Need help in ongoing debate with LA Times editor

[yurbud]

One of the editors of the LA Times has continued to answer my emails, but I don't have enough time to dispute or verify everything he says that I'm uncertain of. Any input from the experts and advocates here would be appreciated, especially if you have good sourcing for your points.

A couple of issues that keep coming up is the history of exit polls, how unusual Bush's victory was given the pre-election polling, and most frustrating of all whether the GOP would bother to rig voting machines.

From the LA Times California section editor:

Re the policy of witholding exit poll numbers: You're confusing two different things. The policy you're referring to, was the policy the networks adopted for witholding projections of which way a state would go. Until the rise of the internet, the actual exit poll results, state by state, were never released until the next day. The news organizations that paid for them regarded them as proprietary information. Now, of course, they just leak even though they are often inaccurate, as we saw in November.

Exit polls are always adjusted to fit the actual turnout -- that's the only way to do it. The way you do an exit poll is to construct a model -- Precinct X typically represents 1.4% of the total turnout, Precinct Y typically represents 0.9% of the turnout and so on. You put the model onto a computer, poll in all your thousands of selected precincts, and then generate preliminary results, based on the model. But the accuracy of those preliminary results depends absolutely on your model being an accurate projection of the real turnout. (You also have to get a representative sample of people to fill out your exit poll.) Since reality never completely corresponds with the model, the pollsters take the actual turnout when it starts coming in and adjust the model to reflect who really showed up to vote. That's when you start getting accurate exit poll numbers. There's nothing fishy about that; it's just the way exit polls have been done since exit polls were first developed.

The problem in November was partly that Democrats were more likely than Repubs to fill out the exit poll (no doubt because GOPers have been telling each other for years now that the news media, except for Fox, are biased). So the sample wasn't entirely random. More importantly, tho, the turnout in November didn't mirror past years. If it had, Kerry would have won. The whole reason Bush won was that he succeeded in boosting turnout in Republican areas considerably above their usual level. So when the model was adjusted to reflect the actual turnout, the numbers changed a lot.

Ah, you say, how do you know the turnout was real, not faked up by Republican operatives? Well, consider the task. You're dealing with thousands of precincts, each of which is separately tallied, using several different types of voting machines, all with poll watchers from both parties as well as independent observers looking on. The conspiracy you would need to fix all of those results would be vast, incredibly complicated to pull off and even harder to keep secret. Almost six months after election day, despite lots of people looking, no one has turned up any evidence -- just speculation and inference.

Finally, it's simply not true that the results contradicted the pre-election polls. Bush's victory margin was very narrow and was well within the projections of quite a few of the pre-election polls.
As for Nebraska, sorry, but even nerdy number crunchers have to get their basic facts right. If people don't know what they're talking about, they can't really be expected to be taken seriously. And these people don't.

And I'm glad you think my e-mails are interesting, but the comparison with the news stories in the paper goes to the heart of what a newspaper is supposed to be. When I'm writing to you, I can engage in debate, offer a point of view, etc. Our conception of the newspaper, by contrast, is that it should strive to present provable fact and suppress point of view. In our polarized, highly argumentative society, someone has to at least try to be a neutral source of information--giving provable, reliable, data, not speculation or guesswork. Then let others take the information and use it for debate as they see fit. That's the role we try to play. That's less dramatic than being a polemicist--perhaps less fun. But it's also crucial unless we are all to simply wallow in a sea of subjectivity.

[jobycom]

1. He's right on the exit polls

They are just raw data. All polls, in fact, are only right if the assumptions they are based on are accurate. There are a couple of DUers screaming that the odds of all these polls being so far off are 1x10 to whatever power, but that's just dumb. If the polls all rely on one assumption--say, that 12% of voter turnout will be a certain age bracket-- and that assumption is wrong, then all the polls will be off in the same direction. Since those assumptions are based on past elections, they can easily be wrong, as each election is different, and motivates people differently.

Exit polls are worse. Polls rely on sampling--you assume a certain number of each certain type of voter will show up, and you find samples to represent those groups. With exit polls, you are asking people as they leave the booth what sample they fall into, and then asking how they vote. WHat you don't have is any idea how many people in each of your categories votes. You just have raw numbers. These numbers can be plugged into equations after the voting, when you know how many people voted, and can then make assumptions on what percentage of the population each precinct represents, etc, but all this midday prediction stuff isn't what these polls are for. And they can't possibly be right until the polls close.

After the election, exit polls are used to understand the demographics of what group of people voted for whom. Those numbers have to be fitted to the final results, and those are the numbers that are adjusted to the official outcome. They aren't being used at this point to predict the election, they are only being used to understand the election already past. Say your raw data shows that 90 people in the young adult age bracket voted, and 60% of them voted for Kerry, while 20 people in the 40 age bracket voted, and 40% of them voted for Kerry. That tells you nothing about how many people in each bracket voted. So the next day when you discover that Bush won by 1%, and that 800 aged 40 people and only 500 young adult aged people voted, you adjust your numbers to fit those facts, and give you a better understanding of the demographics.

The only way you can use polls to discover fraud is if, one, things are just really screwy, like double digits off. Or two, if you can prove from the exit polls that the voting assumptions were right, but the results still were off. That wouldn't prove anything, but it could point you in the right direction.

Now, where I disagree with the editor is on his assumption that it would take a grand conspiracy to inflate voting numbers. There are a few ways to cheat in an election, and some involve only small numbers of people. First would be to inflate the number of ballots. At each precinct, the workers have lists of who didn't vote. Using paper ballots (most e voting machines have automatic checks to catch this), you can simply vote a few dozen people extra and dump their ballots in the box at the end of the evening. This is often done (it's how dead people vote), but on a small scale, and by both sides, and is more a problem locally. Another way to cheat would be to rig the machines to switch votes. This is a lot harder to do than people around here claim, and even harder to get away with, since most tests on these machines would uncover such cheating. But it is possible on a grand scale. If you have thousands of these machines in a state, and each one switches ten votes, you have a swing of tens of thousands of votes, and ten votes changed would be hard to catch, even if you knew what to look for. That rig would work better on statewide than local elections.

The best way to rig the election, though, would be on the counting machines for each county. Program them to count every 100th vote for Kerry as a vote for Bush, and you have a groundswell change. You also have problems if there is a recount, because unless you run the ballots through the same machines, the results would be different. And a hand recount would catch it. So you leave yourself exposed.

What your editor misses, though, is that it would not always have to be a grand conspiracy. As we saw in Florida, two or three counties can have a huge impact. That means involving a small handful of people. I don't know the numbers in Ohio as well as I did in Florida, so I don't know if that's possible in this election.

Anyway, that's a lot of words, and probably none of them help you, but maybe they'll give you an idea of where to look. For the record, I think the fraud in 2004 was done before anyone voted. Suppressed votes were the biggest problem. I wouldn't rule out fraud with the counting machines, though. I think hand recounts should be mandatory in every state for every election. I think that would do a lot more than paper trails in cleaning up elections. Even electronic votes leave a trail. But even so, there are always corrupt officials, and cheating will happen.

[yurbud]

2. thanks for thougtful post though I disagree on machines

If you watch the votergate.tv video, particularly the segment where Howard Dean is shown how to change the vote, it's painfully simple, and in some cases lead to over 100% turnout. Also, these machines can be accessed over the internet since that is how they hook up to the central tabulator, so locals wouldn't even particularly need to be in on it.

Another way to cheat would be to rig the machines to switch votes. This is a lot harder to do than people around here claim, and even harder to get away with, since most tests on these machines would uncover such cheating. But it is possible on a grand scale. If you have thousands of these machines in a state, and each one switches ten votes, you have a swing of tens of thousands of votes, and ten votes changed would be hard to catch, even if you knew what to look for. That rig would work better on statewide than local elections.

[Filius Nullius]

4. Yeah, you get more bang for your buck on the central tabulator

During her demonstration of how to hack the vote on "Topic A with Tina Brown" before the election last year, Bev Harris asked Howard Dean something to the effect, "If you were going to do something you shouldn't to voting machines, would it be more convenient to do it to 4,000 machines or just come in here and deal with them all at once?"

For those of you who haven't seen the video <http://www.votergate.tv >, here is a partial transcript of that exchange that I found on the rhizome.org Web site <http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=15212&text=29058 >:

**************

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv ). And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software ? or a County election official ? to know that the vote database had been altered.

**************

[Sawyer]

5. The central tabulator adds up results

from individual precincts, right?

Once those are tabulated, those are published, showing how each precinct voted, right?

People at the precincts can look at what they are sending to the central tabulator and record it, right?

So - doesn't the "central tabulator fraud" theory depend on not one person in those thousands of precincts writing down the final totals for the precinct and comparing them later with the published results?

[Wilms]

7. Re:

"People at the precincts can look at what they are sending to the central tabulator and record it, right?"

Unfortunately, that not exactly the case. The local precinct counts the number of ballots, but they don't count the votes on those ballots.

[Sawyer]

8. Ok, that is not the impression that I got -

the people I talked to who were at the precinct here told me exactly how many people voted for Bush or Kerry here.

Please explain the procedure then - how is the vote counted at precinct level, then sent to the central tabulator without anyone at precinct level knowing what they are sending?

[Wilms]

9. I'm in LA County (not the city).

When I last voted I spoke with the poll workers who told me what I posted above.

They were clueless about the fraud potential, and drop-jawed because it made sense to them.

What also made sense to them was precinct-counts posted. But that's not what's done here.

Where are you?

[Sawyer]

11. Illinois -

please ask them/tell here what the procedure is by which they are sending something to the central tabulator and have no way of knowing what they are sending.

[Wilms]

12. Voter sticks the ballot in the ballot box.

At the end of the election, the poll workers open the box, count the number of ballots, close it back up, and send it off to centrall.

If they count 500 ballots, and central says there were 200 votes for candidate A, and 200 votes for B, they'd know ballots were missing.

But, again, no clue on the voting totals because they don't do that at the precinct.

[Sawyer]

13. I don't think that is how it works -

the votes are counted at the precinct level. Then the results of the vote counting are sent to the central tabulator, which adds them all up. At least that is how I understood it works. If you have a link to some place that explains it differently, please give.

On edit: correction, it seems that there are some places where votes are not counted at precinct level. I think that's a ridiculous way to do it and removes the checks/balances needed and increases the chances of fraud. Does anyone have any stats on what percentage of precincts in the US do not count votes at precinct level?

[Wilms]

15. You got it.

Re:

"On edit: correction, it seems that there are some places where votes are not counted at precinct level. I think that's a ridiculous way to do it and removes the checks/balances needed and increases the chances of fraud."

Welcome to our world. :hi:

[liam_laddie]

24. precinct procedures

In Hamilton County Ohio (Cincinnati) the designated poll workers for each precinct (always 2-Dem & 2-Rep) count the punch-cards at open and at close of poll. They do NOT count the VOTES. For instance, there are large numbers of local races and issues, sometimes as many as 25, or more, different selections to be made. Not feasible to count punch-card VOTES at the precinct level.

I believe Hamilton had about 75 different ballot layouts, due to candidate rotation plus all the specific local issues; there are (49) separate political entities here. Other counties, states? YMMV.

That said, counting voter-hand-marked PAPER BALLOTS at precinct level for the four or five most important races or issues, then recounting at the central collection office..BoE...makes perfect sense. The cross-checking would confirm accuracy...or that other thing.

Until one really immerses oneself in researching and understanding what it takes to prepare and manage an election, one does not appreciate the complexities involved. From proof-reading (4X) the ballots before releasing the files to the printer, to checking the final ballots, to running the process on election day...it's quite an accomplishment to hold an accurate
election on all fronts. The more we citizens are involved, the better it will become.

[Sawyer]

25. I understand you're the one who intends to do

a "personal" recount of a couple of precincts in Ohio. Any ETA on that?

[Filius Nullius]

14. No need to hack manually into central tabulator

The next thing you need to know is that you don't have to manually go into the Diebold GEMS central tabulator to do this or even use a modem or wireless access point.

1. Since GEMS is a Microsoft Access program, anything you can do in the GEMS user interface or manually in the .mdb file, you can do programmatically through Visual Basic for Applications. GEMS is even capable of self-modifying code that can erase itself after it executes.

2. According to the RABA Technologies report, the software is not secure, including the audit log. You can erase the evidence in the audit log of changes you make in the tables that count the votes.

3. The certifying agencies have admitted to Bev Harris that they only test voting machines and central tabulators for functionality. They don't have the manpower to check every single line of code in a program that has hundreds of thousands of lines. In fact, I am not even sure they have access to the code since it is considered to be a proprietary trade secret of the voting machine vendor.

4. Diebold has previously had a convicted felon Jeffrey Dean in charge of software development. His conviction was for embezzlement that involved the manipulation of sophisticated accounting software and the insertion of back doors in the programs that allowed him to secretly access and manipute the data.

5. Dean inserted a two-character switch that decouples the two vote tables in GEMS so that the front-end table, from which the elections supervisor takes interim election reports, will not show anything amiss, while the back-end table, from which the final vote counts are taken, can be altered without affecting the other table.

4. That means that a programmer on the take (who could be Jeffrey Dean or one of a couple of other felons that Diebold has had on its payroll) can insert malicious code in GEMS that is self-executing after the polls close. The machine arrives at the elections supervisor's office with this code already installed.

5. Shortly after the polls close, it can check the vote tables to see who won the election and, if the difference is below a certain percentage (after all, it might be a little obvious in a county where your opponent won by a landslide), it can decouple the vote tables (so that nothing seems amiss to the supervisor when checking on a precinct-by-precinct basis), flip the votes, delete the audit log entries, send the results to the state capitol and, finally, delete the malicious code itself. Of course, you may not want to delete the code right away if you believe that you may need to reproduce the altered results.

You have just stolen an election, and it took maybe a second or two and is completely unnoticeable from the GEMS user interface.

[Filius Nullius]

3. "Reluctant Repug Responder" erroneously reasserted by reporter

Has this guy read the USCountVotes.org report? They thoroughly debunked the "Reluctant Repug Respondent" theory. Does anyone have definitive knowledge of whether a revision of the turnout was the only difference between the ultimate and penultimate polls?

[Filius Nullius]

6. Where did this reporter get his Ph.D. in statistics?

The USCountVotes.org experts are statisticians with Ph.D.s. Many of them are university professors who teach statistics. What kind of statistical credentials does this reporter have?

[yurbud]

10. good point

[snot]

16. This may be too general but

The MSM seem perfectly content to repeat conservatives' "he said she said" without bothering to confirm whether there is any evidence to support the facts he or she said; yet now, they can't report what MANY liberal he's and she's are saying because our proof, which is certainly adequate to justify both investigation and extreme alarm, is supposedly "speculative".

I mean really, what kind of proof does this guy want? Why is what we've got not enough for ALL citizens to DEMAND investigation? Why are the analyses of hundreds of respectable lawyers, statisticians and other professionals, and affidavits from thousands of citizens, regarding issues that go to the very heart of our survival as a democracy, of less weight than conservatives' nebulous objections to "travelgate"?

This is totally Kafkaesque.

[yurbud]

17. Well, you should write them too.

Go to the CONTACT link of your local paper, and find the directory of actual editors names.

[snot]

19. OK; but b.t.w., . . . ?

I have not yet received any response to the question I posted (not in this thread but as a new thread in this forum) asking for the best "blaster" for gov'l reps--you don't happen to have that, do you?

In addition to writing my own ltrs & e-mails to both media and gov'l reps, I've been urging others to write. I think giving others links to blasters makes it much easier for them to do so.

I think I've seen a site where you can type in your address and you're automatically enabled to write one ltr/e-mail to all your gov'l reps, but it's been a while and I can't seem to find it now.

[Chi]

20. I didn't have it bookmarked, but try a search with 'blaster' on DU ..N/T

[snot]

27. thanks, tried that and others w/o luck, but maybe in archives.

[yurbud]

28. blaster--townhall or firstgov.gov

Ironically, the right wing Townhall website has a good blaster:
http://congress.nw.dc.us/townhall/home/


firstgov.gov is easy to remember, even if you lose the link, and it's the one I end up using when I want to harass more than my own elected officials.

http://firstgov.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

[pgh_dem]

18. We can pretend corporate network media is catching on

With lines like this:
"Almost six months after election day, despite lots of people looking, no one has turned up any evidence -- just speculation and inference."

OOOO... "LOTS" of people "LOOKING"... I'd love to see this guy name a single journalist working for a newspaper who has "look"ed into this case. Aside from the one lady in Cincinnati who reported on the Warren County "Terror" lockdown (nothing since, I guess), I don't know of any "mainstream" journalist who has done a lick of investigation on this case. In fact, just the opposite...any reference to election fraud I have seen sourced to a newspaper has been an editorial comment saying it should be looked into (Koehler/Philly Daily News), or an editorial comment saying "Hey I asked my best friend who asked his cousin who is clearly non-partisan, and they said there was nothing to it".

PS I don't count Keith Olbermann, because (although he's cool for even bringing it up), Countdown has done ZERO investigation (or at least zero reporting on any investigation...maybe they're waiting for something...a slow news week without runaway brides). They just repeat press releases.

I had this daydream a little while ago. I imagined all these superheroes like SubpoenaMan, SecuringTheEvidenceWoman, and the Incredible TakingCustodyOfMaterialWitnesses Girl. I dreamed that they actually cared whether or not a citizen's vote was accurately counted. They all worked in a big superhero building, with a cool superhero name on it...something like... THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.

Then I woke up.

[Bill Bored]

21. Help is on the way!

Bud, nice that he/she is actually in a dialog. Keep it going!

See the following with my comments:

"The problem in November was partly that Democrats were more likely than Repubs to fill out the exit poll (no doubt because GOPers have been telling each other for years now that the news media, except for Fox, are biased). So the sample wasn't entirely random. More importantly, tho, the turnout in November didn't mirror past years. If it had, Kerry would have won. The whole reason Bush won was that he succeeded in boosting turnout in Republican areas considerably above their usual level. So when the model was adjusted to reflect the actual turnout, the numbers changed a lot."

BB -- What is the actual evidence for either the Reluctant Bush Responder hypothesis or the higher turnout of Republicans vs. Democrats? I say there is none. The turnout numbers (party ID weights) were adjusted in the final version of the polls and this did put Bush in the running. Without that change he certainly would have lost the popular vote. But what actual evidence is there that so many Dems stayed home on Election Day? In the Western Region this weighting was actually REVERSED in the final adjusted poll, i.e., the Dems went from having more turnout than the Repubs at midnight 11/3, to having lower turnout than the Repubs! I find this highly unlikely in the the Blue states of CA, OR and WA. So what evidence is there for this change, other than the word of Rove and the possibly corrupted vote count? Please INVESTIGATE before parroting such assertions. Isn't there a way to independently determine how many registered Dems and Repubs actually voted? If there is, you should find it instead of taking Edison-Mitofsky's or Karl Rove's word for it. That would be the objective journalism you tout.

"You're dealing with thousands of precincts, each of which is separately tallied, using several different types of voting machines, all with poll watchers from both parties as well as independent observers looking on. The conspiracy you would need to fix all of those results would be vast, incredibly complicated to pull off and even harder to keep secret. Almost six months after election day, despite lots of people looking, no one has turned up any evidence -- just speculation and inference."

BB -- No one has looked for this evidence. The way the election management systems (EMSs) work, is that individual machines are configured by software on servers such as Diebold's GEMS system. Any intentional or deliberate mis-configurations could affect every ballot on every machine in a given jurisdiction, or affect how the ballots are counted. Often, the task of setting up the election is outsourced to private contractors and the BOEs have no understanding of how it is actually done. There is no oversight, and not enough training to allow such oversight. Another subject for you to investigate: Who actually runs our elections?

No conspiracy was actually necessary. The EMSs allow all kinds of fraud to take place. It's like having a million cars on the road that can go 100 mph, even though the speed limit is only 65. You don't need a conspiracy for a significant number of drivers to exceed the speed limit and break the law. Anyone with access to the EMS platforms would have to resist any and all temptation to rig the vote. This is an unreasonable expectation, given human nature and the ease with which the vote can in fact be rigged without detection. And this does not even take into account the possibility of obtaining access illegitimately or simply making errors which has occurred in several states including WI and FL. You should report on this too, and not in the back of the paper where no one will read it.

See what he says about this. If there's still no interest in investigating, tell him he's not a journalist.

[Peace Patriot]

22. This L.A. Times editor is so misinformed and so off base, well I'm just..

..."shocked! SHOCKED! that there could gambling in this establishment!" It's hard to know where to begin...

LAT Editor:
"Re the policy of withholding exit poll numbers: You're confusing two different things. The policy you're referring to, was the policy the networks adopted for withholding projections of which way a state would go. Until the rise of the internet, the actual exit poll results, state by state, were never released until the next day. The news organizations that paid for them regarded them as proprietary information. Now, of course, they just leak even though they are often inaccurate, as we saw in November."

(He is the one who is "confusing two different things." PREDICTING someone is going to win is far different from providing your viewers with ACCURATE INFORMATION, say exit polls (unpolluted data) vs. the official tally. Further, his description starting with "until the rise of the internet" is extremely vague, and indicates that he knows nothing about the exit poll data and its analysis by various experts in this election.)

-----

LAT Editor:
"Exit polls are always adjusted to fit the actual turnout -- that's the only way to do it."

(This is baloney. Exit polls are NOT always "adjusted." And that is NOT "the only way to do it." Example: The recent Ukraine election. Ukrainian voters had the unpolluted exit poll data vs. the official result, and they could plainly see that something was very wrong. Exit polls are used worldwide to verify elections and check for fraud. This election--with Wally O'Dell and buddies counting all our votes with secret, proprietary programming code, in paperless electronic systems that were being tested out nationwide for the first time--CRIED OUT for verification. Instead, the networks deliberately deprived us of the one tool we had to verify this inherently insecure and hackable voting system!)

-----

LAT Editor:
"The way you do an exit poll is to construct a model -- Precinct X typically represents 1.4% of the total turnout, Precinct Y typically represents 0.9% of the turnout and so on. You put the model onto a computer, poll in all your thousands of selected precincts, and then generate preliminary results, based on the model. But the accuracy of those preliminary results depends absolutely on your model being an accurate projection of the real turnout. (You also have to get a representative sample of people to fill out your exit poll.) Since reality never completely corresponds with the model, the pollsters take the actual turnout when it starts coming in and adjust the model to reflect who really showed up to vote. That's when you start getting accurate exit poll numbers. There's nothing fishy about that; it's just the way exit polls have been done since exit polls were first developed."

(Yes, this is more or less right--and that's why exit polls have increased in accuracy over the years--and are used as THE standard tool in other democracies to verify elections and check for fraud. But these other democracies don't tweak the numbers at the last minute, with impossible models, to prove the official tally right!)

-----

LAT Editor:
"The problem in November was partly that Democrats were more likely than Repubs to fill out the exit poll (no doubt because GOPers have been telling each other for years now that the news media, except for Fox, are biased)."

(He is talking through his hat. There is NO DATA to support this theory, period. Indeed, there is data showing the opposite--that the exit polls actually favored Republicans in response rates. See the US Count Votes report. His "no doubt because GOPers..." parenthesis is right off Karl Rove's desk. This is the Bushite talking point. It is a frigging lie--that originated with Edison-Mitofsky (the exit pollsters) who were trying to cover their asses, and then got picked up by all the Bush toadies in the news monopoly media and touted around as if it were true. There is no basis for presuming that Republicans who voted for Bush were shy of the pollsters THIS YEAR (post 9/11, with Christian solders on the march). There is no data to support this--but there IS much intuitive reason to believe that Republicans who voted for KERRY would be afraid to say so to a stranger who approached them, especially in a Republican (Bush/fascist) precinct. These people were made to sign LOYALTY OATHS to attend Bush/Cheney events. The coercion and repression in Republican circles under the Bush Cartel is extraordinary--and is a very new social and political condition, unique to this election.

(Cliff Arnebeck said he has reason to believe that a lot of votes for Kerry were stolen in Republican precincts in Ohio--and that Republican precincts would be the least detectable place to do so. I've been working on election data that indicates the same thing in California. We know from numerous anecdotes, and from some 100 newspaper editorials around the country that endorsed Bush in '00 and turned against him in '04, that Republicans were defecting from the Bush paradigm, possibly in big numbers. If you're going to play with hunches--such as the "reluctant Republican responder" hunch--why not play with its opposite as well--the reluctant Republican responder who voted for Kerry--and see what the numbers might tell you about THAT. Which brings me to his next points...)

-----

LAT Editor:
"So the sample wasn't entirely random. More importantly, tho, the turnout in November didn't mirror past years. If it had, Kerry would have won. The whole reason Bush won was that he succeeded in boosting turnout in Republican areas considerably above their usual level. So when the model was adjusted to reflect the actual turnout, the numbers changed a lot."

("So the sample wasn't entirely random." He makes a wrong point, for which there is no foundation in the data--that Republicans were shy of the pollsters--and then says, "So the sample wasn't entirely random," thus verifying his own wrong point. And he'd just got finished explaining exit polls, which are weighted by their nature. Of course they're not random! The man is a sloppy thinker.)

(Then he does the same thing with turnout and a Kerry win. He is using the official tally--the item that is in question--to verify his assertion that the November turnout favored Bush. BECAUSE Kerry "didn't win," the turnout must have favored Bush (is his thinking). Does he tell you the numbers for turnout in Democratic areas? No. Does he mention that the Democrats had a blowout success--almost 60/40--in new voter registration in 2004? No. Does he mention or examine Roves' "invisible" Republican voter registration effort? No. Does he mention how they "weighted" the false exit poll result--the one on everybody's TV screens at the end of the night--with an impossible infusion of dead Republican voters from '00? (See TIA.) No. Once again, he is talking through his hat--a lazy, sloppy thinker, who knows almost nothing about Nov. 2, 2004, except what others in the news monopolies press have told him.)

-----

LAT Editor:
"Ah, you say, how do you know the turnout was real, not faked up by Republican operatives? Well, consider the task. You're dealing with thousands of precincts, each of which is separately tallied, using several different types of voting machines, all with poll watchers from both parties as well as independent observers looking on. The conspiracy you would need to fix all of those results would be vast, incredibly complicated to pull off and even harder to keep secret. Almost six months after election day, despite lots of people looking, no one has turned up any evidence -- just speculation and inference."

("how do you know the turnout was real...?" - how does HE know the turnout was "real" (i.e., this supposed Republican turnout that elected Bush)? Really, where is he getting this from? The "turnout" was big across the board--in both Dem and Repub areas? Further, how does HE know that the bigger turnout in Repub areas, '00 vs '04, favored Bush? (--because Diebold and ES&S told him so?) See below: Prove Bush won.

("The conspiracy you would need to fix all of those results would be vast." He knows nothing about this electronic voting system. Nothing! One hacker, a couple of minutes, leaving no trace--that's all it takes. And the code by which the votes are tabulated is secret, proprietary information, owned by Bush donors.)

( "...just speculation and inference." First of all, this is not true. There were numerous reports by voters of electronic touchscreens changing Kerry votes to Bush votes, defaulting to Bush, and erasing Kerry votes in a party vote--all favoring Bush and hurting Kerry, with astronomical odds against this happening. Secondly, he fails to state--and perhaps doesn't even know--that the election system was DELIBERATELY SET UP by the Bush donor owners of the electronic voting systems, and by Tom Delay and the Bush toadies in Congress--TO BE UNVERIFIABLE. We have to rely to some extent on inferential evidence (f.i., the true exit poll result) BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY THEY WANTED IT TO BE. And so, now they're using that very unverifiability to debunk evidence of fraud--evidence of fraud that was withheld from the American people??? The twisted logic here is unbelievable.)

(You should try this on him: Prove Bush won. Hint: It's not possible, given the breaks in the "chain of custody" of the votes, and the secrecy (not to mention Bush partisan control) of the vote counting software.)

LAT Editor:
"Finally, it's simply not true that the results contradicted the pre-election polls. Bush's victory margin was very narrow and was well within the projections of quite a few of the pre-election polls."

(Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. He says "quite a few of the pre-election polls." He doesn't say what percentage of them, or which ones, nor by how much. And he fails to say that most of the pre-election polls were TRENDING to Kerry--the key factor in pre-election polls--and that Zogby (the most reliable one) was predicting a Kerry win.)

LAT Editor:
"As for Nebraska, sorry, but even nerdy number crunchers have to get their basic facts right. If people don't know what they're talking about, they can't really be expected to be taken seriously. And these people don't."

(I don't know what he's talking about here. Fill me in. "nerdy number crunchers"??? Whatever he's trying to say here, his choice of epithets is interesting. Is this early warning of the Rovian line on US Count Votes? (--nine Ph.D.'s in statistics at leading universities being dismissed as "nerdy number crunchers" in BushWorld?).

(The key point in the exit poll analyses is not so much that Kerry won the exit polls as the weird and virtually impossible skew to Bush, in the official tally vs. the exit polls, in the battleground states (the states he needed to win)--with 10 million to one odds against such a skew. THAT is the chief indicator of fraud. If the exit polls were wrong--say, if they had a bias toward Kerry (for which there is no evidence), they would be wrong more or less evenly across all states. But this is just "nerdy number cruncher" stuff, is what the Bushites will be saying. Mark my words. The appeal is to stupidity--we've seen it on numerous issues in BushWorld. He is taking his cues from THEM.)

LAT Editor:
"And I'm glad you think my e-mails are interesting, but the comparison with the news stories in the paper goes to the heart of what a newspaper is supposed to be. When I'm writing to you, I can engage in debate, offer a point of view, etc. Our conception of the newspaper, by contrast, is that it should strive to present provable fact and suppress point of view. In our polarized, highly argumentative society, someone has to at least try to be a neutral source of information--giving provable, reliable, data, not speculation or guesswork. Then let others take the information and use it for debate as they see fit. That's the role we try to play. That's less dramatic than being a polemicist--perhaps less fun. But it's also crucial unless we are all to simply wallow in a sea of subjectivity."

("Our conception of the newspaper, by contrast, is that it should strive to present provable fact and suppress point of view." Uh-huh. To tell you the truth, I laughed out loud at that one. To be a little more specific (I'm on the floor--really--you gotta keep your sense of humor in all this) (har, har, har, har....!): --as if their CHOICE of "provable fact" were not influenced by their "point of view" every day, in every story and every headline. --and as if they DON'T print "unprovable facts." Remember all those headlines taken from Centcom press releases about WMD's in Iraq, day after day after day, during the invasion--with the news monopolies printing every government lie based on the POINT OF VIEW that the government and the military MUST BE TELLING THE TRUTH, that this empty barn or that white powder was going to turn up WMDs. No skepticism whatsoever. Straight-on controlled government "news"--to make it SEEM LIKE the invasion was justified. And now we know it was all CRAP, all cooked up, 100% lies! Provable fact, my ass.)

LAT Editor:
"...to simply wallow in a sea of subjectivity." Over 100,000 innocent Iraqis slaughtered by US bombers, according to the British doctors report, in those weeks of the invasion, while the Los Angeles Times and their brethren were feeding us a blood pudding of unforgivable and irredeemable lies to justify that mass murder.

A war that nearly 60% of Americans STILL OPPOSE.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't bother with this jerk any longer. He is hopelessly stupid, misinformed and highly prejudiced. It is a noble work to try to reach whatever good, honest, intelligent people might still work for these news monopolies. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and this pompous B.S. about "wallowing in a sea of subjectivity" is where I would draw it.

[Stevepol]

23. To mis-program the voting machines IS NOT HARD.

The machines are mis-programmed at the factory. ES&S and Diebold run on the same original program according to Bev Harris, but you can't prove it since the source code is off limits.

12 people could have hacked or patched or whatever was done, THE WHOLE 04 ELECTION. Why is this difficult to see? How many central tabulators are used in key precincts across the country, in OH or FL, the key states? Just use common sense. This could easily have been done.

The exit polls are FACT. Steven Freeman is a PhD in this area of research. His last ms was done with 6 or 7 other PhD's mostly in statistics. THESE ARE FACTS!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is not speculation.

What does the guy want? Give him, send him, give him the web site for the Freeman study. Send him articles by people whose authority can't be questioned. But make it clear, the only proof possible is pre-election polls and exit polls. The results in elections are not routinely audited in this country and unless the alleged result is w/i a certin margin, no recounts or audits are done. And the source code is legally off-limits. Ask him what he wants you to send him besides the statistical break-downs. Make it clear to him that THIS IS ALL THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO USE TO PROVE AN ELECTION EITHER VALID OR INVALID. Ask him to prove to you that the election WAS NOT a fraud!! He can't do it. Nobody can. And THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO!!!!!!!!!!

[Peace Patriot]

26. Exactly. Prove Bush won. They can't do it. And furthermore the...

...REASON they can't do it is that Tom Delay prevented a paper trail for electonic voting ever making it out of committee, and the electronic voting machine companies, mainly Diebold and ES&S, fought against every verification measure, with Congress underfunding the watchdog agency (the EAC) and permitting this massive purchase by the states of unreliable, hackable, insecure voting machines and tabulation systems.

If the Bush Cartel had wanted a verifiable election, why didn't we have one?

It's a no-brainer.

People like this LAT editor are lazy and stupid or corrupt--or some combination of these. He's not thinking. He's not investigating. He's mouthing platitudes and small bits of information he's picked up from others.

A real journalist ASSUMES that the government is lying. Governments and the powerful always do. If you don't start with that assumption, they'll snow you every time. The lie may not be obvious, but you know it's there, and your job is to ferret it out. That's what "investigative reporting" MEANS.

All of these so-called journalists in the news monopoly press assume just the opposite of what they should be assuming--that the government tells the truth. And we're not dealing here with just any government, but with an all-powerful regime that controls the White House, the Justice Dept., the intelligence apparatus, the Congress, and the courts, with their close buddies in control of the counting of our votes. They're telling the truth? And we're whackos and tinfoil hats (and "nerdy number crunchers")?

This is so upside down from real journalism! And it's no wonder that this particular upside down journalist is trying to cover for the TV news monopolies who changed the exit polls--and denied the American public strong evidence of fraud. He's part of this news monopoly establishment run by war profiteers and billionaires. He reeks of their arrogance and snobbery and prejudices. And his writing is typical of the sloppy, lazy, pro-government B.S. that they shovel down Americans' throats every day, and have the effrontery to call "news."

[Carolab]

29. Send him TIA's "Our Evidence vs. Their Evidence".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x366974

And his other stuff on exit polls, if you haven't already.