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Election Defense Alliance's Jonathan Simon with the Timely Lowdown on Our Elections

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Well the pollsters learned their lesson from this little scare. They began adjusting their exit polls earlier and earlier, so that what was posted was already conformed to the "actual" vote counts. Now, in the 2010 primaries, we're seeing no exit poll results at all, and indeed no running vote counts either. They just tell us who won and, if it's a "shocker," gin up some supposedly "benign" explanation. Of course, there aren't going to be very many shockers with the pre-election polls so distorted by the Likely Voter Cutoff Model (LVCM), and the right-skewed demographics from prior manipulated elections and their "adjusted" exit polls, and whatever other fudge factors are necessary to keep pace with the rigging.

Gallup has been so kind as to let the public see the seven questions used for the LVCM. But what they're not sharing with us is how they decide who has "passed the test" and gets included in their poll. It could be five out of seven answers; it could be seven out of seven: these thresholds have dramatically different effects on the sample. They can vary the threshold from poll to poll based on their hunches about how much red-shift there will be. The Likely Voter Cutoff Model is, in short, a tunable fudge factor , plain and simple. It is a methodological abomination, as I detailed previously, which gets races right because the votes in those races are being counted wrong .

Without baselines, or with distorted baselines, we can forget about forensic analyses. So first they took away direct observation (hand counting in public), then they progressively took away indirect observation. What's left of our democracy (and I'm not even touching the new-found corporate "speech"--without disclosure of the identity of the "speaker," which might (God Forbid!) bring about negative consumer reaction---brought to us by the Bush Court's Citizens United decision) is that you can troop down to the polls every couple of years and cast your vote and then go back home, secure in your 100% pure unadulterated blind faith that your will, and the collective will of all your fellow citizens, will somehow pass through the private (and partisan) darkness of cyberspace faithfully recorded, tallied, and unaltered. We've accumulated reams of evidence that this is not what actually happens, that election theft is rampant and directional. Of the many ways to stage a coup, this thumb on the scale in cyberspace has got to be the most insidious, because it is not even recognized and therefore provokes no resistance.

Democracy demands more of us than simply going down to vote, but we've probably let it go too far. At this point, as crazy at it seems, simply getting our votes counted honestly will almost surely require a revolution.

Let's pause here. Jonathan has a lot more to say. In the second half of our interview, he'll discuss the press, the Democrats and the specter of Internet voting. Please join us.

***

Part two of my interview with Jonathan

Election Defense Alliance website

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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of (more...)
 

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