(A request for information, not for debate.)
So what can we now say about the quality of the 2004 US Presidential Election? While no election can be perfect, was this one noteworthy in any way?
What about all this about Diebold machines faking the results? Any real proof?
I’ve heard of the usual handful of isolated incidents, but that’s about it. The people claiming widespread fraud all seem to be rabid anti-Bushies, and as far as I know, none have offered any proof for their claims.
One claim that bothers me and which hasn’t been denied plausibly is that all of the errors in the Ohio election were in Bush’s favor. It’s normal for there to be errors in an election, I can accept that. But when all the errors are in one candidate’s favor, one suspects what one is seeing is not random error but telltales pointing to electoral fraud.
I’ve read this claim several times, but no effective denials of it, which puzzles me since if it is false it would be very easy to PROVE to be false … one would only have to say, “the results show 11,000 errors favoring Bush, with 9,000 favoring Kerry” if there are records to back that up. But I’ve heard nothing to that effect.
Kinda makes ya think.
I have never understood how here can be records of errors. I mean if we knew they were errors we would fix them, right?
Not exactly.
Here in Milwaukee, just last week, there were reports out of the election commissions office that upwards of 10,000 same day registration cards that were submitted (the day of the election) were illegible. The addresses on most of them are untraceable. If a registration card is illegible it is not supposed to be accepted by the pollster. They apparently accepted 25,000 of them.
The details are still a little foggy, but it will turn out that most of the cards are from the precincts that voted mostly for Kerry.
Here is the context of the site;
*Assemblyman Jeff Stone (R-Greenfield) has been pestering the Milwaukee Election Commission to report how many people registered at the polls on November 2. Initially, they reported to him on Wednesday that about 8,000 people registered at the polls that day, out of about 255,000 votes cast, about 380,000 voters registered as of the September election (and an estimated 20,000-30,000 registrants between that point and the cutoff point for preregistration), and 565,000 residents (including about 430,000 adults) in the city. Now, they report a few VERY disturbing things:
84,000 people registered at the polls on November 2.
10,000 people, despite filling out illegible registration cards, were given ballots.
The other 74,000 registrations have yet to be verified through mailing a confirmation to the address listed.
A couple of things to point out. First, President Bush lost the state by about 12,000 votes. Second, there are now more registered voters in Milwaukee than there are adults in Milwaukee.
*
Some monkey business went on. This is the same city that had about 30 vehicles that belonged to the Republican Party tampered with the night before the election.
Dirty politics in Milwaukee? Fraud? You decide.
(The Republicans own thirty vehicles in Milwaukee? What for?)
Of course the problem is that a certain background level of cheating is common, but can we tell if the last go was worse than usual?
And another problem is if these cards were unreadable, was it part of a plot, or just poor penmanship?
There appears to be sometime wrong with those figures. I can’t find the city of Milwaukee vote or its registration, but I have found the entire county, state and nation vote for 2000 and 2004.
The state and national vote went up about 11.6% and the county went up about 11.2% 2000 to 2004. I also checked with census bureau site, and it estimated the county population went up slightly since the 2000 census. If there was such a large surge in (possibly illegal) registration, why did the percentage increase in voting trail the state and nation?
The actual vote totals don’t show it.
Kerry won by less(and in Iowa loss) by lesser margins than Gore in PA, Iowa, Ill and Michigan - declines of between .99 and 1.72%. Kerry actually REDUCED the margin of defeat in Ohio from 2000 - from 3.51% in 2000 to 2.10% in 2004. Ohio had the Republican governor and apparently more of the Diebold machines, yet Kerry did better relative to Gore there and worse in the other states.
The cars were rentals that were going to be used to transport people to the polls who otherwise couldn’t get to them, run errands, etc,. - legal.
Whether or not the illegible cards were part of a plot or not doesn’t matter, the fact is they should not have been submitted. The pollster should have requested legible handwriting or could have assisted someone who could otherwise not write clearly.
aahala, could you rephrase your question? I’m not sure what you’re looking for. Although we may agree that the county population has increased, I have heard unofficial reports that the city population has declined.
This is quite possible. Detroit has been losing people for decades, while the surrounding communities have been booming.
11,000 in favor of one candidate vs. 9000 errors in favor of the other is hardly all. If all of the errors were in favor of one candidate, one of those numbers has to equal zero.
But not necessarily, clearly.
I don’t have the registration for the city, either now or four years ago, nor the city only vote. That’s what I’d like to see a cite for.
The county wide vote according to my source was 433,537 in 2000 and 482,236 in 2004. If your site is claiming the city jumped by 84,000 election day, I think you can see why I thought sometime wrong with the figures. That’s 35,000 more than the increase in voting. Presumably, if you register to vote on election day, you will vote if permitted. If you’re not permitted, then it’s irrelavant to this discussion.
Why would you add the 84,000 to the 2000 numbers? Many of those same day registers might not have voted in 2000 and many that voted in 2000 might not have voted in 2004. It sounds like you assumed that all of the 84,000 didn’t vote in 2000 and everyone that voted in 2000 voted in 2004.
Population of Milw. county and city dropped since 2000.
"*But both the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County experienced declines in population, with Milwaukee County being the only one of the state’s 72 counties to lose residents.
Between 2000 and 2004, Milwaukee’s population fell by 0.5%, to 593,920. Milwaukee County lost 806 residents, with the population dropping from 940,164 to 939,358, a 0.09% decline.*"
It would appear as though the city lost more than the county.
Isn’t that exactly what he was saying? That it would be easy to disprove claims that all errors were in Bush’s favor by saying something like the above?
I am presuming the vast majority of the 84,000 did not vote in city in 2000. If they did, they would have been registered in 2000 and dropped from the rolls by 2004.
Do you have to re-register every four years to vote in the state?
If they didn’t vote in 2000, then the numbers imply a net decline in others voting in the entire county of about 35,000 – this is a very significant decline in an election that showed at net increase in the state and the country of double digits. How many counties in the state showed a decline in voting, 2000 versus 2004? Any?
Whatever the number who registered election day is interesting, but it’s of little importance to any fraud claims, unless the registrations were illegal–people in Wisconsin are entiltled to register that day.
Gotcha, I’m just trying to argue that there were 84,000 people that registered to vote (last minute) in 2004, and we have no idea how many of those who voted in 2000 didn’t vote in 2004. Maybe it’s around 84,000. Or could be 10. I have no idea. That number (84,000) is meaningless in any other context except that it seems to be a fairly large number of last second registers.
We will know more when we can tally up the ‘undeliverable’ address confirmation requests and add those to the 10,000 ‘illegibles’.
That new number will be somewhere between 10,000 and 84,000.
This is the basic arguement here, “How many of the actuall votes cast were legal votes, and how many were cast for Kerry Vs Bush.”
It is possible, and somewhat likely, that of the 35,000+ ‘missing’ votes some could have voted legally and then went and got a sameday registration form and filled that out errantly/illegally and were still issued a ballot.
We wont really know how many of the 84,000 votes cast were double votes. What we will find out is how many ballots were illegally issued/used. That number alone could have swung the State for Kerry.