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Even Blinder
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The (Usual) Stench From Wisconsin
What we got tonight, June 5th, in Wisconsin was the same old stench, coming from the same old corner of the room, even more pungent than usual. If it smells a bit acrid to you, that would be the ashes of your democracy still smoldering. To wit, there was a huge turnout (highly favorable to the Democratic candidate Barrett), in fact they're still waiting in line to vote in Milwaukee and elsewhere nearly two hours after poll closing; and the immediate post-closing Exit Polls had it a dead heat, 50%-50%. But the only place those polls were posted was as a Bar Chart in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Not a single network posted any Exit Poll numbers, though they all have been regularly posting them throughout the 2012 primary season within a few minutes of poll closing. But they all called the race "extremely tight," since they were looking at the same 50%-50% Exit Poll that the Journal Sentinel at least had the courage to post in some format.
Votes counted by partisans in complete secret--is this sane?
WISCONSIN AUGUST 9, 2011 RECALL ELECTION DATA
- to provide at least an indicator, in the absence of virtually all other indicators, as to what might be happening (that is to introduce at least a dim ray of transparency into our utterly opaque and concealed vote counting process);
- to determine whether a more strongly probative follow-up canvassing would be warranted;
- to draw public awareness to the very disquieting realities of concealed, computerized vote counting (for example, many still erroneously assume that because they vote on paper, their votes and all votes are “safe,” even though in 99%+ of cases those ballots will never be examined and the optical scanner could easily be programmed to record a result radically different from what is indicated by the voters of their ballots);
- and to build the citizen participation that one day can translate to actual human counting of the actual ballots.
| WISCONSIN RECALL ELECTION EXIT POLL - VOTECOUNT COMPARISON, 8/9/2011 | ||||||||||||
| Senate | Polling Locations | Vote Count | Exit Poll | EP-VC Diff. | ||||||||
| District | Ward #s | VC-R | VC-D | VC-Tot* | VC%R | VC%D | EP-R | EP-D | EP-Tot | EP%R | EP%D | EP%D - VC%D |
| 14 | Baraboo 7, 8,9,10 | 453 | 695 | 1148 | 39.5% | 60.5% | 113 | 364 | 477 | 23.7% | 76.3% | 15.8% |
| 14 | Pardeeville 1,2,3 | 286 | 426 | 712 | 40.2% | 59.8% | 139 | 299 | 438 | 31.7% | 68.3% | 8.4% |
| 8 | Shorewood 9,10,11,12 | 484 | 1349 | 1833 | 26.4% | 73.6% | 155 | 845 | 1000 | 15.5% | 84.5% | 10.9% |
| 8 | Menomonee Falls 14,15,21 | 1351 | 605 | 1956 | 69.1% | 30.9% | 421 | 303 | 724 | 58.1% | 41.9% | 10.9% |
| 8 | Butler 1,2,3 | 397 | 200 | 597 | 66.5% | 33.5% | 63 | 63 | 126 | 50.0% | 50.0% | 16.5% |
| *includes absentee ballots: Baraboo=97, Pardeeville=40, Shorewood=354, Menomonee=283, Butler not known | ||||||||||||
Preliminary Election Assessment
November 11, 2010
by Jonathan Simon
The American people have voted and spoken. And, if you believe that the 75 million-plus votes that were sent into the privatized darkness of cyberspace emerged from that darkness as cast, then you have before you The American Self-Portrait, taken every two years and carried around in all our mental wallets till the next election.
Perhaps to you it is a grim portrait. Perhaps it doesn’t seem to make sense, given the underlying national realities. Or perhaps it does seem to make sense, in light of the stacked electoral money game and all those polls that predicted and prepared us for this outcome.
It is our sad duty to inform you that, once again, the Portrait appears to be a fake.
At EDA we are still crunching numbers, reviewing disparities and anomalies, and will have much more detailed findings and analyses to report in the coming weeks. But the preliminary indications are clear: a dramatic nationwide pattern of “red shifts” (votecounts more Republican than exit polls) in the Senate and Governors’ races; an aggregate red shift in the contests for the House; a huge catalogue of “glitches” and anomalies, and quite a few “impossible” results across the nation, beginning with the barely scrutinized primaries.
The truth is that America, while increasingly polarized, remains very closely divided. It doesn’t take many added, deleted, or shifted votes to reverse outcomes across the land and to dramatically alter the Self-Portrait that emerges. Examining, for example, the Battle for the House, a total of fewer than 50,000 Democratic votes instead of Republican in the closest contests would have left the House under Democratic control. The red shift we uncovered for the House races nationwide was 1.7% or 1.25 million votes, twenty-five times those 50,000 votes that constituted the national Republican “victory” margin.
There are signs that real-time calibrating of votes needed to “win” targeted races is becoming easier, and the vote processing infrastructure to enable such exploits proliferating. EDA is attempting to investigate these developments, which make it possible to steal more elections while stealing fewer votes, leaving barely a numerical footprint.
EDA is also probing the polling methodologies that have yielded red-shifted polls to match red-shifted elections, making everything seem right enough. We know, for instance, that the now universally adopted sampling protocol known as the Likely Voter Cutoff Model is a red-shifting, methodologically unjustifiable ploy that nonetheless accurately predicted last Tuesday’s results. EDA is asking “Why?” We expect to issue a detailed study of polling distortions and fudge factors in the coming weeks.
We at EDA are accustomed and fairly hardened to nights like last Tuesday by now. The most maddening part for us may well be listening to the Wednesday post-mortem analyses in which very astute pundits on, say, CNN or NPR read the tea leaves with straight faces and 100% faith in the gospel of the official results as their unquestioned premise. Official results that we, sleepless and still crunching numbers in an attempt to keep honest score at home, had already recognized as likely lies.
Excepting Dan Rather on HDNet TV on October 26, there have been virtually no journalists courageous enough to tell this story. Much of our work going forward will be to persuade those same pundits and opinion leaders to scale the towering wall of never-happen-here denial that is putting our nation at such grave risk.
How many more elections can our democracy survive with the use of concealed vote-counting, where there is no meaningful oversight by citizens, election officials, or the media? How many more elections where the will of the public is ignored? Time is running out on our democracy.
We must get the facts about our electoral system into public dialogue to create a foundation for a rational and unblinking examination of evidence and for serious investigation.
If anyone reading this has access to any public figures who might help us get the word out, please write to us at info@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org as soon as possible.
- If you cannot help with contacts, please consider a tax-deductible gift. We need to hire a PR firm as another means to broadcast this news. http://ElectionDefenseAlliance.org/donate.
For a more detailed look at the big picture, see Joan Brunwasser’s OpEdNews interview with Jonathan Simon: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Jonathan-Simon-of-Election-by-Joan-Brunwasser-101027-150.html.
Kos, "Raw Data," and the Mainstream Media
Michael Collins
When DailyKos publisher and owner Markos Moulitsas demanded that his pollster produce raw data from the polls Moulitsas purchased, he established a principle of election polling transparency that could open up the checkered history of presidential elections in the United States.
The controversy erupted when Moulitsas (kos) fired his polling company. He was unhappy with their results and demanded that his pollster, Research 2000 (R2000), turn over raw data for review. Moulitsas said:
"Early in this process, I asked for and they offered to provide us with their raw data for independent analysis -- which could potentially exculpate them. That was two weeks ago, and despite repeated promises to provide us that data, Research 2000 ultimately refused to do so." kos
When R2000 either refused or delayed (there's disagreement on that), kos took their actions as a sign of "fraudulent polling practices" (from the kos lawsuit). DailyKos published a searing criticism of R2000 and the National Council on Public Polls supported kos in his demand that R2000 release the raw polling data. Blogger Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com and the New York Times supported kos, as well.
The request by kos is well justified. He'd paid for the polling. Like any customer in this type of arrangement, he had a right to the product of the work done in his behalf.
Reviewing the basis for the polling results, particularly the raw data and the analytic methods, could answer two key questions: 1) were the polls actually conducted and 2) did the techniques used meet the professional standards of other polling organizations.
The president of R2000, Del Ali, defended his polling and denied any and all accusations of improper conduct: "Every charge against my company and myself are pure lies, plain and simple, and the motives as to why Kos is doing it will be revealed in the legal process and not before that." Some of the criticisms of R2000 polling methods have been answered by independent analysis at RichardCharnin.com
We don't know how the law suits will turn out. But without much doubt, the raw data will be released at trial or during the discovery phase.
But there is a much bigger case for releasing raw polling data, one that has a profound impact on our history as a nation. That raw data, requested time and again, is the polling data from the 2004 National Exit Poll, sponsored by a consortium of mainstream media organizations (Associated Press, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox).
The Other Raw Data - Election 2004
The 2004 election was marred with controversy throughout the country. Florida and Ohio received the most attention. Had Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry won Ohio, he would have achieved an Electoral College victory. This had an enduring impact on public confidence in the 2004 presidential election. By September 2006, only 45% of registered voters surveyed were “very confident” Bush won election “fair and square.”
The situation in Ohio was so questionable, an ad hoc congressional hearing was held to examine the irregularities. Current House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) led the congressional delegation. He presented his findings in the report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.
Conyers made requests for the 2004 exit poll raw data but was turned down (Congressman wants 'raw' exit poll data). Without that critical raw data, the results in Ohio and nationwide could not be fully reviewed and analyzed.
Others including Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll) in (Proving Election Fraud), Michael Keefer, Mark Crispin Miller, Steve Freeman, and the Election Defense Alliance provide compelling arguments to question 2004 and subsequent election results (see Landslide Denied, 2006). But like the Rep. Conyers and his 2004 inquiry, they were not allowed to review raw exit poll data from 2004.
At the root of any demonstration of election fairness or fraud is an examination of the raw data and methodologies used by the mainstream media's hand picked polling. This is the only national data that we have. The results of the exit polls are presented after statistical analysis but without full access to the analytic methods used or the actual raw data gathered
When kos asked for R2000's raw data, he made an important and principled demand.
It follows that it's an even more important and more principled demand that, at long last, the mainstream media consortium that controls the 2004 exit poll raw data release that data for open examination (and other years, as well). These aren't their election. They belong to the people. We have a right to verify their accuracy.
Kos will have his day in court. He will see the raw data as a result of his law suit filed on July 1. Now it's time for the people to see the raw data from their elections. Let us determine if the suspicions of election fraud are justified.
But it's been six years since Representative John Conyers and others requested the exit poll raw data to determine if election fraud was responsible for four more years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
It is now time to release all of the raw data from all the presidential election exit polls to determine if those who claim to spread democracy throughout the world are actually practicing it at home.
As the National Council on Public Polls said, "public disclosure of all the relevant information about the polls in dispute will provide a solid basis for resolving this controversy." The council was referring to the kos - R2000 dispute but the same principle applies to exit poll data controlled by the mainstream media.
It's time to know how our history is made and who's making it.
END
N.B. The official 2004 exit poll results released by the mainstream media pollsters had to be contorted to show a Bush victory. Their official polling showed that Bush supposedly won 2004 in the nation's big cities, not the Red states, as broadcast to the public: see Election 2004: The Urban Legend.
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