Under the circumstances, how do we know it wasn’t close?
My god … what if Reagan cheated, too!
We know Nixon cheated in 1972, but we also know he would have won without cheating. We don’t know Bush cheated. And we don’t know he didn’t cheat. And we don’t know whether he would have won without cheating. And we don’t even know whether he really won, in the sense of actually getting a majority of the votes cast, nationwide, or in any state using electronic voting machines. That is the whole point of this thread. These damned e-machines hide all the cards.
I’m a little disheartened that anyone could possibly feel this way. Fair, honest elections are the foundation of a democracy (or republic, for all you nitpickers out there). Tampering with votes is criminal.
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If strong evidence is presented that this administration was involved in election fraud, and
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Even if such tampering had no influence on the end result of the election,
I would think that’s sufficient cause to boot the bastards out of office. I would also hope a majority of Americans would agree with me.
Even of most Americans agreed, most members of the Republican-controlled Congress would not. (I mean, unless there’s sufficient evidence of fraud that enough Congressional elections could be voided to tip the balance of power.) So what are the prospects for impeachment? We could dig up enough dirt to send dozens of RNC officials, secretaries of state and county supervisors of elections to prison, and Bush would still be president.
Washoe County, Nevada machines had paper trails. You cast your vote on each question, reviewed the results on the screen, and then the machin printed a sheet showing each one of your choices. The sheet was printed behind a glass cover, and you reviewed the printed sheet for accuracy before finalizing your vote. Once you tuoched the “submit” option on the screen, the printed sheet rolled far enough that none of your ballot was visible for the next voter. The county seems to have found a way to use electronic voting machines with a paper trail that did not precipitate a financial crisis.
Do you see any of that lying around? I don’t. And finding a connection from fraud to the White House is even more implausible, in part because that would be a very very stupid way for them to do it (i.e. getting directly involved in any fraud at all).
Of course I want fair, honest elections, and of course we should punish any fraud found in the last. But that’s no longer as an urgent of an issue, because the election is over. The urgent issue is that we would have lost a fair election too.
I’m not arguing that there is or isn’t evidence of fraud. And I’m not arguing that if there is fraud, that this administration was actually involved. I’m only saying that when there is fraud, whoever perpetrated it should be held accountable, regardless of whether or not that fraud affected the final outcome.
It’s only the general principle of your statement:
that I’m arguing against.
If you were reading lots of threads on election day, you might have seen one from me claiming that it was dead certain that we had more people setting out to vote for Kerry than for Bush in Ohio. Our turnout was fantastic in our key areas. Some of the Ohio counties won by historic numbers for Democrats, even pushing up the percentage wins a tiny bit.
But regardless, I was dead wrong. I hadn’t seen the turnout numbers from the Bush strongholds I had assumed would do marginally better for him but not massively better. In some of his areas, he had almost a 90% turnout, which is about as close to 100% as is possible in elections. It wasn’t just a computer glitch: it really happened. And that’s how he won, and won fair and square. We registered more new voters, sure, but they got already registered people to come out and vote like never before. They perfected all the approaches they used in 2002 (the wave of reminder calls that we’ve always used to crush them), the foray into Democrat-like voter contact and GOTV. Plus they had their old powers (paid mail, suppression/confusion). Plus their church network had finally come to fruition: allowing them to deliver their message through the only social network that really matters to many people in many Republican areas.
They did a good job: they didn’t just wing it with a Diebold glitch.
Well, duh.
But who are you going to hold accountable right now?
But what I really want to know is did the exit polls suck?
:smack:
Anyhoo…
I also found an interesting article regarding the voter fraud in Georgia that magically dissolved a couple of startling poll percentage leads of Democratic officials.
But the former doesn’t disqualify the latter, does it? Let’s say it’s possible that they did a good job and there were significant e-vote glitches. Why is that so far-fetched, or not worthy of concern?
What troubles me the most is that all of the so far revealed “glitches” favoured Bush. Is it so unreasonable to assume that system error glitches wouldn’t skew that way?
I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong here. I’d just like to feel comfortable with the results as accurate, and frankly, the people who ridicule these questions are both disheartening and suspicious.
And I can’t be arsed about the people who will ridicule me for asking, so hopefully you’ll spare me the ridicule and show me something fact-based.
No need to get snarky. I would never have posted anything had you not originally posted
which now seems at odds with this most recent comment. Maybe we just have a misunderstanding? I don’t know.
I’ve never said that I believe there’s any fraud to hold anyone accountable for; I was only speaking in general terms.
Having said that, yes, in my opinion things are a bit fishy with this election. I don’t know of any solid evidence for fraud yet, but if such evidence turns up, I woud hope investigations would discover the guilty party or parties. I don’t think anyone can answer this question of accountability (or whether there is even anything for which to hold someone accountable) any better than that at this point.
I don’t think vote tampering at the state level is anywhere near as easy as that article makes it sound.
Sure, I get the demonstration of how all the tabulated votes could be swapped around once they’re all in the central computer. But aren’t original precinct tallies available? Votes can be reported precinct-by-precinct before they ever get to some central computer. In fact, they should be (for this very reason). If the precinct publicly posts them, anyone (say, a campaign worker, or a poll watcher) can collect the numbers. Then a candidate or party could do their own tallies, from results phoned in separately by those volunteers, to check the summaries.
To make tampering work, you’d have to do it at the precinct level. And that seems much more challenging.
Here’s a pretty fair article in the NY Times. Fixing the voting process needs to become the priority it was promised to become after the 2000 election.
*“To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby’s 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that Harris’ last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an incumbent doesn’t do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not tampered with in this election.” *
It was well known that diebold machines were vulnerable, however only Republicans took advantage of this. Machines were rigged at the manufacturer, but nobody who works there would ever break the conspiracy. Machines were rigged after the fact, but nobody ever mentioned such a thing to a single Kerry supporter, and not a single young Kerry supporting hacker would bother to help his side. You say the exit polls don’t match, but CNNs website matches right up with the result, therefore CNN and all the other big media outlets are in on the fraud too.
I’m going to apply my standard conspiracy theory method to this. You want to make an accusation this big, your proof is going to be big too. I’ll keep an open mind, but not so open that my brain falls out.
But do keep it open… even if it being true might mean the worse…