A Stolen Election in 2004?

[Makalakumu]

Hmm... it would take a constitutional amendment.....

constitutional amendment + Congress doesn't read what they pass = ????

Now, where did I see the administration trying to push through a constitutional amendment before.....

People need to wake up and smell the coffee. This country is not, and has never been, "Leave it to Beaver". Take a look at the above and look into it yourselves.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real...

 

[Bob Hubbard]

I sometimes wonder if I took the wrong pill....

 

[Tgace]

A slight tangent, but in line with the exit poll's and their dependability...

An article from Slate Magazine

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110860/

 

[Makalakumu]

A slight tangent, but in line with the exit poll's and their dependability...

An article from Slate Magazine

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110860/

The article is talking about predictive polls before the election.

An exit poll is something different then a pre-election poll. An exit poll is done as people are leaving their polling place. They are so accurate that they are used by the UN to monitor elections in Third World countries. When there is a discrepancy in the results that goes beyond what could be accounted for by random chance or error, the world wide organization declares the elections phoney as it has done in the Ukraine.

We have a similar discrepancy in the results of our election...

upnorthkyosa

 

[raedyn]

Even though the article Tgace posted mentions exit polls, it's really about polls intended to forecast the outcome. But it's an interesting link nonetheless. For example, to see that the pollsters arbitrarily pick where the 'undecided' votes are going to go. That helps explain why they get different results...

 

[shtygolfr]

Propoganda.

 

[Ender]

Propoganda.

*l..and rationalization. Had Kerry won, would the effort to prove the election was stolen still be there?..I don't think so....

The Democratic Party that I belonged to, no longer looks to help the common man. It sold out to special interests and to the far left. In the words of Ronald Reagan, "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me". Thats why they lost in a landslide: 30 states to 20 states.*s

 

[Bob Hubbard]

I think there would have been just as much grumbling if it had gone the other way, especially from those folks who didn't vote. I've already heard from folks who said "See Bush won, my vote wouldn't have counted anyway". These folks were both pro and con towards him.

 

[rmcrobertson]

"The far left." That's genuinely funny--or it would be, if it didn't outline the extraordinary shrinkage of the political and intellectual spectrum in this country, and our general shift to the Right.

No, the election wasn't stolen--though it may be convenient to believe, if we wish to blame Them for our failures, and to keep on with the way that liberalism has too often fed off working people. This way, we can look down on those poor benighted souls who cook and clean and work; we can attribute Bush's getting elected and relected to anything and everything else than money, and power, and arrogance, and colonialism, and fear of change.

 

[Makalakumu]

"The far left." That's genuinely funny--or it would be, if it didn't outline the extraordinary shrinkage of the political and intellectual spectrum in this country, and our general shift to the Right.

No, the election wasn't stolen--though it may be convenient to believe, if we wish to blame Them for our failures, and to keep on with the way that liberalism has too often fed off working people. This way, we can look down on those poor benighted souls who cook and clean and work; we can attribute Bush's getting elected and relected to anything and everything else than money, and power, and arrogance, and colonialism, and fear of change.

Did you read some of the articles I posted? There were specific reported incidents recorded by the media and state authorities where voting machines "malfunctioned" and counted backward for John Kerry.

The FBI is investigating a report on the dissemination of a computer program that could do this very thing.

Are you so sure this election was so clean? Does the guy who lost a contest because the other guy cheated blame himself?

 

[Tgace]

 

[rmcrobertson]

Perhaps you're right. After all, we KNOW that Mayor Daley pretty much stole the '60 election for Kennedy--yet it is my impression that all these "stolen" votes together wouldn't be enough to change the election's outcome.

Face it. Kerry did a piss-poor job of campaigning, in many ways, in part for reasons that Hunter Thompson wrote about two decades ago (fat-cat Democrats refusing to, "take a chance," and offer genuine democracy as opposed to Republican plutocracy) and in part because he didn't get up there and tell George that he and his draft-dodging cronies could stuff it.

The country's changed, too, swung to the Right--in part because of liberal and left-wing smugness, as well as our refusal to examine the nature of our extraordinary privileges in regard to most Americans.

Our national beliefs have swerved towards fundamentalisms--partly because Americans are scared of corporate capitalism, and partly because we're freaked out by the passing of the moment in history when we could do pretty much what we pleased to everybody else.

The yahoos won.

But as I wrote....it is easier, for most Americans, to believe in conspiracy than to look at history.

 

[PeachMonkey]

But as I wrote....it is easier, for most Americans, to believe in conspiracy than to look at history.

Apparently, this sort of black-and-white thinking goes both ways.

In other words, even if the left has alienated many, if not most Americans, and even if Kerry completel pissed away any chance to really challenge Bush, it's still possible that there were serious voting irregularities. These irregularities need to be investigated, even if they are proven to be false.

But I know it's easier to buy into the party line of the GOP and the DNC, curl into a ball, and pretend It's Not Happening.

 

[rmcrobertson]

Not what was written (one wrote that the irregularities weren't serious enough to change the outcome, for example) and yet, thanks for the admonition.

Nor does the point have anything to do with who liberals and lefties have alienated. The point concerns liberals and lefties who refuse to actually understand their place in the world, and in history, and the poor political decisions that flow from such blindnesses.

Could be worse: could be libertarians.

Perhaps if one were to consider the repeated poll results showing that most Americans more or less support the Iraq War, more or less on the grounds that Hussein Had To Have Been Up to Something, the point about conspiracy being more convenient than history would make more sense.

 

[Makalakumu]

What does this refer to?

 

[ghostdog2]

These stories of stolen elections have reached the status of urban myths, sort of like those alligators in the sewers of New York and the choking doberman stories that go around every so often. Oh yeah, don't forget @ the Wal Mart kidnapings and the Roswell spacemen. In fact, stolen elections are the UFO's of the new millenium.
From a more objective perspective, the presidents of the three major networks' news groups did a forum at Stanford not long ago. It was broadcast on CSPAN. Questions @ the " stolen votes " clearly made them uncomfortable. Why? Because the questioners although seemingly sincere, are paranoid and delusional. I seem to recall one of these newsmen saying:"No one wanted this story more than we did. Regardless of your candidate, Florida 2000 was a great story. We assembled a team of attorneys and investigators numbering in the hundreds and sent them to Florida and Ohio. There is no story. They found nothing that would have changed the outcome. Period.:
I've paraphrased and combined their answers, but that's the gist of it.
Believe it, NBC, CBS, ABC and the Kerry campaign wanted to find irregularities and couldn't. So now, your sources can?
The internet is the safe house for kooks and misinformation. Don't buy into it.

 

[loki09789]

These stories of stolen elections have reached the status of urban myths, sort of like those alligators in the sewers of New York and the choking doberman stories that go around every so often. Oh yeah, don't forget @ the Wal Mart kidnapings and the Roswell spacemen. In fact, stolen elections are the UFO's of the new millenium.
From a more objective perspective, the presidents of the three major networks' news groups did a forum at Stanford not long ago. It was broadcast on CSPAN. Questions @ the " stolen votes " clearly made them uncomfortable. Why? Because the questioners although seemingly sincere, are paranoid and delusional. I seem to recall one of these newsmen saying:"No one wanted this story more than we did. Regardless of your candidate, Florida 2000 was a great story. We assembled a team of attorneys and investigators numbering in the hundreds and sent them to Florida and Ohio. There is no story. They found nothing that would have changed the outcome. Period.:
I've paraphrased and combined their answers, but that's the gist of it.
Believe it, NBC, CBS, ABC and the Kerry campaign wanted to find irregularities and couldn't. So now, your sources can?
The internet is the safe house for kooks and misinformation. Don't buy into it.

Don't start sounding too rational here....next thing you know you will be getting labelled as a 'copper top' that is still 'plugged into the matrix.'

 

[PeachMonkey]

Perhaps if one were to consider the repeated poll results showing that most Americans more or less support the Iraq War, more or less on the grounds that Hussein Had To Have Been Up to Something, the point about conspiracy being more convenient than history would make more sense.

I fully understand your point, and actually do my best on a day-to-day basis to work on it; none of this excuses us from our separate duties to make sure that elections are free and fair, without which no amount of convincing the American people will matter a tinker's damn.

 

[lvwhitebir]

Ohio just finished its recount. Here's its take on the EVoting machines. By the way, about 75% of Ohio was paper ballot, not EVoting.

http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/10469526.htm

Some blurbs from the report:

"elections officials said electronic voting systems worked as promised"

"An AP review of electronic voting found few reports of widespread problems. Elections officials of both parties were confident the election was fair and done properly"

"Election Day problems were largely limited to three machines that showed low-battery signals, according to Janet F. Clair, board director. She said the board doesn't make Election Day repairs, so the machines were taken out of service."

"Clair wouldn't be drawn into specific criticism of vote system skeptics, instead mentioning that critical records are kept under locks that require two keys - one held by a Democrat and one by a Republican. "Everything we do is under lock and key," she said."

"One e-voting problem this election that became a lightning rod for critics happened in Gahanna near Columbus in Franklin County, where an electronic voting system gave Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes. Officials said the malfunction occurred when one machine's cartridge was plugged into a laptop computer and generated faulty numbers in several races."


I personally don't think the election was won because of fraud. I believe that too many people are crying foul before we even know what the problems were. They can be simple errors that are caught and corrected. No system is or can be perfect. I would be extremely difficult to have the fraud in Ohio because only 25% was done with a machine.

However I think we as a nation should welcome any investigation into improving the voting process. EVoting is a new venture and will require safeguards that we had never had to worry about before.

WhiteBirch

 

[raedyn]

Treating electronic vote counting machines with caution does automatically mean that person is a conspiracy theorist. Not everyone who has questions believes the election was stolen. Even if your man got in, you should be concerned about the possibility of incorrect results. Anything that decreases trust & confidence, decreases participation. And that will have consequences for everyone.