Voting Critics Don't Have the Numbers : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

The Cleveland Indymedia newswire is flooded with postings that the 2004 Presidential election was stolen. Since it is the only Indymedia up and running in Ohio and since Ohio is "the heart of it all" in this election it is getting the full treatment by self-publishers on its Newswire.

However, many of the arguments being raised are very flimsy and conjectural. They compare the election totals to various "soft" data that don't really prove the point.

My personal favorite is the one that the large numbers of Ohio voters who didn't vote at all on the Presidential line are proof that Kerry votes were stolen. Me being one of the many people who had publicly declared that I refused to vote for a pro-war candidate I find this particularly demeaning. First I was disenfranchised by not having an anti-war candidate on the ballot, then disenfranchised again by the critics who say my refusal was not valid.

The huge numbers who voted "yes" on Issue One to ban gay marriage would seem to indicate that a conservative tide was running.

I believe that the fraud in this election lay in the idea that "you had a choice" when in fact there was no choice. You could be "for the war" or "for the war". You could pick Bush, or Bush-Lite.

The Anything But Bush (ABB) crowd now seems transformed into The Elections Were Stolen crowd.

"The Hit-and-Run Left - From ABB to CYA" by Michael Donnelly has described this as being like a hit and run driver who continues blindly onward without stopping to reflect on the damage they have done.

This weekend two good articles have appeared which deal with the way statistics are being misused. Both acknowledge there were irregularities, and both point out the flaws in the arguments being used to claim the election was stolen.

The first, on the Counterpunch website, is "Ohio's Provisional Ballots - The State of Play", by Jordan Green of Southern Exposure. In it he deals with the question of Provisional Ballots and what revisions would need to be made because of their tabulation in order to change the Ohio election result.

The second, from The New Standard, a left-leaning project of professional journalists with extremely strict journalistic standards is, "Amid Charges of Vote Suppression, Activists Look for Larger Fraud", by Jessica Azulay. It tries to be sympathetic to the critics, but demolishes many of the flimsy statistical conjectures.

The New Standard waited a long time, while making caveats, to evaluate the evidence of election fraud before releasing this article. I met Jessica Azulay this year at the Clamor Magazine conference where she led a workshop on Journalistic Ethical Standards so I am sure the article is thoroughly researched.

In my opinion, the "elections were stolen" crowd invested so much effort in the Kerry campaign, and mortgaged so many of their radical beliefs, that they just can't let go. They are still in denial that he could have lost, so they turn to the "stolen" argument.

[ My earlier post on the same topic, with the famous county maps of the red /blue counties from 2004 AND 2000, which are almost identical, has dropped off he front page. It is Elections Evidence to the Contrary

[Go to this Truthout link to download pdf file of Freeman's paper]

Editor's Note | How could the exit polls in this year's presidential election have diverged so drastically from the results that election officials and the media announced?
Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a disturbing answer. Looking at the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, he concludes that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one.

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

Read Dr. Freeman's well-reasoned, well-written argument, and make up your own mind. -- sw

The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
By Steven F. Freeman
t r u t h o u t | Report

Sunday 14 November 2004

Firstly, there is enough evidence of widespread fraud to at least make you suspicious of the official result and to demand an investigation. Second, it should be down to the state authorities to prove that their results are valid. The electoral system ought to be transparent and free of even the suspicion of fraud, and that in itself is something worth fighting for.

Cleveland Indy Media Center