• flashback November 2, 2004 | 5:51 p.m. ET
John Zogby’s
polling was generally considered the most accurate during the crazed
2000 election, and if he maintains that measure of reliability, you can
go to sleep now.
Zogby’s final tracking poll, state by state, released at 5:30 EST,
suggests the prospect of a Kerry win by a margin of 311 Electoral Votes
to 213, with only Colorado and Nevada
too close to call
(and representing just fourteen votes between them).
Oh and by the way, he has Mr. Bush winning the popular vote, narrowly -
an irony of biblical proportions that one Democratic pollster rated a
one-in-three chance just last week.
It should be noted Zogby is doing a lot of extrapolating. In the
two from Column A (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania), two from Column B
(Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin) states, he gives them all to Kerry.
But Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are listed as “trending Kerry” based on exit polling. The smaller
three states show Kerry up by 5-6%.
up!
• flashback November 2, 2004 | 6:46 p.m. ET
The
tone of Norah O’Donnell’s first report from the White House suggested
that whatever the Re-Election Campaign is reading in the way of exit
polls, they must be similar to the 5:30 ET final Zogby tracking numbers
which forecast a Kerry
landslide by as many as 100 Electoral Votes (while giving Mr. Bush an absolutely
useless popular majority of 3/10ths of one percent). Norah
reported the President and his supporters putting on positive but
somewhat forced faces.
And if they heard the first set of nationwide exit polling released by
NBC a little after 6 PM, the White House can’t be very hopeful:
54% thought the economy was “not
good”; only 45% “good.”
46% thought they were worse off today than they were in 2000; only 21%
said they were better off;
Only 52% said they thought we were safer from the threat of terrorism
now than before; 43% thought we were less safe.
And while 53% said they were somewhat worried about another terrorist
attack, just 22% described themselves as “very” worried”, a comparatively small percentage.
All of which
brings us to what might be a very unpleasant Election Night party in
the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington - the President’s soiree.
up!
A professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, notes that in Florida the vote to raise the
minimum wage was approved by 72%, but Kerry got 48%. "The
correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for
Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would
normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - would be far
smaller than it was."
up!
My plan now is to compose an explicit
summary of what went down and to visit as many news/current
affairs/politics sites, but especially american, and paste the facts
into whatever 'leave a message/contribute to discussions' they
have. There's a lot ignorant of all this and the message needs to
appear as much as possible [critical mass?] so they can educated about
what just happened. Michael Moore might have some ideas so I'll
go visit there first.
The new UP!
is good, you manage your apology with style. What can I
say? I also suspended doubts I should have nurtured from last
time [you helped make it all seem hopeful!], but it did seem like the
other way. Lesson, we must never give in to optimism ;-) but keep
it in a pocket for when it really can be got out.
Love and peace
Pete Password, Hereford, UK
up!
Election night, just after midnight, during
the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled
to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W.
Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit
polls were clear: Kerry
was winning in a landslide. "Bush
took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several
pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News
regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by
every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of
brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential
fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from
those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by
substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative
turnout of different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry
was slated to carry Florida,
Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of
which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to
Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
A few hours after the exit polls were
showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerised vote numbers began to
come in from the various states, the election was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
up!
It Was All
Predicted Months Ago Live
On TV!
Several months ago, on the CNBC TV show "Topic
A With Tina Brown," Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as
guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who
started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that
regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only
done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done
by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read
paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the
scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a
touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central
tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In
a voting system," Harris explained to Dean
on national television, "you
have all the different voting machines at all the different polling
places. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up
all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something
you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it
to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of
them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the
central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's
just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody
who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program
called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns
it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County
Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a
PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They
went to the screen titled "Election
Summary Report" and waited a moment while the
PC "adds up all the votes
from all the various precincts," and then
saw that in this sample election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor
had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't
tamper with this software," Harris
noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC!
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the
normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder
"LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep
the votes." Harris then had Dean
double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes,"
which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like
Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had
received 800 votes and Lex Luthor 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from
one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give Tiger 100 votes."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county
supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean
has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took
us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (clip on www.votergate.tv.)
And they’d left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that
it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a
County election official - to know that the vote database had
been altered.
up!
• flashback November 2, 2004 | 9:01 p.m. ET
Exit numbers meaning a Bush exit?
Secaucus The exit polling is sometimes easy enough to read that
even I can figure it out.
The NBC information released at 8:23 indicates numbers crushing for the
president’s hopes of gaining significant votes based on the war in Iraq.
Only 12% of voters nationally agreed that things were “going well” in Iraq, and
only another 32% said things were going “somewhat
well” there. 55% were clearly
negative, saying things were going “badly.”
More significantly perhaps, the President’s argument that the war in
Iraq is a component of the war on terror, was only partially successful
with voters - 52%. 45% said the two elements were separate.
Overall, the exit polls show voters evenly split about the wisdom to go
into Iraq in the first place, 48-48.
And most strikingly, when asked if the action in Iraq improved our
security or harmed it, only 43% said it had improved it 54% felt
otherwise.
No wonder Norah O’Donnell’s latest report refers to more grim faces
inside the White House strategy and war rooms - what we liked to call
the “interior numbers” would suggest that the fundaments of the President’s
re-election strategy haven’t succeeded, and the Zogby forecast of a
Kerry 100+ Electoral College vote looks ever-increasingly plausible.
And those “interior numbers” in Ohio fascinate. The NBC exit polling there
suggests the state saw 800,000 new voters 13% of the entire
electorate there - and they went 56-44 Kerry (58-41 Kerry among those
under 30), with the only demographic group going for the President in
Ohio being those 60 and over.
But Ohio still shows the closeness of the votes-in-hand.
As of 8:15 EST, out of the 40,367 absentee ballots cast in Franklin
County that’s Columbus, the President led Senator Kerry by
exactly 267 of them. That’s not the case in Cuyahoga (Cleveland),
where Kerry got nearly two out of every three absentees (49,816 to
27,770).
up!
Fox's Dick Morris, wrapping up his story for The Hill,
wrote in his final paragraph, "This
was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as
they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
up!
When the majority of Americans
realise they’ve been conned (again) surely there has to be some massive
civil disobedience. The majority of Americans who voted for Kerry
should do something, like refusing
to pay their taxes that are used to fight an illegal war in order to bolster Halliburton’s already
ill-gotten profits.
And why not? This would be more effective than complaining about
the result. Or - how about everyone begs OPEC to switch oil trading
currency to the Euro, that would create a "run" on the US dollar (kinda
like what happened to Argentina) - thus bringing the war machine to a
grinding halt. . . . just a thought, and admittedly it is quite
extreme, but so is another four years of Bush madness!!!
marc deeley, glasgow.
up!
Ehhh Frrrazer,
A bit of a half drunk night mail, my semi forbidden semi Pitbull dog
invaded my armchair and I am typing on the floor. I am sitting
here, shifting some of my meagre remainders of past Internet
investments to Solar Energy Stocks. Why I do this? Because
Oil Peak will hit soon... IT WILL! And the UP! brought my
attention back to this long known and rather unavoidable FACT!
The thing that annoys me is that the re- enthroned Government of the
u-dot-s-dot and their cronies profit most from the crisis - a crisis
that is not a coming one but one that already is in full bloom.
The oil price will rise, rise and ever rise from now on (well - it will
wax and wane and go up and down to create this and that illusion to
fool those who are unable to extend their memories and their foresight
beyond 3 months) but otherwise REALITY will take over and the oil price
will go up and up and up and up.
And those who have oil - as little as that may be - will profit from
that rise. If I were a Texas Oil well owner, I'd put my pumps all
on halt and WAIT. WAIT, WAIT, WAIT. The best investment I could
make! Because it will not be long before people will sell their
souls for the rotten remainder of oily sludge that rests in my
hypothetical ground.... Let us not forget that Oil Peak means a
major shift of... EVERYTHING. Well - not really of everything.
The astronomer in me tells me that the universe at large will remain
rather unimpressed. But for us little Earth dwellers everything
will be at stake. And this shift is happening. Right
now. Right here on the one and only planet Earth, and not
somewhere in some anti utopian novel fantasy.
I am wondering if there is any credibility to the stories related to the voting machines.
Although I am a Geographer and Astro Physicist who sank down (after the
shadowy bankruptcy of a long forgotten world company named Commodore
International) to the levels of being a mere writer, I did once in the
early ‘90s own a company specialising in Systems Security. And
therefore, yes - I assume this
ballot betrayal is well within the realm of the possible.
But to quote one of my heroes, the
great Richard Feynman: "The question is
not whether something is possible. The Question is whether it actually
is going on..." What would be
worse: if George Bush were re-elected by manipulation, or if despite
his records he were re-elected by an actual popular vote of the people
of the United States of America?
Now it is time to throw my dog out of the armchair and go to
sleep. Like most of the rest of the PLANET.
• flashback November 2, 2004 | 10:35 p.m. ET
It's 10 p.m., do you know where your
spin is?
Secaucus How right have we been tonight about the distress in the
White House? The re-election campaign admitted a pool camera and
still photographers to the residence to videotape images of Mr. Bush
and his family sitting around stiffly on a couch, he in a white shirt
and a tie, smiling towards the media and saying “I believe I will
win. It’s going to be an exciting evening.”
Well, the night Titanic sank was an exciting evening.
The President’s men had begun whining about the exit polling and its
interpretation since shortly after 7 PM tonight. Norah
O’Donnell’s 9:50 EST report had referred to “anxiety” from Republicans
out in the field, and perhaps the odd photo-op was designed as much to
reassure them as to counter-effect the exit polling with which the
White House so fervently disagreed.
Brian Williams offered the astute observation that the White House did
need to influence photo and videotape selection. Mr. Bush had
been captured with stern and/or exhausted looks on his face at
yesterday’s pre-election events, and today’s voting - and that’s the
last thing the campaign wanted to project. Hence, in Norah’s
phrase, the decision to “put the
President out.”
As I write here Mr. Bush is up by around 80 Electoral Votes, and just
about that many from the promised land. But the Zogby forecast
from 5:30 EST tonight - which ends with Senator Kerry getting at least
311 and the President no more than 227 - has performed flawlessly
through the first 32 NBC state projections.
up!
On Friday I received a phone call from a good friend who
works at CBS. I've known her for years and she is a producer for
some of the news programs, one well known one in particular.
She tipped me off that the news media is in a "lock-down"
and that there is to be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting
on Nov. 2nd. She said similar "lock-down
orders" had come up last year after the Iraq invasion, but
this is far worse - far scarier.
She said the majority of their journalists at CBS and elsewhere in NYC
are pretty horrified - every one is worried about their jobs and
retribution Dan Rather style or worse.
My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on
their own time but she was pissed and her journalistic and moral
integrity as a gov't watchdog requires her to speak out, albeit
covertly, and she asked me to "spread" the word...She said journalism
and truth are at stake.
She said another friend of hers, a producer at MSNBC, told her an
anchor by the name of Keith Olbermann [see
several entries from him in this UP!] had raised it on
his show on Friday eve and the axe came down. At least he’s
fighting back and talking about it on his "Blog", but she said people
there are worried he's going to be fired.
She said the only way the "real news"
was going to get out at this point is if the people start talking and
made a big enough stink about it to our elected officials, the FEC, and
"noise" to the international media,
that our own media won't have any choice but to cover it. (Yes,
this is really happening in the good ole' supposed "democratic" free
press of the US of A). The only place you'll see this talked
about right now is on the internet and on AirAmericaRadio.