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Alarms Should Go Off Whenever the Discrepancies Between the "Official" Results and the Polls Can't Be Explained

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Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry comfortably leading Bush in Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning. These same exit polls, seen worldwide as so reliable that they’re used to ensure against fraud, had just been used to overturn the Ukranian election and have until 2000 been a bedrock of reliability in the US (significant, inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies only started showing up in the U.S. in 2000 and only in Florida). And yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in the vote count mysteriously turns and the election is 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

The media, lacking the responsibility and the curiosity of your average second grader, reported that all the exit polls were somehow mistaken or just wrong. Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for the Hill on 11/04/2004 in which he noted:

 

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong.....This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

University of Pennsylvania statistician Steve Freeman, Ph.D., analysed the exit polls of the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida in 2004 and concluded that the odds of the exit polls being as far off as they were are 250 million to one.

The media also failed to get back to us on the inexplicable discrepancies in Florida in the 2000 election. Turns out the "mainstream" media’s projections had been right all along. The problem wasn’t the exit polls, but the official tallies themselves. In analyses conducted by the National Opinion Research Center 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.

How could our media not have investigated the correlation, if any, between the increased use of electronic voting systems, with their non-transparent secret software, and the sudden demise of a half century’s experience with highly reliable exit polls? The rest of the world still considers exit polls as the gold standard of accuracy so how is it that this phenomenon only exists in the United States? Not only did our media fail to question such a remarkable coincidence, but ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and the Associated Press have all refused to release the raw exit poll data, requested by Rep. Conyers on behalf of the Judiciary Committee. In his request Conyers stated that the information in the media’s possession was needed because "the American citizenry has voiced a collective lack of faith in government to carry out fair election procedures". Ironically, this very need to protect its citizens against a government not accountable to the people was what caused the founders to include protections in the Constitution so that the press would be free to provide to the people this very information it’s now withholding. "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press". – Thomas Jefferson

 

The Ohio Recount which followed the 2004 election, aside from being successfully thwarted, continued the electronic nightmare. In a nutshell: in an interview a former employee of Triad confessed to having altered tabulating software in a great number of counties in Ohio. The Conyers Report, stated that it strongly appeared Triad was engaged in a course of behavior to provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots so that the machines would correlate with the recount and appear to be operating fairly and effectively.

See the pattern? Still think we’ll just vote them out in 2006 or 2008? We’ve lost the means to hold our government accountable. We’ve lost our constitutionally guaranteed free press – in service to we the people. We’ve lost our vote that so many Americans gave their lives for. We are all we have left if we are to save this republic. It is therefore every person’s responsibility to take this on.

 

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." — Samuel Adams

* originally published at freepress.org on March 17, 2006

 

 

 

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