"My Election 2004 bad dream" - By JOSH MITTELDORF

[dzika]

From Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News:
April 26, 2005

My Election 2004 bad dream

By JOSH MITTELDORF

ON A RECENT flight to Nashville, I sat next to a man who asked what I was writing. Preparing a talk, I told him, for a conference of people sharing evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Without missing a beat, he asked. "Isn't that next door to the convention on UFO sightings?"

I wasn't surprised. We've been painted as conspiracy theorists and worse by Democrats and Republicans alike, and even the liberal arm of the press has steered clear of this issue. But when I arrived at Jefferson Street Baptist Church in Nashville, my doubts about the election were reinforced by a group of sober professionals, none who seemed overtly loony.

I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who spent months with colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and "consecutive number registers" from Brakey's Tucson home precinct.

They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct and found: 12 innocent and unsuspecting voters who had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. Twenty-two "undervotes" where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush.

The "Republican" and "Democratic" co-directors of the polling place were a local fundamentalist preacher and his wife. Thirty-nine of their parishioners from another precinct had cast provisional ballots, which were (illegally) converted to regular ballots and passed through, all 39 for Bush.

(...)

Now I'm safely returned from Planet Nashville, back home in the land of ABC-CBS-NBC-FOX-AP. I find it reassuring to remember that if any of this had really happened, the Democrats in Congress would be screaming about it. I'd read about it on the front page, and it would be all over the network news. Yes, I can be sure that Nashville was just a bad dream. The reality is that President Bush won the election, and it's time to move on. Time to move on. It was all just a dream. Yes, it's time to move on.


Josh Mitteldorf teaches math and statistics at Temple University.

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[Amaryllis]

1. kick

[Fly by night]

2. This is such a good letter. We're going to try to get the ...

... Nashville paper to run it also, along with Bob Koehler's second column on the "Nash-ional" conference. Down here on Planet Nashville, we like our elections to be reality-based, s'il vous plait?

[rumpel]

3. wow

[glitch]

4. Wonderful article thanks for posting. I can't wait until the Nashville

dvds are ready.

[MontageOfFreedom]

5. Sounds pretty obvious and laid out to me.

They used the bias in the machines to convert non-readable straight ticket and overvotes into votes for Bush.

Probably was done in the software itself and with the hired election administrator.