February 26, 2007 at 23:42:25

A RETURN TO SANITY WHY WE MUST ELIMINATE COMPUTERIZED CONTROL OF OUR ELECTION SYSTEM:

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By andi novick (about the author) Page 4 of 11 page(s)

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By the 2004 election Bush's approval ratings were extremely low, but national turnout that year was extremely high (in fact the highest since 1968 when another unpopular war swept the ruling party from the White House). Winning a re-election with a disapproval rating below 50% was an historical first. High turnouts have always favored Democrats- making 2004 another first.

Bush had lost significant numbers of people who'd voted for him in a closer race in 2000 and yet, according to the 'official' computer tallies, Bush still received a 3.4 million vote surplus nationally. In fact, in 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republicans' votes that he got in 2000. This time he received more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 24 out of 67 Florida counties; more than 200% of registered Republicans in 10 counties; over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties; more than 400% of Registered Republicans in 4 counties; and over 700% in one county.

Ohio and Florida were understood to be the two main states on which the outcome of this election hinged, although there were 11 swing states, 10 of which Kerry was leading with a comfortable majority when most of us went to sleep on November 2, 2004. However in the morning, Bush had miraculously won all 11 swing states!

The exit polls were compelling: People had told the exit pollsters they'd voted for John Kerry. And yet just a few hours after the exit polls had been showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in, the vote count mysteriously turned and the election was called for Bush. The odds on one state switching the next morning from Kerry to Bush "are about one in one hundred. For four, it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm of, well, a stolen election." Fitrakis and Wasserman, 10/18/05, Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008 (for a wealth of information see Bob Fitrakis' and Harvey Wasserman's on line journal at freepress.org).

After Half a Century of Reliability Exit Polls, As of the 2000 Election, Are "Mistaken" Only in the United States, Only in the Swing States and Only in Order to Favor Bush

Exit polls are the gold standard of vote count validity internationally and nationally. When conducted properly they predict outcomes with a very high degree of reliability. They are so accurate that in Germany, for example, the winners are announced based on the exit polls, with paper ballots being counted as a backup check against the exit polls.

It is because of their high degree of reliability that exit polls are used to expose fraud. The United States has funded exit polls in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe as a way to ensure clean elections. Discrepancies between the exit polls and the 'official' numbers were used to successfully overturn corrupted election results in Serbia and in the Ukraine (Ironically the Ukranian exit polls were extensively reported in the American press which touted the exit polls over the Ukrainian 'official' count while at the very same time the press was either suppressing these discrepancies in the US elections or downplaying the exit polls in favor of the United States' 'official' computerized count).

Significantly, inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and 'official' tallies only started showing up in the U.S. in 2000 and only in Florida. The discrepancy was not the exit polls' fault, however, but in the 'official' tallies themselves. Although the mainstream media took the blame for having first called Florida for Gore in 2000, their projections based on the exit polls were right. In an analysis conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court aborted the vote recount, Gore emerged the winner over Bush, no matter what criteria for counting votes was applied. The fact that this is not widely known constitutes itself a major untold story.

What is particularly interesting about the U.S. exit poll discrepancies since 2000 is that in every single instance where exit polls were wrong the discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us that any survey errors should show up in both directions.

A number of different statisticians have examined the 2004 election results. University of Pennsylvania statistician Steve Freeman, Ph.D. (see endnote17) most notably, analyzed the exit polls of the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida and concluded that the odds of the exit polls being as far off as they were in 2004, were 250 million to one. He also explained:

"Thus, as much as we could say in social science that something is impossible, it was impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the critical battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio could have been due to chance or random error."

In concluding his investigation and analysis with regard to the 2004 election, Freeman stated:

"every calculation of how America voted indicates that, rather than giving Bush a 3- million-vote plurality, American voters gave Kerry a plurality of at least 5 to 7 million votes. And had ballots be counted as cast, Kerry would have received between 282 and 364 electoral votes, more that the 270 required to win."

The 2006 Election or How the Incumbents Failed to Steal Enough to Retain Complete Dominance

The 2006 election was reported in the mainstream media as "fine", but in fact voting on these same machines which had performed so abysmally in the other elections produced the same nightmare of breakdowns, malfunctions, switches and glitches. And once again the exit polls had to be "forced" in order to comport with what we were told was the 'official' computer count.

While many seek false comfort in the inadequacy of the theft, happy that at least for the next two years some semblance of checks and balances may return, the admitted vulnerability of these voting machines, their lack of transparency and the absence of safeguards and accountability, remains unchanged.

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Andi Novick Election Transparency Coalition, www.etcnys.org, http://nylevers.wordpress.com/

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