Okay, now I'm depressed

I wasn't as upset about the results of the election as many because I didn't have nearly as much of an emotional investment in a Kerry victory as others did, for reasons which should be clear to any regular readers.

But evidence is beginning to mount that there was in fact fraud in the election, fraud which may have been enough to affect the outcome. And that depresses me, far more than an outright, legitimate Bush win would. I'm used to being in the minority; I've spent most of my political life there. But if the stories actually do add up to what they appear to add up to, we could be in the majority and it wouldn't matter: "Elections" would still say otherwise.

The evidence is fragmentary and some of it is anecdotal. It's not proof, which makes it even more depressing because there's nothing solid enough to act on, nothing you could, so to speak, take to court. Enough to suspect, reasonably suspect, but not enough to know. Doubly depressing because I feel helpless to do anything about it not only for that reason but also because there is no evidence of any foul play here; everything in this state played out just about as anyone would have expected. And as far as I'm aware, there are no plans for street action anywhere else.

Oh, we can call for investigations (three House Democrats already have), we can say "not next time," but who can we say that to? The Democrats who caved so easily and quickly for the sake of maintaining decorum?

But for the sake of the record, let me note a few things:

- The Evening Leader of St. Mary's, OH, reported on Sunday that

[i]n a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results, which would go against election protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the computer the weekend of Oct. 16.

- Rense.com, quoting a poster on Democratic Underground, noted that

in several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results.

In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

(Rense.com seems, from what I see there, to lean toward the paranoid, but it was the source of the link.)

That is, every state where a recount is possible, totals matched exit polls. Every state where it's not, advantage Bush. Another poster on Democratic Underground added that the odds of that happening by chance, that is, seven out of seven anomalies all favoring Bush, assuming a random distribution of errors, are 128 to 1 against. The Blue Lemur has some state-by-state details.

The Bush people usually respond by saying

exit polls are skewed by the methodology employed. It is odd that they don’t say what that error producing part of the methodology might be. A skew means a systematic error is introduced by the test protocol and causes a consistent shift in one direction.

IF this was true, then all the exit polls would show the same sort of shift from "actual" results.

The GOP offer an alternative argument that the exit polls are not large enough samples and therefore the results are off by a large random error.

IF this was true, then the exit polls should scatter on either side of the actual result, especially if the final result is close to 50/50.

So what do we actually see when comparing exit polls with actual results?

There is skew - but ONLY in states which the Republicans had previously stated to be target states in play. The skew is in the same direction every time; that is to say in favor of Bush.

The exit poll results are not scattered about the mean as the alternative theory predicts.

That is, statistically, neither excuse will wash. The issue isn't if exit polls are accurate; they, especially ones taken early in the day, do have a relatively large margin of error. (Although, interestingly enough, GOPper political consultant Dick Morris claimed "exit polls are almost never wrong" in accusing the media and Democrats of a conspiracy to depress Republican vote in western states.) The issue is, as Blue Lemur pointed out,

[e]xit polling accurately predicted the results in most states with very little error. Where there were discrepancies, they were significant in the +5 percent range, and always favored Bush. [emphasis added]

And, as Citizens for Legitimate Government argues, in the 12 "critical" states it examined, such shifts between exit polls and final results should occur in less than 5% of cases but actually occurred in 12 out of 12. In four of those cases (1/3 of the total), the shift exceeded the margin of error - the likelihood of which is 0.2%.

Bottom line: Is it possible that what happened was by chance? Yes. But extremely unlikely.

- Large and bizarre discrepancies have appeared in Florida counties between voter registration and actual vote counts. And again, every discrepancy favored Bush. There is one and apparently only one consistent factor across these counties: They used optical-scan voting machines whose results were tabulated on central computers - Windows-based PCs subject to hacking and manipulation. Radio host Thom Hartmann writes that

[w]hile the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots ... the results seem to contain substantial anomalies. ...

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. ...

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Filtering out the rural vote produced a smaller swing, but still one related to the equipment used, with a p<0.01, meaning there is a better than 99% probability these results are not due to chance. So again, the only consistent factor was the use of optical-scan equipment relying on hackable PCs for tabulation. The charts and analysis are here and some charts showing the shifts graphically are here.

Could the PCs be hacked? Certainly and easily by anyone with access to them. Hartmann refers to Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting - whose yeoman work in raising the issue of election manipulation deserves great respect and praise - showing guest host Howard Dean on CNBC's "Topic A With Tina Brown" several months ago just how it's done. It took 90 seconds - and because it changed a stored record and had nothing to do with the software, detection would be difficult if not impossible.

Hartmann notes that a clip of the show is available at www.votergate.tv - but when I went to look at it, it seems the site was attacked and the video stripped out. At that time, they said they were trying to restore it and hoped to have it back up within 12 hours.

Back on July 12, I had this:

She was trembling, on the razor edge of tears.

"I'm scared," she said. "I've never been scared before. But now I'm scared they're going to take away our way of life. And no one is going to stop them."

The quotes are neither fictional nor melodramatic. They are exact.

I have to confess those fears seem realer now.

Footnote: Hartmann also writes that

[w]hen I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002....

Maybe there are still honest people in government, people who would be willing to pursue the truth to find out what lies at the end of the trail. It could be that the end of that trail marks innocence, that Bush did indeed win fair and square - in the legal sense - and does indeed have the support of a majority of the voting public. That, frankly, I would greet with relief because it offers hope, hope for people coming to their senses, for people realizing they're not getting what they thought they voted for, for changed minds, changed futures. The alternative, that we face a future of demonstration elections with outcomes as certain as any in any outright totalitarian state, is too much for me to face now.