Electronic Coup
June 2, 2006
The 2004 election was stolen. I’m curious to see (other than the dull and predictable ad hominem), how the Bush supporters among you will be able to take material from within this article and dismiss or contradict the thesis that George Bush is not our duly-elected president.
Posted in Brainhell, George W. Bush, Politics
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June 3rd, 2006 at 5:35 am
SHHHH! Don’t tell anyone, Somebody will try to fix the sytem. Probably Congress. Don’t put this in their hands. We have 13,000 separate voting processes and if one state gets out of whack one time, I may be okay with that rather than with a partisan Congress that wants to re-structure how a state’s citizens votes. Let’s not re-invent the wheel because the tires went flat.
June 3rd, 2006 at 8:18 am
Moonbat alert…… this has all been disproven time and time again. Maybe you should have done a little more fact checking.
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:34 am
I agree with Cathy, the RFK assertions have been addressed on a point by point basis. I saw it a few days ago; Kennedy’s assertions were so stupid I did not bother to bookmark them.
Now if you want voter fraud, listen to this Democrat telling illegal alians that they don’t need papers for voting, and they don’t need to be a registered voter to help.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:01 am
> …this has all been disproven time and time again.
Nice bold assertion. URL please?
> … the RFK assertions have been addressed on a point by point basis.
Nice bold assertion. Any URL welcome.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:12 am
You want a URL, try this one and if you want to talk about voter fraud in the 2004 election, what about Wisconsin, where real election-day dirty tricks and voter fraud occurred and actually resulted in prosecution. RFK did not mention that, because it was Democrats doing the voter fraud.
I gave you a URL to the audio clip, but if you don’t want to just listen to the Dem telling illegal alians that they don’t need papers for voting, try this one or this one
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:19 am
Well played Don, but I’m interested in any proof you have that the article referenced in my post is false. You’ve said it is, but you can’t back that up. I conclude you are unable to refute any of its points.
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:49 pm
I gave you a link to a post in which CQ refutes the claims of the article.
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Don, thanks. Your first link does say it attempts to refute the article I posted about, after a series of ad hominen attacks.
But it doesn’t refute the points in the article. It makes statements which sound as if intended to persuade:
“News flash: mathematics is an exact science. Polling isn’t, and for at least one basic reason — you can’t force people to participate. The only people answering exit polls are those inclined to share their opinions. It also relies on the skill, integrity, and execution of the actual polltakers, many of whom are hired with little training.”
But this, while true, has no bearing on the actual case at hand, where the exit polls were scientifically designed to be accurate.
Next:
“Moreover, reporting results in the middle of the sample almost always guarantees bad conclusions.”
The samples were completed and then reported. I suppose this rhetorical trick is designed to imply that only the announced election results (“Lordy, Bush won!”) are complete.
And:
“And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what two research firms looking into the exit poll debacle found:
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International found that the Democratic challenger’s supporters were more likely than President Bush’s supporters to participate in exit polls interviews.”
Only problem is that the valid research shows that Bush voters were more likely to participate.
This CQ link you provide is an example of a partisan trying to shore up support among the already converted. If anyone could provide a link that actually attempts to refute the points in the article, I’d appreciate it.
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:50 pm
BH,
What did you think of the article that Don referrenced which refuted some of RFK’s claims?
June 3rd, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Silke, I commented on that blog post, the first URL Don supplied, in my comment above.
Here’s another interesting look.
Silke, what would your reaction be if someone had cheated Bush into office in the 2004 election?
June 3rd, 2006 at 7:56 pm
BH,
If this is true why haven’t the Democrats taken this to court? Why hasn’t anybody been indicted? Why hasn’t the Washington Post or the New York Times written extensively about this? This sounds like Pulitzer Prize winning material to me. I hesitate to get my news from a Rolling Stones article written by a Kennedy. Having said that I have no doubt that the system as a whole is probably prone to all kinds or irregularities, but I’m not sure the Republican Party would be smart enough to pull this off.
June 3rd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
If this isn’t true why can’t it be refuted on its merits?
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:23 pm
BH, CQ may make this point, but what do you mean by “exit polls were scientifically designed to be accurate.”
There is no way an exit report can be accurate because (1) people are not required to respond to an exit poll, and (2) if they do respond there is no requirement they need to tell the truth.
I know some people intentionally lie to exit pollers, just to screw them up; I would not do this; I would just refuse to respond one way or the other.
Silke, I agree with you completely. If what RFK is saying had not already been disproven when it was first claimed, following the election, the anti-Bush media certainly would be screaming it as loud as they could.
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:32 pm
BH, I have not read the whole article, but see this
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:27 pm
> but what do you mean by “exit polls were scientifically designed to be accurate.â€
You remember that Statistics course you took in college, right Don? If your heart is set against the truth, though, there’s no way I can persuade you of it any more than on the Darwin issue. You are a man of hermetic faith. I wouldn’t want to grease the pig.
> If what RFK is saying had not already been disproven…
When? Where? I’d love to see some compelling evidence.
> …the anti-Bush media certainly would be screaming it as loud as they could.
The article which no doubt you didn’t read deals with the issue of the media. In case you haven’t noticed, the media is pro-Republican. They have no interest in this scary story.
June 4th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Yes I recall studying Statistics in college. And as I recall there was more than just sample size that was required to declare the results accurate; the sample also had to be perfectly random. But as I indicated above there is no way an exit poll can be accurate because (1) people are not required to respond to an exit poll, and (2) if they do respond there is no requirement they need to tell the truth.
What media do you feel is pro-Republican? WSJ may tend to Republican values at least some of the time, but NYT and WaPo are certainly anti-Bush. Fox may be Fair and Balanced, but ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, and PBS certainly are not.
June 4th, 2006 at 10:02 am
> …there is no way an exit poll can be accurate…
Deliberate lie or just politicized wishful thinking?
> …because (1) people are not required to respond to an exit poll, and (2) if they do respond there is no requirement they need to tell the truth.
Knowing this, a properly-design the exit polls is designed to compensate. And they have been highly accurate, as you must admit. It’s science, though perhaps not the kind you approve of.
The presidential election of 2004 was stolen and the will of the voters trashed.
June 4th, 2006 at 11:28 am
How can you design an exit poll to compensate for the fact that you can’t do a random sample, because some will not answer your question, and some may answer it with false answers?
You can increase the number you sample, but that will just increase the number of rejects and the number of false answers.
And no, many of them are not that accurate.
June 4th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
> How can you design an exit poll to compensate for…
It’s called science.
>And no, many of them are not that accurate.
Not one designed by you or me, but their track record is excellent.
June 4th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
BH this article of RFKs was so foolish when it first came out, and many fisked it in detail that I just skipped it.
I dug out a post from the Right (CQ) and one from the left (Salon) debunking it.
I even explained carefully why one cannot guarantee that an exit poll is perfectly accurate, and now you fall back on your faith in science. I will just leave you with that.
June 4th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Don,
I’d LOVE to read Salon’s attack on this article! But I just reviewed all the links in your comments in this post, and cannot find it. URL please, baby one more time?
June 5th, 2006 at 8:58 am
In entry 14 I provided this link to the Salon article
Here is an article from OTB on the subject.
June 5th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Thanks for pointing it out! I’ll have a look.
June 5th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Don,
Thanks much for the Salon link, which at least appears to address the facts.
Amid all the put-downs and belittling, we find Majoo’s first point to be the RFK says nothing ‘new.’
This is Manjoo’s first attack, and is often repeated. But RFK’s article, as I recall, didn’t place much emphasis on information being ‘new.’ (Between true and new I know what I’d pick, by the way.) And it would be silly to stake the legitimacy of one’s argument on being new, which is why Kennedy didn’t.
In attempting to counter the facts cited by RFK, we find Manjoo citing facts. But when you look carefully at these ‘facts,’ they’re just opinions by certain vested and beholden parties, like pollsters.
Not least of which are the Democrats and Kerry — both of which claim the election was fair and square. Of course they would. Who wants to risk a second Civil War?
The ‘reality’ Manjoo cites to counter RFK is often fanciful, and a repetition of various claims and opinions.
The 2004 presidential election was stolen. John Kerry won, but there was an electronic coup.
June 6th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Just because many Democrats depend on various forms of voter fraud to win elections does not mean that when they lose them, it was because the other guys did the same things, just better.
June 6th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Don,
This is a frequent trope on the Right, to respond to serious charges as if the Democrats were on the defensive. An example is the studies that showed, after the 2000 vote, that all means of recount would have resulted in a Gore win, which was turned by the Right into the oft-repeated claim that all means of recount would have resulted in a Bush win.
The RFK article is serious stuff, Dn, and you clowning doesn’t help resolve it.