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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
 Posted - 08/22/2008 : 09:22:18
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I was perusing new movies on My Yahoo and I came across a documentary called "Stealing America: Vote by Vote" and the description starts like this:
| For more than thirty years, exit polls accurately predicted election results. Over the last ten years that reliability has disappeared. What's going on? |
I recall some talk about how the exit polls were suddenly wrong and how the odds of that happening by accident were very high. (This was the 2004 election, right?) The simplest explanation of such a strange occurence is vote tampering, IMHO. Of course I know next to nothing about the entire affair, so my opinion is truely humbe. But I do find it very suspicious. Considering the ethics and integrity demonstrated by the Bush Administration, I would not at all be surprised to find out they rigged some portion of the election.
Any thoughts on this? Is it a paranoid conspiracy theory or is there real evidence that the 2004 election was stolen.
Link to movie page.... http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810035056/details
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-Chaloobi
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2008 : 09:39:13 [Permalink]
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Rolling Stone covered this back in 2006. There was just so much weirdness going on, especially in Ohio, that I don't think you need to be particularly paranoid to be skeptical of the results.
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2008 : 10:05:47 [Permalink]
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| The film "Uncounted" did a pretty good job of covering this too. |
Diversity, independence, innovation and imagination are progressive concepts ultimately alien to the conservative mind.
"TAX AND SPEND" IS GOOD! (TAX: Wealthy corporations who won't go poor even after taxes. SPEND: On public works programs, education, the environment, improvements.) |
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Rubicon95
Skeptic Friend
USA
220 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2008 : 14:28:08 [Permalink]
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My Source
This is the part that we should be really worried about.
218 million American of voting age
168 million Registered
123 Million Ballots case
Only 56% of those of the age to vote, voted.....
No one can justifiably say that the people have spoken. Bush "I have a mandate from the electorate"
If voter turn out is the same for 08,
If Obama wins by 10%, Dems will claim mandate from the people which it isn't
If McCain wins, closely or decisively, groups will cite fraud...
Our elections are a joke. |
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tomk80
SFN Regular
Netherlands
1278 Posts |
Posted - 08/22/2008 : 16:37:44 [Permalink]
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| Does the documentary discuss Febble's fancy function? |
Tom
`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'
-Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll- |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 14:23:12 [Permalink]
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I've been struggling with a translation of an expression regarding voting.
Is it correct to say that someone "is eligible to vote" to describe someone who fulfill everything necessary to grant him the right to vote?
Merriam-Webster is a bit unclear on the subject.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 14:53:30 [Permalink]
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It is indeed the correct expression.
Electing really mean choosing. So, being eligible to vote just meant that he would be chosen to be among the voters.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 08/25/2008 : 16:29:48 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
I've been struggling with a translation of an expression regarding voting.
Is it correct to say that someone "is eligible to vote" to describe someone who fulfill everything necessary to grant him the right to vote?
Merriam-Webster is a bit unclear on the subject. |
Right, exactly. "Eligible to vote" just means that the person has met all the requirements to vote. That they are able to vote if they desire, but are no means required to. Actually, I thought Merriam-Webster summed it up pretty well with their first definition of "qualified to participate."
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
| Edited by - H. Humbert on 08/25/2008 16:31:52 |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 08/26/2008 : 17:32:31 [Permalink]
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I misinterpreted the first Webster definition as meaning someone being "electable". Simon's explanation makes it make perfect sense.
Thanks guys.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/02/2008 : 10:30:31 [Permalink]
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| Ok, I read most of the Rolling Stone article, noting the thorough footnoting and so on. I'm convinced. So why did the Democrats do nothing? Why did all the major news media roll over and play dead? If you believe A that the election was obviously rigged, then what about B, the fact that all major entities - media and political - played along? |
-Chaloobi
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Vic Daring
New Member
49 Posts |
Posted - 09/03/2008 : 10:05:13 [Permalink]
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I tend to put stolen elections into the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" category.
I don't dismiss the notion, but I think it's wise to tread lightly. Else you can wind up sounding like a raving loon. (Think Dylan Avery.) |
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. |
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astropin
SFN Regular
USA
970 Posts |
Posted - 09/03/2008 : 10:15:24 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Vic Daring
I tend to put stolen elections into the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" category.
I don't dismiss the notion, but I think it's wise to tread lightly. Else you can wind up sounding like a raving loon. (Think Dylan Avery.)
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I'm with you.
Then again....when it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. |
I would rather face a cold reality than delude myself with comforting fantasies.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and I am free to ridicule you for it.
Atheism:
The result of an unbiased and rational search for the truth.
Infinitus est numerus stultorum |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/03/2008 : 10:45:31 [Permalink]
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Have you read the article? Assuming the references in the article arn't falsified or too exaggerated, the evidence looks pretty extraordinary.
I think nobody dares go there out of a sense of arrogance and horror. First, to make the accusation, to even accept that rigging a US election is possible, or that one of two major parties would do something so heinous, to get your mind around the idea that this could happen in the US is to visciously attack our self-concept, our pride, as a nation. If it's true then that means we're no better than the faux democracies in the 3rd world; it's deeply humiliating.
Second, if it's found to be true it means you have to get the Federal government - the Justice Department controlled by the rigging entity - to act. What do you do when the Presidential election is found to be rigged and the Executive Branch dismisses the findings? Imagine the leadership crisis, the political chaos that would follow.
It's almost knee jerk to reject this accusation out of hand - no need to look into it, as by it's nature it's just the crazy talk of the lunatic fringe consipracy theorists. And we all shudder to think of the consequences if it were found to be true - better to let it go and just make sure it doesn't happen again. |
-Chaloobi
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Vic Daring
New Member
49 Posts |
Posted - 09/04/2008 : 06:05:16 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by chaloobi
Have you read the article? Assuming the references in the article arn't falsified or too exaggerated, the evidence looks pretty extraordinary. |
I read it in a doctor's waiting room right after it was first published, actually. So I admittedly don't recall a lot of detail now.
I do recall my own reaction was to ask myself if I'd accept the same level of evidence from, say, a UFO sighting or a psychic reading. And I had to admit that I probably would not.
I think nobody dares go there out of a sense of arrogance and horror. First, to make the accusation, to even accept that rigging a US election is possible, or that one of two major parties would do something so heinous, to get your mind around the idea that this could happen in the US is to visciously attack our self-concept, our pride, as a nation. If it's true then that means we're no better than the faux democracies in the 3rd world; it's deeply humiliating.
Second, if it's found to be true it means you have to get the Federal government - the Justice Department controlled by the rigging entity - to act. What do you do when the Presidential election is found to be rigged and the Executive Branch dismisses the findings? Imagine the leadership crisis, the political chaos that would follow.
It's almost knee jerk to reject this accusation out of hand - no need to look into it, as by it's nature it's just the crazy talk of the lunatic fringe consipracy theorists. And we all shudder to think of the consequences if it were found to be true - better to let it go and just make sure it doesn't happen again.
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No doubt.
Like I said earlier, though, my other concern is that once you hop on that train, it's tough to get off. |
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/04/2008 : 08:05:50 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Vic Daring
I do recall my own reaction was to ask myself if I'd accept the same level of evidence from, say, a UFO sighting or a psychic reading. And I had to admit that I probably would not.
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I'm not sure how you would compare statistical analysis of exit polls and return data to UFO sigtings. Seems completely unrelated to me...
Per the article, statistically, there's almost no way Bush could have won based on the exit polls. And there's been no reason found how the exit polls could be wrong.
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18)
<snip>
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
<snip>
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)
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In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''
What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.'' |
Overall odds against Bush winning based on exit polls: < 450k to 1. I'd take that bet with my life savings. I think this by itself is compelling enough evidence to warrant a thorough investigation.
But by who? The Justice Department? Yeah, right. Congress? Still controlled by the Republicans at that time. Democratic party? Sore losers with very real conflicts of interest. The Media? Roll over, play dead. Good dog.
I think we are so sure an American nation wide election can not and would not be stolen we don't even have a mechanism to investigate it, much less do anything about it, when the evidence is there. |
-Chaloobi
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| Edited by - chaloobi on 09/04/2008 08:06:54 |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 09/04/2008 : 08:37:48 [Permalink]
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Vic:
I do recall my own reaction was to ask myself if I'd accept the same level of evidence from, say, a UFO sighting or a psychic reading. And I had to admit that I probably would not. |
Well, the difference is there were major pollsters there like Harris who investigated on there own because the numbers made no sense. The anomalies are just to great to wave it away as the kind of confirmation bias that you would expect from those advocating alien visitations and proof of psychic phenomena. And while we have never confirmed the examples you use as having enough supporting evidence to raise them to the level of serious plausibility, real cases of voter fraud are well documented, even if not on this level in this country.
No exit poll has ever been so far off that the swing went from one candidate as a clear winner by serous numbers, to a loser. Worse yet are the precincts that had more votes than there were people registered to vote there.
Another thing to consider when were looking at these as anomalies, is they favored Bush in almost every case. Also, these same exit polls are used to determine if elections in other countries are fixed. And that is just exit poll evidence. There were other strange happenings, also favoring Bush.
Now, I am not fond of conspiracy theories. But this stuff is well sourced and real numbers exist. Hell, even Fox news declared that unless the exit polls in Ohio are completely wrong, then Bush looses.
As I said, you don't have be paranoid to be skeptical of the results of the election in Ohio.
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Stolen Elections?
