How does Salon know this was a fair election?

[springhill]

When you don't even know what the machines did with the votes? How in the hell can they know? Nobody does. And to suggest that we can just focus on 2006 or 2008 without getting rid of these machines is fruitless. Now, I hate to say this, but even in 2000 tons of "liberal" commentators kept quiet about the stole election. Why do you think this year will be any different. I, for myself, am not going to dismiss out of hand the fact that almost every exit poll in the swing states had Kerry leading, a lead that just disappeared. And that every internal poll supported that. Tell me, please, anyone, before 2000 when the exit polls did not accurately reflect who the winner would be. Can someone please tell me, cause I don't know of a one.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/10/voting /

[StephanieMarie]

1. Here's the Letter I just Wrote to Salon

regarding their treasonous article:

How much did the Republican thugs pay you to say that the election was fair? How in the world could any rational being look at these charts and see anything other than massive, coordinated, deliberate fraud? Kerry won both the electoral and the popular vote, and you know it. So, how much did they pay you?
Stephanie Wilson

<I included here the bar charts showing the exit polls vs. vote count in paper states and non-paper states>

This is my new activism. Any article I see that includes a mention of shrub "winning", I write in my correction! The election was stolen!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[GR]

2. Don't You See, They Said Nothing Was Wrong, What More Do You Need...

Yes that article was a whole lot of nothing and some of the quotes seemed to support the existence of election fraud rather than debunk it.

[tngledwebb]

3. Thanks,

another Corporate Media enemy of democracy positively identified.

[On the Road]

4. What Salon Said Was That

none of the articles so far claiming the election was stolen can prove that assertion. This is true -- Greg Palast's article was one of the most egregious in this regard.

It's easy for the press or the public to confuse "it hasn't been proven" with "it didn't happen." This is a big danger. This is why I've been discouraging accusations until more evidence has been assembled. If the window of media and public attention closes before there's a smoking gun, the whole issue will be assigned to the fringes and no one will pay attention. Look at Florida in 2000. Nothing was ever done about Escambia County, even though the official totals strongly suggest fraud.

This is the time to vigorously pursue irregularities without claiming that they will overturn the results. We just don't know yet. Credibility is everything.

[milkyway]

5. Terrible. Does not address the main way to steal it: hacking the vote

totals.

[crispini]

6. The article didn't suck, but it wasn't all that great either.

IMO, getting anything out there is better than getting nothing out there. But people, when you write them, please sound RATIONAL! Don't sound so convinced, like a tinfoil-hatter. Just point out that some of these things have not yet been explained, and they need to be explained.

Here's more or less what I wrote to them.

The Salon.com story is OK -- it refutes some of the voting irregularities, but it doesn't do a complete job.

- It touches on the "Dixiecrats in Florida" issue, but Olbermann pointed out that only five of the counties they looked at were in the panhandle. The other 24 were scattered across the state, and had nothing in common other than the optical scan balloting.

- It did absolutely NOTHING to address the facts that are coming out on blackboxvoting.org about the ease-of-hackability of the systems. Their FOIA request showed that the Diebold central tabulators were never even evaluated from a security standpoint by the company that was supposed to do the evaluation. I showed their article to a coworker who is a certified ethical hacker -- he is a white hat security expert. He said that he had written more security into our last product (which does nothing business-critical, and does not protect anything very important) than they had for an election.

- It still doesn't answer the question of why the exit polls were so off? Several people have weighed in on this, including Sheldon Drobny, a former CPA and founder of Air America Radio. Interesting article here:

http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10385

Anyway, I'm not sitting here like chicken little saying "the election was stolen, the election was stolen." I'm just saying that the more I look into this -- with my programmer co-workers, who are actually mostly Republicans, not lefty conspiracy theorists -- the more I realize that there have been egregious security lapses.