I've done a lot of studying and pondering of election statistics and polls. And something is critically wrong with the election stats, and with the polls just before and after the election. At the time that voters supposedly gave Bush a 2.5% margin of victory in the election, nearly 60% disapproved of the war in Iraq, over 60% opposed torture "under any circumstances," and there were similar stats on other issues.
Other election activists who have studied the matter closely seem to have reached a general consensus that Kerry won the election by about a 5% margin (some have put it higher). Given the completely non-transparent nature of the election--so much so that it is a stretch to even call it an election--you have to rely on other stats to estimate what Diebold/ES&S's "thumb on the scales" for Bush was (via the "trade secret," proprietary vote 'tabulation' programming code in the central tabulators--code that likely had to be pre-programmed to certain percentages, to give an automatic advantage to Bush, Bushites and other warmongers and corporate shills). The war profiteering corporate news monopoly exit polls--the real ones--say Kerry won by a 3% margin. But that stat has an inherent anti-Kerry flaw*, and it does not include significant vote suppression against Democratic voters before and during the voting--votes that would not be reflected in the exit polls (because the exit polls are of voters who made it to the polling place, as they emerge from voting). Greg Palast, for instance, estimates that one million black voters were purged from the voting rolls prior to the election (nationwide). We know of 50,000 Democratic area absentee ballots that were "lost" in Florida, just before the election. We know of an RNC operative in the western states who was shredding Democratic voter registrations. Then there is Ohio, where multiple forms of vote suppression were used, including intimidation. In addition, individual voting machines (touchscreens) were changing votes from Kerry to Bush. Tip of the iceberg, I'd say. These are just the things we know of, that got reported.
So, in addition to Diebold/ES&S's "thumb on the scales," there was likely massive illegal activity by Republican election officials and others, to prevent Democrats who wanted to vote from voting.
Other stats include, for instance, a 60/40 blowout success for the Democrats in new voter registrations in 2004, and Kerry's overwhelming success among new voters, independent voters and former Nader voters.
Combining all this with all the opinion and issue polls over the last several years--but excluding the polls very close to the election (which I think were fiddled)--I am beginning to feel, both on the evidence, and intuitively, that Bush lost the 2004 election by a lot more than 5%. I think the election was much closer to the 60/40 new voter registration stat. (3% is a 53/47 split. 5% is 55/45. I think Bush lost 60/40--the true picture of the rightwing minority in this country, much as it has always been.
And everything else is election fraud, poll fiddling and smoke-and-mirror illusions by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies.
Another reason I am tending this way--toward a belief in truly incredible levels of fraud by the Bush junta and its corporate beneficiaries including the corporate news monopolies--is what the corporate news monopolies did on election night, that is, FALSIFYING their exit polls (Kerry won), on everybody's TV screens late on election day, to 'FIT' the results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret vote tabulation software (Bush won). You may remember this. Kerry was winning all day long. The reporting system was shut down for about an hour late in the day. Then suddenly Bush was winning. What they did during that supposed computer "crash" was DOCTORING the exit polls--in impossible, absurd ways--to make it APPEAR that Bush also won the exit polls.
This is not done in any other country in the world. Elsewhere, exit polls are the standard tool for verifying elections and checking for fraud. Not here. Here, they were DOCTORED to give the illusion that there was no evidence contradicting a Bush win. They thus denied the American people major evidence of election fraud, and helped to squelch protests and calls for investigation--and, following this, the story of the 2004 election, including the massive, blatant, visible and illegal vote suppression in Ohio, and the "trade secret," proprietary vote tabulation by highly partisan Bushite corporations, and subsequent statistical analysis by independent experts of the exit poll/official result discrepancy (who got access to the real exit poll numbers by alert bloggers and experts who took screen shots before the numbers were falsified), all of this got utterly black-holed in the "news" and not reported, and in fact, got black-holed with great hostility, with a vengeance. No one dare mention it. It was the story that wasn't.
This falsification of the exit polls is the worst journalistic crime I have ever witnessed. Documented. True. Provable. I am not guessing here. They put FALSE NUMBERS on everybody's TV screens. (See www.TruthIsAll.net.)
Now, people who would do that, would do anything, is what I'm thinking. What do they care? They left journalism behind a lot time ago. They could just as well have fiddled the opinion polls leading up to the election, and leading away from it.
It's possible that their deception is subtler than this--generally--and that their combined efforts of national imagery control, and 'news' and 'opinion' control, brainwashing and propaganda PRODUCED a closer split between pro-Bush and anti-Bush segments of the voting population at voting time. By that time, voters have resigned themselves to only two narrow choices: i.e., a blood-drenched warmonger, murderer of tens of thousands of innocent people, and torturer of many more, on the one hand, and someone who offers to do a more efficient war on the other. There is no antiwar choice (with 60% of the country against the war). And voters then go into a kind of despair, with some even going insane--at least on the matter of having to choose who to vote for. They become so enervated, that they vote on the basis of the latest phony "terrorist alert" in the 'news,' or on the color of Bush's tie that morning, or on what they ate for breakfast.
I'm just saying this is a possibility. I think the other possibility is much more likely--that the good people of the U.S. voted quite sensibly, in overwhelming numbers (60%), to throw these fuckers out of office, and to put their only other choice, an intelligent, competent, moderate/centrist, in the White House--and the war profiteering corporate news monopolies first of all created the ILLUSION of contest, through imagery and 'news' editing and phony fiddled opinion polls, and then let Bush's numbers go into free fall after the election (starting on his INAUGURATION day--49%!), maybe in order to demoralize and further disempower people like us, to make us feel small, helpless and alone: Bush, with a 35% approval rating, now about to start ANOTHER war, and there isn't a goddamned thing we can do to stop it. Fuck you, is what they're saying.
I don't know--I'm thinking we are not bold enough in our analysis of this junta. We don't know the half of what they've done. We don't know the half of what the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, and the War Democrats, and the military contractors, and rightwing 'think tanks' have done in collusion with these monsters. So we have to guess--based on their visible behavior (bad enough) and what we know about them.
I have long perceived that the rightwing is still that same old crowd of rightwing fascist religionists and corporate predators--the unholy alliance--that has always been with us--from the days of the Inquisition through the McCarthy era to today: those who oppress human freedom in collusion with those who profit from oppression. What is new is that they've now been given a BIG TRUMPET, way out of proportion to their numbers, to promulgate their views--by the corporate news monopolies. In non-election years, the corporates need accurate opinion polls, in order to figure out how to manipulate and control us, and also possibly to demoralize us (as per above). They see us as consumers, not as citizens and voters. But they see our power--or potential power--as voters as a threat. If ever we were to assert our sovereignty as a people--the mechanism of which is voting--these SOB's could lose big time.
But they haven't convinced anybody of anything--on the political front--as their in-between (non-election) opinion polls and issue polls continually, and overwhelmingly, indicate. Public opinion has remained immune from the kinds of advertising techniques that are used to brainwash people into purchasing things. People aren't buying it, on political and government issues. And people seem to be fairly well informed on some issues--contrary to the opinion of some here at DU (who call them 'sheeple'). So, what is really going on? The thrust of it is demoralization, I think--to make each of us feel alone, isolated, and powerless in a country that we perceive as having gone nuts, in 2004, and is only just coming to its senses now. I think we need to challenge this script.
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*(The anti-Kerry flaw in the exit polls is the "reluctant Republican voter for Kerry." There was/is a lot of social pressure in Bushite zones that would cause defecting Kerry voters to shut their mouths, and not tell anyone how they voted--least of all a pollster in a public place, right around the corner from their church, or home, or workplace. Wives defecting from husbands, in male-dominance Republican households. Members of church congregations taking Jesus' message of peace and love seriously, and defecting from Bushite preachers. Workers defecting from Bushite bosses. People afraid of losing their jobs or getting their tires slashed. Etc. They wouldn't want their vote for Kerry to get back to people who could punish them socially or economically. I think this skewed the exit polls (which Kerry won) against Kerry, causing them not to pick up on significant Republican defections from Bush. Ironically, the fraudster pollster, Edison-Mitofsky, who had a monopoly on the exit polls--the only pollster used by the entire war profiteering corporate news monopoly establishment, in conspiracy with each other--fabricated the opposite hypothesis, to explain why Kerry won the exit polls and not the election (after Kerry's win of the exit polls was discovered, and they were forced to admit that it was true). E/M said Republican Bush voters were reluctant to disclose their Bush vote to pollsters. You ever met any shy Bushites? I haven't. But it was just bullshit. They had ZERO evidence for this. They just made it up out of whole cloth, to get themselves out of hot water with expert statisticians who were challenging them. MY hypothesis is much more plausible--that Republican voters for Kerry were socially fearful, and that the exit polls failed to catch them. E/M has refused to release its raw data for objective, independent analysis.)
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Some resources:
www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
www.verfiedvoting.org (great activist site)
www.votetrustusa.org (news of this great movement from around the country)
www.UScountvotes.org (statistical monitoring of '06 and '08 elections)
www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtml (fab compendium of all election info)
www.freepress.org (devoted to election reform)
www.bradblog.com (also great, and devoted to election reform)
www.TruthIsAll.net (analysis of the 2004 election)
Sign the petition (Russ Holt, HR 550, great bill-has 169 sponsors).
http://www.rushholt.com/petition.htmlwww.debrabowen.com (Calif Senator running for Sec of State to reform election system)
www.votepa.us (well-organized local group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania, where important legal issues are at stake, including state's rights over election systems)
Also of interest:
Bob Koehler (-- four recent election reform initiatives in Ohio, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, flipped over, on election day, into 60/40 LOSSES!--the biggest flipover we've seen yet; the election theft machines and their masters are now dictating election policy!)
www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk
Bob Koehler's latest: "Take this box and stuff it" (3/16/06)
http://commonwonders.com/archives/col337.htmAmaryllis (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia lavish lobbying of election officials - Beverly Hilton, Aug. '05)
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340
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Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!
:think: :patriot: :woohoo: :patriot: :think:
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