Another stolen election?
Published November 04, 2004
Though I'm not personally happy about the election results (understatement of the year - I feel sick about them), I am happy the election is over. And then I found this: Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results.
From this page:
What seems very odd in these numbers is that the increase in ACTUAL votes over EXPECTED votes for REPs has a striking pattern of being so much higher than that for DEMs in counties using optical scan voting machines.
And I've also heard that exit polls matched the actual results in states where there were verifiable paper ballots. The exit polls were off 5% or more, in favor of Bush, where there was no paper trail.
Now, I'm sure Bush supporters will think this is just sour grapes. But try, for just a moment, to imagine that it was the other way around: Kerry won, but there were numerous discrepancies in his favor. Wouldn't you want to know the truth? Isn't that the idea behind democracy? Would it sicken you to think that the winning candidate's supporters had cheated?
Laura K. Lawless
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- Another stolen election?
- Published: November 04, 2004
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Comments on this articleComments
The true ABB crowd will never "Give it up and Move On."
It's much easier to lay blame elsewhere vice at the feet of a deeply flawed front loaded Primary system, Dean and Gephardt shotting each other in the head in NH, and the resultant candidatacy of Kerry. Himself deeply flawed who ran what may be the most inept compaign of the last 50 years.
Almost immediately after it became clear that Bush was going to be re-elected, the loons in the comments section over at Atrios were screaming "Diebold stole it!" and other similar things.
You Lefties really need to get a grip on reality...
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/21870)
I don't think "sour grapes" would be quite the right words for it. "Sore loser" would probably be closer.
There's NO evidence suggesting any nefarious behavior electorally by Republicans. The worst thing they might reasonably be accused of would probably be that perhaps they were somewhat overzealous in purging voting rolls, maybe slightly. Even the worst version of that is STILL playing by the rules, though.
Those exit polls were screwed up all over the nation, which if anything suggests something funky-monkey being done with them trying to influence voter turnout.
There are at least a couple of obvious possible explanations. The preferable one would be that it was accidental. The thousand or two they picked didn't turn out to accurately represent the 100 million who voted. This would be easier to accept if it hadn't been mistaken the same direction everywhere.
Rather than think that the Republicans somehow jimmied the polls in all these places with thousands of Democrat lawyers hovering over them, though, it would seem more likely that some Democrats were jimmying the polls. The simplest explanation would be that somebody with the pollsters tipped some Democrat operatives off as to where and when they would canvas. Dick Morris, among others, suspects something like this.
On the other hand, I have seen NO evidence of this, other than that the numbers don't match- which is no evidence at all. The reasonable thing then is to assume that the polling was simply inaccurate, margins of error and such what.
Look, Bush beat Kerry by some 3,500,000 votes for a modest but clear majority. It's outside of the margin of Democrat cheating. There's nothing the Florida or Ohio courts could do to even try to hand it to Kerry this time.
Even Al Sharpton can't come up with any plausible line to claim y'all were cheated. Give it up and Move On.