Erie Observer

IRAQI TRADE UNIONISTS UNDER THE GUN--LITERALLY

2005-10-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

( This is short--not my usual entry)

The numerous reports about American troops and Iraqi troops being used to break strikes and end demonstrations against privatization are disturbing. Our young men and women have pointed weapons at unionists who went on strike because they had not been paid for a few months. Iraqi troops have fired into crowds.

Is democracy about union-busting and privatization. A decent historian could tell us about rural boys in the Guard frequently being sent to Pittsburgh and the coal fields to break unions and Hunkie heads. They doubtless came to think unionism was un-American. What lessons do our young men and women bring home with them. Remember that they are treated to Rush Limbaugh daily on tax-supported Armed Forces radio.

By all accounts Saddam's old secret police , Mukhabharat, are roaming feeely, killing union leaders. Neither the US forces nor the government are trying to stop them. Some Iraqis think these thugs think the unionists are collaborating with the Americans? Others think these goons are the collaborators.

Scrubbed Voter Rolls Pioneered in Florida

2005-10-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

There were many reasons why Al Gore lost Florida in 2000. One of the most important was a program to eliminate fellons and others from the voter rolls. There was nothing wrong with purging Florida fellons, but the program was found to make massive errors and it eliminated a disproportionate number of black voters. After the election, Florida Secretary of State spoke to out-of-state Republican gatherings, showing how it was done. When the Helping Americans Vote Act was passed, it carried provisions to fund more purges. When the American University voting commission published its report in 2005, it was clear that the Democrats on the commission had to endorse purges--even dishonest ones-- in return for paper trails for the new voting machines. A tough choice, but probably a necessary one.

The decision to purge illegal voters from the voter rolls were made before Katherine Harris became Secretary of State. Her predecessor, another Republican, hired a firm to do the job for $5,700. That operator was later fired, and an initial contract was given to a Georgia firm for a fee of $2,317,800. The successful contractor, Choice Point, has strong ties to the Republican party. The work was to be done by its DBT subsidiary, even though the FBUI had cancelled its data handling contract with it due to an officer of the firm’s criminal contacts. In 1998, JEB Bush and Katherine Harris set in motion the program to scrub the voter rolls of fraudulent votes, particularly felons and the dead. The program was unique in that they hired a private firm in Georgia with strong Republican Party ties to do the work. Eventually costing over $4,000,000 the program was carried out in haste, with few efforts to correct obvious errors. It resulted in unjustly disenfranchising thousands.

The computer program used by Database Technologies, Incorporated, eliminated people whose vital statistics were the same as those of known felons. In fact, the program sought possible felons rather than real felons. Of those purged from the rolls, at least 44% were African Americans. In that election, Blacks voted more than 90% fore, and Bush only won by 537 votes. The DBY contract specified that there would be "manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling." Sampling to verify the lists of name to be purged did not occur. The firm may been partly at fault, but the evidence is clear that the State of Florida repeatedly pressed it to produce larger and larger lists by suspending various safeguards.

DBT, concerned about acquiring a reputation for sloppy work, protested some of these instructions but ultimately complied. Former felons from other states were stripped of their right to vote even if their former states had restored to them the right to vote. There were two court rulings ordering the Jeb Bush to give the vote to people whose full civil rights had been restored in other states. Bush refused to obey the orders and insisted that these people pursue a cumbersome process to obtain Florida pardons. A letter from the governor’s office verified that this was the case, but the original copy later turned up missing, and an altered version of the original was found in the files. ABC reporter Dave Ruppe discovered the document switch, but the network refused to air the story.

There is no way to prove that program was designed for partisan purposes or to reduce the Black vote. Former convicts who came from states that restored voting rights to them were prevented from voting despite federal law on this point and a decision of the Florida Court of Appeals. They were told it was necessary to obtain clemency in Florida. When the legislature passed ballot reform in 2001, it left the door open for same abuses in the future.

A few counties refused to go forward with dishonest purges. The American University panel's report gives the GOP a huge plumb. It recommends that Congress provide that no county can refuse to com,pletely carry out a state's purge program. Don't be too hard on the Democrats. Their only other choice was to accept dishonest purges AND the use of the new technology to "flip" elections. Do not l;ook for Congress to adopt the panel's recommendations.

SOME AMERICAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS TURN BACKS ON PEACE AND JUSTICE

2005-04-24T17:05:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest achievements of the United States government was the creation of the American welfare state. This accomplishment would not have been possible without strong Catholic support, rooted in the social encyclicals, and the work of Catholic thinkers like Msgr. John J. Ryan, and the efforts of numerous Catholic organizations. Their work and efforts reflected the best of the so-called Catholic Renaissance.

Now the welfare state is under siege, being slowly dismantled by funding cuts and out of control medical expenses which those in power refuse to address. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the Catholic hierarchy has aided and abetted in attacks on the social net by supporting political candidates who want to reduce taxes and trim the social safety net. After his reelection, George W. Bush told Archbishop Myers of Newark, New Jersey that the activities of conservative John Paul II bishops had decided the election.

The bishops efforts to undermine John Kerry’s candidacy lent vital support to the belief that the market should be sovereign and that the US is entitled to global dominance. Through their efforts, the courts will be packed for decades with judges who are skeptical of the right of the community to regulate economic activity, protect the environment, assure the rights of workers to organize and redress their grievances, or provide fair venues where those harmed by great and powerful interests can seek relief.

Claiming that opposing gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research are far more important than upholding the church’s teachings on peace and justice, solidarity with the community, and the preferential option for the poor, these bishops opted to embrace political religion and support a party that opposes a great portion of the Catholic agenda. It was not that long ago that this party was a bastion of anti-Catholicism. If abortion were not a matter of settled law–if something could actually be done about it, one could almost understand if the bishops temporarily abandoned peace and justice to address the matter. Their failure to attack pro-choice Catholic Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph Giuliani raises serious questions about their sincerity.

During the 2004 election, high personages in the Vatican issued oblique statements that could be interpreted as telling American Catholics that they should not vote for John Kerry. For example, a leaked letter of Cardinal Joseph Ratinger said that "Not all moral issues have the same weight as abortion and euthanasia." The future Benedict XVI said people who disagreed on those matters should not receive communion, but that they were free to disagree with the church on war, the death penalty, or capital punishment. American priests who took up this line usually said something like, "I cannot see how a good Catholic could consider voting for John Kerry." The comments of Vatican officials and American clergy broke tradition and confirmed the worst fears of many about American Catholics. We heard little about this because those who had most distrusted Catholics were also deploying religion to elect George W. Bush.

It is interesting to contemplate how the Vatican might weigh policy choices. In September, 2004, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger--now Pope Benedict XVI- was quoted in the Tablet of London that the United States had sent evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries to Latin America to bring political stability to the continent. In translation, that means to combat the liberation theology then being advanced by many Latin American bishops and priests. All this began in the 1980s, when the Vatican was allied with the US in trying to end Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Some prominent American churchmen, including Joseph Cardinal Bernardin were actually smuggling US funds into Poland for Solidarity's use. In the last US election the Vatican favored George W. bush despite John Paul II's condemnation of the Second gulf War.

In biblical history, we noted that the prophets remodelled Judaeism from a cultish religion attached to a warlike deity to a religion built around a God who challenges our prejudices and promotes compassion, mercy, and opposition to unjust social systems. Scholars have seen this expressed in a Catholic ethic with core values centering on sharing and the community and special concern for the poor and disadvantages.

The media coverage of John Paul II' death left the impression that his version of Catholicism was an exact match for the policies of George H.W. Bush. Of course, this was anything but the case. JPII strongly supported full employment, national health care, security in retirement, and environmental protection. All this flows from traditional teachings about the dignity of man and God's creation. He was suspicious of so-called market economics, saying that "the inalienable value of the human person must always be an end and not a means, a subject, not an object, not a commodity of trade." He reminded listeners that "the state has the duty to prevent people from abusing their private property to the detriment of the common good...."--hardly a pean to deregulation and privatization. Commenting on globalization and market economics, he complained that the world is "witnessing the resurgence of a certain capitalist neoliberalism which subordinates the human person to blind market forces." In criticizing abortion, he did advocate a "culture of life," which included opposition to the death penalty and upholding the dignity of all human beings. Benedict XVI, his successor, shares the same moral fundamentalism and is even more skeptical of market-based policies and globalization. Unfortunately, Benedict and some others in Rome sometimes seemed to let Republican rhetoric on reproductive matters blind them to the fact the present administration is not attune to the church's positions on war, diplomacy, or economic justice.

The behavior of the American clergy who are tilting to the Right suggests they do not take seriously the church's traditional teachings on war, diplomacy, or economic justice. However, they have stepped up to the plate on the death penalty. They claimed to opposed John Kerry because a matter of doctrine was involved, even though Kerry repeatedly said that he personally opposed abortion. On the other hand, they assigned less importance to John Paul's opposition to war or advocacy of economic justice. These were merely "prudential" matters--questions of judgment. That means Catholics can disagree on how Gospel values are applied to life. However, Kerry and others have not denied or criticized Catholic doctrine. They have simply said they oppose using the law to force others to acccept it-- a prudential matter. It is also a judgment call as to whether anything can be done about abortion now that is is a matter of settled law. This is a simple fact--one that Catholic leaders should consider before they scuttle the bulk of what Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called the "seamless garment" of Catholic social judgment in order to punish those who disagree with them over what realistically can or should be done about abortion.

By allying with the Christian Right, these conservative Catholic leaders risk regressing in history to some sort of tribal religion that creates idols like "Family Values," accepts militarism and imperialism, and condones belligerent righteousness. The usually optimistic scholar, Fr. Andrew Greeley has writen recently that he was not sure the Catholic ethic would survive in the United States. Perhaps one reason for this is that Catholics have moved into the middle class and cultural mainstream. There are now Catholic neoconservatives who seek to reconcile Catholicism with the spirit of capitalism, and one of them even went to Rome to instruct the prelates on how to see the invasion of Iraq as a just war. They seem to be moving toward a cultic religion that underpins the status quo and refuses to speak truth to power. This strategem would probably shore up membership at least in the short run. In the process though, the church would run the risk of losing its very soul.

GROVER NORQUIST AND THE REPUBLICAN INFORMATION MACHINE

2005-04-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Grover Norquist, leader of the Americans for Tax Reform, is an important Republican strategist and leader of the conservative information network. Over decades, he has played a major role in moving the party’s center of gravity to the right. Much of the success of Republican efforts to thwart Bill Clinton was the result of careful organization and smart politics, and the careful work of Norquist. The destruction of Clintoncare paved the way for Republican conquest of the House of Representatives in the elections of 1994. Norquist, a Lee Atwater protégé, and the Wednesday Club saw Clinton’s health care program as a deadly threat to their plans. After Clinton was elected, about 30 leaders of right-wing organizations met every Wednesday in the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform The Wednesday Club coordinated attacks on the plan and was generally successfully prevented Republicans from offering or supporting alternatives. The destruction of "Hillarycare" was the first of many exceedingly successful operations undertaken by a highly efficient network of conservative news and political information outlets. Democrats, who are divided into many factions and have a tradition of diversity, have no information mechanism worthy of the name.

These weekly meetings of conservative political activists were to continue into the second bush administration. By 2005, the weekly strategy meeting has as many as 120 participants. Right-wing columnist bob Novak is represented by a researcher, and columnist Peggy Noonan may make a personal appearance. In addition to lobbyists, right-wing organs The National Review and Washington Times are represented After the meeting, the word goes out via fax, e-mails, and other means to pundits, propagandists, and others in the conservative information machine about what issues are to be stressed and how they are to be handled in print and on the radio and television. Norquist argued that government should be reduced to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub; and the aspects of government operations he most had in mind were those that provided benefits and services to citizens.

Robert Novak wrote that Norquist thinks God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes." Norquist thought Democrats kept seats in Congress because so many voters depended upon government largesse. Government spending tied bureaucrats and recipients of government largess to the Democratic party. He argued that cutting taxes would defund the Democratic party and cause it to lose power. Gaining power, he knew, depended upon efforts to market Republic ideas to the public. He had read Antonio Gransci and took to heart the Italian Communist’s argument that a political movement cannot succeed until it has captured the culture. Writing in an Italian prison, Gramsci recognized that elites enjoyed hegemony when they controlled culture through domination of important institutions and the press. He sought to counter this hegemony by developing other means of influencing opinion. Norquist and others have developed mechanisms to capitalize on the assets they already had. The development of talk radio and political cable shows as well as the rapid emergence of political religion may reinforce conservative hegemony and, in some ways, head off the alternative means of communicating that Gramsci described.

How Fair was the 2004 Election?

2005-01-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

by Don Swift ( master web site is http://mysite.verizon.net/resox2t6/thelakeeriereporter/ )

Last revised March 12, 2005

While the 2004 vote was still being cast, a possibly tipsy New York Republican Representative Peter King appeared on the White House lawn with a blue plastic drinking cup in his hand. He told a documentary film-maker, "Its over! The election’s over-we won." When asked what that meant, he added, " It’s all about but the counting, and we’ll take care of the counting." King is one the better members of Congress and he seemed to be disquieted this knowledge.

The election victory of 2004 violated two long-standing rules of thumb.( 1) Last minute undecided votes usually do not break for the incumbent. (2) An incumbent whose approval rating falls below 50% usually loses. These rules are not written in stone. Questions should be raised about the 2004 election because the results are not statistically probable and there was much evidence of gaming.

Recently, Christopher Hitchens published a piece in the March 2003 Vanity Fair
entitled "Ohio's Od Numbers" and argues that the Federal Election Commission should take a careful look at the strange outcomes in Ohio. A sharp critic of John Kerry, Hitchens only looked at a few obvious problems and did not view the outcome from the standpoint of a statistician. He also gave full weight to the Republican argument that the Ohio election could not have been fixed because that would have required the cooperation of a significant number of people.

There was less physical intimidation of minority voters in 2004 than in 2000, but there were probably even more efforts to suppress the minority vote. There were was less irrefutable evidence of efforts to almost openly fix machines, but those that did turn up almost always favored the GOP. Almost gone was the shifting large numbers of votes to obscure minor party candidates for president. We can no longer expect to see the obvious and huge shifting of votes that occurred in Valusha County and elsewhere in Florida in 2000 or the unauthorized reprogramming of a large number of electronic machines, as occurred in southern Georgia in 2002. However, the election was replete with the kinds of anomalies and strange, unpredictable outcomes that alarmed statisticians and seasoned election observers.

The election was unusual because there was such a great disparity between the exit polls and the actual results. The exit polls called for a Kerry victory , but the actual results gave Bush another term in the White House. In 42 of 51 states ( and District of Columbia), the states moved more toward Bush than the exit polls indicated. When it was clear that the exit polls appeared to be very wrong, the Edison and Mitofsky exit poll results were "rebalanced" early in the morning of November 3 so they came closer to actual results. An important assumption in the "reweighing" was that Bush got every vote he garnered in 2000; no one died and no one changed his mind. This data was published by CNN and a CALTECH/MIT study, based on the modified figures, pronounced that the disparity between the exit polls and actual results was not great enough to warrant further inquiry. The actual exit poll data became available two weeks later and great disparities or "red shifts" in favor of Bush. In Delaware it was 10%,in New Hampshire 9.8%, in North Carolina 8%; in Ohio 6.2%, and Florida 6%. (2)

In ten of the eleven battleground states, the differences between tallied and exit poll margin favored Bush. For two generations, the media’s exit polls have never been more than a tenth of a percent off. Freeman and Mitteldorf noted that there was a huge 10.0 average within precinct error in precincts that went at least 80% for Bush. On the other hand, the WPE for similar Kerry precincts was 0.3. Even Republican consultant Dick Morris told FOX News that "Exit polls are almost never wrong." The discrepancies were far outside the allowances for random error and chance. Statisticians have concluded that the chances of the wide variances of 2004 occurring were less that one in a thousand. In The chances that Kerry only received 47.1% of the vote in Florida are only three in a thousand. The best explanation Gallup pollsters could come up with was that Kerry people were much more willing to participate in exit polls than Bush backers. This became the official explanation of the pollsters. Yet 56% of those approached completed the surveys in Bush precincts, compared to 53% in Kerry bastions. (3) In states where a variety of means were used to count votes, there was no meaningful disparity between exit poll results and actual tabulations. However, there was a great difference between the exit polls and reported results in states were electronic programs were used to register and count votes. (4) The three corporations that control the manufacture and maintenance of electronic voting machines and the programs that tabulate votes are controlled by people with strong GOP ties. Moreover, their vote tabulating programs are easily hackable.

The many statistical anomalies of 2004 almost all benefitted the GOP, and they were a sort that could not be readily investigated. Indeed, Republican computer security expert Chuck Herrin noted that they "benefitted us 100% of the time."5 In the election of 2004, the electoral count was settled favor of George W. Bush in Ohio and Florida, both states where electronic voting and tabulation was predominant. A Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley examined the Florida election and found that "a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush " and that the random chances of this happening were "less than once in a thousand...." They conservatively estimated that Bush received between 130,000 and 260,000 more votes than could be statistically expected." Some voting machines there actually counted votes backward against Kerry. Bush carried the state by 5% , but lost it by 2% according to the exit polls. From a common sense but not rigorous statistician’s perspective, the results appear even more difficult to believe.. Among the 57 counties that used vote-scanning technology to count votes, 29 had been overwhelmingly Democratic. This time then became Bush bastions. The GOP gained 128.45% in those counties, and the Democrats lost 21%. In Liberty County, which is 88% Democratic, Bush gained 700%. Where optional scan technology was not used, voting followed predictable patterns. In Broward County, voting workers said there were boxes of uncounted absentee votes that were later removed from the court house. Before the election there, 50,000 applications for absentee ballots somehow got lost in the postal system. 6

Analyzing the races in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania ( where a Senate seat was involved), Professor Ron Baiman thought the discrepancy between exit polls and tabulated votes could only occur once in 155,000,000 times. The race was especially close in Ohio, where Bush eventually was declared the winner by less than 130,000 votes. There was not one elected statewide official who was a Democrat, and the secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who counted the votes, was the Bush campaign chairman. Every possible legal and marginally legal device was used against Kerry. . In Franklin County there was a pattern of taking voting machines out of strongly Democratic precincts so that the lines would be longer. There were 580 absentee votes in Trumbull county which could not be matched with voters in the registration list. If this were extrapolated statewide, it would come to 62, 513 fraudulent absentee votes. A former ES&S employee was allowed to tamper with the vote counting computer in Auglaize County on October 16. In Warren County( about 20 miles northeast of Cincinnati–Kings Island), the court house was locked down so that reporters could not observe counting. In the past, there was room for the media in the court house during elections. It is important to know this is one of the last counties in Ohio to close its polling places. That county had a 33% increase in votes cast over 2000. In Perry County, more votes were cast than people who signed the register as on site voters or absentees/ In Butler County, the Kerry-Edward ticket ran far behind other Democrats. In the Columbus area, there were 4,258 votes in a Gahanna precinct and 260 for Kerry. Fortunately this was corrected. However, there were only 800 voters there. Miami County was very slow counting its votes and only released its complete total when almost the entire state had been heard from. Bush picked up an amazing 19,000 more votes than in 2000 in this rural county. , Kerry carried 31.38% of the voter, compared to 36.38 for Gore.. The county boasted an almost impossible increase in turnout, with the new votes shared between the candidates in these proportions. Some precincts had nearly 98% turnouts. In Mahoning County, many voters reported that they attempted to vote for Kerry on the video machines, but the vote kept turning up for Bush. Some might recall that this is Youngstown and naturally wonder is some kind of corruption were involved. In Lucas County where Toledo is located, , numerous machines consistently malfunctioned. Outside of Xenia, polling officials applied special standards to prevent black students from Wilberforce University 7

The Ohio recount was also marred by allegations of fraud. Triads Corporation, that services the punch card voting system in 41 counties was found to be sending people to court houses to prepare computers for recounts. The clearest case of abuse was in Hocking County, where Michael from Triad appeared to brief workers on "tricky" questions attorneys might ask and to work with tabulator and computer/ He asked which precincts had been designated for recount and then worked on the computer, telling the employees not to turn it off as the correct results were then on display. He also helped employees post a "cheat sheet" to help them with the recount. The deputy election commissioner who blew the whistloe on this conduct was subsequently fired by Hocking County, which was presured to do so by Secretary J. Kenneth Blackwell.

In Lucas County, a Diebold technician reprogrammed machines prior to the recount, and in suburban Sylvania Precinct 3 the programming card was reprogrammed..Voting officials in Shelby County admitted they had destroyed critical materials, making a recount there impossible to the recount, Secretary of State Blackwell ordered voting officials in the counties to prohibit others from examining poll registers, a violation of Ohio law which made it impossible for Democratic observers to analyze the election or make sense of the recount. Strange occurances seemed to mark the recount in many of the counties of northwestern Ohio. 8 Moreover, Blackwell did not impound a single machine or computer, so a trustworthy recount was impossible. Moreover, he refused to appear before a House committee investigating the Ohio outcome even though its chairman was a Republican who would have treated him gently. In the same spirit, the Ohio Atgtorney General has demanded that the State Supreme Court discipline four attorneys who unsuccessfully litigated in a quest for a more thorough recount. Much more could be said about the abnormalities in the Ohio recount. One wonders why any rigging was even necessary in view of the fact that Ohio was certain to certify the original results.

Before the election, many efforts were made to hold down the minority vote.The Republican Secretary of State in Ohio attempted to invalidate voter registration forms in Cleveland because they were not printed on pound stock paper.9 A quarter of a million African Americans in Ohio received letters warning them that they could not vote; among the reasons given were being registered by the NAACP. 10 Misleading pamphlets were also sent to Milwaukee blacks in an effort to discourage their voting. John Perzel, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of representatives, openly stated it was necessary to suppress the black vote in Philadelphia. 11

In Las Vegas, Nevada , the Republicans hired Voters Outreach of America to register voters. The firms managers were caught destroy Democratic registration forms. Employees said they were only being paid for Republican signature. In Oregon, the same firm was discovered to be repeating this performance. However, there it sometimes used public libraries, claiming to be official registrars. Its employees were reported to have told University of Oregon students that by registering as Republicans they were somehow fighting the sexual abuse of children. Similar problems appeared in West Virginia.. 12 In Florida, election officials tried to remove another 22,000 Blacks from the voter roles, even though they were not felons. Republican Secretary of State Glenda Hood disqualified an additional 10,000 registration forms of likely Democrats because they had checked in only one place rather than two that they were citizens of the United States. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose center has monitored elections around the world, noted that the process in Florida did not meet international standards in part because it is operated by people holding "strong political biases," and he predicted that the 204 Florida election would again be characterized by irregularities. 13

The usual efforts of those in power to prevent some groups from voting were much in evidence. By placing outmoded equipment in black precincts, the chance of having many "spoiled votes" was greatly increased. In the 47 Dayton, Ohio precincts that went heavily for Kerry, the spoilage rate was 5.16%, compared to 1.31% for the rest of Montgomery County. This is partly why blacks have a 800 % greater chance of not having their votes counted than whites. Similarly, placing too few machines in black precincts created great lines and discouraged people from voting. The situation was so blatant in Ohio, that the very Republican Columbus Dispatch felt obliged to report on it. It found that the number of machines in Democratic parts of Franklin county were reduced by 17 while the Republican precincts received eight more machines. In Democratic Cuyahoga and Summit Counties, old machines were used and the average number of votes per machine was less than half those per machine in the Columbus area. The provisional ballot, was a new technique made possible by HAVA, allowed people to provisionally vote if they showed up at the wrong place or broke some other regulation. These votes were usually not counted . Even Hitchens, a sharp critic of Kerry, noted that the massive bottlenecks "had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts." Many people simply gave up and did not bother to complete the provisional ballots that officials eventually decided to offer them. In Gambier, Ohio, there was only working machine where Kenyon College students voted. Many of them gave up and refused to bother with the provisional ballots because they believed the paper ballots would not be counted. These techniques were widely used, especially in Ohio, and boosted the number of uncounted votes to the 3,000,000 mark In addition there were 95,000 lost votes in Franklin County, 12,000 in Mahoning, and 6,400 in Warren County. In some southwest white Republican counties,, C. Ellen Connally, an unfunded African American running for Ohio Supreme court, somehow ran far ahead of John Kerry. 14 In two predominantly black Cleveland precincts, this also occurred. The normal patteren in presidential election years is that the highest number of votes would be at the top of the ticket, and that there would be a sharp drop-off thereafter.

Social scientists are supposed to be pragmatists, so it is probably unfair to complain about efforts by a political campaign to suppress the opposition vote. Similarly, extremely stringent regulations for the identification of some voters and increased efforts to eliminate legitimate black voters as part of programs to purge felons might be considered benefits of incumbency. Perhaps some would draw the line at capriciously changing voting place locations or how many new machines are placed in black precincts might cross the line for many realists. If all the above were considered part of rigging election, many would be justified in concluding that John Kerry should be sworn in as President in 2005. But leaving these things aside, we still have results that defy any reasonable statistical or common sense analysis. Whether the election of 2004 should have gone to John Kerry cannot be established, even though a shift of 65,000 votes in Ohio would have made the difference. Electronic machines and computerized tabulation systems are extremely difficult to audit and there is very little possibility that this situation will change. We can expect more elections like this in the future.

for similar information, http://forwardamerica@blogspot.com One piece there provides extensive background information on the potential for fraud offered by electronic voting machines and computerized counting systems.

1. To view the film clip---http://homepage.mac.com/duffyb/Movies/peterking.mov (Some who viewed this film clip concluded he may have been a bit tipsy.)
2. Alastair Thompson, "Complete US Exit Poll Date Confirms Net Suspicions," Scoop.com ( November 17, 2004)
3. Steven F. Freeman, "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," (November from voting. 10, 2004) stfreema@sas.upenn.edu; Jonathan D. Simon and Ron P. Baiman, "Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data,"The Free Press.com ( December 29, 2004)
4. Michael Meacher, "Did Dubbya rig the election?" New Statesman (November 29, 2004), 22-23
5. Herrin, "Empathy Training for Compassionate Conservatives,"
6. "UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds ‘Smoke Alarm’ for Florida E-Vote Count," (November 18, 2004) ucdata.berkeley.edu; Sean Sabatini, "Exit Polls and Vote Fraud: A user-Friendly Explanation," OPEDNews.com( undated); "Countdown," MSNBC.com ( November 3, 2004)
7. John Conyers and others to. Kenneth Blackwell ( December 2, 2004), Truthout.com; Richard Hayes Phillips, "Hacking the Vote in Miami County," The Free Press.com (December 25, 2004).
8. William Rivers Pitt, "Proof of Ohio election Fraud Exposed," Truthout.com ( December 15, 2004); Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman, "American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio," Yurca Report.com ( December 15, 2004); Toledo Blade, January 5, 2005
9. "The Poll Tax Updated," The New York Times, October 7, 2004)
10. ABCNews.com (October 31, 2004)
11. Bob Herbert, "Days of Shame," New York Times (November 1, 2004)
12. PBS.com (October 13, 2004); Laura Kurtzman, "GOP Paid Firm Faces Voter Fraud Charge," San Jose Mercury (October 14, 2004); Adrienne Packer, "Voter Fraud Alleged," The Las Vegas Review-Journal (October 14, 2004); Associated Press and KGW News, "KGW Report Prompts Oregon Voter Fraud Investigation." (October 13, 2004)
13. Jimmy Carter, "Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote," Washington Post (September 27, 2004); Kurtzman, "GOP Paid Firm Faces Voter Fraud Charge."