The following quote and response are from a mailing list I’m on with a few friends, published with no permission whatsoever.
I suppose Ed does not always want to be the
uber-liberal on the list. Perhaps this is why he
hasn’t posted here about voting irregularites
vis-a-vis exit polls.Do you think the Democrats perpetrated a wide-spread
conspiracy to rig the exit polls? I do.–Matt
This has been preying on my mind lately. We have the scenario that you would expect in the case of massive fraud by vote machine manufacturers:
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Major manufacturers of voting machines and vote-counting machines tight with right wing politicians
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Strange Republican upsets follow everywhere their machines go
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Paper trails difficult or impossible to get
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The huge Republican upsets were not successfully predicted by pollsters and tend to accompany discrepancies in exit polls
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Democrats and other liberals blame themselves and vow to do better next time and learn to be nicer to the people who don’t like them, because that’s what liberals do. Cigarette smoking man snickers quietly to himself cause the liberals are so predictable.
It’s quite possible that America is no longer a democracy except in the sense that Iraq was a “democracy” because you were allowed to vote for Saddam Hussein.
OK, this isn’t a Cigarette Smoking Man style plot, because he would have found a way to rig the polls too….
I’m not saying this happened, I’m saying that it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and if it ain’t a duck I’d like to see some evidence for the non-duckitude.
The story is that this election was swung by “evangelical voters” voting on “moral issues,” but why would those people not show up in polls? If anything, it appears polls have tended to over-represent Republicans, not under-represent them (Gallup tended to “normalize” the data to show a huge Republican spike disproportionate to actual Republicans in the population — perhaps in response to past Diebold chicanery?).
I mean, yeah, maybe that’s what happened, I’m just wondering why it looks so much like a rigged election if it’s not.
Ed, you’ve figured out the grand plot…I’ll tell you the rest. It is all run by the Trilateral Commission, which is in turn under the control of the Beasties that Swim in the Oceans of Europa. Now I have to try to make it to Mexico before the probe that they’ve planted in my frontal lobe explodes. Or maybe it already has.
Yeah, corruption and fraud in the electoral system is really funny! Tell some more jokes!
I was shaving my brain this morning with Ockhams Razor and a spritz of Barbasol, and I ran across the follow up to my post. *Sugh* Like all the rest, you don’t believe me. You can’t handle the truth.
But the truth is out there. Somewhere in Mexico. And it involves…a goat. A pet goat.
Of this I am sure.
The only thing that makes me think there *is* something wrong with the polls and not the elections is the fact that polls also reflected errors that had nothing to do with voting — such as recording a very wrong number of Hispanics in Florida, for example.
Seriously Ed, if there are valid reasons for an investigation, it should by all means take place.
That’s all I want.
I mean, look, this is something people have been saying for several years, “there is a real danger of this happening. It could be easily prevented, but people are refusing to take steps to prevent it. This is what it would look like if it happened: you’d see X, Y, and Z.”
If I see X, Y, and Z, I’m gonna remember that and wonder.
I’d love to know this did not happen, because believe me, I would much rather live in a nation which had been duped by Republican propaganda than one which no longer had an actual fair democratic process in place.
I would much rather the elections were not rigged, even if it means more people liked the bad guy than the good guy.
That’s why if they *are* rigged, I want that fact to be known so they can *stop* being rigged.
That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Too horrible to contemplate, and yet, nad yet, if YOU were going to arrange things, wouldn’t you give the liberals all the validation you could without actually losing, by having Bush win by just enough of a nose for it to be uncontested, and then throw the liberals a telegenic bone in the form of Barak Obama?
On the other hand, Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.” Your suspicions about rigging, if embraced, lead only to nihilism and despair, stoic withdrawal, or armed revolution. None of these are very attractive, or offer a realistic possibility of changing anything.
Nah, this really isn’t a Cigarette Smoking Man level plot. It’s exposable and defeatable. There are a lot of well informed people working for demanding non-defraudable voting machines right now. Their efforts can be supported. Their voices can be echoed. That’s why I post.