The report originated on Salon, Ibn. Your mind remains closed. When come back, bring something resembling an argument.
I’m not up on your CNN poll, but here are the poll results studied by Freeman:
I note that CNN is among the polls cited.
Ok, could you please stop using this quote until someone addresses my point that absent an explanation of why the Bush voters did not respond to the pollsters while the Kerry voters DID in precincts with high discrepancy rates? I have already pointed out that the report admits they have no idea why this might be true, and have pointed out a very simple, logical alternate explanation: vote fraud in those precincts.
That’s because the networks, which came under SEVERE criticism for early calls in the 2000 election that turned out to be completely wrong, held off on their predictions in 2004.
Maybe it’s because the rightwing was promoting the idea of lying to pollsters at the time to throw them off. That’s as good an explanation as any considering you’re relying polls, an incredibly inaccurate means of measuring anything.
Is that what you meant to link to? It’s just the same article Evil Captor was talking about, AFAICT. As he said, the idea that republican voters were refusing interviews, as presented in that article, isn’t a fact known independently, but rather, is a hypothesis created in order to explain the discrepancies.
I mean–how would interviewers know that it was Republicans in particular who were refusing interviews?
Nm.
I think your arguments against my links are valid, but I did think they should be put out there as evidence. CNN was among the pollsters cited as a whole, but their individual results were close to the actual outcome. If all the exit polls were wrong, I’d be more concerned. But if only some were wrong, bringing the average to a Kerry win, then that doesn’t really provide evidence for anything. Exit polls or any polls were not meant to be more reliable than actual election returns. If they were, we could save a lot of money by just polling a random sample of 10,000 people to determine who should be President.
Hmm, good question.
People have short memories.
John F. Kerry was every so slightly in the lead in electoral college projections shortly before the elections. The attention of the electorate was largely on the Iraq war. Then within DAYS of the election a certain individual named Osama Bin Laden released a videotape. I knew the moment I heard it, “FuckFuckFuck!!! Bush just won the goddam election!!!”
It shifted attention from the Iraq war (clusterfuck) to the generic “war on terror” which was an issue Bush polled much better on.
Speaking as a democrat here, another thing that should be factored in is… if the republicans had the ability to steal the 2004 election, then how did Obama win the 2008 election? What happened to all their nefarious apparatus?
That said, I don’t think that saying “oh you liberals, it’s just sour grapes” is particularly useful or helpful. It’s crucial to be alert for corruption and criminality so that if it does occurs, we are alert and we catch it. It’s also perfectly reasonable to say “hey, I think there was some corruption there, let’s investigate” as long as we’re not simultaneously declaring the presidency invalid and causing a constitutional crisis with no grounds, or something like that.
In my experience, conspiracy theorists can often build a circumstantial evidence case that’s pretty close to overwhelming. Consider the converse, though: if there really were such widespread voter fraud as you’re suggesting, it would require a massive conspiracy. How many people do you think would be the minimum that would have to know about it? And yet not one of those people has been caught; not one smoking gun has been found.
Conspiracy theory. No conspiracy.
To reiterate: the biggest discrepancies occurred in Bush precincts, there was little or no discrepancy in the Kerry precincts. There was more discrepancy in battleground states. There was more discrepancy in states with Republican governors. Nobody that I know of is challenging these facts. I’m not calling for overturning the 2004 election. I’m just saying that Democrats, and anyone who cares about fair elections, really, should be looking VERY hard at the electoral processes where these things occurred, to make sure they don’t RECUR, 'cause right now it looks like it’s gonna be a very close election in 2012. I think refusing to do so shows a lack of common sense.
Electoral fraud works best where the contest is a very close one. It’s much more difficult in cases where one candidate has a large majority of votes, as Obama did in 2008. It’s much easier undetectably shave a few tens of thousands of votes in key precincts in a state to swing the state your way, than to shave hundreds of thousand of votes.
I think the democrats would use the same sort of techniques if they were necessary. They use the ‘get out the vote’ technique because it wins for them. Republican cage and suppress votes because it wins for them. If the tables were turned, the suspects would be different. The reason Republicans are better candidates for cheating is because the demographics are running against them. The number of crusty, scum sucking old white guys and their doormat wives keeps decreasing. They gotta do something!
If you’re arguing that we should be careful to have fair elections, I absolutely agree. But there’s limited energy for where to look, and I’d much rather spend that energy looking at places where we know there’s going to be shenanigans–e.g., discouraging poor and minority voters via false information, unwieldy voter ID measures, and intimidation–than in places where the only evidence of malfeasance is shaky and circumstantial.
Then why did Massachusetts have a bigger pro-Bush swing (poll to tally) than Ohio? Was that state a nail biter? 30 states had result discrepancies greater than the official Margin of Error. There weren’t 30 swing states, there weren’t 30 close races.
There was a lot of talk at the time about Ohio, but nobody put together a cohesive reason why 30 states had such large discrepancies. Well, I’m kind of partial to “Your poll was wrong”.
If it was 30 states wrong, with 15 shifting Kerry and 15 shifting Bush, nobody would have said squat other than “Your poll sucks”. Because the discrepancies favored one candidate over the other*, this crappy poll is suddenly elevated to a “Conspiracy Buster” and paraded around with pride instead of embarrassment.
*Gee, a lousy poll tends to be wronger in one direction than the other direction, what a shocker.
I’m confused. Was there some news item I missed where Democrats started caring about fair elections and planned to start using common sense?
Some Democrats care about fair elections, some don’t. But you’ve totally got me on the “common sense” thing. 
The pro-corruption wing of the party was trying to keep John McCain out of the White House. Rush Limbaugh was literally telling his Dittoheads to stay home.
_
Those who think a conspiracy to steal a Presidential election is unlikely need to remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be attempted. One can try to steal Ohio and have it be moot; in that case the fraudster will be seen as having done no harm, and get away with it. One can try to steal Ohio and succeed. The victorious President will owe his position to the fraudster, who will get away with it. Why do you think there is a risk? Who in living memory has gone to jail for ballot-counting fraud? There’s motive, means, and opportunity. We should assume that it’s happening so we can deter it, not that it isn’t happening.
ETA: PolitiFact | Greg Abbott claims 50 election fraud convictions since 2002
OK, a few. Bet some public servants still take the risk, if they have motive, means, and opportunity. It’s a big country.
Years ago, a Republican acquaintance told a story, and I forget the details, but something like this: She was working on counting votes for her precinct, where they needed a representative of each major party to count and one of the other Republicans said, “The Democrat isn’t here, you just pretend to be the Democrat.” She said no, that was unethical. But see, they thought they could get away with it.
I hear rumors that my home county has had Republicans who work for the government who think nothing of using public time and resources to advocate for the Party. We had a favorite son go to prison for this behavior. I don’t know if it sunk in through their thick skulls why this is a problem, though they’d whinge for ages if Democrats did the same.
William “Boss” Tweed in the Gangs of New York,
Killoran: Monk’s already won by three thousand more votes than there are voters.
Tweed: Only three? Make it twenty, thirty. We don’t need a victory, we need a Roman triumph.
Killoran: We don’t have anymore ballots.
Tweed: Remember the first rule of politics … ballots don’t make the results, the counters do. Keep counting.
That some would prefer to focus on the ballots and ignore the counters should be telling.
CMC fnord!
I’m not sure why you’re engaging in personal insults since I haven’t insulted you.
Now, if you’re upset that I mentioned truthers then you should have linked to the original article on Salon not to the truther website.
It’s actually not terribly hard to imagine that Democratic voters were being oversampled, particularly earlier in the day.
Who votes early in the day, particularly since election day falls during the work week.
The answer is older, retired voters and younger voters, college kids in particular.
Now, which group of voters is more likely to be eager to talk to pollsters? Young eager beaver kids voting for the first time or older retirees who just want to get this done and go home.
Moreover, remember the people doing the polling are often young people themselves. Now imagine you’re a 22-year old male pole taker, who are you more likely to want to talk to? A cute 19-year-old girl in a tank-top and short-shorts or some 72-year-old guy?
In fact, I was following the election that day via the Internet and I remember one blogger, I think it was Matthew Yglesias but I might be wrong, noting in the early afternoon that he was concerned about women being oversampled because at one point 65-70% IIRC the respondents were female.
So, I think a more accurate argument than Republicans avoided pollsters is that Democrats were over represented amongst groups more likely to talk to and be sought out by pollsters.