corrente

This story just keeps slipping away, but it won’t die. This one is particularly damning, since it comes from someone who can say, “I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way.” It’s rubbing my fur backwards, too. I’m looking like the Sabocat. I didn’t post all of it here, since it’s a no registration required one. Just the backards-rubbin highlights:

By Colin Shea, Zogby.com, Friday 12 November 2004

In Florida:

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush…

…In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots - not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result - in four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.

Uh, yeah, I’d call 70% of Dems switching votes “unlikely.” Even “magical.”

In Ohio:

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote - this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences - this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised…

Night of the living dead voters! And then the framework:

…Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one - massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the 'Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.

via 'I Smell a Rat'

One minute I’m ready to think it’s a lack of organization that lost us the election, and the next I’m convinced that we didn’t lose it at all. Not that one excludes the other, really…let’s get organized and end the war, and find the stories that will lead us to impeachment and removal. I, for one, hope it’s election fraud. And into the coffeehouses—didn’t several monarchs close the coffeehouses because of their subversive purposes? Note: Thanks to alert readers Oscar and what, and anybody who is still steamed about the (d)election…