Since, as you state,
. No countering the power of belief, is there? Not with mere facts. Not in today’s faith-based GOP.
It is not obvious at all *what * level of doubt you’d consider reasonable, nor is it obvious that you’d stick to such a standard in the face of any amount of evidence. But tell us - is it on the level of the doubt required not to start a war?
Did you have some facts? I read through the ones provided by SimonX (well, one of them…I don’t have a PDF viewer for the other atm). Seemed pretty small potatoes and a lot of them worked both ways…i.e. they seemed like normal discrepencies and screwups, not some massive conspiricy to steal the election. Something that massive should leave a pretty heavy foot print I’m thinking. I’m also thinking it should be fairly easy for you to find some credible cites that aren’t on obviously partisan sites. If you presented them earlier I must have missed them.
Here is the one I posted in the thread SimonX linked too. annaplurabelle certainly disputed the cite (read through SimonX’s linked thread to see her objections if you like), but I’ve yet to see anything more credible. If you have a good non-partisan cite showing clearly that some kind of massive fraud took place, I urge you to post it.
Here is what my cite had to say on this:
-XT
I have read it and it doesn’t exactly say that the election was stolen.
Basically it’s saying three things.[ol]
[li]The discrepancies between the exit polls and the official tally cannot be explained by chance and therefore must have some other cause. Even the pollster, Mitofsky, says this.[/li][li]The explanation that Mitofsky has given for the discrepancy (Bush voters were more reticent to talk to pollsters) is, based on the data, so statistically implausible that it can be dismissed.[/li][li]The explanation that the official tally was somehow corrupted is statistally plausible and bears further investigation.[/li][/ol] I’m not a statistician but I did take stat 101 and the math in the report is pretty basic stuff. From what I can see it seems to make a good case for what it’s claiming. We do have some mathematicians on this board. Maybe one of them can give a more informed opinion.
“…what’s to stop it from being done again, and again?”
Good question. I’d say that the answer is, “nothing”.
Re Kerry, my theory is that he wanted to preserve his ability to raise the large sums needed for another try in 2008. The large corporate doners are calling the shots – they told him to concede, and he did.
Okay, what exactly is “small potatoes”? What defines the difference between a small potato and a large potato? If 19,000 votes for Bush magically materialize after a county has officially reported it’s vote totals, is that still small potatoes? A “normal discrepancy”? And while it’s easy to wave your hand and declare that a precinct where Badnarik got 35% of the vote in 2004 (as compared to less than one percent for Browne in 2000) is small potatoes, it could add up to big potatoes if it happened in a large number of precincts, wouldn’t you agree?
Second, about this whole demand for non-partisan cites? What qualifies as a non-partisan cite? In this thread, in addition to the article linked in the OP, which has references to non-partisan organizations that documented thousands of voting “irregularities”*, we’ve had articles from everything from Wired to mainstream newspapers. The blog I linked above, in the Feb 25 article, even mentions that the Vanity Fair article referenced was written by a guy (Hitchens) who opposed Kerry. And yet he concluded that he not only found massive evidence suggesting fraud was taking place in Ohio, but also that virtually all the instances of it he found helped Bush and hurt Kerry. If that’s not good enough, what on Earth would be?
*Among other things it says this: they have “a sworn affidavit by a Florida computer programmer who claims he was hired to develop a voting program with a back door mechanism to undetectably alter vote tallies.” You Republicans have been saying that you want to see real evidence of cheating before you believe it, rather than just rumors and statistical probability arguments. Fair enough. There’s your real evidence. A guy says that he was hired to help cheat. What could be more real than that?
Good point. Shouldn’t the suspicions of professional statistics analysts be sufficient justification for an investigation?
I think the 2000 elections were seriously dodgy but not the 2004 election. I don’t think Mr Bush needed to pull any election shenanigans this time.
In reference to my previous post, the paper I was referring to (the one referenced by the OP) was a response to this paper which was issued by the pollsters themselves. For those who don’t have a PDF reader available, Google has HTML versions of both cached at the following addresses:
I’d like to thank the Academy, Google, my agent…
Seriously, no problem. If nothing else, it got me to read through a fair chunk of the damn thing (something I’d frankly been too apathetic to do previously).
To finally get on topic, here my .02:
It’s not that I have a major concern that Bush stole the 2004 election (I do think there were minor shennanigans by both sides though), it’s that we don’t really have a reliable way to tell.
Most of us require more transparency and reporting in our credit card statements than we do the election of our governmental officers. Why is that I wonder?
And a hearty “fuck you” to you, manhattan.
I see I am in Great Debates, not the Pit … I was misled by the tone of Manhattan’s post. My apologies to Manhattan.
Well, if a DA wants to try someone for a crime, they have to have enough evidence to convince a judge that their suspect may have committed a crime. Not enough to CONVICT the suspect of that crime necessarily, just enough that proceeding to take the suspect to trial makes sense.
I would contend that we have sufficient evidence. We have method:
All this is a chain of suppositions without hard evidence – and we have that to in the form of mathematical analyses of the voting records vs. the exit polls which demonstrate improbable differences between the voting results and the polls.
We also have evidence in the form of lawsuits in various other states against Diebold machines which have been successful.
Surely this is enough for any reasonable perrson to think an investigation is warranted. I’m not talking Republican partisan here, I’m talking MOR reasonable person.
Rational Ignorance. The amount of time and effort required to police these sorts of things is more than the benefit the average voter would recieve from the knowledge.
Enjoy,
Steven
It seems to me to be a somewhat circular argument. The possible insertion of large numbers of fraudulent votes is one of the things that makes a single vote potentially meaningless. I would also offer the 2000 presidential election as well as numerous very close “local” races as evidence that a small number of votes can have disproprotionate effect on large issues.
Why can’t we at least implement some form of Satisficing rather than the free-for-all currently in place.
The current system is hardly a free-for-all. There are verification points in registration lists, ID checks, locked and sealed ballot boxes, changes in ballot designs each year, tightly controlled blank ballot stores, etc. It isn’t perfect, but it is at least some level of fraud prevention.
Enjoy,
Steven
But the country is NOT convinced. The essence of the reasonable man standard is that it refers to an ordinary person.
Here’s a case in which the reasonable man standard actually impacts the reasonable man. Where are the cries for investigation from anywhere other than fringe-left sources, if this is enough for any reasonable person to accept?
THAT is the voice of a reasonable person, I think.
If this has already been answered, forgive me…but who “knew” about these flaws? And is “could have” as far down the road as we get on this particular point?
As were about ten others. If there was a grand conspiracy, they conspirators chose well. I guess they are lucky that Pennsylvania or another state didn’t become the tipping point.
I don’t know the context of this oft sited quote, but my guess is that it was said to a group of like minded people as a show of solidarity. Does anyone seriously think that an executive of a company that makes vote counting equipment would make a public statement outlining some evil fraudulent intent? If evil were afoot, I’m guessing they would be smart enough to keep it quiet.
Ah, the exit polls. How about this…I think I’ll accuse the people who conducted the exit polls of being involved in a conspiracy to get Kerry elected. Perhaps they thought that if the early numbers were discouraging enough to Republicans, they could supress the vote in the western states and swing a close election to Kerry. That’s why the numbers didn’t match the result. I don’t intend to prove it, however. The mere accusation should be enough.
With the exception of registration lists (and those only minimally) not one of these preventative measures applies to fraud committed in electronic balloting.
Look, I’m all for the efficient, reasonable, reliable use of technology, but what we have now ain’t it. As Sam Stone pointed out above, what’s the problem with scan sheets? We use them here (Leon County, Florida) and we were one of the very few counties where the manual recount exactly matched the original count in the 2000 election.
Oh, and thanks Bricker, I do try to be reasonable.
You are conflating “reasonable man” with “average man.” The reason you don’t hear more cries of alarm over our voting system is that most people have no idea what’s going on, because the conservative-dominated media isn’t telling them. If we had the equivalent of the conservative media for the left, there would be a LOT of alarmed reasonable people, because the news would spill over into the mainstream media to a much greater extent than it has.