Cinti. Enquirer's politics blog references RFK's lawsuit & Carl Weiser's

[roseBudd]

comments to Editor and Publisher.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002651747

Carl Weiser, government and public affairs editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer, agreed. "I read it and nothing in there was really new," he said. "The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy."


I encourage DUers to comment:
http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov/2006/06/lawsuits-coming-in-ohio-2004-election.asp#comments

And to contact Carl Weiser [email protected] 513-721-2700

[McCamy Taylor]

1. I sent a letter to editor and publisher

The REAL reason the news industry supported W. was because he promised them changes in federal media ownership rules which he could not deliver. A federal court had struck them down. Mike POwell at the FCC was supposed to appeal. The day AFTER Congress swore Bush in for a second term, POwell said that the administration was not going to appeal--that meant that Bush was no different from Kerry who had said "No" all along to the mega-mergers the MSM wanted.

The MSM was not amused. The press's relation to the White House very quickly began to turn sour, and the rest is history, or, to be more precise, it is W.'s poll numbers in the 30's.

Here is the story picture form from my webpage:

http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/060112.htm

[roseBudd]

2. Contact Carl Weiser at the Enquirer and ask...

why the Enquirer has not adequately investigated Warren and Clermont Counties. Lockdown, header cards with Bush hole punched, ballots with only Bush punched, C. Ellen Connaly anomaly, stickers on ballots in Warren.

Dismissing a story because it is reported by a D (Kennedy) rather than an R as Weiser is quoted in E&P is the height of media bias.

Carl Weiser 513-768-8491

Carl has some 'splaining to do.

[roseBudd]

3. M

That Weiser would use the excuse that if a Republican had called attention to the many questionable aspects of the Ohio 2004 election is laughable.

From Editor and Publisherr

Weiser of the Enquirer adds that Kennedy's obvious Democratic leanings do not help the validity of his story. "If a major Republican was saying this, I might be paying more attention to it," he says.

Uh, Carl why in the **** would a Republican admit to things like putting stickers on ballots in Clermont County or devising a story about an FBI/Homeland Security level 10 threat against Warren County so that the right for independent observation of the ballot tabulation could be subverted.

And don't forget Clermont County's problems with "moist ballots" in 91 precincts. Fortunately Hamilton, Warren, Sciota and Pike counties were blessed with a cold front on that hot August day.

And what Republican would admit to this:



Or this:



What Republican official would divulge purging eligable voters, denying provisional ballots cast at the right polling location but the wrong table/precinct?

Is suppression a Cincinnati Enquirer SW OH conservative value?

This paper has failed the citizens of this country.

Where is our Woodward and Bernstein? Not at the Enquirer.

[mod mom]

4. My rather long comment to Mr Weiser:

Dear Mr Weiser,

There has been much discussion on the subject of the election theft of 2004 since the RFK Jr article appeared in Rolling Stone. Bobby Kennedy, a seasoned attorney, was willing to put his reputation on the line and write this article after spending much time reviewing the evidence. As an election reform advocate, I urge you to take the time to research. I would be willing to set up interviews with experts and/or get you access to affidavits, videos, and other pertinent evidence if you are willing to truly review the documentation.

This is much larger than a partisan issue. Our democracy depends on fair and verifiable elections that serve the will of the people. The public is not well served when the fourth estate fails to fulfill their role as the "guardians of democracy and defenders of the public trust". I have put together some links to information supporting the theft of the election. Please take the time to truly investigate this important matter.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXX
PS. It appears that Ohio papers have all decided on the talking point of bipartisan representation at every BOE means no conflicts, but although each Ohio County Board of Election has 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans, they serve at the will of the Secretary of State and in the case of a tie, the Secretary of State breaks the tie.



1. MISALLOCATION OF MACHINES (and less reliable machines) in high Dem Precincts:


Fixing America's Broken Elections
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
February 08, 2005

My staff reviewed thousands of pages of primary source materials, including copies of actual ballots, voter registration databases, and poll books. They also met with several individuals having firsthand knowledge of irregularities. What they found indicated problems in multiple areas, from machine tampering and malfunction, to the intimidation and caging of minority voters in urban and rural areas, to the purposeful misallocation of voting machines and the unjustifiable restrictions that were placed on the use of provisional ballots.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/fixing_americas_broken_elections.php






Ohio 2004 election thief grabs Gov nod while (surprise! surprise!) voting machines malfunction
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
May 5, 2006

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has grabbed the GOP nomination for governor in a vote count riddled with machine breakdowns. In Franklin and Delaware Counties, election officials had to "shut down and recalibrate throughout the day," according to the Columbus Dispatch. Election officials use recalibration as a code word when machines are malfunctioning including the recording of votes for wrong candidates.
<snip>
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1953



2. MANIPULATION OF VOTER REGISTRATIONS and PURGES:


Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White House?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
February 28, 2006

<snip>

It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are verified.

One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical error."

As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged margin of victory---just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell, deemed worth counting.

<snip>
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1832





Discrepancy in Number of Registrations in Franklin Co vs Purges

“Finally on Voter Registration Mr. Chairman, as the Committee is well aware, there were innumerable political parties and 537’s spending tens of millions of dollars on voter registration drives. In Franklin County alone, we processed more than a quarter of a million voter registration forms between January 1, 2004 and the close of registration in early October. This was twice the registration activity as compared to the same period in 2000.”

Bill Anthony testimony on March 21 2005
http://cha.house.gov/hearings/Testimony.aspx?TID=477

Mr Anthony’s testimony stated that in Franklin County alone, more than a quarter million voter registrations forms were processed between Jan. 1 2004 and the close of registration in early October. Yet when the registered voter numbers are compared from 2003 to 2004, we see a change of 120,869.

google: Ohio voter registration historical data
http://elections.ssrc.org/data/voterreg/

Ohio Election Data - Registered Voters before Certification
The Feminist Majority Foundation
Detailed chart of annual changes in Ohio voter registration numbers from 2000 to 2004. The data demonstrates a large voter roll purging in 2002 and relatively high numbers of new registrants from 2002-2004.
voters in 2004 = 845,720
voters in 2003 = 724,851
# Changed
from 03-04 = 120,869

http://www.feminist.org/pdfs/OH_election_precert.pdf




-October 4, 2004 was filing deadline for new voter registrations. At that point there were approximately 20,000 unprocessed voter registration applications with less than a month before the election. One mail tray containing 4,500-7,000 (estimates vary) unprocessed “Project Voter” registrations were discovered on or about October 18,2004.
SOURCE: SOS Investigation pg 10

***Of interest here is information obtained from the SOS website entitled ElectionsVoter/results 2003 and 2004 which show the # of registered voters number change from ‘03-’04 was 11,947 in Lucas County: reg voters 2003 in Lucas=288,190 ; registered voter in 2004=300,137.

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/elections/lucas.htm




3. UNCOUNTED VOTES:

Cranks and Kooks: Kerry won in '04
by Greg Palast
May 11, 2006

Answer: The Uncounted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up.

Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election -- in a footnote to the report on voter turn -- out. The Census tabulation of voters voting "differs," from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census' whispered footnote, has not been reported.

Unfortunately, that's not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1961




November 2, 2004 Election

Iowa New Mexico Ohio

Ballots “spoiled” 18,847 21,084 103,660

Provisional Ballots Uncounted 7,368 6,593 33,998

Absentee Ballots Uncounted 10,596 4,217 15,519

Ghost Votes & blocked votes unknown 2,087 85,950

Total Uncounted* 36,811 33,981 239,127

Bush “Victory” Margin 10,059 5,988 118,599

*Totals here include ghost vote only for New Mexico and machine shortage only for Ohio. Registry purges etc., would increase these totals.



-U.S. Civil Rights Commission reports that ballots of “non-black” voters were rejected: 1.6% (1 in 63 did not count); while black voter ballots were rejected 14.4% or 1 in 7 African American votes went uncounted.

-The rejection of provisional ballots were cast over-whelmingly in Democratic precincts.

-In New Mexico, 9 out of 10 votes uncounted were cast by non-Anglo voters. (90% of this population vote Democratic.

-Nationally, the total numver of voters voting provisionally was 3,107,490 and the rejection rate was 1,090,729.

SOURCE: Greg Palast "Armed Madhouse"




1,597 Provisional Ballots from Franklin Co categorized as Status 200-”Not Registered”, yet voters were registered

http://my.core.com/~rhh/index.htm



Study of Provisionals in Cleveland


From a recent Cleveland study on ‘04:
Almost 1,000 provisional ballots may have been wrongfully rejected because of registration problems alone. At least 944 rejected provisional ballots, mostly classified as “not registered”, were apparently mistakenly purged from the registration lists. Since this error was detected by only one type of search, which did not detect other voters who claimed similar errors, the true number of provisional ballots wrongfully rejected is likely to be higher.
We estimate that 2 out of every 5 provisional ballots that were rejected should have been accepted as legitimate. If we combine incorrectly purged provisional votes, projected votes rejected because of initial registration errors, provisional ballots lost through polling place misinformation and innocent errors filling out the provisional application, it appears that over 41% of rejected provisional ballots (or 14% of all provisional votes) may have been unnecessarily rejected.
We estimate that simply changing residence exposes voters to a 6% chance of being disenfranchised. Youth, the poor, and minorities are disproportionately affected. In fact, with respect to just provisional ballots, we found a two-fold increase in rejection rate in predominantly African-American compared to predominantly Caucasian precincts.
Full text: http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/summary.html
from Feb 2005-but important, in case you missed it.




Wednesday, December 14, 2005; Page A28:


A Defense Department survey on military voting found that 79 percent of military personnel tried to vote in the 2004 presidential election and that 73 percent of those actually voted .

But the survey obscured an important fact: Disenfranchisement of military and overseas absentee voters remains high. Between 30 and 45 percent of these potential voters failed to receive their absentee ballots or received them too late to matter, according to surveys by the National Defense Committee and the Overseas Vote Foundation.

About 1.4 million active-duty members of the uniformed services and 1 million spouses and family members are eligible for absentee voting. In addition, an estimated 4 million U.S. civilians who live abroad are eligible. Yet most states still conduct absentee voting through U.S. mail via a cumbersome three-step process.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/13/AR2005121301729.html


4. GOP DIRTY TRICKS:


June 15, 2006 at 22:00:00
African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List


by Greg Palast


<snip>
One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

Here's how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, ?Do not forward?, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."

The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballot being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

<snip>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_greg_pal_060616_african_american_vot.htm




Busheviks connected to New Hampshire phone-jamming scheme
by The Ostroy Report
April 14, 2006

Every day brings new surprises in the wild and wacky world of the Bush Monarchy. One day its WMD lies, the next day illegal wiretappings, the next day leaks of classified data, and now news that the Busheviks and the GOP may be central figures in the 2002 phone-jamming scheme that kept New Hampshire Democrats from voting in that year's midterm elections, according to court documents.

Phone records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin made dozens of calls to the White House in the immediate days leading up to New Hampshire's election for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Robert C. Smith. Tobin and two others were convicted in December 2005 of hiring Virginia-based GOP Marketplace on behalf of the New Hampshire GOP to jam another phone bank being used by the state Democratic Party and the firefighters' union to get-out-the-vote for then-governor Jeanne Shaheen. John E. Sununu, the Republican candidate, won 51% to 46%. The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became Bush's presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004.

<snip>
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1931







GOP SUPPRESSION FLYERS
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/voter-suppression-flyers.html





Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
February 08, 2005

My staff found substantial evidence, admitted by a Triad voting machine company employee—in public, videotaped testimony— that he developed documents and manipulated voting machines for the purposes of allowing county officials to forgo a legally required full hand recount of ballots. Other instances of inappropriate political advocacy by voting machine company officials are well known.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/fixing_americas_broken_elections.php



Free Press uncovers evidence of ballot tampering in Warren County, Ohio
April 19, 2006

After locking out all media observers and declaring a Level 10 Homeland Security Alert, the Republican-dominated Warren County, Ohio reported the vote tally in the wee hours of the morning on November 3, 2004 -- and gave George W. Bush a surprising 14,000 vote boost. Two election workers told the Free Press that the ballots had been diverted to an unauthorized warehouse where they had been possibly stuffed. That is, punched for Bush only. Maps were supplied to the Free Press showing the locations of the warehouse and the Board of Elections.

Warren County officials refused to allow the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism to handle the ballots, but they did allow us to photograph a few. Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., has analyzed the ballots for the Free Press and concluded that there is evidence of fraud in Warren County. The ballots as photographed with Dr. Phillips' commentary below each ballot are included here for the first time.

The Free Press predicted early on that the ballots would be found punched only for Bush in Warren County. The Moss v. Bush lawsuit pointed to Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties as the three counties that provided more than Bush's entire margin in the Buckeye State: Bush won Ohio by 118,000, and 132,000 votes were supplied in these three southwestern Republican counties.

Now, for the first time, the Free Press is releasing images of the obvious election fraud in Warren County. The Free Press will continue its ongoing investigation in Ohio despite stonewalling by Republican state officials. See the images by clicking on the link below.

<snip>
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2006/1355


Ohio GOP Challenges 35,000 Voters
Saturday, October 23, 2004; Page A09



The Ohio Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 35,000 newly registered voters yesterday, an action that party officials said was unprecedented but necessary to prevent election fraud in a state where polls show President Bush and John F. Kerry in a statistical tie.

Most of the 35,000 voters live in urban, Democratic areas, party spokesman Jason Mauk said. Local party officials, joined by Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie at a news conference, said the voters were mainly registered by "shadowy" Democratic-leaning groups and were chosen after the GOP sent them mail that was returned as undeliverable.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55472-2004Oct22.html





Texas Strike Force

The following affidavit was prepared in the Moss v. Bush case during a videotaped interview with Jim Branscome, who described himself as a conservative, following the 2004 presidential election. The affidavit was never submitted in court for the case and after editing and approving the affidavit, Branscome left his position at the Holiday Inn shortly thereafter. I've spoken to Linda Byrket about releasing the tape of the Branscome interview and she informed me she would work on digitizing for submission. Also, as the co-host of a twice weekly talk show on WVKO 1580AM during this time, callers made me aware of "white people with southern accents" posting fliers and talking to people in the inner city of Columbus telling people that due to the anticipated heavy voter turnout, that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday and Democrats were to vote on Wednesday. I call was made to my house directing me to the wrong polling place, one, by the way, thanks to Ken Blackwell, that is actually closer to my house. Hundreds of documents obtained by public records requests are being released in September in a New Press book I've edited with Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld entitled "What Happened in Ohio?
A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election." Hundreds of other documents will be made available on a digital archive online soon. The Free Press has accumulated over 20,000 election documents, including many public records and sworn affidavits from voters. I would be willing to meet Professor Tokaji for a debate anytime he likes, with each of us presenting our evidence and knowledge. I realize that Tokaji is not the problem, the problem is lack of real debate on the issue. As of today, the Free Press staff has looked at precinct data from over 9300 precincts in Ohio and despite massive roadblocks thrown up by local county officials, intends to look at all the more than 11,000 precincts in the state.

Affidavit
I, James Branscome, residing at XXX South XXXX Street, Newark, Ohio, 43055-3682, do swear and affirm the following:

1. I am an employee of the Holiday Inn, 175 E. Town St., Columbus, Ohio 43215. I work the 3:30-12pm shift drivng people to and from the airport. I have personal knowledge of the incidents relayed below.

2. On October 27, 2004, I picked up 7-10 individuals from the airport to drive them to the Holiday Inn. I made two more runs to pick up people from the group, for a total of approximately 25 people.

3. The individuals identified themselves as the Texas Strike Force. Most of them said they were from Texas, one person was from Florida.

4. The individuals stated they had paid their own way to come to Ohio. The Holiday Inn record for payment for their hotel rooms indicated the rooms were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party.

5. Their hotel rooms were in the back of the hotel, directly overlooking the Republican Party headquarters, which was behind the Holiday Inn.

6. On November 1, I overheard one of the Texas Strike Force men talking on the pay phone in the hotel lobby. He was telling someone that he would call the FBI on them if they went out to vote. He had a big “W” on his shirt.

7. Laverne Sanders, night auditor at the hotel, called the police. When the police arrived, they did nothing. One of the female Texas Strike Force individuals told the police about Democrats at the hotel who were “speaking Arabic.”

8. The phone caller from the Texas Strike Force accused the hotel personnel of violating his civil rights. He was staying in room 617 and was identified by another individual in the hotel as an attorney from California.

TO THIS I SWEAR AND AFFIRM,

(If you would like to review this affidavit, please contact freepress.org)


4. EXIT POLL EXPERTS:

Dr. Steven Freeman:


Illegitimate election-Key RFK Source-Responds to Criticism of 04 Election



Illegitimate election
A key source for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds to criticism of his analysis of the 2004 election

By Steven F. Freeman

June 12, 2006 | Because Robert F Kennedy Jr. based much of the discussion in his Rolling Stone article on interviews with me and on a close reading of my new book, coauthored with Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," and because Kennedy cites in his thorough footnotes many of the same key sources we worked from, I feel compelled to address directly several statements that Farhad Manjoo makes about the exit polls, both in his original Salon article and in his response to Kennedy's response to that article -- statements that are either incorrect or based on misunderstandings about exit polls and the 2004 results.

We regret that Manjoo did not request an advance copy of our book before writing his article. Had he done so, I'm confident that many of the basic errors he made could have been avoided.

Are exit polls usually accurate?

Yes, they are. On Nov. 2, 2004, Manjoo's source Mark Blumenthal, the Mystery Pollster, had this to say: "I have always been a fan of exit polls. Despite the occasional controversies, exit polls remain among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available." Properly done exit polls are highly accurate. Given the large sample size in U.S. exit polls, they ought to be accurate within 1 to 2 percentage points of the official count.

The 2004 Election Day exit poll was a well-funded effort conducted by the most experienced pollsters in the business, and it represented a broad spectrum of media interests, from Fox to CBS. The sample included 114,559 respondents in the 50 state exit polls, conducted at 1,480 precincts throughout the nation. A subsample of these was selected to provide a sample representative of the U.S. electorate for the national exit poll: 11,719 Election Day voters and 500 absentee and early voters. The National Election Pool, NEP, a consortium of six news organizations (ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC) pooled resources to conduct a thorough survey of each state and the nation. NEP in turn contracted two respected firms, Joe Lenski's Edison Media research and Warren Mitofsky's Mitofsky International, to conduct the polls.

more at:


http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/12/freeman/




Dr Ron Baiman:


"I would take this evidence to a trial. Clearly a crime was committed in Ohio. There is simply no other explanation for these patterns other than vote shifting. The only thing we don’t know is who did it and how. And exactly this kind of information is necessary to get serious electoral reform - that you claim to support."

RON BAIMAN


NAME:RON BAIMAN
LOCATION:OAK PARK, ILLINOIS, UNITED STATES
Ron Baiman is currently a Policy Research Project Development Analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, as well as an visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Econonomics from The New School for Social Research.



http://www.baiman.blogspot.com/


WEDNESDAY, JUNE 07, 2006
More Manjoo Fallacies and Lack of Comprehension

This was posted June 7, 2006 on Salon.


In his June 7, 2006 reply to Kennedy’s rebuttal of his earlier critique Farhad Manjoo citing Mark Blumenthal, claims that:



a) The exit poll margins of error for Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio were between 5% to 7%. This is preposterous. Rather than relying on Mark Blumenthal (an unreliable source for quantitative analysis), I urge Manjoo to download the National Election Pool a “Methods Statement” for the Edison Mitofsky (EM) exit polls (produced on Nov. 2 2006) at:



http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/MethodsStatementNationalFinal.pdf



The second page of this statement sets 95% confidence intervals for these polls (for a “characteristic” held by roughly 50% of those polled, for example a Presidential candidate preference for which there is a close to even split) squarely at 4% for sample sizes of 951-2350 – the range of reported sample sizes for these states. However, as Blumenthal knows, the reported sample sizes (also in the methods statements) are about half of what they really are (see Mitofsky correspondence in Baiman June 5 Free Press AAPOR report). For these true doubled sample sizes of 2351-5250, NEP’s own estimated confidence interval falls to 3%. This clearly puts the Ohio discrepancy of about 4% outside of the margin of error - even using NEP's inflated margins of error.

My margin of error calculations (and I believe Freeman’s) find a 2% margin of error with a 30% cluster adjustment factor. As I have stated in my earlier response to Manjoo, this puts Ohio well outside the margin of sampling error with odds of less than 1,900 that Kerry’s reported result is true given the exit poll result. This is not “slight” evidence but rather highly statistically significant, especially one considered with the inexplicable pro-Bush exit poll discrepancies in the two other key battle ground states of Florida and Pennsylvania. As Freeman and I have stated, the odds that these “sampling errors” (in the same direction and of these magnitudes) would occur for these three states simultaneously in less than one in 182,000,000 (i.e virtually impossible - this number is based on doubled sample sizes). Moreover, when one looks at precinct level exit poll data , and not just aggregate state polls, the evidence in even more striking and inexplicable. A fact that Manjoo has not addressed at all.



<snip>

http://www.baiman.blogspot.com/




Joel Bleifuss:
FEATURES > JUNE 19, 2006

Was the Presidential Election Stolen?


By JOEL BLEIFUSS



Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.



Exit polls can provide a wealth of information when they are analyzed in an informed way. They are a vital tool to ensure election integrity. The best use of the exit polls is not to oppose or replace the official count, but rather to serve as an alarm system to ensure democratic process.

It may turn out to be the case that the most accurate count in the 2004 presidential election was the exit-poll result. But the point isn’t to have to choose now between the exit-poll result and the official count. When exit polls contradict rather than confirm the official count, other parts of the machinery of democracy need to be activated—including the free press, which has the skills and the responsibility to investigate, and nonpartisan government bodies, which, through an entirely different array of methods, also have the skills and a civic mandate to investigate.

Our investigations lead us to conclude that we have little reason to trust the official results in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Few jurisdictions provided compelling verification that votes were counted as cast. Sixty-four percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic (DRE) voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which are, to different degrees, vulnerable to interference through hacking or programming fraud. In most cases Americans are being asked, in effect, to place our absolute trust in voting-machine corporations that have failed to meet minimal expectations of impartiality, honesty, freedom from conflict of interest and transparency. Why haven’t the companies that produce electronic voting machines made them so that they provide an audit trail (which is easily achieved through paper records)? And why haven’t they allowed government regulators to inspect their software? The answer to both these questions is that no one has effectively demanded that they do so.

As is the case in any system where there are incentives to cheat, random audits must be conducted to keep voting machine companies and office holders honest. In Ohio, the Green Party paid for a recount of Ohio’s ballots, but rather than acting in accord with Ohio law that counties choose a random sample of 3 percent of the total votes cast, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell interpreted “random” to mean a sample of the county’s choosing. As American Statistical Association President Fritz Schueren put it, this is “analogous to IRS agents allowing taxpayers to choose for themselves the items on their tax returns to be audited.”

<snip>

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2696

[kster]

5. I got one thing to say to you

:toast: and keep up the great work!

[mod mom]

6. It pisses me off that all the major OH papers use the same talking points

and never bothered looking into the evidence, they just took the GOP's word for it. Just maybe...I'll cause a little guilt to surface.

[roseBudd]

7. We all love email BUT I urge people to use the publicly available phone

numbers of these reporters who are not doing their jobs. Making a few phone calls in not investigating.

I have been to the Warren County BoE to look a pol books and seen missing and nonmatching signatures. Has Weiser or Wilkinson done that?