The staggeringly impossible results of Ohio's '05 election

Wurm · #1 11-14.-2005

Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back?

With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it.

As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America. I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently plead guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard alongside progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by < ahref="http://ReformOhioNow.org">ReformOhioNow.org -- a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell.

On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different -- and we mean impossibly! -- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

Now, you tell us...What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch's poll and the final results?

Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employeeing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper) confirmed to be easily hackable.

Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election finally light a fire under the media -- either nationally or just in Ohio alone -- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain hopeful...if not optimistic.

The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1...or...somebody hacked that vote count:

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln. And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.

Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-f...b_b_10589.html

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Now what have the Sheep on CF here have to say about this one, pray tell? Oh, it's just another "conspiracy" by sore-loser Dems, huh?

NOT.

wheelist · #2 11-15.-2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wurm

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.

Now what have the Sheep on CF here have to say about this one, pray tell? Oh, it's just another "conspiracy" by sore-loser Dems, huh?

NOT.

Nice post Wurm.

Exactly the kind of voting practices we in the UK expect to hear about taking place in the US.

God knows we're looking forward to following in your shoes by utilising the latest technology (and other practices) to pervert any remaining possibilities of democracy even further. Postal votes seem to be working okay at the moment, but we'll need further measures if we're to truly derail the legitimacy of our leaders, like you've done over there.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Wurm · #3 11-15.-2005

With Blair being the Bush-stooge that he is, unless you guys oust him soon I don't doubt you'll be quickly on your way to "modern democracy" as well.

rule62 · #4 11-15.-2005

Decaf guys...switch to decaf.

**limerickman** · #5 11-15.-2005

The issue of electronic voting is very contentious to say the least,

Let me give you a quick rundown of what happened here.

In our democracy, since the foundation of this country, voters completed their voting cards and placed those cards in a ballot box.
The ballot box was put in a secure place and the following day - election count day - the boxes are opened under the watchful eye of the tallymen who then watch as every vote is counted to ensure that all votes are tallied
and that all votes allocated to each box, tally with the number of voting slips
per election box.

Every five years we have a general election in this country.

In 2002, on the runup to our general election (to elect a goverment, members of parliament - members of Dail Eireann), the incumbent goverment spent
€50 million on electronic voting machines.
We were told that these machines were designed to make the voting process
more transparent, more prompt and less cumbersome.
The voting machines were sourced from a US software company.

During testing it became evident that "votes" were not recorded properly by the software in the machines.
Trial after trial showed that the votes registered, where not the votes applied to candidates.
In addition, some votes never registered at all - anywhere - within the software system.
Finally, voters registered on the roll of voters were not recognised by these machines (and some of the testers had voted in general elections over the past 50 years.

Under sustained parliamentary questioning Ministers in this country who had attempted to hoodwink the electorate in to accepting "voting technology" denied any wrong doing.
The fact of the matter is that if these electronic voting machines had been used in the general election, there would have been widespread chaos come the result.

The lack of a credible audit trail concerning voting technology is the weakness
with voter technology.
There is no paper receipt to confirm the vote made by the voter, nor is there
any audit trail showing where the vote, when registered, is allocated to.

The scandal of the voting machines still resonates in this country.

wheelist · #6 11-15.-2005

Well, it's to be expected, surely.....

I mean, computers haven't been around very long, so I assume that the technology required to record a number 1 or 0 next to a person's name is still a long way off.

When you couple such an advanced requirement with another such as "printing" (whatever that entails) then one can fully understand the problems involved. It's no wonder you had to go to the US to get hold machinery advanced enough to even attempt this task.

One might ask the question: why change from the system that worked perfectly well for the last "god knows how many" years? Of course, this could only be posed as a purely hypothetical question: the answer being, as always, PROGRESS.

I'm sure that given time, the technology will advance enough for us to return to the state of normality we experienced prior to its inception.

Personally I can't wait.