The Voting Problem Moves Mainstream
 

seems that Florida is not the only state relooking at the ballots and looking into hacking/optical scanner problems - Ohio is recounting right now - and one county has mysteriously locked down its building to observers of the recount - due to Homeland Security concerns??????

Keith is trying to take this to the mainstream news media right now

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240

There has to be some concerns for sure. If someone can actually fix an election who knows.

I've seen a lot of talk n this throughout the net and I gotta say I was surprised at the outcome watching the exit pole results. I kept thinking as soon as they update that it'll show Kerry in the lead...and it never did.

There were some other links I'll see if I can find them.

the thing that bothers me is the experts are saying over and over "Exit polls are NEVER wrong, and could NEVER be that far off" since the exit polls are 100% of those who already HAVE voted, not those who say they are going to.

It just bites at me that they can hide behind the Patriot Act to do a recount that isnt watched by observers in Ohio
and in Florida, the county that was 80% Democratic and the exit polls showed around 70% voting for kerry - and bush comes out with a 60% win in that county????One of those Optical scanner counties BTW

I can't say I'm surprised. Bush was revving up to fix this election from his inauguration 4 years ago.

Well - just saw it reported nationally on MSNBC - lets just hope that K Obermann (sp) doesnt get any envelopes of white powder in the coming days from 4th graders - he's at least reporting the truth finally

Here is a link on expected votes and actual votes.
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

So do you guys spout all this mindlessly without
even reading the election results, or do you know
better and are hoping that your readers will
mindlessly believe your drivel without even looking
at the vote tallies?

1) The exit polls match the vote tallies almost perfectly.
In the exit poll, most women voted for Kerry
and most men for Bush, in nearly the same %
as in the ending vote tally. The pollsters polled
60%-65% women, and so counted more Kerry
votes in their poll. CNN, which leans more left
than right and can't be claimed to be part of the
"right wing conspiracy" apologized within hours
for airing a poll so heavily biased toward women
without correcting it and informing their viewers.


2) Early exit polls are ALWAYS shown with a margin
of error of a few percent. Had you been watching
the election and looked at the screen or listened
to the talking heads you would have seen right
there that any Kerry lead was always WELL within the margin of error.
Polling 1500 voters just doesn't give a very accurate
picture of how 100,000 other voters will vote.
Do you not understand that the 1% difference
is only 8 votes for Bush instead of Kerry in a
poll of 1,500? Had the pollster walked up to a
different family rather than that last one he chose
he Kerry might lose 4 votes and bush pick up 4
votes. The networks would report those 4 votes
one way or the other as a .5% swing.

That's just silly. Exit polls are notoriously innacurate. They can easily be weighted to favor one candidate or another, in dozens of different ways.

However - what troubles me is that, apparently, the exit polls were fairly accurate in all but a few states - most notably, Ohio and Florida.

If we're concerned about voter fraud, the path to follow doesn't start with the question of whether the exit polls were accurate. It starts with the question of whether the methodology used to conduct the polls (as reported) was consistant. (In other words, did the polls from state x reflect one segment of voters, while the polls from state y reflected a different segment.)

If it can be confirmed that the methodology from state to state was the same, but produced dramatically different results, then we have something that seriously needs to be looked at.

Personally, I have a strong feeling that there was vote tampering on a large scale. But I'm not going to push my feeling as fact without some damned good evidence. I am watching the blogs and the boards, and quite frankly, I'm really hoping somebody with a gift for statistics will make sense of what happened. 'Cause I smell something fishy, and it ain't a lesbian porn site.

Feel free to flame if you like, but the reports of problems with Florida's new touch screen voting machines are/were widespread. Just because the media overall isn't giving these reports a lot of airtime doesn't mean they're invalid. Many people kept trying to vote for Kerry in FL but were unable to get the machines to register their votes without using the tip of a pen or pencil to touch the box on the screen. Mysteriously unless you hit the thing just right it registered that you'd voted for Bush. There were serious problems with those machines when they were being tested a couple weeks before the election, and again (mysteriously) this was not widely reported. Not to mention the statistical anomalies in the counties still using the optical scan ballots.

There was one precinct in Ohio with 680 or so registered voters that reported 4000 votes for Bush. The RNC was running voter registration drives all over the place, then tearing up the registration cards of anyone registering Democratic. By the time this was discovered it was too late for those people to register to vote in the election. This is just the stuff I've run across.

Then again, is any of this surprising from the guy who ran a 6 month misinformation campaign so he could justify going into Iraq to finish what Daddy started? Hardly.

We are currently the laughingstock of the world for re-electing this guy...just look at the international media.

Oh wow...I didn't even know that they were looking into recounts/voter fraud. I guess I'm a little behind on my news. That's good I guess.

raymor - I respect your opinion on exit polls - but what originally was the intent here is that the bigger story is that more votes were cast than there are registered voters - by a long shot in Ohio.
Right now in one county that has some 30 precincts, the precincts are reporting any where from 68% voter turnout (probably normal) up to over 1000% in quite a few precincts. taken all together to get rid of any questions that might come up between wards and precincts (like a voter from a town that has 400 residents may have voted in another precinct), the overall count in that one county shows an extra 95,000 votes. And yes the county involved is primarily (80%) Democratic, but for some reason this year became 140% Republican?????