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Edited on Thu Sep-01-05 07:58 AM by karynnj
I could say that I "know" Kerry really won because never before has the exit polling been so systematically wrong - in the same direction all over the country. The exit polls were designed using the same basic method that has been used for years and they have been consistently pretty accurate. Remember they weren't predicting a narrow win, but a pretty substantial one.
I had expected the statisticians to disclose a flaw in the design or in the weights used to create the projections. Instead, what they really said was the projection did not equal the official number, although the methodology had no obvious problems. They then ASSUMED the official number was right and gave the "shy Bush voter" as a hypothesis. Note in Ukraine, no one spoke of the "shy (official winner -disliked by the US and Europe) voter". It also should be noted that there has never been this type of shy voter in previous US elections. This year with the RW echo chamber praising Bush 24/7 and religious leaders overtly telling their people that God wanted them to vote for Bush, "shy Kerry voters" would be more likely.
I would believe "shy voters", if there was something that would explain it. For example, if one candidate was black (or possibly a woman), there might be people with political leanings towards that candidate who would vote for the opponent, but be ashamed of the reason why. (If the media had shown the candidates fairly instead of hiding Bush's warts and covering Kerry less than any Presidential candidate I can remember, people voting for Bush because of tax cuts should have been ashamed of themselves.) The fact that these "shy" voters were mostly in areas with high Bush vote, makes this more suspicious.
When you put together:
- the attempts to suppress legitimate voter registrations either by arbitrary rules (Ohio - where Blackwell challenged forms send in by people who filled out the forms printed as a community service by a Cleveland newspaper) or where private companies (who owners were big Bush supporters) threw out Democratic registrations.
-Voter suppression by lack of enough machines
- The demonstration of how easy it is to manipulate the votes from machines.
- The fact that the companies that make the machines are owned by conservative ideologues and the codes operating the machines were not checked by bi-partisan experts.
- The exit polls being consistently off,
Because you have a pattern of the Republicans being willing to cheat and because there were ways open to the them to cheat, the alternative hypothesis that what the exit polls showed was close to what the actual cast votes were seem at least as possible as the "shy Bush voters" hypothesis. The enormity of this charge, makes even most Democrats back away from it - in essence we are saying that we are a banana republic where honest bi-partisan elections didn't happen.
The problem is that you can prove motive, suggest methods,and hypothesize the wide spread crime - but you can't prove it - maybe there was a flaw in the sample design that was not honestly disclosed (unlikely because the company would not have stood behind the statisticians/ pollsters who made the error) or maybe the Rush audience consists of "shy" Bush voters. There is still no smoking gun.
Without a smoking gun, Kerry could not have made a case that most Americans wouldn't want to believe, in hostile courts, without subpoena power, with the media talking about the convincing Bush victory. If a smoking gun was found before January 6, the fact that Kerry conceded very graciously would work in his favor - he was following the rules and, however personally painful was calling for healing of the rift. He would need to convince the majority of Americans, not only that he won, but that it was important enough to America's integrity to accept that something very fundamental to our democracy went wrong. (The sad thing is that there would be a substantial group who would likely claim the end justified the means.)
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