Month: November 2004

This is What Happens To Saints

Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/08/2004 | Priest who led Druids resigns

“He’s a saint,” said Jessica Kenworthey, who belongs to another church but attends services at St. James’ with her husband, Mark, who is a member. “This is what happens to saints.”

This little witch hunt might seem to be of interest only to Episcopalians, but PJ points out that it’s a small part of a big picture that others might find disturbing.

This whole thing was instigated by a particularly sinister political organization called the “Insitute for Religion and Democracy,” which is dedicated to subverting mainline churches in favor of fundamentalism. The whole sequence of events is pretty creeptacular.

Getting the GAO Involved

Cool!

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.”

John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.

“But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they’re fixed so that it won’t affect other elections in the future,” Doty said. “We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system.”

See, that’s me too. I don’t want the election changed to make Kerry win, now. I just want to have a justified confidence that I still live in an actual democracy.

Slashdot Sort Of Covers Election Weirdness

CmdrTaco of Slashdot spews a lot of good links on 2004 election freakiness while managing to mistake Michigan City, Indiana (near LaPorte, IN) for the nonexistent “LaPorte, Michigan,” misspell “anomaly,” and most egregiously of all, he opposes the “Diebold counties” to the “optically scanned paper ballot counties” — when the point of the article he links to is that the optically scanned paper ballots in those counties are counted by a piece of Diebold software which has been demonstrated repeatedly to be easily manipulated (Bev Harris demonstrated how to completely change the results of an election in less than two minutes at the machine, using no specialized computer skill beyond the ability to find, open, and edit a spreadsheet.)

Good old Slashdot.

In the interests of fairness and balance, I should link to the Kuro5hin story where one of the Kuro5hinites claims to have some statistical evidence of Ohioan weirdness in a particular county and another poster slaps him down and says it’s not statistically significant. I don’t know how to evaluate this either way, but it’s not relevant to the Florida situation where the results are WAY off. Typically, a Slashdot poster linked to this discussion despite the fact that the alleged anomalies it was addressing were not even linked to in the main slashdot post, and as far as I know are the theory of one sole Kuro5hin poster, and not getting any play anywhere else.

Good old Kuro5hin. Good old slashdot.

Dick Morris: Exit Polls Prove Somebody Was Sabotaging The Election

Republican pundit Dick Morris says that exit polls are almost never wrong, and that it would be inconceivable for the exit polls to be as consistently wrong as they were on Nov 2 without there being foul play afoot.

He points out that exit polls are routinely used in third world countries to detect fraudulent elections.

Desipite this, it does not occur to him that the elections could have been rigged.

Morris believes that it is the exit polls that were somehow rigged, despite the fact that a media outlet has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by announcing results that turn out to be wrong, and that there is considerable evidence that it was the elections which were rigged, and they were rigged by manipulation of vote totals in Diebold’s electronic vote-counting machines (NOT the ballot box machines, which had previously aroused suspicion).

It’s possible for anyone who’s alone with a vote-counting machine for two minutes, and who knows how, to untraceably alter the vote counts in a Diebold vote tabulator.

The only evidence of this (without a recount) would be the fact that the exit polls were discrepant from the officially reported vote counts.

There is some supicion that this vote-altering technique was used in favor of the Republican party in the 2002 elections and the 2002 Florida Democratic primary (to keep Janet Reno off the ballot against Jeb Bush); blackboxvoting.org is doing their best to investigate whether it was (as seems likely) used to propel George W. Bush to victory in 2004.

Fraud in the vote-counting machines can only be detected via an audit of votes. That audit is impossible with touchscreen voting machines without a paper trail, which is what Diebold has been trying hard to sell to states as a more “secure” and “reliable” solution. Sounds like they don’t want audits to be possible, to me. But right now most machines do use paper, so an audit is possible, it’s just difficult and expensive.

It’s stunning that the Republican spin machine is now trying to cast doubt on the only thing that could indicate the presence of fraud and trigger audits — exit polling itself.

UPDATE: Cripes, a lot of people are buying his spin.