...this piqued our interest. we talked further with our friend, who assured us that all the polling data pointed to a kerry victory. "we had kerry winning or tying in all battleground states except west virginia," he said.
our friend went on to point out that he worked for edison/mitofsky, whose polling data had never been wrong before. and, he said, the only counties in which the data they collected under-represented awol's votes were the counties in which diebold voting machines were used.
"quite a coincidence, eh?" he said.
he said there was evidence that the exit polling data was correct, and that everyone at edison/mitofsky was convinced their results were right. he also went on to bemoan the lack of media attention to this story, and to also wonder why kerry gave up so easily.
we decided that, much like the family that won't admit their dad is a serial murderer, nobody in america wants to face the fact that there is wide-spread corruption at the highest levels.
we promised our friend to blog about our conversation (keeping him anonymous, of course). we also vowed with our friend to keep fighting the good fight.
so, though it is anecdotal evidence, it's proof enough for us that 2004 was the same as 2000, only not as messy; ie, rigged and stolen.
www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/20/202432/85 - 101k - Cached - Similar pages
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Q: What safeguards have been introduced to protect the vote collection system should problems arise from human or technical error?
A: A series of steps have been taken to safeguard the process, involving both technology and people. AP has built into the system a series of triggers to set off alerts in case of discrepancies or apparent inconsistencies with previous voting history. Historical data has been programmed in about registered and actual voters and past voting patterns.
If a clerk enters numbers that show a significant disparity from expected patterns, for example, a popup box appears on his or her screen that summons a supervisor to intervene. There are also coping mechanisms for technical problems.
If one or more of AP's servers goes down, the system automatically fails over to backup servers; if an entire technical center loses power, the system seamlessly swings over to an alternate site. These "failovers" have been tested repeatedly during dry runs that have been going on every day in the month running up until the election.
AP Counts the Votes
www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-election-ap-qa-blurb.blurb
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.
Zogby International
www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10385
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The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy - Science Technology ...
www.physicsforums.com/archive/topic/t-53147_The_Unexplained_Exit_Poll_Discrepancy.html
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"Zogby is not a reputable pollster," said Warren Mitofsky, who is co-directing the media exit polls this year for the major television networks and the Associated Press. "He is more a salesman and a self-promoter than a pollster. He has made lots of mistakes on election outcomes -- five in 2002. . . . I have heard of volatile campaigns, but he has volatile polls."
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41186-2004Jan23?language=printer
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David Moon argues that optical scan systems are paper-based and therefore fraud allegations shouldn't be levied against them. He has completely mis-characterized the argument against them. The problem with optical scan systems is not whether they?e paper-based, but that the scanned votes are all fed into central tabulating systems that run on Windows-based PCs, using outdated security protocols, and whose results are then transmitted over unsecure modems. Those central computers could be easily hacked from the outside, or edited by an insider who has even a basic knowledge of how to use an Excel-like spreadsheet.
www.crisispapers.org/texts/optical-scan.htm - 28k - Cached - Similar pages
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So why am I posting about this at all if I don't believe it? Mainly because I'm getting progressively more pissed off about the exit polls with every passing day. The folks who ran them have actually encouraged rumor mongering by refusing to publicly explain what happened to us benighted masses. So far, all they've done is write a confidential report that apparently didn't even acknowledge the systemic errors in the final results and instead laid the blame on those irresponsible bloggers who got everyone riled up by posting early results. Meanwhile, their defenders in the media were practically apoplectic about the gall of non-experts using data they can't possibly understand in order to advance their own bizarre conspiracy theories. Which would be fair enough if they'd step up to the plate and give us the benefit of their expertise.
www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005147.php - 101k - Dec 20, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
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The problem seems to rest upon the medias distrust of probabilities. However, my old law school text on Cases and Materials on Evidence begins with a statement on the problem of proof:
Evidence is produced at a trial so that an impartial trier can decide how an event occurred. Time is irreversible, events unique, and any reconstruction of the past at best an approximation. As a result of this lack of certainty about what happened, it is inescapable that the triers conclusions be based on probabilities. <1>
www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm - 29k - Dec 20, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
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Mercuri does not claim any specific instance of vote fraud. But she says that, without paper ballots, theres simply no way to know.
She notes, too, that voters recently lost another check of vote tally accuracy. Since 1964, Voter News Service (VNS), owned by a consortium of broadcast and print media, provided exit polling election-night projections. Following the election fiasco of 2000, VNS undertook a complete redesign of its computers. On election day 2002, VNS announced that, due to computer problems, it would produce no projections. VNS has never released its exit-polling data from the 2002 elections. In January 2003, the owners of VNS announced that they were disbanding the service, which has a historical record of remarkable accuracy.
Safeguarding the Vote By Doug Pibel
www.yesmagazine.org/26courage/pibel.htm - 84k - Cached - Similar pages
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A lot of people dont realize that exit polling isnt a guessing game. Its pretty solid science. In fact, exit polls are routinely utilized in foreign countries to detect election fraud.
As Republican consultant and Fox News regular has said,
Exit polls are almost never wrong
. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Foxs campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling the returns. Dick Morris, Those faulty exit polls were sabotage (November 4, 2004) The Political Life
Unspun: December 2004 Archives
www.unspun.us/archives/2004_12.html - 101k - Dec 20, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
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But exit polls become problematic when they are used to project a winner. No matter how good the sampling process involved in an exit poll, it is still sampling, which means that there is a margin of sampling error. This matters less if the election is a landslide, but in a close election, a one- or two-point margin of error looms large. Based on the pre-election polling and the exit polls throughout the day in 2000, there was no legitimate way that television networks could have possibly determined whether George W. Bush or Al Gore had won the state of Florida before all the votes were counted. The pressure to get the projection first trumped the pressure to get the projection right.
www2.lewisu.edu/~gazianjo/assignment.html - 16k - Cached - Similar pages
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Voter News Service is an exit-polling outfit funded by the major TV networks and the Associated Press. After its analysis mistakenly prompted networks to call Florida for Al Gore on election night 2000, great effort was put into revamping VNS's data services, which provide much valuable information about how people vote--and also serve as a soft check to see if vote counts don't square up with how people say they voted. VNS's database broke down due to a computer glitch on this year's election night, and the data still aren't available. "Where is that data?" an exasperated Mercuri asks. "All they do . . . is Election Day exit polling. We rely on that for error-check, and without it there is no real way to know that something's amiss."
Baltimore City Paper: NEWS
www.citypaper.com/2002-12-11/feature.html - 46k - Dec 21, 2004 -
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For one thing, we have built into the system a series of triggers to set off alerts if a sticky-fingered clerk enters the wrong vote numbers. We've programmed in historical data about past numbers of voters and trends. If a clerk enters numbers that show a big disparity from expected patterns, a popup box appears on his screen that summons a supervisor to intervene.
Poynter Online - The Associated Press: Counting the 2004 Vote
http://poynteronline.org/content/content_view.asp?id=73523&sid=50 - 29k - Cached - Similar pages
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"So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.
"To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."
12/1/04 Dispatches
www.populist.com/04.21.dispatches.html - 28k - Cached - Similar pages
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Margin of Error
The press release ends with this sentence: "The margin of error for these final exit poll results referred to in this release is under +/-1%." How did this number come about?
Here it is necessary to introduce some statistical terminology. The margin of error in a survey is related to sampling error. A sample is subset of a population. When you draw a sample, you get a certain estimate from this sample (e.g. 60%); if you now go and draw another sample from this population, you will get different estimate (e.g. 59%). So the margin of error reflects how widely these sample estimates can differ.
Among other things, the margin of error depends on the sample size. If I draw a sample of only one person from the total population for an exit poll, I would expect a large margin of error (basically, the margin of error is going to be +/-100% and the estimate is useless). If I draw a sample of seven million people from the 10 million people who actually voted, I would have a very tiny margin of error because I have virtually covered the entire voting population. In practice, there are limitations on resource availability, and PS&B reports having interviewed 20,832 voters.
If these 20,832 voters were a simple random sample from the 10+ million voters, then the margin of error is calculated as follows:
Let P be the percentage of persons who chose SI (=59%)
Let N be the sample size (=20,832)
Then the margin of error = 2 x SQRT
= 0.7% rounded up to 1%
The literal interpretation is that there is a 95% chance that the actual percentage of SI's is between 58% and 60%.
A Technical Analysis of An Exit Poll in Venezuela
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Thus, the only real problem they had was exit polling. As SenderBerl touched on below, if the exit polling for this election would be at material variance with the election results, they had a major problem and thus John Kerry was there to do the grudge work of becoming our 44th president. Thus, Bush was told, campaign your heart out, the N.W.O. Board of Directors (of the EU dominant division) knowing that if it were anywhere close, they could produce the win quite easily. However, they still had a problem, if it came down to a key state, such as Ohio, the very case, where the exit poll numbers were coming in live at material variance with the result. Thus, if a key state, such as Ohio, a single state, did have a material skew for Kerry, reflecting the true national sentiment by the way (I dislike being repetitive but outside the Goebbels propaganda why would anyone vote for Bush on his historically dismal record), the exit polls would be at material variance against the vital needed result in Ohio.
Thus, the electronic intervention went into the exit poll program such as on CNN where N.W.O. pawns either at CNN, or even N.W.O. agents from the outside, such as they did on 9-11 with airplanes, could direct and change the numbers. Thus, as shown by what we came across below, the exit polling numbers HAD TO HAVE BEEN ELECTRONICALLY ALTERED AND FALSIFIED.
Thus, the proof, and what I am charging you with is to present this argument to all those initially mentioned with the following advice based on my experience. Find American citizens who taped and captured the election programs from other channels, main and cable, during this period of time. If you or they can establish that the same type of alterations took place during the early morning hours, then you have conclusive circumstantial evidence of the fraud and the crime that proves that we the American people have been stripped of our vote by those that disdain us so much that they must have laughed it up real good when they watched videos of Americans waiting up to five hours to register their meaningless vote.
Please do it. Serve our country and you will be serving your family as well.
May G-d bless your efforts accordingly.
Joseph B. Ehrlich
Sender, Berl & Sons Inc.
November 5, 2004 7:00 AM
Sender, Berl & Sons Inc. {Lead Page}
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BBV summary of Diebold memo's:
"What we know from the memos can be summarised as follows...
Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny's precinct 216, the second one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It automatically replaced the first card's results and reduced Gore's total by 16,022 votes and added several thousand votes to Bush plus a variety of minor candidates;
Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors, indicating (contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;
After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the mistake was rectified;
The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by chance);
According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card being corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less than 60,000 to 1;
The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a reasonable possibility that the second card was part of deliberate conspiracy to rig the election results."
2004 US presidential election controversy, voting machines ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidential_election_controversy,_voting_machines - 101k - Dec 20, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
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Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster
by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout.org
November 8, 2004
Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.
What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.
www.topplebush.com/oped721.shtml - 75k - Cached - Similar pages
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I was in Las Vegas canvassing on election day. One member of our canvassing team had a relative who worked for one of the major news networks; she leaked early exit poll results to us. We were ecstatic; Kerry was taking most of the swing states and was winning by a landslide. I had felt the energy building on the ground for weeks; I knew it in my bones that our hard work had paid off. We won.
If you want to frame something, frame this--we won. The November election was fraught with deception, voter intimidation, and irregularities. Votes mysteriously disappeared and appeared electronically, and, strangely, all the errors seem to swing the vote in Bush's favor. Imagine that!
MyDD :: Framing when the House is Burning
www.mydd.com/story/2004/11/28/23129/473 - 45k - Cached - Similar pages
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November 18, 2004 NEWS ITEM
A research team at UC Berkeley reported Thursday morning that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study showed an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the probability is less than 0.1 percent. .... The disparity in favor of the incumbent President Bush cannot be explained away by other factors. The study shows that counties that used electronic voting resulted in disproportionate increases of votes for the President.....For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting, someone needs to explain the statistical anomalies that we found in Florida. Were calling on officials in Florida to take up this task and to take action now.
Bush vs Kerry : Setting the Record Straight
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Voting machine companies with partisan ties to political parties
In 2003 Wally O'Dell CEO of Diebold said in a letter to Ohio Republican officials that he was committed, "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President".
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
However, Punch card voting took place in 68 of Ohio's 88 counties, including three of the four most populous -- the counties which include Cleveland, Dayton, and Cincinnati.<16>
http://www.klkntv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2485180
Diebold is the company which makes electronic touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and other states, most significantly Florida. Ohio and Florida were two of the "swing" states critical to the 2004 election.
Diebolds political ties are not limited to Republicans. <17> http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=409)
"Diebolds election-systems division is run by a registered Democrat" and Mark Radke (Director of Marketing for Diebold Election Systems) "has an exclusive Democratic donation history"..."including the legal limit of $2000 to John Kerry in the recent campaign".
Chuck Hagel, the previous chairman of ES&S, another major manufacturer of voting machines and still a $1m stock-holder in McCarthy & Co which owns a quarter of ES&S, became a Republican candidate. Hagel's Democratic opponent made a formal protest to the state of Nebraska over the conflict of interest.
2004 US Election controversies and irregularities - Wikipedia
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Who Counts the Votes
The widely-circulated quoted attributed to Josef Stalin says: "Elections are not won by those who cast the votes, but those who count them." In Florida, the deck was completely stacked against Al Gore.
The chief executive officer of the state, the governor, and ultimate overseer of election statutes, was Jeb Bush, younger brother of the candidate. It is relevant to note that the exit polling data from Voter News Service, based on strategically-placed questioning of large numbers of actual voters who just voted, has an incredible record of historical accuracy. If their data shows the election to be excessively close (as in New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin) they say it is "too close to call." Their record is so impressive and reliable that Dan Rather (using their numbers) said that "if we call a state, you can put it in the bank." The data reflecting the intended votes in Florida showed that it was close, but that Gore was the clear winner, which is why the state was called for him early on, and consistent with the calculations by the Miami Herald cited previously. Voter News Service and the networks have been criticized for this rare "mistake" but based on the facts, it appears that Voter News Service and the networks were not wrong at all.
When the state was first called for Gore, Jeb Bush and his staff objected, saying they knew there were more votes for Dubya. How did they know that? The actual votes had not been counted yet! If Jeb Bush "knew" something, it could only have been because he "knew" he could control the delivery of enough votes to make the difference. This is the same governor who had previously VETOED a voter education measure passed by his own Republican legislature ... and then joined the chorus of those critical of senior citizen or inexperienced voters who were confused by ballots that clearly violated legal requirements.
The secretary of state, Kathleen Harris, with immediate responsibility for oversight of election procedures, was a partisan Republican loyal to Jeb Bush and a state co-chair of the Bush campaign, who repeatedly disregarded election statutes and judicial decisions made prior to the election to make sure that votes would never be counted if they came from areas that would likely be recorded for Gore.
George Dubya Bush election theft 2000
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As pointed out in various analyses, the exit polls were accurate within their margin of error in many states but were surprisingly far off in a number of swing states, and always off in the same direction, showing more support for Kerry than was found in the official counts.
Warren Mitofsky, co-director of the National Election Pool, told the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that "Kerry was ahead in a number of states by margins that looked unreasonable to us." Mitofsky speculated that perhaps more Kerry voters were willing to participate in the exit poll, but did not suggest any reason for that speculation other than the difference between the exit polls and the final counts. He and his colleagues have since produced other speculative reasons why the exit polls could have been wrong, all grounded in circular reasoning.
Mitofsky told the News Hour that on the evening of November 2 he decided to wait for the official counts and then use those to "correct" the exit polls, thus rendering the hugely expensive exit polls useless as either predictors of the election outcome or measurements of the count's accuracy. Media outlets "corrected" the exit polls on their websites early in the morning of November 3. Mitofsky promised in the future to keep exit poll results secret, thus fully rendering them useless for any stated purpose related to election outcomes (they will still be able to tell us after the fact how many voters were female or Jewish or go to church weekly or believe health care is the most important issue, etc.).
David Swanson: Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations
www.counterpunch.org/swanson11082004.html - 101k - Dec 21, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages
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For example, Ohio exit polls predicted that Kerry would win 52.1 percent of the vote to Bushs 47.9 percent. But the tallied vote had Bush winning 51 percent of the vote to Kerrys 48.5 percent. The difference, then, between Ohio exit poll projections and the actual tallied vote for Kerry comes to 3.6 percent. Based on the size of the sample the exit polling firms were working with, the likelihood of this happening is less than 1 in 1000. Doing a similar analysis with exit polls in Florida, Freeman found a less than three in 1000 chance that the tallied results would differ as much as they did from the exit poll projections.
And while Kerry did carry Pennsylvania, the chance that he would receive only 50.8 percent of the vote after exit polls indicated he would get 54.1 percent (a 3.3 percent difference) is less than two in 1000. Finally, according to Freeman, the odds against all three of these statistical anomalies occurring together are 250 million to one
Was the 2004 Election Stolen? -- In These Times
www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1742/ - 70k - Dec 20, 2004 -
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