The Stolen Election of 2004 - by Michael Parenti

[kpete]

Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Stolen Election of 2004
by Michael Parenti

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported, along with observations of my own.

Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004.

Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors.

Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up.

much more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0302-21.htm

[kimmerspixelated]

1. Exactly.

Sigh....I sure wish this could become a real issue with the MSM! In fact I wish almost anything relevant would become an issue with the media. At least now that ANNA Nicole is buried, they'll give it a rest for awhile.

[OnTheOtherHand]

2. wow, there are some real clinkers in here

I will skip the exit poll malarkey, for a change of pace, and cut to this:

This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself.

Like hell he did. What on earth was Parenti thinking? Where does this stuff come from?

(For anyone who thinks that it really shouldn't matter whether claims like this are dead wrong or not, OK, that's your choice.)

[Phredicles]

3. Why are exit polls only "malarkey" in the US?

In other countries election results at variance with exit polls are called into serious question, even thrown out altogether. If a Ukranian exit poll is good enough to take seriously, why the hell isn't an American one?

[OnTheOtherHand]

7. I didn't say exit polls are malarkey

-- but what Parenti says about them is seriously problematic.

"Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections." I guess I can't say that is wrong, just meaningless. How accurate is "exceptionally"?

"Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world." That's pretty meaningless, too. What are the "international organizations" that have used exit polls to "validate" election results, in which "countries around the world"?

There were two exit polls in Ukraine for the first presidential runoff. Fun fact: they differed from each other by more than the U.S. exit poll differed from the official count. But there was much other evidence of fraud, which international organizations such as the OSCE relied upon in their reports.

"Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate because they were taken only in the morning...." Umm, whatever. Maybe some Republicans were stupid enough to argue that, but it has nothing to do with the exit poll debate. We could check with some folks who actually study the topic:

Although these disparities have alarmed many observers, for several methodological reasons there is no a priori reason to believe that these differences reflect problems with the actual vote tallies. Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the United States are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates.

But hey, why ask the experts?

"...sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll." Actually, the error in New Hampshire was 13.6 points, and that certainly is large. But several non-swing states had larger errors, and the exit poll error in New Hampshire was almost as large in 1992 and 1996. Also, Parenti doesn't mention that a hand recount of several New Hampshire jurisdictions where the results were considered suspect revealed no significant anomalies.

"(Touchscreen) machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls." That's pretty incoherent on its face: what is "often... consistent" if not inconsistent? Maryland used touchscreens, and Kerry won it by 13 points.

I'm tired of the slipshod rehashing of other people's claims presented as "research." Others' mileage may vary.

[Morgana LaFey]

11. Where's YOUR proof

or documentation for your counterclaim? Let's see it.

[OnTheOtherHand]

12. why don't you look at the NM data yourself?

Will you care when you find out that I am right? Just curious.

[OnTheOtherHand]

13. here is a link to Stewart and Theisen's spreadsheet

http://www.votersunite.org/info/NMStateData4.2.xls

Stewart and Theisen worked very hard for months uncovering, documenting, and exploring the egregious undervotes on pushbutton DREs in New Mexico, as well as the phantom votes and other anomalies. Other good people worked hard too. Parenti, maybe not so hard.

For whatever reason, Parenti feels comfortable saying: "In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns." Which is a bit like claiming that every touchscreen machine displayed "Bwahahaha" instead of "Cast your vote." It makes about as much sense. If someone had been foolish or careless enough to rig touchscreens to deliver Bush victories in heavily Democratic precincts, don't people suppose they/we would have heard a bit more about this phenomenon in the last two-plus years? If someone claimed that Bush stole 300,000 Ohio votes on touchscreens, would anyone stop to check how many votes were cast on touchscreens in Ohio? What does it take to set off people's BS detectors? (Actually, I assume that many DUers just stopped reading these threads long ago.)

So, a quick spreadsheet tutorial in case anyone is actually reading. Click on the "NM 04 By Precinct" tab, and scroll over so you can see columns T, U, and V. (The spreadsheet is set up so that the precinct names are always visible.) The touchscreen precincts are displayed in blue (see the "Legend" tab for all the details) -- many counties used one technology for early voting (EV) and another for election day (ED). Who knows what Parenti thought he was claiming, but let's use a county that used touchscreens for both early and election-day voting. Valencia, at the very bottom of the data (row 1396 and on), is a good choice. Valencia precinct #013 (row 1408) is an interesting case: we can see in columns C through F that it had many more registered Democrats than Republicans. Also, we can see in columns AD and AE that it was about 78% Native American. And Bush won this precinct? shocking, if true. But not true. Not even close, in fact. Kerry beat Bush here 169 to 59 (columns K and I).

In this particular precinct, even the undervotes aren't very interesting -- for instance, there were only 3 (1.52%) on election day, see columns BI and BJ. That isn't coincidental: most NM touchscreen precincts did not have high undervote rates. The high undervote rates were typically in pushbutton DRE precincts, displayed in red. If you scroll up (with columns BI and BJ still visible), you can see the large undervote rates highlighted in light blue. You will see some blue-on-blue (a number of precincts in Torrance County), but a whole lot more red-on-blue (i.e., high undervotes on pushbuttons). If you scroll carefully and perhaps hide some columns, you can watch the early-voting undervotes at the same time (columns AV and AW).

Stewart and Theisen must have spent hours formatting this spreadsheet so that people could see for themselves what happened in New Mexico. What did Parenti do? I have no idea where he came up with his "fact."

[Morgana LaFey]

14. Like this?

REPORT: Undervote Rate Plummets 85% in New Mexico's Native American Precincts after Statewide Switch from Touch-Screen Voting to Paper Ballots
Comparison of Voting Data from 2004 to 2006 Shows Hispanic Undervote Plunged 69% as the 'Civil Rights' Case for DREs Continues to Fall Apart
ALSO: New Concerns Emerge About Racial Profiling vis a vis Touch-Screen Voting Systems...

"We were looking for any impact the change to paper ballots may have had on New Mexico’s historically high undervote rate. When we found the dramatic drop in Native American precincts, we were shocked," says New Mexico's Theron Horton. The Election Defense Alliance (EDA) activist added, "something was going on with the DREs in those precincts in 2004."

Something indeed.

Details now out from New Mexico reveal that undervote rates dropped precipitously in both Native American and Hispanic areas after the state moved from DRE (Direct Recording Electronic touch-screen) voting systems in 2004 to paper-based optical-scan systems in 2006. In Native American areas, undervote rates plummeted some 85%. In Hispanic communities, the rate dropped by 6% according to the precinct data reviewed by EDA, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.org.

Ellen Theisen, then-Executive Director of VotersUnite.org, reviewed the original high undervote rates in the state after the 2004 elections, but hadn't broken it down to compare DRE/touch-screen vs. Op-Scan precincts. "When I heard of Theron’s work," Theisen says in today's press release, "I performed the comparison, and found that it’s the paper ballots that made the difference in the minority precincts.”

New Mexico banned the use of DREs across the state after their disastrous experience with Sequoia touch-screen voting machines during the 2004 Presidential Election. They now require a paper ballot for every vote cast statewide.

As he signed the bill which banned DREs into law in early 2006, New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson wrote a letter to Election Officials in all 50 states, warning that while "some believe that computer touch screen machines are the future of electoral systems...the technology simply fails to pass the test of reliability."

more here (read down): http://www.bradblog.com/?m=200702

[OnTheOtherHand]

15. it's a shame that you didn't read my posts first

DREs are not all touchscreens. In fact, most of the DREs used in New Mexico in 2004 were pushbutton DREs, not touchscreens. And it is the pushbutton DREs, not the touchscreens, that had the large undervote rates in 2004. I made these points in post #13 using the same data that Theisen is referring to when you quote her in #14.

You can also see this on page 3 of Theisen and Stewart's report here.

I assume Brad knows that DREs are not all touchscreens, but maybe his mind wandered when he was writing one or two of these posts.

[L. Coyote]

16. Indeed, and anecdotal accounts sidestep the real problems.

"... Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush. ..."

Small incidents explained away after the election were not the real problems.

Most readers of this forum have many times greater depth of understanding 2004 than this piece communicates.

"In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush’s favor."

How can one write something like this without realizing it is patently false? Of course, readers here know "some precincts" reported more votes than voters, phantom votes. Now, how can I believe this author on other topics unless I know the facts myself?

[Febble]

17. Well said

Most readers of this forum have many times greater depth of understanding 2004 than this piece communicates.

It's one of the worst pieces I've ever read. I started to list the facts that are simply wrong, then gave up.

It might have been excusable if written in November or December 2004, but not in 2007.

[kster]

4. K&R.nt

[Melissa G]

5. off to Greatest with you! n/t

[robinlynne]

6. I wish this were our (the left and/or the dems) main focus. If we could annul that

election, which should be legally possible, instead of trying for impeachment, his appointments, judicial and otherwise, would likewise be annulled.

[bleever]

8. One group that was almost unanimous for Bush: errors.

Vote flipping. Tabulation. Machine allocation.

A very influential bloc, that massively favored Bush.

K&R.

[kpete]

9. Hello bleever

Always happy to have you stop by...and right on with your comments!

[bleever]

10. Hi kp.

Have a great weekend! :hi:

[philb]

18. Huge non-partisan monitoring effort documented widespread manipulation and stolen election in 2004

widespread voter suppression, touch screen switching, undervotes, illegal dirty tricks
Kerry won Ohio

www.flcv.com/ohiosum.html

Kerry won Florida and New Mexico
www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
www.flcv.com/fla04EAS.html

similar manipulation in other states
www.flcv.com/summary.html


Student vote suppression
www.flcv.com/studentv.html

[OnTheOtherHand]

19. well, maybe Kerry won Ohio

There's a big disconnect between the people who are convinced of this and the people who aren't -- and the article cited in the OP certainly doesn't do a thing to narrow the gap.

Widespread vote suppression, for sure.