The whole thing is so depressing. What should I do? At the end of F911 Moore says "do something", but what? I feel guilty because I'm just reading and complaining, but I don't know what to do. I read an article saying that since the election there have been 6 times the number of inquiries at the Canadian immigration web site from the US than before the election. And I figure there are as many more of us who are looking for a warmer place than our friendly neighbor to the north.
If the data that the article points to is accurate, this is pretty damning. Virtually every precinct that was under about 25000 registered voters, that also had the Op-Scan, went way against party lines for Bush.
If you look at the previous stories on the same website, you'll find a few AP reports that the major newspapers seem to be ignoring. Even the so called liberal media rag apologized for their complacency regarding Iraq.
Where are they now? I say that you should write a crap load of letters to the editor of as many news papers and programs with viewer mail as possible. Especially the NY Times.
A plausible explanation from Salon.com Was the election stolen? (Probably requires membership, so here's the important snippet):
A couple days after Election Day, Kathy Dopp, a businesswoman and, more recently, a full-time activist working against the widespread introduction of paperless touch-screen voting systems in the U.S., began compiling a statistical analysis of the votes cast in Florida. She was initially looking for odd patterns in counties that use electronic touch-screen systems in the state, but when Dopp plotted the data, she found the weirdest results in counties that used optical scan systems -- on which voters fill out a paper ballot that is counted by machine, not unlike the process you'd see on a standardized test in school.
Specifically, Dopp noticed that in many optical scan counties, there were many more votes for George W. Bush than you'd expect from the number of Republicans registered in those counties. Although Dopp offered no speculation as to why Bush seemed to have won so many votes in apparently Democratic counties, her report has been cited as proof that something may have been amiss with the optical scan systems. Reporting on her work in a widely circulated article in CommonDreams.org, the journalist Thom Hartmann concluded that Dopp's analysis shows that Florida's "results seem to contain substantial anomalies."
Dopp's analysis does give one pause. For instance, about 70 percent of the 12,000 registered voters in Baker County are Democrats, but of the 10,000 votes cast there, more than 7,000 were for Bush. There are 11,000 registered voters in Holmes County, and 72 percent of them are Democrats -- but 77 percent of the voters in Holmes chose Bush. Considering that most voters across the country voted according to their party -- 90 percent of Democrats chose Kerry, and 90 percent of Republicans chose Bush -- why did so many Democrats in Florida's optical-scan counties go with Bush? And why was such a startling pattern not seen in counties that use touch-screen voting machines?
For anyone who knows Florida politics, the explanation is easy -- "Dixiecrats." Ansolabehere points out that in Florida, optical-scan machines are mainly in "rural areas or places with low population density, and those counties happen to be more Republican," even if voters there are registered as Democrats. These voters may keep their Democratic registrations alive so that they can participate in local Democratic primaries, but when it comes to national races they would never vote for the Democrat. Walter Mebane, a political scientist at Cornell who's long studied Florida politics, echoed this thought. In a rebuttal to Dopp's work that has also been flying around over e-mail, Mebane -- working with Jonathan Wand, another Cornell political scientist, and Jasjeet Sekhon, at Harvard -- explains that many of the counties Dopp considers curious have been voting for Republicans for years. "The pattern in which counties that have high Democratic registration had high percentage increases in the vote for Bush reflects the fact that all those counties have trended strongly Republican over the past twelve years," he wrote. "The counties are mostly in the Florida Panhandle. Given the voting history and registration trends, these counties seem to have many old-style southern Democrats who have not bothered to change their registration."
5 comments:
The whole thing is so depressing. What should I do? At the end of F911 Moore says "do something", but what? I feel guilty because I'm just reading and complaining, but I don't know what to do. I read an article saying that since the election there have been 6 times the number of inquiries at the Canadian immigration web site from the US than before the election. And I figure there are as many more of us who are looking for a warmer place than our friendly neighbor to the north.
If the data that the article points to is accurate, this is pretty damning. Virtually every precinct that was under about 25000 registered voters, that also had the Op-Scan, went way against party lines for Bush.
If you look at the previous stories on the same website, you'll find a few AP reports that the major newspapers seem to be ignoring. Even the so called liberal media rag apologized for their complacency regarding Iraq.
Where are they now? I say that you should write a crap load of letters to the editor of as many news papers and programs with viewer mail as possible. Especially the NY Times.
A plausible explanation from Salon.com
Was the election stolen? (Probably requires membership, so here's the important snippet):
A couple days after Election Day, Kathy Dopp, a businesswoman and, more recently, a full-time activist working against the widespread introduction of paperless touch-screen voting systems in the U.S., began compiling a statistical analysis of the votes cast in Florida. She was initially looking for odd patterns in counties that use electronic touch-screen systems in the state, but when Dopp plotted the data, she found the weirdest results in counties that used optical scan systems -- on which voters fill out a paper ballot that is counted by machine, not unlike the process you'd see on a standardized test in school.
Specifically, Dopp noticed that in many optical scan counties, there were many more votes for George W. Bush than you'd expect from the number of Republicans registered in those counties. Although Dopp offered no speculation as to why Bush seemed to have won so many votes in apparently Democratic counties, her report has been cited as proof that something may have been amiss with the optical scan systems. Reporting on her work in a widely circulated article in CommonDreams.org, the journalist Thom Hartmann concluded that Dopp's analysis shows that Florida's "results seem to contain substantial anomalies."
Dopp's analysis does give one pause. For instance, about 70 percent of the 12,000 registered voters in Baker County are Democrats, but of the 10,000 votes cast there, more than 7,000 were for Bush. There are 11,000 registered voters in Holmes County, and 72 percent of them are Democrats -- but 77 percent of the voters in Holmes chose Bush. Considering that most voters across the country voted according to their party -- 90 percent of Democrats chose Kerry, and 90 percent of Republicans chose Bush -- why did so many Democrats in Florida's optical-scan counties go with Bush? And why was such a startling pattern not seen in counties that use touch-screen voting machines?
For anyone who knows Florida politics, the explanation is easy -- "Dixiecrats." Ansolabehere points out that in Florida, optical-scan machines are mainly in "rural areas or places with low population density, and those counties happen to be more Republican," even if voters there are registered as Democrats. These voters may keep their Democratic registrations alive so that they can participate in local Democratic primaries, but when it comes to national races they would never vote for the Democrat. Walter Mebane, a political scientist at Cornell who's long studied Florida politics, echoed this thought. In a rebuttal to Dopp's work that has also been flying around over e-mail, Mebane -- working with Jonathan Wand, another Cornell political scientist, and Jasjeet Sekhon, at Harvard -- explains that many of the counties Dopp considers curious have been voting for Republicans for years. "The pattern in which counties that have high Democratic registration had high percentage increases in the vote for Bush reflects the fact that all those counties have trended strongly Republican over the past twelve years," he wrote. "The counties are mostly in the Florida Panhandle. Given the voting history and registration trends, these counties seem to have many old-style southern Democrats who have not bothered to change their registration."
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