U.S. Elections 2008

[digi]

what percent of people voted and of those, how many voted for bush?

I don't know how many people voted, obviously, only those interested in democracy voted....the rest don't care who their 'leader' is. Of those who did vote, it seems clear that the majority voted for Bush.

 

[ShonTron]

Well, at least the majority that were interested and able to vote (Republicans are pretty good at discouraging some voters from being able to cast ballots) voted for Bush in 2004. There was enough funny business in Ohio that was largely glossed over.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

I don't know how many people voted, obviously, only those interested in democracy voted....the rest don't care who their 'leader' is. Of those who did vote, it seems clear that the majority voted for Bush.

according to wikipedia, 62,040,610 voted for bush in 2004. that's just over 20% of americans. the rest of the population couldn't vote, didn't vote or voted for other candidates.

 

[digi]

the rest of the population couldn't vote, didn't vote or voted for other candidates.

exactly, they got what they wanted.
It speaks volumes about the american electorate.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

exactly, they got what they wanted.
It speaks volumes about the american electorate.

well, about 20% of other americans who voted democrat didn't get what they want. neither did some of the people who were too young or too sick to vote whose percentage i don't know. we know fore sure that the 20% or so that voted republican got what they wanted. we can only speculate about the rest that weren't able or didn't vote.

for certain, we can say that at least 20% of americans suffer from some sort of cognitive impairment. i wonder what that number will be this election?

 

[Brandon716]

according to wikipedia, 62,040,610 voted for bush in 2004. that's just over 20% of americans. the rest of the population couldn't vote, didn't vote or voted for other candidates.

Its fair to take into consideration the significant under 18 population. What the percent would be out of only people over 18 is, I don't know.

 

[Mongo]

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent.

A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent. "Exit polls are almost never wrong," Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are "so reliable," he added, "that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries."

In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. "As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible," he says, "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. "I'm not even political — I despise the Democrats," he says. "I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong."

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.

"When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud," concludes Freeman. "The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints."

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts — nearly half of those polled — they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again — against all odds — the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered "27," in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.

Such results, according to the archive, provide "virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount." The discrepancies, the experts add, "are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent." According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, "No rigorous statistical explanation" can explain the "completely non-random" disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are "completely consistent with election fraud— specifically vote shifting."

In the months leading up to the Election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties. "The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground," a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as "caging." During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging. But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters in sixty-five counties. On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett — who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County — sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable. Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.

On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. "The return of mail does not implicate fraud," the court affirmed, and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted "precincts where minority voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts." Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering "Kerry" on the touch screen and watching "Bush" light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush. (Similar "vote hopping" from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away. In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.

Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud — and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes — in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See "The Twelve Suspect Counties," Page 56.) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties — and George Bush's were unusually high.

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally — a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent. The Conyers report — recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts — suggests that "thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost."

Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. "Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that," he says. "That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?"

They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent — a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush — more than enough to alter the outcome.

"This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties," says Freeman, the poll analyst. "By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud."

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots — and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as "strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud." In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent — meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote.

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000.

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that "democracies die behind closed doors." But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials — citing the FBI — declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown.

 

[caltrane74]

Obama has his biggest national lead of the campagin... it's now 12 points!!!

Could be a landside.

Virginia is in his column, North Carolina (gasp!) could go blue as well...... unreal.

These use to be very, very red states.....

 

[Brandon716]

Can the next week and a half melt away very quickly? This election has taken way too long, its been 2 years since they started in January 2007.

 

[JasonParis]

Wow, is it now only days until Texas be considered a swing state?

 

[Mongo]

This is off-topic, but does anybody else here think that Democrat = blue, Republican = red sounds backwards? I assume that part of this is the Canadian PC = blue, Lib = red symbology, but still, isn't the colour red associated with left-wing revolution (waving the red flag, "the red menace", etc.) and the colour blue with right-wing reaction (i.e. blue-bloods)?

So why does the U.S. have the colours the other way?

 

[cacruden]

I surprised that you didn't know -- red = red-neck

 

[detroitbootybass]

This is off-topic, but does anybody else here think that Democrat = blue, Republican = red sounds backwards? I assume that part of this is the Canadian PC = blue, Lib = red symbology, but still, isn't the colour red associated with left-wing revolution (waving the red flag, "the red menace", etc.) and the colour blue with right-wing reaction (i.e. blue-bloods)?

So why does the U.S. have the colours the other way?

It used to be different in each election and between each TV network (sometimes red was used to show Democratic voting states; sometimes red was used for the Republican states). It is my understanding that the current 'unofficial' system of colors was solidified by the late Tim Russert back in 2000.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

This is off-topic, but does anybody else here think that Democrat = blue, Republican = red sounds backwards? I assume that part of this is the Canadian PC = blue, Lib = red symbology, but still, isn't the colour red associated with left-wing revolution (waving the red flag, "the red menace", etc.) and the colour blue with right-wing reaction (i.e. blue-bloods)?

So why does the U.S. have the colours the other way?

if you go west far enough you pass the international date line end up in the far east. the republicans are the new red menace because they went too far to the right and ended up next to the far left.

 

[cacruden]

It used to be different in each election and between each TV network (sometimes red was used to show Democratic voting states; sometimes red was used for the Republican states). It is my understanding that the current 'unofficial' system of colors was solidified by the late Tim Russert back in 2000.

Unfortunately Tim Russerts death symbolizes what has happened in the news industry - lazy - don't ask the hard questions - preprint rumours. Tim Russert was a symbol of the best of the news industry - he did his job - and he did it well.