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DEMOCRACY: Government & Politics | December 1, 2004


NOT QUITE THE SMOKING GUN BUT...

A Posting in "Comments From Left Field",

Prompted by My Statistical Analysis & That of a University Professor

I just received this from a Canadian colleague (who is as upset by our election as we are) -- the closest thing to a "smoking gun" there is: See this webshot of the CNN exit poll for Ohio late at night on election day (actually, early in the morning the day after), before it was "conformed" to fit the official results (The "mainstream media" is dismissing exit polls as "early in the day" results). Kerry won Ohio by 52% to 48% (and even won amongst men) -- as that University of Pennsylvania professor calculated, from the same unadulterated data, there is less than one chance in a thousand that Kerry got only 48.5%, as reported.

But unless a real "smoking gun" turns up, at the state or national level -- the discrepancies between the exit polls and the reported votes are too widespread for a ham-fisted (non-computerized) Ukrainian type of vote-rigging, bussing sympathasizers from precinct to precinct for multiple absentee voting (Why the heck did they have to travel for absentee voting?!) -- then I see no way of proving any wrong-doing.

The only thing we're really left with then is the presumption that Bush voters were far less inclined to answer the pollsters' questions than Kerry supporters were...in virtually every swing state in the nation. If I were to suggest such a phenomenon, I'm sure it would be dismissed as just another unbelievable "conspiracy theory" [Actually, later studies of Election Day polling results showed if anything just the opposite to be true: Nationwide, voters in heavily Bush precincts were slightly more apt to answer the pollsters' surveys than voters in heavily Kerry precincts were].

I hate to keep chewing away at this, especially since I see no way to crack this nut; but I would surely hate to go down in history as part of the generation that let such important questions about our democracy go unanswered...or let democracy itself simply slip away. We -- perhaps even more than any perpetrators -- would be roundly and rightly damned.


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