had been following the election closely tucked themselves into bed Tuesday night confident that “help was on the way.” This logical assumption was based not only on early exit polls: it was based on the worldwide public perception, particularly salient in the United States, that the only way a Republican victory could be secured was through a dubious fiat similar to the one we witnessed in 2000. As one astute reader responding to your front-page coverage of this highly significant media event succinctly stated: “If George W. Bush had won the 2000 election honestly, people would not be so quick to assume that he did not win this one fair and square either.” Of course, that was in the letters section, A30. So many readers may have missed it.

Years before the election—perhaps it was with the quiet passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act which mandated the use of Diebold and ES&S machines notorious for their “tamperability”--concerned citizens from various walks of life--professors, computer scientists, systems analysts, even grandmothers and literary publicists from Seattle--had been attempting to sound the alarm: the Diebold voting machines are not secure; the democratic process itself is in jeopardy, seriously so. Inspired partly by a John Hopkins University study, Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer protection organization Blackboxvoting.org began writing her groundbreaking book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, published in 2004 by Talion. Avi Rubin, professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the Hopkins Security Information Security Institute, authored that study. Rubin is a qualified expert with years of practical experience in the fields of cryptography, network security, Web security and secure Internet services who was employed by such companies as AT&T and Bellcore prior to accepting his appointment at Johns Hopkins. On Wednesday, October 27, 2004—one week before the election, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast an alarming segment covering electronic voting, featuring not only Rubin, but David Jefferson of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jefferson described the system currently in place as the “electoral weapon of mass destruction” which could easily be manipulated by a “rogue programmer.” Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University and author of several “legitimate” books on American government published by Norton & Company, also pointed out the potential for problems with the machine-voting systems—and these are but a few of the “minority report-esque” voices who attempted to sound the alarm before the most recent election scandal broke loose on the internet. Are we to discredit these experts as “internet conspiracy theorists”?

In the hours since you posted your disparaging report, the bloggers have lashed backed faster than you could flog them: As Joseph Cannon’s Friday blog points out, even as you discount the “early” reports that began appearing just two days after the election, you neglect to take into consideration Dr. Stephen F. Freeman’s (University of Pennsylvania; degree: MIT) study published on November 10, which—two days prior to your biased and poorly researched report—lent credence to the bloggers’ “conspiracy theories.” Instead, you invoke the imprimatur of Harvard, Cornell and Stanford, citing an email by three unnamed political scientists posted to the website ustogether.org (a study that has since been revised and is now being referred to in the scientific community as the Dopp and Liddle report). According to your account, there was not sufficient “concrete support” to merit the GAO investigations sought by three Congressmen John Conyers. Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler. The “Dixiecrat” theory has, in fact, since been challenged by solid research findings, not by anonymous emails shot off from prestigious schools. At present, the three primary studies circulating on the net are the Dopp and Liddle report, the Caltech report and the Freeman’s MIT report—all of which are based on analysis of concrete statistical data. Dr. Freeman’s report concludes that while “Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion <. . .> the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate," and, furthermore, that, "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 of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." Freeman concludes that the odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 250,000,000 to one.

These studies do not involve a the kind of fuzzy math implied by the Times’ report of “blog-to-e-mail-to-blog”—they involve a diligent, however frenzied, study of the actual data produced by exit polls versus actual results. These so-called “internet conspiracy theorists” are credentialed professionals engaged in hard research--most of which is beyond my grasp as a classically literary-minded PhD, but which clearly reflects solid research conducted by people who, by virtue of their professional training in precisely the fields required to analyze this data, are hard at work doing the job of the entire nation right now. They are doing your job, and they deserve your support and gratitude, not disdain, derision and dismissal. The fact of the matter is, the situation we face as a nation is far too complicated to be figured out without the aid of sophisticated independent scientists who can analyze the data. The jury is still out on this one: the fact of the matter is, there are three well-researched statistical analyses that will need to be studied, compared and analyzed by highly discerning and well-trained minds. That is likely to take some time—consider the stakes involved, we’d best just hold our breath waiting for the research to be complete. In the meantime, these three studies alone provide enough evidence of “anomalies” to merit a thorough, time and cost intensive investigation.

Let’s not even begin to ”discuss” or otherwise dismiss the most recent findings of investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of those internet-conspiracy-theorist-bloggers charged with snowballing rumors in cyberspace: in his BBC report (also available online) he states that “documents from the Bush campaign's Florida HQ suggest a plan to disrupt voting in African-American districts.” Is it the BBC that is spreading rumors, or Germany’s highly regarded Spiegel (also available online), which rightly identifies Palast as an “investigative reporter, documentary film producer and best-selling author” and the remaining “internet conspiracy theorists” as “watchdog groups” (in most democracies, this is a positive moniker, not a pejorative).

I must confess, Mssrs. Zeller, Fessenden and Schwartz, in my professional capacity as a translator of German historical and literary texts, I often have the unpleasant task of researching “internet conspiracy theories” and subjecting myself to the horrific rantings of stark-raving lunatics on the net. One classic example can be found at this site: http://www.regmeister.net/verbrecher/verbrecher.htm. This, sirs, is an “internet conspiracy theory”—the remaining sources I have cited here are highly legitimate studies and reports conducted by credentialed scientists and respectable journalists.

Had you done your research, you’d have recognized the difference. Perhaps you got your internets confused: I see from today’s headlines that the “Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War”—Tim Weiner reports that “the Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats—a ‘God’s-eye view’ of battle.” Maybe that was the internets you had in mind—I’m quite content with the God’s eye-view I’m getting right here and now on this ol’ fashioned democratic internet.

The story is bigger than Watergate. Your dismissal of it is on a par with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Lilian Friedberg
Reporting from the Democratic Mandate of the United States of America

[BevHarris]

71. A tweak. Not quite correct

I'd never heard of Avi Rubin when I started writing my book. He did his study in July 2003 using files that I found in Jan. 2003 while writing my book.

Inspired partly by a John Hopkins University study, Bev Harris, Executive Director of the consumer protection organization Blackboxvoting.org began writing her groundbreaking book Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, published in 2004 by Talion.

[Andromeda]

65. BBV - Diebold Source Code...

This came in my mailbox from [e-mail] This may have been posted before but just in case it hasn't been, here it is.

"Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 22:45:01 -0500
From: "Valerie" <[e-mail]>
Subject: junk voting

Diebold Source Code!!! --by ouranos (dailykos.com) "Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He 'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines. Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in particular stood out over all the rest: #defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key... The line that staggered the Hopkins team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination."

If ATM didn't leave a verifiable paper trail and were as error prone as voting machines, banks would be bankrupt. Throw out all the voting machines and have the new ones manufactured by ATM companies!"
*****

[BevHarris]

66. This story was a year old.

He 'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--

He didn't accidentally get his hands on it. I found it on Jan 23, 2003 and later gave a copy to Alastair Thompson, DU's "althecat," and arranged with Alastair to post it publicly on July 8 2003 in conjunction with a story on the GEMS central tabulator vulnerabilities. Dr. David Dill then told Avi Rubin to download it.

The hard-coded source code, by the way, was identified by a DU researcher around June 17, weeks before the code was released to Avi Rubin. The exact post on DU is in my book, Chapter 12, which can be downloaded here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-12.pdf

It has a brilliant bunch of DUers tearing apart Diebold code on June 16-18 2003, long before anyone else wrote any kind of report. (Go DU!)

Bev Harris
Executive Director
Black Box Voting Inc.
Cleanup Crew

[althecat]

73. CALTECH ARE TRYING TO COVER THEIR TRACKS... (Credit To GoldenGreek)

They have changed the footnotes in the PDF of their report..

GoldenGreek's Post Follows..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=48130&mesg_id=48836&page=

************

This is from the Pres Footnote #2 in the link: "The primary election return data source for this paper is uselectionatlas.com, supplemented by official state web sites, to update the election returns."

Footnote #2 in the second version of the report itself on my desktop:

"The primary election return data source for this paper is uselectionatlas.com, supplemented by official state web sites, to update the election returns. The exit poll data were taken from the cnn.com web site. The poll data can be accessed through http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/index.ht... . Because the web site does not report the bottom line candidate percentages directly, we had to calculate them from the demographic breakdowns. In this case, we estimated the Bush percentage of votes in the exit polls using the gender breakdown. For instance, 54% of the respondents in Florida were women, 46% men. Women gave 50% of their votes to Bush, men, 53%. Therefore, Bush’s overall share of the exit poll in Florida was calculated as (54% x 50%) + (46% x 53%) = 51.38%."

THEY'RE HIDING THE FACT THAT THE CALTECH/MIT REPORT IS USING THE "CORRECTED" EXIT POLL DATA!!

Compare this to the second footnote of the Freeman report, which tells us he uses the exit poll data from ELECTION NIGHT. They'd managed to get hold of it before it was thrown into the black hole. Adobe Reader won't let me copy it because I don't have the privileges.

Finally, THE CALTECH/MIT REPORT ONLY DEALS WITH THE ISSUE OF THE "BLACK BOXES," FOR WHICH THE ORIGINAL DATA TURNED OUT TO BE FAIRLY WEAK. WHAT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MUCH MORE WIDESPREAD, RATHER, IS THE USE OF OLD FASHIONED JIM CROW TACTICS TO BLOCK MINORITY VOTES.

Election Results version of this thrad..

[goldengreek]

80. Thanks for that.

I feel so pretty!!

[althecat]

75. Sequoia Correlation - Alternative Florida Analysis Not Debunked

...not even looked at I expect and bloody interesting...

I know this is on DU somewhere but I found it on BBV.org in a post from lostnfound

**********

Analyzing the growth in Democratic and republican votes, by county, between 2000 and 2004, I made the following graph. The size of the bubble indicates the total quantity of votes. The lack of scatter below the line indicates either that Bush has a magical appeal to a wide spectrum (urban and rural, D and R) ..or else cheating, which is clearly impossible in America.



These 4 counties are all running the Sequoia system and same release:



Excitement about another close election and huge get-out-the-vote efforts by both parties would tend to raise turnout, but these factors would tend to help both Democrats and Republicans.

In the graph above, such factors would tend to drive all counties upward along a diagonal line of even growth in vote counts. Rather than following the diagonal line, the Sequoia-counties seem to have simply shifted the line upward by 10% - 11%.

Compared to the 2000 election, both parties did achieve substantial improvements in vote count, in some counties more than others. But George W. Bush enjoyed a 10% - 11% advantage in Republican vote improvement – compared to the corresponding increase in Democratic votes -- in 3 of Florida’s largest 5 counties, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough, and also in the beautiful but smaller Indian River. How?

Perhaps Republican voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote activities were that much more – “exactly that much more” -- effective in these four counties? Let’s look at voter registration changes during the same time period:



During this same four-year time period, Palm Beach and Pinellas both had significant growth in Democratic registrations, but either a loss or no increase in Republican registrations.

Perhaps 5% of Kerry votes transferred over to Bush..

[greenmutha]

76. Kick!

[leftchick]

77. kick

another outstandung thread!

:kick:

[greenmutha]

78. Good morning kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

79. Kick! n/t

[distantearlywarning]

81. Kick

nt

[greenmutha]

85. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

87. Kick!

[greenmutha]

88. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

89. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

91. Kick!

[intheflow]

92. Kick

Wish I had something to contribute! Keep it up! :kick:

[greenmutha]

93. Kick! n/t

[greenmutha]

95. Kick!

[tommcintyre]

100. high level people....PR push to debunk : Any update?

http://www.independentmediasource.com/evotingfraud.htm

[tommcintyre]

101. kick