...working on 2004 election data with clean hearts and clean hands, and despite the considerable danger involved in challenging the Bush regime and its lapdog news monopolies. Frankly, I can't think of anything more difficult or more dangerous.
Be advised: My donation is on its way. It's not big, but I hope it reminds others here that challenging these powers in an organized way needs our support. DUers!!!! Wake up! Contribute whatever you can NOW!
You may mail checks to:
USCountVotes
P.O. Box 682556
Park City, UT 84068
Or make an on-line donation at:
http://www.uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=40-----
The lack of verifiability of the election, and all the confusion that Edison-Mitofsky has created, seem quite planned to me. Why should there be any confusion about what the official tally or the exit polls say?
E/M has created confusion by the type of polling they did, by "adjusting" the polls to fit the official tally (depriving Americans of the real exit poll result), by withholding data, by eking out data and explanations in fits and starts, and by tossing out unsupported theories to explain it all. Why do this?
If they had wanted to verify the election, they could easily have done so. And this election system cried out for proper verification procedures. Many aspects of the election system were controversial, or just plain absurd, including the ownership and control of the secret vote counting software by major donors to the Bush campaign, the lack of a paper trail, and the insecurity and hackability of electronic voting machines and tabulators. So, why didn't Edison-Mitofsky do a poll specifically designed to verify the vote count--as is done in every other democracy in the world?
I have asked this question in other posts at DU, and naysayers have replied that the private business interests who commissioned the poll--that is, all the major TV networks that are using our public airwaves for private gain--had the right to commission whatever kind of poll they wanted, and, if somebody else--the general public, the Democratic Party--wanted verification, they should have paid for it themselves.
This reply is much too simplistic. It fails to acknowledge the reality of the overweening influence that these TV networks have upon our elections, including the billions of dollars they receive in political campaign advertising--which has turned our political life into a corporate pigsty--the untimely prediction of winners (so critical in the year 2000 Florida situation, and also in 2004), and their control over political debate--which has had such a corrosive, trivializing impact on American political life.
Their use of our public airwaves is a privilege, not a right. They are supposed to earn that privilege through public service. They furthermore have an obligation as journalists to monitor, investigate and oppose the government--an obligation that they have repeatedly failed at, throughout the Bush presidency--never so much so as by their commission of exit polls that would be fitted to the official result. Why kind of journalism is that? It is lapdog journalism. There is no other word for it.
The fact is that nobody can prove Bush won this election, and that is the problem.
The official tally was under the control of two corporations, both of them run by Bush partisans, with ample means, motive and opportunity to produce whatever result they wanted. The election system was characterized by severe insecurity and utter lack of transparency. If you try to track it back--from the official results on TV, to the AP computers into which the results were fed, to the state and county computers that were compiling reports from the precincts, back to the voters casting their votes, you are brought to a halt somewhere around the central electronic tabulators in the states and counties. No one knows how they tabulate the results from the precincts. No one--not even state election officials--has the right to review the tabulation software. And if you travel past this rather big hurdle back to the voter, you find NO RECORD OF HOW THEY VOTED that can be independently checked, in one third of the voting machines in the country, and little or no auditing of the machines that do have some kind of record.
Then you find numerous reports (in the Election Incident Reports) of people voting for Kerry and the MACHINES CHANGING their votes to Bush (in 86 out of 88 incidents), or defaulting to Bush, or deleting Kerry votes in a party vote ballot, or counting backwards, deleting thousands of votes, or showing 4,000 votes for Bush in a precinct with 600 registered voters--with virtually all these "anomalies" favoring Bush and none favoring Kerry--an impossibility.
Kerry had near unbeatable advantages going into this election (huge Democratic success in new voter registration in 2004--nearly 60/40; miserable Bush approval ratings; big jump of Nader voters to Kerry; big turnout--always favors Democrats, etc., etc.) And, IN ADDITION, the exit polls showed a Kerry win.
Against all this evidence, what the Bush regime and the news monopolies have is an unprovable election. And so they just made stuff up. Their exit polls showed a Kerry win--so they changed them! Alert citizens and statistics experts got hold of the real exit poll result, so they invented a theory, out of whole cloth, for why their exit polls were wrong (and won't or can't support it with the data). The voter registration statistics showed a huge Democratic success in new voter registrations, so they promulgated Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's "talkings points" about the Republicans' "invisible" voter registration and GOTV campaign.
US Count Votes is the clear-eyed child in the street watching the Emperor's parade go by--and crying out, "The Emperor has no clothes!"
The "adults" in the crowd--those with a vested interest in contributing to the Emperor's delusion that he is clothed--refuse to see the obvious, and can't or wont' say it.
If the Bush regime had wanted a transparent, verifiable election, why didn't we have one?
This is the situation we are dealing with--one of pervasive lying, power-mongering. vast corruption, war profiteering, and worse. The folks at US Count Votes are extraordinarily brave to take it on. I salute you!
Now, take a deep breath! Get some rest! And remember, it's not up to you alone. It's up to all of us.
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DUers! Any spare bucks you have in your pockets--or even unspare ones that you would be willing to part with, for this most worthy of causes--do so now!