He seems to be trotting out MSM talking points wrt to vote fraud under The Nation's banner of respectability. Usually, this is one of my most trusted sources. We need to debunk this with intelligence by writing a well thought-out letter to the Editor. Someone has been infiltrating their water supply with sweet red powder....
More On the "Stolen Election", 11/30/04 @5:09 pm
(interesting timing on this...)
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=2037snip--
The emails keep pouring in. Please investigate voter fraud! Here's evidence the Republicans stole the election! We're watching YOU cover the election irregularities! A number of Americans--is the number growing?--believe George W. Bush only won the election because the voting was somehow rigged. And each day they disseminate via email what they consider to be proof--or, at the least, reasons to be suspicious. In pieces for The Nation magazine, I've noted that there is good cause to worry about the integrity of a voting system that is overseen by partisan players and that relies in part upon paperless electronic voting machines that are manufactured by companies that are led by pro-GOP executives and that refuse to reveal the computer codes they use. But I've also cautioned against declaring that the potential for abuse means the system was abused to flip the results. Exit polls that differ from reported vote counts are not necessarily proof of foul play, and statistical analyses that seem to raise questions need thorough vetting before they are waved about as signs of chicanery.
--snip
Then--put on your foil hat to keep from getting Kool-Aid infected!--
he asserts that the exit poll discrepancy is mainly due to "a former highschool math teacher named Kathy Dopp" who failed to take into account the Dixiecrat voters. Then -- David! Lay OFF THAT KOOL_AID!!--he disputes the whole notion of vote fraud using--GET THIS!!--the Cal-Tech MIT voting project and THE MIAMI HERALD!!!
He considers the Miami Herald evidence so stunning that he puts it in italics (which I can't reproduce):
snip--
Some wondered whether Florida's tally was corrupt, with one Internet site writing: "George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable."
The Miami Herald last week went to see for itself whether Bush's steamroll through north Florida was legitimate. Picking three counties that fit the conspiracy-theory profile--staunchly Democratic by registration, whoppingly GOP by voting--two reporters counted more than 17,000 ballots over three days. The conclusion: no conspiracy.
The count of optical-scan ballots in Suwannee, Lafayette and Union counties showed Bush whipping John Kerry in a region where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1.
The Herald found minor differences with official results, most involving ballots that had been discarded as unreadable by optical-scan machines but in which reporters thought the voter's intent was clear.
--snip
The evidence that Corn's been hitting the Kool-Aid, or worse, keeps mounting as he dismisses the Berkeley study as by "grad students", using words like "skullduggery":
snip--
According to Florida's official vote count, Bush won by 381,000 votes--more than the total of these "ghost votes." Still, the grad student study has been hailed by election results skeptics as reason to believe skullduggery transpired. Yet other experts in statistics have not been persuaded.
--snip
(But, David, why don't you quote more of those who have?)
Now he quotes a CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project henchman to debunk it:
snip--
Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at MIT and researcher at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, examined the data used by the Berkeley researchers and found what he calls "an interesting pattern." But, he told me, "it may not have anything to do with voting machines." He explained, "It is a baroque form of regression model they're using. Almost everyone I talk to says it looks like they were fishing for results. I would hope you'd find a lot of skeptics." Stewart pointed to two sets of precincts he examined in Palm Beach County. Both were heavily Democratic, one contained many African-Americans, the other set had but a few. It was the set with few black voters that shifted dramatically toward Bush, according to Stewart. And this movement, he said, may be unrelated to the e-voting machines. These precincts, he speculated, could have had more Jewish voters who shifted toward Bush this election.
--snip
He struggles to present the appearance of objectivity (a Nation hallmark, which makes this kind of spinning the most insidious of all) in the next paragraph:
snip--
Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University, also examined the Berkeley study and found that the statistical anomalies only were significant in two counties--Broward and Palm Beach--not all of the 15 e-voting counties. On his weblog, he notes that the Berkeley researchers "make some pretty strong causal claims which I would think should be studied further, but with some skepticism." Gelman observes, "Something unusual seems to have happened in Broward and Palm Beach counties in 2004. One possibility, as suggested by
is cheating." But he is quick to add, "I don't know what was going on in these counties, what else was on the ballot, etc., but an obvious alternative explanation is that, for various reasons, 3% more people in those counties preferred Bush in 2004, compared to 2000...Such a swing would be unusual (at least compared to recent history), but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen!...It would make sense to look further at Broward and Palm Beach counties, where swings happened which look unexpected compared to the other counties and compared to 2000, 1996, and 1992. But lots of unexpected things happen in elections, so we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that e-voting is related to these particular surprises." (Pollster John Zogby says that he does not believe that the "election was stolen," but he concedes it was an odd result: "51 percent of the voters gave Bush a negative approval rating; 51 percent voted for him.")
--snip
Then reference to Bev, which "seems" almost neutral (but again, quotes a Florida newspaper to subtly deride Bev for pulling tapes out of the trash):
snip--
The Berkeley study is no slam-dunk. And the-election-was-rigged activists are raising other issues regarding the Florida vote count. When Bev Harris, a prominent critic of electronic voting who runs www.blackboxvoting.org, showed up at the elections office of Volusia County--where Kerry won by 3,723 votes--in mid-November seeking poll tapes for the optical scan voting machines used during the election, she found a set of the poll tapes discarded in a garbage bag. Was this part of a cover-up? Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that these election records were backup copies destined for a shredder. Harris and others fear there is more to the tale. And today Black Box Voting sued Teresa LaPore, the elections supervisor for Palm Beach County, to force her to turn over elections records. (The group is threatening to initiate similar lawsuits against 13 other counties in Florida and up to 80 counties in Ohio.)
--snip
Clearly Corn has a big bias, for whatever reason. Otherwise, he just hasn't done his research. Where is mention of Freeman? What about the Dean of Yale Law School? Sometimes I think people at The Nation are so entrenched in bemoaning the futility of both parties that they can't see the truth when it hits them with a two-by-four.
We can't just flood them with more e-mails. This needs some insightful, well thought out responses. The email The Nation sent to their EmailNation subscribers yesterday subtly discourages any desperate replies, especially by email:
snip--
The emails keep pouring in with charges of election irregularities, and a number of Americans believe George W. Bush won the election because the voting was somehow rigged. But, as David Corn writes in Capital Games, though the voting system is shaky enough to warrant serious concern, a strong case that the election was stolen has yet to be made.
The General Accountability Office was right to agree to a request from Representative John Conyers and four other Democratic House members that it investigate election irregularities in the 2004 election. But the evidence to date is that the election results were not rigged but were produced by a flawed system.
--snip
But of course we are desperate. Our democracy is being stolen out from under us, and biased reporting like this from one of our most trusted sources only makes us all the more so. I will try and gather my wits enough to put something together, but I wish one of the more knowledgeable and intelligent among us might do so. Otherwise, I will at least need some help.
Edited to remove inadvertent embedded code? (damned Mercury retrograde!)
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