Executive Summary of Election 2004: The Urban Legend
Prepared by DU Poster Eridani
The following is an executive summary of:
Election 2004: The Urban Legend
&
Sludge Report #177 – Bigger Than Watergate II
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Demand an explanation
Over the past few months America has been exposed to a seemingly never-ending cascade of evidence concerning Karl Rove's efforts to suppress minority and working class vote.
On election night 2004 TV screens across the world bore testimony to the results of his meddling.
The huge queues to vote in some minority and inner city precincts saw people waiting 10 hours or more to vote—Ohio was particularly bad—but it happened in many key urban areas. It was accompanied throughout the country by race-based voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement. In Florida nearly 700,000 ex-felons are barred from voting, in Virginia 200,000; simply for having a felony on their record.
The “Urban Legend” uncovered by Michael Collins and detailed in his report is simply this.
According to the official election night results and the official exit polls (the most extensive ever conducted in the history of elections) it was these queuing voters from the core of America's largest cities who elected George W. Bush.
The full article is at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm
Excerpts from the Collins report—
The Bush campaign focused its efforts heavily, almost exclusively, on the rural areas and suburbs in order to counter the anticipated big city Democratic margins. But then the miracle occurred just when it was needed. White ghosts never seen before emerged from parking lots, alleys and perhaps even graveyards in big cities across the country to give George W. Bush a stunning victory in the presidential election of 2004. It had to be this way, otherwise the vote count was wrong and who would tolerate such a notion, despite the clear signs on the ground and in the National Exit Poll? But the convenient and wide spread Red versus Blue story of election eve was maintained through inertia. For those with nagging questions, that story was replaced by the Urban Legend of 2004: Bush won the 2004 Presidential election in big cities.
So please ask yourself—if Karl Rove, Bush and the US Attorney Generals were so busy disenfranchising urban minorities as fast as they could, how can the above "official story of Election 2004" be remotely possible?
Where then did the Bush swing in the urban wave come from? The simple answer is that it was weighted into existence. The act of reconciling the exit polls to the official vote count created it. The Bush urban voters came into existence because they had to—otherwise the official vote count would be wrong.Weighting is a practice used by the US Census, political consultants, public health officials and others who conduct large scale survey research. If you collect data on a population, Latino voting patterns in the 2004 election for example, and your data is unrepresentative of a subset of that population, you can weight certain responses by a multiplier greater or less than one to make your poll consistent with the population measured. The problem though is when weighting is used to reconcile polling data with a “known fact” that may not be known at all. The NEP assumes that the official vote total must be accurate and weights accordingly.
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