On election day, I hope to see long lines of voters stretching around the block at each Democratic stronghold. And I hope to hear that courts will allow polling places in Democratic precincts to remain open until midnight to enable all the citizens to vote. And would not it be great to read the crawl on the screen at MSNBC around 9 o’clock est saying
NBC calls the presidential election for Sen. Barack Obama. You can go to bed. ?
However, you will know that the Republicans are up to their usual dirty tricks if
I. Someone In Charge In A Battleground State Tries to Keep Exit Pollsters 100 Feet Away From the Polling Places Back in 2004, I knew that something was up in the state of Ohio before the first vote tallies were in. How? On the morning of election day, Ohio Secretary of State and Bush Campaign Chair Ken Blackwell issued an order trying to keep exit pollsters more than 100 feet away from voting places.
http://www.unknownnews.org/041109comvot.html Blackwell also was sued Monday by six national news organizations over a policy that would prevent exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place.
Five television networks -- ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC -- and the Associated Press filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, seeking additional access at the polls Tuesday. The organizations have formed a consortium to collect exit-polling data in Ohio and other states.
The networks and the AP said exit-poll reporters were allowed to conduct interviews within 100 feet of polls as recently as the March primary.
Did Ken Blackwell pull the figure “greater than 100 feet” out of his ass? No, he chose that number, because when exit pollsters are more than 100 feet from the voting location, their results become worthless as the graph on page 17 of the following pdf document demonstrates.
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdfThis paper is worth a read for those who have heard about Mitofsky’s “Reluctant Responders” theory. The authors demonstrate that a more likely cause of the vote tally/exit poll discrepancy was vote tabulation error in Bush strongholds. Also read the text on page 18. “The number of precincts where the pollsters was placed far from the polling places was small.” This was true only because the networks went to court to get an injunction against Ken Blackwell’s last minute order that would have kept exit pollsters more than 100 feet away from the polls---
rendering exit polls in the state of Ohio worthless .
Now, why would the Bush campaign chair decide at the last minute that exit polls had to be stopped in his state? I will give you one guess.
Karl Rove planned to commit vote fraud
beyond the margin of error , and he could not afford to have any smoking gun exit polls around that would tell the world that the vote had been miscounted in Republican controlled precincts. So, Blackwell was ordered to issue his order which would have the deliberate effect of making the exit polls so unreliable that when the discrepancy was noticed, the experts would say
It must be because we were too far from the polls. .
II. TV News Brings On An “Expert” On Election Night To Start Talking About the Bradley Effect As If It Is Science The latest science shows that the
Wilder Effect ( The so called Bradley Effect probably had little effect on the California Governor’s race which Bradley lost. His Republican opponent had a narrow victory thanks to a gun initiative on the ballot and the surprise appearance of a bunch of absentee ballots that were cast for him.) had, at most, a 2.3% impact on races before 1996. What that means is that if an African-American was running for office in some parts of the country, he could expect to do better in pre-election polls than he actually performed on election day. Why? Who knows. Maybe people lied to pollsters, claiming they intended to vote for a Black so they would look hip, when they really intended to vote white. Maybe they changed their minds in the voting booth. Maybe racists in the Republican Party ramped up their election fraud efforts when they knew that a Black was running out of a sense of white entitlement and outrage. Yes, southern whites have had ways to suppress minority voting and the tabulation of votes which minorities have cast for decades. E-voting is just the newest, most sophisticated form.
In any case, the so called Wilder Effect disappeared from elections in America after 1996. Now, Black candidates pre-election polls match their election performance. You can read all about it in thus elegant study,
http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/wilder13.pdfwhich has thrown a serious monkey wrench in McCain plans to steal E-votes beyond the margin of error and claim “It’s the Bradley Effect!” And, to those who say that there has never been a nationwide election involving an African-American, check out this article about how Obama’s election performance in the primary outperformed his pre-election polling.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/08/persistent-myth-of-bradley-effect.htmlIn other words, people were more likely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Hillary but in the voting booth they would turn around and vote for Obama. This was not sexism. There is something called the Front Runner Effect that played a roll in the Wilder election. When polled before elections, people will casually toss off the name with which they are most familiar. So, in the primary, they would say “Clinton.” But, by the time they got around to voting, they would have bothered to learn about the new candidates—which helped out Obama. The Wilder Effect benefits Obama in the general election, since McCain is better known with independents than Obama. McCain/Palin are desperately trying to associate Obama with
bad things right now so that last minute undecided voters will get to know him as someone scary.
More links about the so called Bradley Effect in my journal here
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/312The consensus at the moment is that the Bradley Effect was not much an effect even in the Bradley race. The main place where you see it talked about like the Holy Grail of the McCain campaign is over at the Free Republic. So, on election day, beware if Fox News pulls a Bradley Effect expert out of a hat.
III. Mass Transit in a Major Democratic Urban Area Gets Shut Down on Election Day Can’t happen, you say? You must not live in Fort Worth, Texas. Back in 2006, the Teamsters endorsed Republican Governor Rick Perry for re-election. They also happened to represent the workers at the T, the city of Fort Worth bus company. A few days before the 2006 midterm election, they called a bus strike for no particular reason. The city newspaper ran stories about how bad service was with the managers trying to drive the buses. A couple of days after the election, the strike ended
with no concessions by the city .
While early voting in Fort Worth had been brisk, as if was all across the country (Fort Worth city proper has lots of Democrats though the suburbs tend to be Republican), on election day itself the turn out was light compared to neighboring Dallas which still had mass transit available for its citizens who do not drive. The weather in North Texas was excellent. If that was a trial run to see what shutting down mass transit will do to the city vote, they proved their point.
Most unions would never pull this crap, and the Teamsters support Obama this year. However, there are other ways to cripple mass transit. So, vote early if you are dependent upon the bus or subway.
IV. Bush Tries to Launch a Major Military Offensive the Day After the Election Remember Fallujah? The Second Battle in which the U.S. managed to destroy the city, causing its several hundred thousand residents to be homeless? The battle in which we used illegal chemical weapons,
white phosphorus to be precise?
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1115-03.htm Reporter Darrin Mortenson wrote of watching Cpl Nicholas Bogert fire WP rounds into Fallujah. He wrote: "Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused."
Snip
One resident told him the US used "weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud" and that he watched "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns." The doctor said he "treated people who had their skin melted"
Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. In the RAI film, Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete ... Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children."
The Presidential election was held November 2, 2004. By November 7, 2004, the Bush administration had offered the press a major distraction---the fiery deaths of Iraqi civilians in Fallujah. The siege of the city was conveniently timed to keep people’s attention off the exit polls which the TV news organizations would not release and off the recounts which no one in Ohio wanted to do and off the closed door vote tabulations and the precincts which had greater than 100% voter turnout----all ballots cast for Bush.
There are plenty of wars to chose from if Bush-Cheney decide to repeat history and kill some civilians
over there so that people will not ask questions about election irregularities over here.
V. The DOJ Gets Involved In Any State’s Election Either Before or After Voting Takes Place Once upon a time there was a piece of legislation called
The Voting Rights Act which said that all U.S. citizens except for a few felons in a few states had a right to cast a vote in secret
and to have that vote counted. That was before the days of Ashcroft and Gonzales and Mukasey. Since Bush-Cheney came to office, the DOJ’s Voting Rights Division has rubber stamped two GOP state’s laws in two of the southern states which have to get federal approval for any voting legislation (Texas and Georgia. These laws were then shot down by the SCOTUS as being illegal. There was a photo ID law in Georgia that the court ruled was a poll tax. And there was redistricting law in Texas which illegally diluted Latino voting strength to favor the GOP. This proves that the Bush DOJ is not doing its job in protecting voters’ rights. In fact, the only voters’ rights case that it has brought is one for
reverse discrimination against white folks. No one was charged in the case of the bogus felon’s list in Florida which was designed specifically to strip tens of thousands of African-Americans from the rolls because their names
sounded like the names of felons somewhere in the United States (!!!!!). No one was charged in the case of the separate and unequal treatment of Black voters in Ohio in 2004.
Worse yet, Bush recently called upon Mukasey to get his wrinkly butt up to Ohio and do something about keeping those hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters from having their votes tabulated (in clear violation of federal law), because many of them were likely to be Democrats who would vote against his hand selected Pardoner-in-Chief John McCain.
Since Mukasey has proven that he has never met a law that he will not ignore at the orders of his master in the oval office (see his stance on torture, habeas corpus),
if you see the Department of (In)Justice, the FBI or anyone else under his jurisdiction try to seize ballots, voting machines or take over the control of a state’s election from the people who are supposed to be running that election
it means trouble . Recall that Bush v. Gore was not supposed to set a precedent. The Supreme Court said so.
And if the DOJ tries to get involved
before election day, issuing orders about who can and can not vote and what kind of protocol must be followed---well, that is even worse. If it is going to happen, expect it to occur late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, that way the states will have to scramble to get federal judges to issue restraining orders.
VI. Busloads of Republican “Protesters” Arrive In Any Battleground State To Start Riots Before or After the Vote Remember the Brooks Brother Riots? The Congressional Aids and Lobbyists who crossed state lines in violation of organized crime statutes in order to threaten those conducting a lawful vote recount in Florida?
http://www.democrats.com/joel-kaplan The Brooks Brothers Riot – carried live on CNN and other networks – marked a turning point in the recount battle. At the time, Bush clung to a lead that had dwindled to several hundred votes and Gore was pressing for recounts. The riot in Miami and the prospects of spreading violence were among the arguments later cited by defenders of the 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 12, 2000, that stopped a statewide Florida recount and handed Bush the presidency.
Backed by the $13.8 million war chest, the Bush operation made clear in Miami and in other protests that it was ready to kick up plenty of political dust if it didn’t get its way.
A later unofficial recount by news organizations found that if all legally cast ballots in Florida had been counted – regardless of which kinds of chads were accepted, whether punched-through, hanging or dimpled – Gore would have won Florida and thus the presidency. Gore also won the national popular vote, defeating Bush by more than a half million votes, making Bush the first popular-vote loser in more than a century to be installed in the White House.
Karl Rove likes to repeat himself. If this election is close, he will look into his old bag of tricks and pull out whatever worked before. So, if you see a “spontaneous eruption of conservative anger”----it isn’t spontaneous.
Bonus points if alumni from the original Brooks Bros. Riot show up in another staged riot. If the rioters show up early on election day itself, this will be an even worse sign, since it means that they are trying to set it off, so that Bush can move on to number VII.
VII. National Guard From One State Is Sent To Another State Before or After the Vote ….in anticipation of or reaction to election related violence. Or to secure polling places and seize ballots and machines. Or just because Homeland Insecurity says there is a terror threat. That is when you
know we have a stolen election on our hands. How many Democratic voters can be dissuaded from turning out if there is a ring of soldiers or police surrounding their polling place? Wouldn’t the GOP love to find out?
The old “police blockade” of the Democratic polling place is a tried and true Southern vote suppression strategy that the administration could recycle this election, claiming that they are actually trying to protect Democratic voters. The Republicans used it in Florida, 2000. A television news crew had a camera set up, and the viewer could watch as cars approached the polling spot, the drivers saw the police cars, turned around and drove away. Democracy in action.
This Ripley’s Believe It or Not list of voter suppression, election theft strategies represent tactics that the GOP has used before or (in the case of the Bradley Effect) is using now. Know them, just in case. W. has not been able to get the Iraqis to sign away their oil rights, which was the whole reason for the invasion, so he is not going to want to turn over the White House if he has nothing to show for his biggest investment of U.S. dollars. He would much rather have the occupation continue for four more years, until the Iraqis get so sick of having us over there that they give us a big share of their oil just to win their freedom. If he has to steal another election to do that, what the hell? Oil business is more important than democracy to George W. Bush.
If only Rove would teach Dumbya how to do math. Now, these figures are a few years old. Oil prices have risen. But back in 2005, here is an estimate of the money that U.S. oil companies stood to make from the U.S. financed occupation of Iraq which could be used to force that country to write special contracts that favored Chevron and Exxon.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm Economic projections published here for the first time show that the model of oil development that is being proposed will cost Iraq hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue, while providing foreign companies with enormous profits.
Our key findings are:
# At an oil price of $40 per barrel, Iraq stands to lose between $74 billion and $194 billion over the lifetime of the proposed contracts (2), from only the first 12 oilfields to be developed. These estimates, based on conservative assumptions, represent between two and seven times the current Iraqi government budget.
# Under the likely terms of the contracts, oil company rates of return from investing in Iraq would range from 42% to 162%, far in excess of usual industry minimum target of around 12% return on investment.
The problem is that the occupation costs taxpayers a lot more money than that. $10 billion a month of money to be precise. The Washington Post recently estimated that the total cost of the Neo-Cons colonial jaunt into Iraq will be
$3 trillion . Wouldn't it have been smarter to have handed out some of that $3 trillion to the oil companies and told them to invest in alternative energy----wind, solar, nuclear? Then our 4000 troops would still be alive and a million Iraqis would still have a home.
I guess you can't expect much from a Texas Village Idiot who turned to politics because he could not make it in business. Even their election theft strategies have been sloppy. If not for the help of the corporate media in 2000 and 2004, they never would have gotten away with it. If they do not try the seven tricks I have outlined above, it will not be because they did not think about it. No, they will be cautious only if the people who control the press tell them
This time we are not going to cover for you. And this time, I think even the press is fed up. Stock Market crashes have that effect on people.
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