Intelligent Discontent

• Written by: PogieJune 2nd, 2006
• Comments:6 Comments
• Category:Civil Liberties, US Politics
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It's 4:00 a.m., so I'll keep this short. Go read Robert Kennedy's piece in Rolling Stone about the 2004 election. It is a deeply troublig summary/analysis of  an election still plagued by serious questions.

In what may be the single most astounding fact
from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who
registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover
that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to
stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast
ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling
evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000
votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush.

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the
University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology,
the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are
one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that
something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the
discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three
critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been
due to chance or random error.''

In
only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity
benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct
Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of
those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have
received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the
certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical
odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3
billion.

Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to
these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an
initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide,
the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the
president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect
counties — as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio
– Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To
trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that
thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush
and gay marriage.