Was the 2004 election stolen?

[Mokele]

Ok, I'll be the first to acknolwedge that the Rolling Stone isn't exactly a bastion of respectable journalism. However, this article, while very long, makes some quite convincing points about serious voting and election irregularities in the 2004 US elections.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/1

 

So, thoughts? Flaws, merits, etc? I'm particularly curious about the reliability of election polls, something dealt with at great length in the article, not to mention that some of the other alleged misdeeds are no longer alleged, but matters of public record.

 

A second, and more important point: What can be done in the future to prevent this or the potential for this? I had two ideas: allow voting for an entire week (so individuals can get stuff sorted out) and allow a month to process the results (to deal with irregularities). It's a national election, not a damn Hot Pocket, you can wait more than 2 minutes for the results.

 

Mokele

[Nevermore]

Hell yes it was stolen. A major flaw in the diebold voting machines allows machine users to edit the vote count. There is no protection of the canditate vote count files. I once saw an expose on this, I don't know where it is now though. And did you know that election volunteers in Florida sometimes ripped up democratic registrations?

[Pangloss]

Actually I don't know that Rolling Stone's journalism isn't respectable, so much as the fact that it's not journalism, at least in the sense of reporting the news. (I'm a fan of the Stone, at least in so far as it has reported on the music industry over the years. I'm reading a Lester Bangs book as we speak.)

 

The story in this case isn't reporting anyway -- it's an op/ed opinion piece. But certainly there's no question that Rolling Stone's editorial slant is strongly to the left. Not that that matters -- Kennedy could have had this piece published in the Wall Street Journal if he'd wanted to.

 

There's no real evidence that the election was stolen. Just rumors and innuendo and plenty of straw men in the form of individual statements, which of course are irrelevent on the scale of ~120 million voters. It's sad statement about politics in America that a Kennedy speaks so definitively on the subject, in the face of total lack of evidence, merely because the winners were Republicans.

 

There's plenty of evidence of problems, i.e. votes not being counted and so forth. But if memory serves, there were not only fewer such problems than in 2000, there were fewer such problems than we normally see. And as I said, NO evidence of actual tampering. None. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. Nothin'.

 

Some of the allegations and implications in the piece are just... pathetic.

 

1) That there was a "media blackout" (for which no evidence is even presented, just the proving-a-negative claim that few stories on this subject have appeared).

 

2) That only Republicans believe the election wasn't rigged, and that this somehow stands as evidence that it was.

 

3) He goes on at great length about all the things Republicans did, but completely fails to mention all the efforts by Democrats to perform all the same kinds of actions that he claims were used to "deny people the vote". For example, he talks about the thousands of lawyers that the Republican party hired, but doesn't mention that the Democratic party did exactly the same thing!

 

4) Ah forget it. I could go on like this for hours. What's the point? I'm surprised that he didn't stoop to the favorite phrase of conspiracy theorists everywhere: "You'll never convince me that...."

 

Because that's what this is -- it's a 9/11 conspiracy territory, enobled only by the fact that... well... it's not about 9/11. Since it is about Republicans, though, somehow that's okay.

 

I think we all know this tune. Thankfully, very few people are singing along.

[Phi for All]

I agree with Pangloss that the slant makes it difficult to take the piece seriously. There are always guerilla techniques that both sides take advantage of and some of those dance on the gray borders of the law. That doesn't make it right but much of what is disclosed in that vein must be discounted as opinion.

 

Frankly, the only piece of evidence for tampering that I trust are the statistics from the exit polls. I remember hearing those polls on election night and it was disturbing that such a trustworthy piece of information could be so wrong. Statistics are easily skewed, but there is no rational reason why exit polls could fail by such a large percentage and I remember the shock on reporters faces when results went against those polls.

 

People don't lie to the pollers *after* their vote is counted, at least not by that much. I can't believe Edison/Mitofsky could screw themselves so badly by doing work that would so easily show them to be incompetent. These guys practically wrote the book.

[Pangloss]

By the way (not that this is a minor aside), I hope I didn't give the impression that the issues regarding things like the absentee ballots and electronic voting boxes are anything less than legitimate. It's only the "we know for a fact the Republicans stole this election" angle that angers me. In reviewing Mokele's post I realized that that's really what Mok's focusing on (the legitimate concerns), and I hope I didn't distract from that with my criticism of Kennedy's agenda.

 

This may in the end be one of those rare cases where the bipolar nature of politics actually causes some beneficial change to come about. The unitary nature of the problem and the fact that both sides want the same goal seems to suggest a potential push in that direction.

 

Regarding the exit polls, I'd have to see how their accuracy compared with previous elections, and how their methods changed. Unfortunately that kind of logical skepticism was glaringly absent from Kennedy's piece.

[ecoli]

I've seen no real prof. I's much as we hate to admit it, Bush won the popular vote, fair and square.

 

The 2000 election, I think, was much shadier, especially in the deal with florida.

[Pangloss]

I know I've already said my piece on this but I just can't help myself. (grin) I just want to point out the Kennedy's entire argument is based around statistics, which he manipulates, interprets and/or otherwise uses as needed.

 

What's not so obvious are the statistics he ignores. For example, all but three states in the 2004 presidential election went exactly the same way that they went in 2000. Or the fact that 153 counties that voted for Clinton in 1996 or Gore in 2000 voted for Bush in 2004 (that's a lot of "tampering"!). Or the fact that 98% of the incumbents in 2004 were re-elected (which speaks to larger trends that Kennedy prefers to ignore, not to mention larger dangers like gerrymandering).

 

None of those statistics prove anything, but then none of Kennedy's statistics do either. Which is, of course, my point. Numbers can be misleading. But ideologues with numbers are always misleading.

 

Those numbers come from George Will's Newsweek column in late February, which may be found here.

[Sisyphus]

Ok, so what are the facts? We don't have hard numbers about how widespread anything was, or which party played more dirty tricks. However, there are three things to keep in mind. First, very alarming anecdotal evidence is apparently very easy to find. Second, it is demonstrably very easy for even one person to tamper with the vote on a significant scale. Third, the entire election can very well hinge on one swing state, for which the margin of victory can be WELL within the margin of error, considering the first two points. You don't have to change the entire popular vote (which would be a lot of "tampering," yes) to change the outcome.

 

So what does this mean? Does it mean the election was "stolen?" No. It COULD be, but we can't possibly tell, and that is precisely the point. The vote can be manipulated and there's no way of even proving anything. Obviously there are major flaws in the system that have real, major consequences for our democracy, and the need for reforms is urgent and should not be belittled.

 

So what do we do about it? I have no idea. More uniformity in methods and centralization of authority and less responsiblity for local polling places, I suppose. Also, for what it's worth, I like Mokele's idea for the whole week to vote and the month to confirm results. Aside from the obvious benefit of being more accurate, it would also help alleviate the problem of the great disparity of polling places per capita in wealthier vs. poorer areas...

[Pangloss]

What can we do about it? Here are a couple suggestions:

 

1) Educate the voter. If people understand the process better, then not only are they less vulnerable to wild interpretations like these, but they're also less vulnerable to actual vote manipulation. They can better evaluate how and why changes need to be implemented.

 

2) Remove partisan politics from the equation. I'd like to see the president appoint a bipartisan committee including retired centrist politicians and key scientists and/or mathemeticians to revamp the voting process and assess electronic voting systems.

[ecoli]

What can we do about it? Here are a couple suggestions:

 

1) Educate the voter. If people understand the process better' date=' then not only are they less vulnerable to wild interpretations like these, but they're also less vulnerable to actual vote manipulation. They can better evaluate how and why changes need to be implemented. [/quote']

 

either that, or only allow the already educated to vote - it's much cheaper.

[Phi for All]

Regarding the exit polls, I'd have to see how their accuracy compared with previous elections, and how their methods changed. Unfortunately that kind of logical skepticism was glaringly absent from Kennedy's piece.

I'm going to find some results from past elections' exit polls, particularly from Edison/Mitofsky. The Kennedy piece did mention that E/M had only increased the segment of voters polled (I think it was by a factor of six) which should make the polls even more accurate.

 

I find it interesting that even the Bush administration relies on their veracity since it funded exit polls overseas in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine because they were one of the “ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.” A discrepancy of eight million votes certainly qualifies, imo.

 

I also find it interesting that the exit polls seemed to be completely accurate in non-battleground states. The strongest objection to polling data, that Kerry voters were more likely to respond to the exit polls, was completely refuted. In fact, Bush voters showed a slightly higher tendency to respond to pollers.

 

I'm still looking into it (i hate statistics) but it was my understanding that the exit polls were considered a true barometer because their poll questions were unassailably clear: "Who did you just vote for for President?" Seems like exit polls would be fairly free from your normal statistical skews.

[Mokele]

Yeah, it was the statistics that caught my eye the most, in large part because I'm actually just finishing up my grad-level biostatistics course. A few months ago, a well-known scientists in my field published a new differentiation locomotor mode ("lumbering": walking dominated by potential energy fluctuations) based on less statistical support than the statistical support that something's wrong with what happened (and this was a solid paper).

 

The rest, as Pangloss said, is often annecdotal and highly partisan. But the statistics are what caught my attention. I've been stuck at the computer indoors all day doing sample-size power analyses, so when I see this...

 

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000...."I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong."

 

...I suspect something's seriously off. I'll be publishing data with nowhere near that confidence level. Shit, I can technically publish with 100,000 times less confidence and have it called scientifically sound. All I need to do is show that there's a less than 1 in 20 chance that my results are due to random error.

 

Even if we ignore the misdeeds around the election, legitimate and alleged, something's still seriously wrong.

 

Mokele

[ecoli]

I wouldn't trust some who says "I'm not even political" followed by the words "I despise the Democrats." That doesn't sound like an apolitical statement to me.

 

@ mokele - are you saying that the exit polls are suspicious, or that the author of the article is?

[Mokele]

I wouldn't trust some who says "I'm not even political" followed by the words "I despise the Democrats." That doesn't sound like an apolitical statement to me.

 

True, but it highlights that he's drawing conclusions in the opposite direction from his political inclinations, reducing the chance of partisan hackery.

 

are you saying that the exit polls are suspicious, or that the author of the article is?

 

I'm saying it's suspicious that the actual results deviated to such an extreme degree from the exit poll results. In science, we say results are significant if there's only a 1 in 20 chance that they were the product of random variation. Here, we have a level over 100,000 times that, yet some don't want to consider it significant?

 

Mokele

[Pangloss]

I wouldn't trust some who says "I'm not even political" followed by the words "I despise the Democrats." That doesn't sound like an apolitical statement to me.

 

Well it may or it may not. That just goes to show how two-party focused we are. I'm reminded of a famous quote by one of the creators of South Park, in talking about the centrist position their show takes. He said "I hate conservatives, but I REALLY f'ing hate liberals!"

[ecoli]

True, but it highlights that he's drawing conclusions in the opposite direction from his political inclinations, reducing the chance of partisan hackery.

 

ok, I guess that makes a kind of sense... Although the statement seems self contradictory.

 

I'm saying it's suspicious that the actual results deviated to such an extreme degree from the exit poll results. In science, we say results are significant if there's only a 1 in 20 chance that they were the product of random variation. Here, we have a level over 100,000 times that, yet some don't want to consider it significant?

 

Mokele

 

ah ok... I just wasn't getting what point you were trying to make... I see it now.

[Nevermore]

He said "I hate conservatives, but I REALLY f'ing hate liberals!"

I find that unlikly, look at where their show is on the political spectrum now.

[Pangloss]

Sorry, not a mind reader.

[Nevermore]

What are you talking about? Mind reading comes into play nowhere here, and I thought the message in my post was quite clear.

[Pangloss]

What position in the political spectrum do you perceive South Park to be in?

[ecoli]

What position in the political spectrum do you perceive South Park to be in?

 

The opposite of the people their making fun of... so everything. Or many nothing.

[bascule]

What position in the political spectrum do you perceive South Park to be in?

 

Norman Lear liberalism. In the end, as much of a douche as Meathead is, you know he's right and Archie's wrong. And Cartman is really little more than Archie Bunker for Generation Y

 

I'd call the show liberal but I call myself liberal and liberals piss me off left and right. So....

[Pangloss]

ROFL! Two replies, two opinions. I'll add my third: That they're slightly to the right of center, trending along a conservative-libertarian bent. You need to watch more episodes, Bascule -- Meathead would never go along with most of Kyle's "wisdom" either.

 

And so much for Nevermore's suggestion that South Park not only has moved into a specific area of the "political spectrum", but that it's so obvious to any and all that it doesn't need to be specified. ;->

[bascule]

You need to watch more episodes, Bascule

 

Umm, I've been watching the series since its inception and have seen virtually every episode. I also live in Colorado and get all the inside Colorado jokes you non-Colorado folks don't

 

They're obviously libertarians... I just happen to think they're liberaltarians

[Pangloss]

Interesting. The slightly-right-of-center Pangloss thinks South Park is slightly right of center, and the "liberaltarian" Bascule thinks the show is "liberaltarian".

 

Guess we shoulda seen that one comin', huh?