(Ted Rall’s blog)
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Getting too much sleep? Let Wonkette’s Rebecca Schoenkopf introduce us all to “our new Diebold“:
Hey, remember when they stole Ohio? Hahaha, yeah, good times. (Here is a quick story explainering the bizarre discrepancies between exit polls, which showed John Kerry winning handily, and the tabulated results, which flipped that. It has the special bonus of world’s greatest pollster Dick Morris musing that since exit polls are like never wrong, and are used in Third World countries to determine if an election’s been thieved, Occam’s Razor insists that the easiest answer is not that the machines were hacked, but that the liberal media fixed … the exit polls. To dissuade Bush voters from coming out. A man of fierce intellect, most certainly.) Right, so! It is time to meet your new Diebold machines, from H.I.G., a company of fine fellows who to the man have donated to Mitt Romney, and a full third of whose board of directors come from Bain? Oh yeah, them….
We’re not just gonna have to win; we’re gonna have to win big enough that the Repubs can’t steal enough votes to flip the swing states
amk
Yeah, I posted about this a week back. Even e-mailed cole about it asking him to make some noise Zilch. Instead, he chooses to freakout about friggin’ usa today pollz.
pfft.
Kristine
I can’t worry about voting machine integrity today. Today is my day to worry about swing state polls.
What I should do is ship my cable box and modem to an undisclosed location until after the election. The first few days would be hell, but I would adjust.
YoohooCthulhu
@Kristine: I’m avoiding political blogs, other than this one, until the election. Along with cable news. So far, it’s decreased my stress level a lot.
sfinny
This is the first time I will be working as an election inspector. Finally went to the training classes and they called me last week to work in a nearby town.
Wish I could have gotten some experience with a midterm or primary, but this is it. I figured that any questions about election integrity may be best answered by actually participating. The 5:30 AM start time is not exactly my thing, but it should be interesting.
owlbear1
Do you think the 1 percenters understand they used up all their ‘benefit of the doubt’ on Dubya?
Do you think the 1 percenters are forgetting they own most of the private property out there?
Redshift
Margin of cheating, as Howard Dean called it.
TenguPhule
Yes, because anything less then 100% and a lieu on the first born children of their serfs is not enough.
Short of some vigilante justice on Wallstreet Topdowner Tebaggers, I don’t see this ending well at all.
Mino
Ya know, the next time Dems have a filibuster-proof majority in both Houses and an executive, they might think about securing federal elections. And put some damn teeth in the laws. Ya think???
RosiesDad
I remember hearing this during the 2004 campaign. Satire but maybe not so much.
youtube.com/watch?v=KNqRLA9bjSU
Chris T.
@TenguPhule:
They think they’re entitled to food! They think “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are something we owe them!
/snark
hep kitty
YUP!
Steeplejack
@amk:
I think I see your problem.
different-church-lady
The thing that drives me nuts about people who focus on Ohio 2004 is that Kerry lost by 3 million votes nationwide. That’s a correlation point they ignore.
liberal
@Mino:
A big part of the problem is that people are stupid about this stuff.
The person here in MD who was most in charge of the voting machine thing was a Democrat. Like a lot of other people, she bought into the “if it’s tech, it must be good!” BS.
Matt McIrvin
While lots of horrible crap went on in Ohio, I wouldn’t use the exit polls as slam-dunk evidence that the 2004 election was stolen; the reliability of exit polls to make distinctions on this level is greatly exaggerated, because it’s so hard to get a decent sample in the uncontrolled conditions under which they’re taken. Mark Blumenthal is the guy to read on this subject:
pollster.com/blogs/novak_and_the_bradley_effect.php?nr=1
mysterypollster.com/main/2006/06/is_rfk_jr_right.html
Noe that two of the people most responsible for claims about the infallibility of exit polls are antivaxxer RFK Jr. and the aforementioned Dick Morris.
In 2004 the early exit polls showing a Kerry win were completely inconsistent with standard polling taken on election eve, which was pretty close to the final result.
Patricia Kayden
How long has Diebold been tabulating the votes? This seems to only have been an issue since Bush. I can’t worry about it or my brain will break. As Anne said, we have to win big enough that the Rethugs can’t steal this thing.
stinger
It’s like being a woman. Or a black American. You have to be twice as good. Luckily, we are.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
We’re not just gonna have to win; we’re gonna have to win big enough that the Repubs can’t steal enough votes to flip the swing states
Gee, and how big would that be these days?
If 99% of the tallied votes were for Romney, the wingnuts would consider this justified (“‘cos, you know, everyone *I* know hates that Kenyan Muslim!”), and the closest the mainstream media would get to criticism is a “opinions disagree” piece.
The US electoral system is not very far at all from coming up with the sort of results elections in North Korea produce.