Richard Charnin
Feb. 21, 2016
Updated: Feb.24, 2016
Reclaiming Science: The JFK Conspiracy
Matrix of Deceit: Forcing Pre-election and Exit Polls to Match Fraudulent Vote Counts
Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes and the National Exit Poll
LINKS TO WEB/BLOG POSTS FROM 2004
Election Fraud Overview
Mark Lindeman: Still Blowing Exit Poll Smoke After All These Years
Mark Lindeman posts as Hudson Valley Mark on Daily Kos. He previously posted as OnTheOtherHand on Democratic Underground where I debated frequently with him. The key debates are in my 456 page E-book Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes and the National Exit Poll.
Mark is a prolific exit poll skeptic who has made a career trying to dismiss my analysis starting in 2005 and right up to the present. He is obsessed with discrediting my analysis whenever my work is cited. But has only succeeded in being exposed as a world-class election fraud naysayer in the process. Mark is intelligent and writes well. But if one makes the effort to analyze the facts, his sophisticated deception and obvious agenda to misinform becomes clear. In 2006, I thoroughly debunked Mark in the Response to the TruthIsAll FAQ (I posted as TruthIsAll).
Mark is one of the cadre of professional disinformationists in the media, academia and government. These shameless naysayers are unceasing in their attempts to discredit honest researchers who have proven that many conspiracies are factual based on solid evidence, simple mathematics and the scientific method.
Mark commented in the Kos thread below: “The question you answered is not the question I asked. The distinction is very substantial. I have always believed it is “possible” that massive election fraud “may” have occurred in 2004; that is true from first principles. The challenge is to assess the evidence that it did happen”.
That is not what Mark said in 2005 when he totally dismissed the evidence that the election was stolen. It’s 2016 and Mark is still promoting the corporate media fiction that there is no proof that Bush stole the 2000/2004 elections. That is patently false.
Mark dismisses the mathematically impossible “red shift” in 274 state and 6 national presidential exit polls in the 1988-2008 elections. Of the 274 polls, 135 exceeded the margin of error and 131 red-shifted to the GOP. The Democrats led the unadjusted state and national exit polls by 52-42% but won the recorded vote by just 48-46%. The probability of the red-shift is one in trillions. How much proof does one need? It’s all in the numbers. And the statistical evidence is overwhelming .
I was banned from Daily Kos in 2005 for having the gall to post that Bush stole the 2004 election. Believe it or not, election fraud was a taboo topic at that time on Kos. And yet Markos Moulitsas, who claims to be a Democrat, would not allow postings claiming the election was stolen. But he had company: The NYT, CBS, CNN, FOX, AP and the Washington Post belittled those “tin-foil hat” conspiracy theorists.
The comments in this Daily Kos thread illustrate Lindeman’s mastery of deflection and obfuscation. The poster out of left field does a good job in defending my work.
A few quick comments:
Mark states that the exit polls in MN, NY, PA, NH showed impossible discrepancies compared to the pre-election polls. To be precise, the exit polls were MN 56.3-42.4% vs. 51.1-47.6% recorded, NY 62.1-36.2% vs. 58.4-40.1%, PA 56.6-42.9% vs. 50.9-48.4%, NH 56.7-42.0% vs. 50.2-48.9%. What Mark does not say is that the pre-election polls are Likely Voter (LV) polls, a subset of Registered Voter (RV) polls. The LVs always understate the Democratic vote. Mark is saying that the exit pollsters never get it right, but the pre-election pollsters do. How ridiculous is that? Bush stole votes in strong Democratic states to generate his bogus 3 million recorded vote margin.
View the 2004 unadjusted exit poll stats. Note that Kerry won the National Exit poll (13660 respondents) by 51.7-47.0%. He won the unadjusted state exit poll aggregate by a nearly identical 51.8-46.8% assuming the 2004 electorate was comprised of an implausible mix: 39.5% Bush/ 38.4% Gore returning voters. Kerry won the True Vote by 53.6-45.1% assuming a plausible returning voter mix: 41.4% Gore/ 37.7% Bush.
Mark states” the American National Election Studies include a panel survey in which respondents were interviewed after the 2000 election, and then again in 2004. In the data from that panel survey, we can actually see that over 7% of respondents who said in 2000 that they voted for Gore, said in 2004 that they had voted against him (for Bush). (Some respondents switched in the opposite direction.) So, the assumption that exit poll respondents accurately reported their past votes flies in the face of strong evidence from other polls. (In fact, that includes other exit polls, but I’m trying to keep things simple.) Without that assumption, Charnin’s arithmetic melts”.
Mark is the one who is melting. The ANES study was based on RECORDED VOTE data, not the True Vote (i.e. exit poll). To claim that 2004 exit poll respondents forgot or misstated who they voted for in 2000 is ludicrous on its face. This sleight-of-hand is analogous to Mark’ s Swing vs. Redshift argument in which he parrots exit pollster Warren Mitofsky’s argument that zero correlation between 2000 to 2004 vote swing and 2004 red-shift “kills the fraud argument”. But this faulty logic is based on a bogus premise that Recorded Vote Swing represents fraud-free elections. When red-shift is plotted against True Vote Swing, there is an obvious correlation in the downward-sloping graph. View this Swing vs. red shift analysis and corresponding True Vote graph.
Catskill Julie Oct 15 · 07:40:01 AM
I sure hope we have our own “mobs” ready
to protect those ballots and assure they are all counted this time. Mark, I didn’t look it up, but I thought in fact the exit polls were right(er) in 2000. ? Isn’t that where a lot of the distrust arose?
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 08:09:55 AM
it’s true that the exit polls were righter in 2000
I think the distrust arose because some smart-sounding people insisted, immediately after the 2004 elections, that exit polls had always (or almost always) been phenomenally accurate in the past, so accurate that they were used around the world to detect election fraud.
It was a compelling story — especially because it seemed to validate what a lot of people believed in their guts about the election in general and Ohio in particular — but it wasn’t true. While they were more accurate in 2000 than in 2004, they were pretty far off in 1992. And while the U.S. has sometimes bankrolled exit polls in countries with contested elections, neutral observers generally don’t embrace the practice.
That aside, if I had a do-over, instead of responding to all the claims point by point, I would probably point to a few of the most ridiculous exit poll results and say, “Really?!” Not that that always works.
Of course, saying that the exit polls were wrong doesn’t say much about what happened, or what could happen.
I doubt we need “mobs” to protect ballots, but in some cases observers can help. (Some states have much better ballot security than others, for sure.) Beyond that, one lesson of 2000 is that it can be damn hard actually to get the ballots recounted. The rules for that vary a lot from state to state.
out of left field Oct 15 · 09:40:17 PM
Righter in 2000?
HudsonValleyMark wrote:
It was a compelling story — especially because it seemed to validate what a lot of people believed in their guts about the election in general and Ohio in particular — but it wasn’t true. While they were more accurate in 2000 than in 2004, they were pretty far off in 1992. And while the U.S. has sometimes bankrolled exit polls in countries with contested elections, neutral observers generally don’t embrace the practice.
What is your source for this? How do you know that the results of exit polls in U.S. elections were more accurate in one year than another? As far as I can tell, most observers assert such a thing because the official vote count compared to the exit polls comes up that way. But if the official vote count has been corrupted, the argument is completely invalid.
Unfortunately, many commenters on U.S. elections implicitly assume that the official tallies are always accurate, and therefore exit polls that diverge from the official count must be incorrect. After all, if the official tallies are not correct, in some cases by a lot, that opens up a whole can of worms that many people would rather not get into.
Given how U.S. elections have been run the past couple of decades, with the increasing use of easily hackable electronic voting machines and tabulators, the potential for corrupting the vote has certainly been there. One way of detecting such corruption is to look at exit polls versus the official count and see if there are any revealing patterns.
Well, there are patterns and they are very disturbing, tending to point at wholesale manipulation of voting totals by Republican-connected voting machine makers. If you want to deflect attention from this, one way would be to point to the exit polls and say that they are the source of the errors. The problem with this is, if exit polls were just unreliable, over time and many elections, no one party would consistently benefit from official vote counts varying from the exit polls. But, the phenomenon of “red shift” has been noted in election after election. This cannot be accidental, or a matter of unreliable polling.
By the way, it may not be impossible that Kerry really did win New York State by 30 points in 2004, etc. I remember the confidence many activists had in how well Kerry was doing, and their utter shock when the official results came in. Even by 2004, the course Bush had been following in invading Iraq and the like was already very controversial–it was not a given that he had anywhere near majority support for what his administration was doing.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 16 · 06:56:53 AM
I was trying to follow Julie’s lead
Frankly, I’ll be shocked if you can make a plausible case that the exit polls weren’t more accurate in 2000 than in 2004. But I’m happy to restate that: the discrepancies between the exit polls and the official counts were generally smaller in 2000 than in 2004.
But if the official vote count has been corrupted, the argument is completely invalid.
Actually, it isn’t, because we can compare both the exit polls and the official vote counts with other information sources. By way of modest example, Iagain invite you to consider Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in 2004.
There’s no reason to assume a priori that either the exit polls or the official counts are correct. It’s likely that, in some sense, both are routinely wrong, although we don’t know a priori how wrong. That should be the starting point of analysis.
Well, there are patterns and they are very disturbing, tending to point at wholesale manipulation of voting totals by Republican-connected voting machine makers.
I should believe this because you say so? Or you actually have some evidence?
If you want to deflect attention from this, one way would be to point to the exit polls and say that they are the source of the errors.
You haven’t presented any facts for me to “deflect attention from.”
The problem with this is, if exit polls were just unreliable, over time and many elections, no one party would consistently benefit from official vote counts varying from the exit polls.
Malarkey.
(1) Circular reasoning. You haven’t demonstrated that any party ever has “benefit[ed]” from the discrepancies between the exit polls and the official counts.
(2) Semantic equivocation. If by “just unreliable” you mean “unbiased but inconsistent,” then your assertion is tautologically true — but irrelevant. If the exit polls are subject to bias, it is eminently plausible that the bias tends to be in one direction.
(3) Handwaving. You have barely addressed the facts about exit polls in one election; it’s wildly premature to generalize.
By the way, it may not be impossible that Kerry really did win New York State by 30 points in 2004, etc.
It may not be impossible? That’s nice, but if that is your standard of proof, then obviously a rational discussion cannot proceed very far.
out of left field Oct 16 · 07:50:20 PM
Re: Marlarkey, etc.
Hudson Valley Mark wrote:
(1) Circular reasoning. You haven’t demonstrated that any party ever has “benefit[ed]” from the discrepancies between the exit polls and the official counts.
I have not demonstrated such a thing, but Richard Charnin has.
Oh, I forgot, you don’t like Mr. Charnin, in your opinion he produces “crap”. Well, please show us where Mr. Charnin has gone wrong. The link above references a fairly lengthy article, “1988-2008 Unadjusted Presidential Exit Polls: A 51.8-41.6% Average Democratic Margin”, in which Richard Charnin documents the existence of “red shift” when comparing state exit polls to the official counts in presidential elections during the years cited. Charnin is clear about his data sources and about the methodology he uses to come to his conclusions.
Therefore, if he has messed up, you should be able to tell us why. I am really interested in your conclusions, as this is an important issue and you have some very definite opinions about it.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 16 · 09:14:39 PM
you’re still demanding that I do all the work
If you can walk me through at least one argument in Charnin’s screed that you actually understand, take seriously, and are prepared to defend, then we might have some basis for discussion. Your unsupported assertion that Charnin demonstrated something has no more force than if you had linked to an article that “demonstrates” that the Twin Towers were sabotaged with thermite, or that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, or that climate change is a hoax.
I’m willing to discuss any of those propositions, but if you can’t even provide evidence that you actually believe them, there is no point in my trying to change your mind. Charnin was banned here years ago, but if you think he is some misunderstood prophet, why don’t you tell us all what we’re missing?
a fairly lengthy article… in which Richard Charnin documents the existence of “red shift” when comparing state exit polls to the official counts in presidential elections during the years cited.
Facepalm. Why would we need a “fairly lengthy article” for that? We already knew that the exit polls don’t match the official counts. The claim to be supported is that any political party “benefit[ed]” from the discrepancies.
So, can you cite any evidence of error in the official counts? Bear in mind that your current position on exit poll accuracy is that the 2004 New York estimate “may not be impossible.” If that is the strongest statement that you can muster, apparently you concede that the exit polls can’t be assumed to be accurate. Now what?
Seriously, if there is something Charnin has written that you thought was strong evidence of vote miscount, and you want to know why it wasn’t, I’m willing to engage. But it’s flat-out nuts for me to try to guess what, if anything, you actually thought made sense. Or maybe you didn’t think any of it made sense, exactly, but it just sounded so darn smart. How can I know if you don’t tell me?
out of left field Oct 16 · 09:51:52 PM
Here’s a walk-through
HudsonValleyMark wrote:
Seriously, if there is something Charnin has written that you thought was strong evidence of vote miscount, and you want to know why it wasn’t, I’m willing to engage.
Here you go–from Charnin’s blog as of April, 2012, Fixing the Exit Polls to Match the Policy. In the quote, he is discussing how the 2004 National Exit Poll was “adjusted” to match the official vote results by changing various weightings of voter shares in novel ways:
Consider the 12:22am National Exit Poll timeline – before the vote shares were inflated for Bush. It shows a) a net Kerry gain of approximately 4.0 million from 22 million new voters, b) a 1.0 million net gain from returning Bush and Gore voter defections, c) a 1.5 million net gain in returning Nader voters, and d) a 540,000 gain based on Gore’s recorded margin. That’s a total net Kerry gain of 7.0 million votes. But it was surely higher than that. If we assume conservatively that Gore won by 4 million (based on the 2000 unadjusted state exit poll aggregate), then Kerry had 53.6% and a 10.5 million vote landslide – matching the True Vote Model.
So how did Kerry lose?
How come the published Final National Exit poll indicates that Bush was a 50.7-48.3% winner? The pollsters forced the NEP to match the recorded vote by implying there were 6 million more returning Bush 2000 voters than were still alive in 2004 – an impossible 110% turnout. And even that sleight-of-hand was not enough; they had to inflate Bush’s 12:22am shares of returning and new voters to complete the match in the Final NEP.
Note that Charnin is basing his argument on state and national exit poll data, as reported by the pollers themselves (Edison-Mitofsky). The 12:22am exit poll was a preliminary result that was downloaded from a web site (the WAPO site, I believe) and contained data that had not been forced to match the official vote count. Charnin is here showing how the matching to the official vote count was forced by using entirely unrealistic assumptions about the number of returning Bush voters that voted in the 2004 election.
As you can see, this parsing of statistics can get a little lengthy, which is why in previous comments I provided links instead of quoting everything I was referring to. But apparently, you don’t want to bother with links. I also thought you were conversant with Charnin’s basic analysis of presidential elections and exit polls, given your categorical put-down of same, but you just keep saying “you’re making me do all the work.”
This will not do. Richard Charnin has made a strong statistically based argument that analysis of unadjusted exit poll data indicates electoral fraud is going on in our elections. Is there something wrong with his methodology? Is he making assumptions that are unwarranted? What is it that you object to about his work? Anything?
HudsonValleyMark
thanks for showing up
You haven’t done much to discuss my substance (Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York), but I’m willing to discuss yours.
So, let’s see where Charnin goes wrong.
Charnin is here showing how the matching to the official vote count was forced by using entirely unrealistic assumptions about the number of returning Bush voters that voted in the 2004 election.
No, he isn’t.
We’re not discussing “the number of returning Bush voters that voted in the 2004 election.” We can’t be, because we have no way of knowing that. What we know is how many people, on their exit poll questionnaires, said they had voted for Bush.
(Many of Charnin’s errors have this character of confusing exit polls with reality. Consider: “If we assume conservatively that Gore won by 4 million (based on the 2000 unadjusted state exit poll aggregate)….” Guess what: unless we assume that the 2000 exit polls are accurate, there’s nothing “conservative” about assuming that Gore won by 4 million votes. I’m skipping over a bunch of technical issues.)
As a matter of logic, then, Charnin’s argument already has a gaping hole: He is assuming the accuracy of the “unweighted” exit poll results in order to argue for their accuracy. The argument isn’t exactly circular, because at least two kinds of “accuracy” are at issue: whether the realized sample is unbiased within random sampling error, and whether the responses are factual. Charnin is in trouble if the sample is “inaccurate” in either sense. The exit poll results in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York — which, among other problems, defy all pre-election expectations I’ve ever seen — stand as unrebutted evidence that the sample isn’t unbiased.
But the assumption that people accurately report past votes fails, too. In the 1989 General Social Survey, 53% of respondents reported having voted for George H. W. Bush and 45% for Mike Dukakis — not too far from the official count, by the way. In the next three GSS administrations, Bush’s reported vote share was much higher. In the 1993 GSS, Bush “won” by 70% to 29%. The most parsimonious explanation is that a lot of people misreported whom they voted for.
Moreover — as Charnin has known for years — the American National Election Studies include a panel survey in which respondents were interviewed after the 2000 election, and then again in 2004. In the data from that panel survey, we can actually see that over 7% of respondents who said in 2000 that they voted for Gore, said in 2004 that they had voted against him (for Bush). (Some respondents switched in the opposite direction.)
So, the assumption that exit poll respondents accurately reported their past votes flies in the face of strong evidence from other polls. (In fact, that includes other exit polls, but I’m trying to keep things simple.) Without that assumption, Charnin’s arithmetic melts.
I’ve presented two specific examples, but if you look at GSS and ANES data, you can see for yourself that present or past incumbents’reported vote shares generally do increase over time (although usually not as much as in the 1993 GSS).
As you can see, this parsing of statistics can get a little lengthy
Yes, but the statistics are basically irrelevant, because Charnin’s assumptions are bogus. It’s logically possible that part of his argument somehow can be salvaged — but the apparent excess of Bush 2000 voters in the weighted 2004 exit poll results is what we would expect, given the general propensity I described above. The GSS and NES data are freely available for download, and in many cases can be analyzed via UC-Berkeley’sSurvey Documentation and Analysis archive.
out of left field Oct 17 · 08:32:16 PM
Thanks, at last, for a serious answer.
I will be looking at the sources that you cite to see what I can learn.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 17 · 09:49:20 PM
y’know, all my answers have been serious
The fact that you find Charnin credible, and I don’t, doesn’t make your comments more serious than mine. But it’s one of those fundamental disconnects. If you find Charnin credible and I don’t, I suppose you will consider that you’re making an important point just by citing him, while I consider that you’re making no point at all. It’s more interesting to be talking about actual arguments, I think.
Lovepolitics2008 Oct 14 · 10:27:43 PM
Time to alert the international community?
I mean… this is ridiculous. The USA are like a banana republic. The national media won’t cover this abomination. Maybe it’s time we alert the international media to what’s happening in the USA. The shenanigans in Florida, Ohio, and God knows where else. It’s getting ridiculous and scary. The republicans are totally out of control.
If you live outside the USA, try to send a message to the journalists of your country who are covering american politics and ask them to do some digging.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 02:57:28 AM
so, Rove has the magic wand and wouldn’t share?
Sorry, that makes no sense.
rubyr Oct 15 · 10:13:21 AM
if you choose to view it as a magic wand that’s
on you. The reality is quite a bit more chilling and dangerous. Why don’t you read a few books and articles about it. For instance the book I mentioned above, written by a very respected author or any of the many books on Karl Rove that you can get from your public library, Amazon or on your Nook. Anyone who does not view Karl Rove as a clear and present danger is just not paying attention.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 05:59:24 PM
stop hiding behind borrowed authority
I’ve read dozens of books and articles about it. Now what?
The question isn’t whether Karl Rove is “a clear and present danger.” The question seems to be whether Karl Rove can steal any presidential election he pleases, more or less by snapping his fingers, but decided to let 2008 go because he hates John McCain.
But if you don’t like that paraphrase of the question, I’m happy to hear the question in your own words. Only, make your own argument; don’t tell me to go read stuff and figure out what your argument is. You can cite sources to support your argument, but you have to make it first.
out of left field Oct 14 · 11:19:14 PM
Good diary, but…
I would recommend including a little of the story you linked to so your readers can get a better idea of what’s involved.
Regarding your question:
Why , when there are computer errors do they always favor the republicans….Patiently awaiting answers…….
It’s called “red shift” and is definitely an indication that everything is not on the up and up in our elections. I did a diary on the subject back in June, reporting on an important article on the subject by Bob Fitrakis in The Free Press web site. You can do worse than to check it out.
tvdude Oct 14 · 11:33:50 PM
Thanks for the tips…
Bob Fitrakis has been at the heart of this matter for some time…read your diary…excellent stuff!!
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 03:39:48 AM
the problem with exit polls…
is that in 2004, the exit polls projected that Kerry would win Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania by 14-15 points each, and New York by over 30. And so on. Most of the largest discrepancies weren’t even in swing states.
Conceivably you believe that those projections were correct within sampling error. You’re not likely to convince neutral political observers. That’s a major reason why the argument hasn’t caught on: it’s a bad argument, and Bob Fitrakis should have known that for years.
out of left field Oct 15 · 04:40:38 PM
Your thesis
if I understand it correctly, is that exit polls in general are unreliable indicators of the actual vote. But the examples you give were all taken from an election that was almost certainly corrupt, in a big way.
To repeat a segment of the article that inspired my diary:
Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.
What is the probability of this happening? “One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion,” said Charnin….132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.
Here we have a guy who has done real statistical analysis of exit polls versus the official count. He not only finds the exit polls trending well outside the margin of error in a shocking number of cases, he finds a bias towards one side that is really something.
This cannot be explained by anything other than direct manipulation of vote totals. If exit polls were just no good, we would expect the discrepancies to be all over the map–essentially random in a large study. But Charnin finds anything but randomness. Face it. The fix is in.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 06:10:33 PM
you talked right past my point
The problem with exit polls is that in 2004, the exit polls projected that Kerry would win Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania by 14-15 points each, and New York by over 30.
If the best you have to say about that is that the 2004 election was almost certainly corrupt, you are missing the point.
Here we have a guy who has done real statistical analysis of exit polls versus the official count.
No, there we have a guy who has done crap, at length, for years. If you care to argue otherwise, step right up. Maybe you can start by discussing the four states I’ve mentioned. Do you think those exit poll results are plausible?
out of left field Oct 15 · 08:18:45 PM
Re: you talked right past my point
Are you saying that the exit poll results in Minnesota, NH and PA in 2004 were wrong, and therefore, exit polls cannot be relied upon?
Do you know for a fact that the official counts in those states were correct, and therefore the exit polls were wrong?
You say Charnin has “done crap for years”. Show me some evidence please. Where has he been incorrect?
HudsonValleyMark Oct 16 · 05:23:11 AM
LOL
Yes, I understand, you’ll ask the questions around here. That is the hallmark of crap CT: the burden of proof is always on the skeptic.
I’ll give you another chance to answer the simple question that you ducked: Do you think those exit poll results are plausible?
Welcome to Daily Kos, where extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If you really believe, in any worthy sense of the word, that Charnin’s work supports your weirdly smug conclusion that “the fix is in,” then why not marshal an argument, instead of appealing to dubious authority?
I’ve encountered many fans of Charnin, but no one who can explain and defend his analyses in detail. Not that I care whether you defend Charnin’s analyses, per se: feel free to offer your own.
But if that is too ambitious, you might start by answering my question about the exit poll results.
out of left field Oct 16 · 07:33:01 PM
Re: LOL
I do not know if the exit poll results you cite have problems or not. But YOU make an awful lot of claims that you do not back up, while accusing other people of producing “crap”. If you are going to make that sort of charge, you need to provide some sort of evidence for it. So far all you have done is throw charges at Mr. Charnin’s work. If you have some evidence for those charges, produce it in a comment or give us a link.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 16 · 07:57:52 PM
umm, why?
Dude, you’re apparently alleging massive election fraud in which leading Democrats are more or less complicit. I’m alleging that Richard Charnin’s work is bad. Which one of those is an extraordinary claim? Which of those even matters? Why do you expect me to do all the work? Are you even interested in this topic, or are you just yanking my chain?
Do you actually believe that massive fraud occurred in 2004? If so, for heaven’s sake, aren’t you going to say why? Do you have something better than that it isn’t impossiblethat Kerry won New York by over 30 points? Talk about weak tea….
out of left field Oct 16 · 08:34:17 PM
Re: umm, why?
You are going around in circles. You allege that Richard Charnin’s work is bad. Fine. Tell us why.
Yes, I believe it is possible massive election fraud may have occurred in 2004. The work of Richard Charnin and others informs my belief. If you cannot explain why you think his work is no good, you cannot address the issue. (Hint: Follow the link.)
HudsonValleyMark Oct 17 · 08:08:48 AM
see above, but, goalpost shift noted
Yes, I believe it is possible massive election fraud may have occurred in 2004.
The question you answered is not the question I asked. The distinction is very substantial. I have always believed it is “possible” that massive election fraud “may” have occurred in 2004; that is true from first principles. The challenge is to assess the evidence that it did happen. You don’t have to profess certainty — in fact, you probably shouldn’t — but you could at least state a non-trivial opinion.
Pardon my impatience, but I’ve watched people move the goalposts in this direction many, many times.
kainah Oct 15 · 02:45:04 AM
Want more reason to worry?
Read the new book called “Boss Rove” by Craig Ubgar which talks about the sleazy vote manipulation that has likely occurred under Rove’s tutelage in the past. I think there is real cause for concern which is also why I think it’s imperative that we ensure that PBO has too big a win margin the tamper with. But if, god forbid, that fails, we all have to be ready to fight like hell in the aftermath. No lying down and getting run over like in FL 2000.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 03:52:30 AM
what in that book are you discussing?
Some people seem to think that Unger made a strong case for SmarTech tampering in that book, but I couldn’t find the case.
reflectionsv37 Oct 15 · 03:28:14 AM
I developed software for 35 years…
and I wrote this diary back in 2006 that details a hypothetical way of programming a touch screen monitor voting program to push the vote to one party while simultaneously minimizing the possibility of being detected. It’s far more simple than most people imagine.
I think it will probably answer your question!
out of left field Oct 17 · 01:56:59 AM
Your 2006 diary is superb
A quote from it:
Allowing private corporations, who have a vested interest in the outcome of an election, who have openly stated their preferences for one political party over another, to develop and implement a voting system using such an easily manipulated tool as a computer is a grave threat to our Democracy.
And reflectionsv37 explains exactly why. I urge everyone on this thread to go read it.
reflectionsv37 Oct 17 · 03:09:18 AM
Thanks for the compliment!
It didn’t get much attention at the time. I haven’t heard many complaints this election season about votes being switched, but if I start hearing it again, I’ll rework it and try to shorten it a little and repost it so others might get a chance to see it.
HudsonValleyMark Oct 15 · 03:33:33 AM
I don’t agree with the premise of your question
I get called paranoid, and a CT, but please answer one question for me and then I’ll calm down : Why , when there are computer errors do they always favor the republicans….Patiently awaiting answers…….
I don’t agree that computer errors always favor the Republicans. Sometimes Democrats pick up votes when errors are corrected (as, apparently, in Palm Beach, although that election was nonpartisan on the ballot). Sometimes Republicans do (as in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year). Sometimes the errors occur in primaries (Pottawattamie County, Iowa). These were various kinds of errors; there is no evidence of fraud in any of them.
Susan Bucher is right to be concerned that her systems are unreliable and her vendor is, too. That isn’t a CT. Making claims of fact without raising a finger to support them — and telling people to Be Very Afraid, but nothing else — is exactly what a lot of us consider CT.
Fisticuffs Oct 15 · 04:54:18 AM
The fact that Bain OWNS the machines in Ohio
right now – Bain Capital owns the company that owns and has distributed voting machines for Ohio – the company’s president is a FORMER FUCKING CAMPAIGN MANAGER for ROMNEY – is HORRIFYING to me. The fact that the MSM has TOTALLY ignored this and won’t report on it before the election is fucking STAGGERING.
Richard Charnin's Blog 
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