Elections Or Electrons

What If Anything Will Count Your Vote

By Dom Stasi

11/06/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- There’s been a lot - not enough, but a lot - of hoopla recently about the fealty of the new electronic voting systems with which we’ve been gifted this election season. It is fitting to see these machines as having spread across our land like the robotic monsters of the 1897 H.G. Wells novel, The War Of The Worlds. The science fiction metaphor collapses, however, when one realizes that these invasive machines bring a lot more fiction to the voting process than they do science.

But let’s face it. The gadgets themselves are but an abuse, a visible target, salt in an already open and festering wound, a wound to the heart of American democracy. The real monsters remain hidden from our view. The real monsters are alive and among us, their dreams of conquest perhaps the closest thing to reality we’ll see manifest this day.

So, as the hours before the midterm elections of 2006 wane, we should look back, not far, just enough to see where we’ve been. It will tell us where we’re going and why the only thing that should surprise us when Wednesday dawns, is truth.

Think of what follows here as you enter the voting booth. I know I will.

Consider the facts of recent elections as you participate in our representative democracy. Consider the reality as you look at and listen to the useful idiots of the mainstream media describing the “outcomes” and feigning analysis. But most of all, remember this.

The Democratic presidential candidate won in 1992 and again in ‘96. He was impeached.

The next Democratic presidential candidate to run won in 2000 by at least 500,000 votes nationwide, and in Florida by at least 16,000 votes that we know of. All one need do to confirm this is to reverse the definitive computer glitch in Velusia County alone which the board of elections has proved actually subtracted over 16,000 votes from Al Gore, thus fabricating George W. Bush’s 527 vote margin of victory.1 These simple and verifiable tabulations are but a few among the many that give Al Gore both the popular and electoral vote counts.

Further, an ex post facto statistical analysis of just the Florida “errors” deviated so far from the plausible median of standard deviation, and in a direction that favored the Republican candidate (the governor’s brother), that to consider them the result of random errors alone, is statistically improbable and ethically impossible.

Didn’t matter. A corrupt system gave George W. Bush the presidency. The Democrat’s victory was simply obviated by a partisan U.S. Supreme Court on a blatant and obvious misinterpretation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The next Democratic presidential candidate won yet another mathematical victory in 2004, and this time by a margin the exit polls and regression data now show to be an incredible five to eight million votes nationwide. The aggregated exit polls have never been wrong by even their specified 3% in all the years that they’ve been exercised. Yet in 2004 they showed a 6% error against 100 million votes. Analysts place the probability of such an error at 16,000,000:1 (one chance in sixteen million).2

If we halve the statistical margin, hell, if we quarter it, Kerry still wins.

Notwithstanding these claims, is it unreasonable to expect that in 2004 such polls would have yielded the most accurate results ever? This would seem particularly probable after they proved the only accurate barometer in the Florida mess of four years prior.

Apparently that would be an unreasonable assumption. After all, the bubble-headed-bleached-blondes of CNN gushed for days about how in 2004 the exit polls were wrong because more Kerry voters answered the pollsters’ questions than did Bush voters. Now, while this just might have been because there were more Kerry voters than Bush voters, that eventuality was quickly dismissed.

Instead, the claim was that the Bush voters were reluctant to answer the pollsters. Not that I blame them, but this bit of rationality seems uncharacteristic of Bush supporters.

Didn’t matter. However ethereal an excuse, it was good enough for the media to discard the statistical analyses entirely.

More to the point, though, how did the blondes know this, and why only after the fact? How did the pollsters know it? Did the Republican voters’ little boy haircuts give them away. Did their bowties choke off the Repubs’ windpipes leaving them speechless and unable to answer the pollsters’ queries? (Can I say “queries” when speaking of Republicans?) Did the Bush voters say things like, “I voted for Bush, but I won’t tell you that.” If so, why did the pollsters not neutralize this bias before calculating the results as would any competent statistician? If they can recognize and quantify respondent bias as the reason for the inaccuracy, why could they not mitigate it before reporting? It’s irrational to not do so. They’re pollsters for heavens sake! Did the pollsters simply forget to weight the raw numbers? Or had the previous four years of power left Bush Republicans overtly shy, modest, and reserved, thus confusing the pollsters with their polite reticence?

We’ll never know. No evidence has been forthcoming to support the hypothesis.

But, of course, none was needed: the Democrat was once again denied the fruits of victory, the recount, and the presidency.

Why, then, in light of these traceable results, do both the mainstream media and the fools who believe them keep saying the Democrats have no plan for winning? Are we to believe most Americans and the flacks who feed them thoughts devoid of critical thinking skills? The Democrats have been winning consecutively and consistently for 12 years running! Do the math. One plus one does not equal eight. Winning and losing are different. Mathematics IS an exact science.

The Democrats, it seems, not only do have a plan for winning the presidency, it’s a plan that has worked for 12 straight years. What they don’t have, is a plan for invoking the will of the American people. That takes more than a plan. That takes backbone. And that’s an anatomical commodity I’ve seen far too little of from this generation of Dem politicians. Their cowardice has been especially manifest in the face of Republican bluster. (All this does beg a question, though. What is it about ugly men in suits, most of whom are hardly taller than the children they molest or cluster bomb, that makes them so frightening to spineless Democratic politicians and their consultants? But I digress…)

Well, Dems, it is time to become vertebrate! Because, on Tuesday, November 7th, those same voters who’ve supported you and many of those who traditionally haven’t, will cast ballots that could, if they are counted, regain both houses of congress for your party. A boatload of the loftiest Republicans should then prepare to face indictments, impeachment proceedings, and both international and domestic war crimes tribunals, the latter being a hideous thing that they, themselves, have resurrected. But the instigation of such justice will take backbone – loyal opposition backbone.

Somehow, though, the incumbents remain outwardly rather blithe about it all.

Perhaps – just perhaps – that’s because they know something about that salt in the wound I mentioned earlier… Electronic voting.

This year some eighty percent of all U.S. votes will be tabulated on electronic machines. How lovely for us. Each and every one of those machines has failed even the most fundamental proof-of-performance tests and shown itself to be inaccurate and easily hack able while leaving behind no evidence of their infidelity, to say nothing of a voter’s true intentions.

In a major change, neither will any of the traditional national exit polls be carried during the day. There’ll be no Associated Press or Edison exit poll reports before 5:00PM to assuage what is already the greatest crisis of confidence entering an election in American history. This despite that such data would be priceless if open to timely analysis. So any ancillary data gathered on what should perhaps be called Electron Day, that might serve to contradict the “official” results will be labeled as unprecedented, non-contiguous, and highly suspect by the “winners.” Do you think then that all or even most of the Democratic votes will count? If they do not, will the right questions be asked afterwards, or will the Dems just accept the results and endure yet another congressional term characterized by the emasculating abuses of their colleagues across the aisle? Will wrong or no answers be sheepishly tolerated on our behalf – again?

Conclusion: I was raised by devoutly Republican parents in Teddy Roosevelt’s Republican home town, surrounded by Republican friends, Republican neighbors, and Republican everything else. As a teen member of the Young Republicans, I drove elders and dissabled (regardless of party affiliation) to the polls on Election Day.

It was an arguably normal environment when viewed through the prism of time. Normal. Sane. Rational. I was just a kid, but I liked Ike, and so it seemed did everyone else.

Fast forward to today. The gang of “Republican” extremists now running and ruining our country bear these folks no resemblance whatsoever, but only serve to defile their memory.

In fact this new gang are not only non-Republicans, they’re not even politicians. Hell, they are not even corrupt politicians. No. They are criminals. They are criminals and sociopaths posing as corrupt politicians and dragging the GOP legacy down with them.

As for the other “parties,” well, the Greens are just a naive, vote-sucking distraction and at this point, nothing more than Karl Rove’s favorite wet dream. That’s all they’ll ever be, too, unless they and progressive America both wake up and demand instant runoff elections so a future Green vote will count for something more than a Republican victory and subsequent elimination of 400 environmental protection laws by Bush’s EPA.

Libertarians are equally well-intended, but today represent an ideological train wreck existing at any given moment somewhere between Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff.

So, does that leave the Dems – or a revolution - our only hope? Eeek!

Seems that way. But, either way, win or lose, if the Dems don’t stand up and fight, take their hits, and give back better than they take, their party, and our Democracy is finished.

As for the revolution, hell, it’s been underway ever since 1992 when the Democrats began winning elections but slowly losing the will and the power to govern. If the Dems win again this day, but the so called “Republicans” succeed in retaining power, the revolution will be over.

The real haters of democracy will have overthrown the America of her founding fathers and done so without firing a shot.

Man-oh-man, I can’t wait until Wednesday morning – I guess.

Dom Stasi <Responds1@aol.com> is Chief Technology Officer for a national television network. An Air Force veteran, pilot, engineer on Project Apollo, and author of two books and twenty-seven peer reviewed papers, he is a widely published science and technology writer and an American patriot.

References

1/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error

2/ http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf#search='exit%20poll%20disparity