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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