Paper chase
Paranoia? Perhaps. But there's quite a bit of evidence mounting that maybe that election last week didn't come off quite so clean as folks are being made to believe.
To wit, exit polls showed Kerry winning several key states. ABC's exit polling had Kerry winning Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which went to Bush after computerized vote totals came in.
Now, it would be logical to suggest that ABC's methodology for exit polling is simply flawed, which may well be the case. But ABC wasn't the only organization to come up with numbers projecting a Kerry victory. The Kerry campaign's own polling had Kerry believing he was president for about six hours on Election Day.
Even the Bush team came up with numbers that showed a Kerry win. Top operative Karl Rove said he felt sick when he learned of the exit poll results as Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base following a last-minute swing through swing states. The AP reported that Karen Hughes sat Dubya himself down to tell him he had lost the election.
By all exit poll indications, this wasn't even close. It was a clear and decisive rout ... for Kerry. If the exit poll data was accurate and Kerry carried the states he was projected initially to win but lost, it would've meant a swing of 73 electoral votes. That means the final tally wouldn't have been 286-252, but 325-213. A landslide.
But are we placing too much trust in the exit polls? Probably not.
In The Hill, Dick Morris wrote last week that exit polls are virtually never wrong. They're widely regarded as being more accurate than standard pre-election polls because they can separate actual voters from "likely" voters, and they rely on observation rather than guesswork to gauge actual voter turnout. Exit polls, Morris reports, are so accurate that they're routinely used as a measure for determining the relative honesty of elections in countries that require independent election monitors.
To screw up one exit poll is unfathomable. To botch six or more is improbable. Something is rotten in Denmark. And while Morris, being a Republican shill, immediately jumps to the irrational conclusion that it was a concerted effort by the major media to depress turnout for Bush, such a liberal bias interpretation seems less than likely.
Given how easy it is for a hacker to tamper with the computerized vote totals without leaving a trace, it's not so far-fetched to suspect significant fraud that accounts for the discrepancies between exit polling data and the actual (or "actual") totals. Of course, it's much harder to detect such corruption when the election lacks independent monitors, and particularly when the touch screen voting machines don't produce any sort of paper record to match up against the computer's count.
The irony of this all is that, had the Carter Center, or the OSCE, sent teams of independent observers to monitor our election, they probably would've concluded that there were sufficient irregularities and fundamental, systemic flaws with the process as to cast unmitigated doubt on the integrity of the results. Certainly, had the electronic voting machines used in the Venezuelan recall election a few months ago not dispensed paper records, the Carter Center would've rejected the results that saw Hugo Chávez defeat the recall with 58 percent of the vote.
Of course, we shouldn't let the doubts cast on the honesty of this election detract from important, overriding tasks, such as persuading the Democratic Party to at least resume giving the impression of representing liberal, working-class interests, and seeking to arrest what superficially seems to be steamrolling right-wing tendencies. But it would certainly go a long way to restoring people's faith to think that even in light of the generally low quality of Kerry's candidacy, a majority of the country views Bush as an illegitimate, major-league asshole. Big time.
To wit, exit polls showed Kerry winning several key states. ABC's exit polling had Kerry winning Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which went to Bush after computerized vote totals came in.
Now, it would be logical to suggest that ABC's methodology for exit polling is simply flawed, which may well be the case. But ABC wasn't the only organization to come up with numbers projecting a Kerry victory. The Kerry campaign's own polling had Kerry believing he was president for about six hours on Election Day.
Even the Bush team came up with numbers that showed a Kerry win. Top operative Karl Rove said he felt sick when he learned of the exit poll results as Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base following a last-minute swing through swing states. The AP reported that Karen Hughes sat Dubya himself down to tell him he had lost the election.
By all exit poll indications, this wasn't even close. It was a clear and decisive rout ... for Kerry. If the exit poll data was accurate and Kerry carried the states he was projected initially to win but lost, it would've meant a swing of 73 electoral votes. That means the final tally wouldn't have been 286-252, but 325-213. A landslide.
But are we placing too much trust in the exit polls? Probably not.
In The Hill, Dick Morris wrote last week that exit polls are virtually never wrong. They're widely regarded as being more accurate than standard pre-election polls because they can separate actual voters from "likely" voters, and they rely on observation rather than guesswork to gauge actual voter turnout. Exit polls, Morris reports, are so accurate that they're routinely used as a measure for determining the relative honesty of elections in countries that require independent election monitors.
To screw up one exit poll is unfathomable. To botch six or more is improbable. Something is rotten in Denmark. And while Morris, being a Republican shill, immediately jumps to the irrational conclusion that it was a concerted effort by the major media to depress turnout for Bush, such a liberal bias interpretation seems less than likely.
Given how easy it is for a hacker to tamper with the computerized vote totals without leaving a trace, it's not so far-fetched to suspect significant fraud that accounts for the discrepancies between exit polling data and the actual (or "actual") totals. Of course, it's much harder to detect such corruption when the election lacks independent monitors, and particularly when the touch screen voting machines don't produce any sort of paper record to match up against the computer's count.
The irony of this all is that, had the Carter Center, or the OSCE, sent teams of independent observers to monitor our election, they probably would've concluded that there were sufficient irregularities and fundamental, systemic flaws with the process as to cast unmitigated doubt on the integrity of the results. Certainly, had the electronic voting machines used in the Venezuelan recall election a few months ago not dispensed paper records, the Carter Center would've rejected the results that saw Hugo Chávez defeat the recall with 58 percent of the vote.
Of course, we shouldn't let the doubts cast on the honesty of this election detract from important, overriding tasks, such as persuading the Democratic Party to at least resume giving the impression of representing liberal, working-class interests, and seeking to arrest what superficially seems to be steamrolling right-wing tendencies. But it would certainly go a long way to restoring people's faith to think that even in light of the generally low quality of Kerry's candidacy, a majority of the country views Bush as an illegitimate, major-league asshole. Big time.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 23:21
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