What do we think of the Keith Mothersson’s scenario?
October 25th, 2008
Could Obama really be robbed of victory in this way?
[Keith Mothersson of the Campaign for Visible Ballots has been following the US election integrity movement since 2000. In this guest slot he gives his assessment of the current state of play.]
Psephologists sometimes look too closely at opinion polls, naively assuming a predictable feed through into election results. The election in the US is a genuine no-holds-barred struggle which could easily go all the way the Supreme Court and/or Congress and/or the streets.
In the Red corner McCain fronts powerful Neo-Con interests, who imposed Christian Dominionist attack-dog Palin as running mate precisely to gee up Christian Rightists who will be prepared to fiddle the election (to stop Satanic Democrat baby-killers) and redneck racists prepared to fight in the post-election period.
In the Blue corner Obama has been chosen, like Carter and Clinton, as the representative of Neo-Liberal interests, who prefer to pursue global supremacy using free trade and multilateral frameworks, e.g. NATO, WTO. Skull and Bonesman Kerry ‘threw’ Ohio within hours in 2004, despite an inexplicable mismatch between original exit polls and and final result of 11 percent (7 nationally)
By ignoring the dozens of tell-tale signs of fraud in 2000, and the historical experience of black and other communities most affected, Gore condemned himself to defeat.
Let’s assume that Obama is way ahead in the polls and the Republicans really, really don’t want to lose. How might they still pull it off?
First they need to win the ‘Jim Crow’ battle to suppress the vote of likely Democrat demographics. Robert Kennedy Jr and Greg Palast report in Rolling Stone that the Republicans have been mis-registering and purging voters at unprecedented rates, with the result that when John Brown goes to the polls in Ohio he may find that he can’t vote because his driving licence says John D Brown (the ‘exact match’ rule), because he has been forced to move house recently, or on a host of other pretexts.
He may also need courage to push past intimidating police sweeps and Republican ‘cagers’ challenging his ID, and patience to stand in long queues when the underprovided-in-poor areas machines ‘break down’. Early voting in the South is attempting to mitigate polling-day delays, but at the risk of ‘racialising’ the image of Obama’s support-base in the eyes of the white national majority.
Second McCain will need to win the ‘Boss Tweed’ battle about counting the votes. Although the burgeoning election integrity movement has been recruiting many teams of citizen exit-pollers, the media will likely ignore them and the Republicans will be doing all they can to ensure that the ‘offical’ exit polls aren’t leaked before the necessary ‘adjustments’.
Black Box Voting and allies are encouraging election-integrity moles and training citizen sleuths and videographers in further non-partisan efforts to cut down room for credible election fraud. But the Democrat leadership has been so backward (denial?, complicity?) that more votes than ever before will be registered on, counted using, or transmitted through tamper-friendly secret software controlled by Republican-allied companies and counted without possibility of public local public auditing and typically without any physical ballots to at least theoretically recount at polling stations ‘randomly chosen’.
Top computer-analyst Stephen Spoonamore has recently defected from the McCain camp to explain exactly how the electronic swindle is being planned.
Although Ohio election-integrity lawyers are now homing in on those he named, the same software that produced absurdly massive suprises for Hagel in Nebraska in 1996, Chambliss in 2002 in Georgia and contained the (underlying) Democrat avalanche in 2006, is already causing (ahem) ‘glitches’ (vote flips) in West Virginia, and several other states. ‘Ah, but Hagel and Chambliss won on late-swings’.
Asssuming the powers that be don’t want an Obama landslide, they will have to engineer a sequence of events which can be spun into a sufficiently credible narrative to persuade people to overcome their gut instincts that far more people were voting Blue than Red. Beyond pre-poll promotion of McKinney and Nader to credibilise the flipping of Obama votes to them.
The Republicans have prepared the ground for protracted legal battles by countering ‘election theft’ charges with relentless propaganda against ‘massive partisan improprieties’ supposedly accompanying the registration drive of ACORN. The fact that the ‘voter fraud’ meme has been demolished in the eyes of rational people, does not mean that it might not be good for legal filibustering and serve as a great battle-cry for Palin’s mob against the ‘sore losers’ and ‘terrorist/insurgents’ causing ‘anarchy on our streets’.
Which failing there’s always the JFK solution (lone Pakistani gunman, anybody?) and Martial Law.
It’s a long way to the White House and those who can’t read the extra-psephological runes could be in for nasty surprises.
MessageSpace Advertising
I decided to publish Keith’s piece, although it is not in the normal PB format, because it does represent something that a lot of people are talking about and I have not seen it all pulled together like this.
Let’s hope he’s wrong.
Even the Military-Industrial complex might work out that this is a good election to lose. In addition
1. This time the media want obama to win and won’t put up with shenanigans.
2. Even if they fiddle tghe Presidency this time a Democratic House and Senate won’t sit idly by.
3. AA disenfranchisement could well lead to civil unrest
4. More state governments in Democratic hands this time. eg Ohio
On Yesterdays Topic I think ICM rightly or wrongly replicate some of the pro LD prompting that ROPA equal air time generally causes in Election periods. So there generally higher figures for the LD are not strictly accurate now but might be a better pointer to the result after a GE campaign. I don’t think the party is on 21% its outlier but I’m sure the final percentage result in 2010 will be closer to the current ICM that the rest of the polls.
As a general rule I knock 5% to 6% of the previous local elections Projected National Share of the vote as an indicator so today I would bet on a LD score of 19% to 20% in a November 2008 General Election.
I’m cautiously pessimistic about our prospects. Retrenchment not melt down but basically.
(a) Clegg is useless
(b) utterly the wrong leader for a third party, anti establishment, protest vote needing semi rural, low wage economy operation like the LDs.
(c) We aren’t trying to repl;ace Labour on the left which is where the traction is instead have gone all right wing (as perhaps might have made sense in 2005) just when the Tory party has restablished its self in the that part of the spectrum very nicely.
With regard to the BBC Camo will huff and puff but won’t blow the house down. As a left liberal I accept its an irredeemably left liberal biased organisation but its just too popular to touch.
Sorry to go OT, but Yachtgate gained some interesting new momentum while I was fast asleep in the tropical night.
Why the F did Mandelson lie? That is the gist of his Times letter - “I lied”. Now, call me Doktor Suspicious of the University of Cynicalberg, but when Mandelson lies, or, sorry “inadvertently misleads”, he ALWAYS has a reason.
So what was the reason for his lie? What is he covering up? Didn’t he realise that in trying to stitch up Osborne, any shadiness of his own would soon be revealed? How stupid is this highly intelligent man?
More to the point, how idiotic was Brown in rehiring a twice-disgraced Minister known for his gruesomely mendacious behaviour? This latest twist was bound to happen. Just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.
Good grief. I can’t even begin to imagine the eruption of sheer indignation that’s going to hit this thread when Stars and Stripes wakes up. And this time - possibly for the first and last time ever - he might actually have a point.
Really? Nutso conspiracy posts that end in supposing a Pakistani gunman paid for by the Republican Party? Sigh.
I’m for Obama, but jeez this is just dumb. I understand trying to publish different types of pieces, but if you want to talk about computer voter fraud go get a guest piece from Ars Technica or some other computer website that has been following the issue closely.
On Exit Polls he’s obviously clueless, go get Nate Silver or the guy at Pollster to do a guest post.
Although he does make a couple good points—it’s pretty clear Republicans are laying the groundwork for a profoundly silly (to anyone who understands the issue) “we waz robbed” argument via Acorn—but then he winds up with vague “powers that be” and talk of, essentially, Republicans hiring assassins to kill Obama. That’s pretty stupid, no matter how you look at it.
If I wanted to read insane conspiracy theories, there’s lots of blogs to read. I come here for talk about elections and the odds of things, perhaps a little commentary or analysis.
“With regard to the BBC Camo will huff and puff but won’t blow the house down. As a left liberal I accept its an irredeemably left liberal biased organisation but its just too popular to touch.
by Yellow Submarine October 25th, 2008 at 5:01 am”
Well, there’s yer answer, nice educated left liberals, like you, admire the nice left liberal BBC, and therefore have convinced themselves it is “popular”. Go figure.
However, if you ask the average poor person what they think about paying the f***ing license fee, I think you’ll find it’s not that “popular” after all. How many taxes are?
The fee is begrudgingly accepted. If Cammo can find some way to get rid of it, or at least freeze/lower it, and sell off the BBC crap no one needs to be publicly funded (Radio 1, etc), he will find a lot of support.
The Beeb is doomed in its present state, anyway, cause of new media. As it is majorly reformed, so we must and shall purge it of its absurd political slant.
However, if you ask the average poor person what they think about paying the f***ing license fee, I think you’ll find it’s not that “popular” after all. How many taxes are?
This is a silly argument. The average “poor person’s” television viewing would be a lot more expensive without the license fee.
6. If Thatcher didn’t tackle it Camo won’t. There is a reason they call it the Conservative Party.
I also don’t understand the argument about the BEEB being “doomed” by the new media, when it is THE leading exploiter of the new media. How many other organisations offer a website of the scope of the BBC, have anything approaching what it has done with BBCi, exploited the use of digital technology (the red button) to the same extent?
There is an alternative to the licence fee - funding out of general taxation. That is hardly a sensible suggestion for anyone worried about Govt influence on its output.
Anyway, frm one ageold PB topic to another:
Isn’t the Govt useless?
Having sent his wife there first - supported by five heavies with shooters - and her head not having been sent back in a sack, Gordon has been told it’s safe to venture into the Glenrothes manor. Just to parley.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7690291.stm
Still likely to find his operation has been turfed out by the better organised Salmond outfit. They are selling better gear, Gordon. And better protection, in case you should suffer a - how shall we say - “downturn” in fortunes. Worst of all, they don’t fear you anymore….
Sorry Mike, this piece seems hysterical.
Aren’t statements such as this simply actionable when stated as fact:
“In the Red corner McCain fronts powerful Neo-Con interests, who imposed Christian Dominionist attack-dog Palin as running mate precisely to gee up Christian Rightists who will be prepared to fiddle the election (to stop Satanic Democrat baby-killers) and redneck racists prepared to fight in the post-election period.”
I hope he has established and explicit proof that they will be prepared to fiddle the election and that she was “imposed” for the reason stated.
Getting into one area of real detail, the article linked through on “Dominionist” (imho a dreadful “Old Testament Totalitarian” movement) provides mainly guilt by association along the lines of:
“Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America.”
Nothing there that attaches to her personally or that demonstrates what her own views are.
and
“Sarah Palin is a product of an extreme fringe of the American Evangelical movement known variously as the Third Wave Movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation, or as Joel’s Army, a part of what is called Dominionism.”
Nothing proven about her personal views there either. Check the article linked. You can’t say “x was a member of y therefore she believes the worst version of the nuttiest of their doctrines”, any more than you can say “Obama is a Muslim Terrorist” because his middle name is “Hussein”. Or not without some stated real evidence.
There then (in the linked article) follows a lot of stuff about Dominionism (which may or may not be true - the statement that the Third Wave is a sub-part of Dominionism makes me doubt the accuracy) which is attached to her personally.
That “Palin the Domionist” claim is repeated above as a statement of fact.
I don’t have much time for her, but if it was me I’d get him to post it somewhere else that he is legally responsible for, and link to it from an opinion post. Your call, of course.
Sorry for the long post.
Matt Wardman
Only got through the first few paragraphs. Not at all a biased viewpoint then!
Don’t worry. Stars & Stripes will tell you that all voter fraud is committed by Dems and covered up by a conspiracy in the Liberal MSM.
alex - 7 - You state that the average “poor person’s” television viewing would be a lot more expensive without the license fee. Why the quotation marks?
A colour TV Licence costs £139.50. Black and white £47.00. How much more would it cost the average “poor person” without the licence fee?
16 - Quotation marks were because i was quoting!
Let’s not kid ourselves, the Republicans are prepared to try to steal the election through unfounded smears to put the fear of God into the American people.
Palin: “Our opponent … is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”
If they are capable of trying to affect the outcome of the election through the use of fear and prejudice and they are willing to systematically purge millions from the voting register, can anyone believe they would not be capable of using more covert means?
The narrative could include that the opinion polls were all wrong, apart from those who factored in something the rest never thought of - maybe the fear factor that the Republicans would take credit for that meant voters who said they would vote Obama, faced with the reality of voting, could not trust him. Notice any polls yesterday from a PR company that were completely out of line with everything else?
We would never know if the voting machines had malicious software designed to favour one party. But there is evidence:
http://www.ideamouth.com/voterfraud.htm
Franklin County’s (2004) unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. If there was malicious code inserted to take every 10th vote for Kerry and give it to Bush, and the programmer accidentally added Kerry’s running total instead of 1 vote (B=B+K instead of B=B+1) to Bush, it would have produced exactly these results. Thanks to WhiteKnight1 for this analysis.
An electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush’s tally in a suburban Columbus precinct, even though there are just 800 voters there. Error is referred to as a glitch. Error favored republican.
How about this for an election night betting strategy based on discrepancies between exit polls and results?
If the discrepancies are systematic, then it does not really matter whether they are due to Republican fraud, Democrat fraud, or (as I believe) because American polls are rubbish.
The Democrat primaries had both candidates attracting higher than usual numbers of voters from particular demographics: older women for Hillary Clinton; Black, young and disillusioned Republicans (including Ron Paul types) for Barack Obama. This led to hasty revision of pollsters’ weightings for these demographic groups.
The hypothesis is that these weightings are no longer valid outside the special circumstances of the primaries (or, if you prefer, because they take no account of fraud).
So the plan is to take any early discrepancies and use them to adjust the polls for the later-declaring states, and bet accordingly.
See you in Carey Street.
Hey, how weird. I clicked on my favorite political betting Site and found myself at democratparanoia.com
I’ll be back when I’ve fixed my puter.
ttfn
Admin — please fix the time again and use ntp (network time protocol) so it stays fixed.
£139.50 is £11.50 per month. Not a huge amount when put like that.
You’ve also got to consider than there is no one critique of the BBC, and many are contradictory which is in itself a serious barrier against change.
Some focus on the news output (claiming it is biassed). I would question whether this is an argument against the principle of the licence fee.
Some complain that they have an unfair dominant market position and are driving out competition. This may be true, but then a dogmatic approach to encouraging competition doesn’t always help the average consumer. There is a strong argument IMO that absence of competition is the BBC’s great strength, encouraging it to take risks where truely commercial organisations wouldn’t dare tread. To take one example, would any commercial organisation have produced Strictly come dancing? I doubt it. Who would produce the costume dramas? etc etc
Related to this (as mentioned above) I don’t think many commercial channels would have exploited digital technology to the extent of the BBC.
Some simply complain that they never watch the BBC, (they usually lie) so why should they have to pay for it? They’ve got their Sky package and that’s all they want. This argument doesn’t do much for the poor person.
There are many others.
Every complaint has a valid point behind it, but most complaints contain different, and often contradictory solutions. Which makes serious change pretty unlikely.
Has Cameron himself declared war on the BBC or is its abolition part of the fantasy manifesto that has him withdrawing from the EU the day after hanging the curtains?
alex - 17 - thank you. A complete answer.
However, you specifically said “the average poor person’s television viewing would be a lot more expensive without the license fee.”
The second question was “How much more?” Your long post at 22 is not an answer.
Oligarchs to the left of them
Oligarchs to the right of them
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/25/partyfunding-conservatives
26 - Oh no, The Tories have taken a totally legal donation which has been checked by the Elecrotal Commission.
Jail them all!!
Hadn’t you heard? In a grave breach of security which the authorities are trying hard to suppress, the result has already leaked out. Have a look at this
Good Morning PBers and GOP Conspirators Worldwide and in Ohio.
Meanwhile in the real world ….
Latest Zogby/Reuters tracker :
McCain 41.6% .. Obama 51.1%
Note - Yesterday - M-41/O-51.3
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1608
I have given money to the Conservative Party and once spent a weekend in St Petersburg. Should I alert the authorities?
25 - Well basic cable/Sky costs 20+ per month and that provides extremely restrictive viewing and where there is an overlap the BBC offers far greater coverage and overall quality. Most people with Sky pay upwards of £35 a month i would think.
Now obviously the market dynamics would change considerably in the complete absence of the BBC (which isn’t going to happen) but i can’t see any service being offered cheaper. That’s without mentioning what would happen to the radio channels, the internet etc
So in summary, i’ve done a very poor job of answering your question
31 - alex - thanks, anyway.
Mike, you have my congratulations you on putting up this piece.
This is not paranoia, it is the result of analysis of what happened during the last two Presidential election “counts”. By now, almost everyone on the site must have an understanding that the 2000 election was stolen by the GOP through the Supreme Court decision.
What is also a widely-held opinion is that the 2004 election was stolen, this time by the widespread use of paper-trail-free computerised voting shenanigans, wherein programming was used that counted every nth vote for Kerry as a vote for Bush. This is not paranoia! This is really what happened. I have a jpeg which shows graphically the following data. In 9 states.
PAPER BALLOTS Kerry : Bush
Illinois Exit 55:45 Machine tally 55:45 = no change in %
Maine Exit 55:44 Machine tally 53:45 = change of 1 to 2%
Wisconsin Exit 52:48 Machine tally 50:49 = change of 1 to 2%
ELECTRONIC VOTING
N Carolina Exit 49:51 Machine tally 43:56 = change of 5 to 6%
New Hampshire Exit 57:41 Machine tally 50:49 = change of 7 to 8%
New Mexico Exit 50:48 Machine tally 49:50 = change of 1 to 2% WINNER CHANGED TO BUSH
Florida Exit 51:48 Machine tally 47:52 = change of 6% WINNER CHANGED TO BUSH
Ohio Exit 52:47 Machine tally 48:51 = change of 4% WINNER CHANGED TO BUSH
Pennsylvania Exit 60:40 Machine tally 51:49 = change of 9%
Look, guys, just because the very idea of some high-ups inthe totally trustworthy (NOT) US establishment actually fraudulently changing the way that people have voted is too awful to contemplate does not mean that it doesn’t happen. You all think that that’s what happens in places that are ‘backward’ in democratic terms, but you also know that there has been electoral fraud in the UK, in Birmingham, committed by the Labour Party. That has been discussed at length on here.
Please, good people, just open your minds a little bit! Maybe it wasn’t that long ago that you thought that hedge funds were kind of OK. I mean, they were being encouraged by UK Government tax policy. Well now you know different. Please, just open your minds that little bit further. Remember, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was a whole war, that’s still going on, justified by way of fraudulent information.
Having said all that, I don’t think that the GOP will steal this one. And not only for the reasons that Yellow Submarine has listed in (2). Thank God.
30. No, just a psychiatrist.
Morning all. First, the off-topic post on the Beeb (yes, I know we’ve done it tons of times before but I’ve been doing some thinking).
The analogue switchover is due to take place by 2012. After that, the Beeb (and everyone else) will be broadcasting solely on digital. Is there any good reason why its TV package could not be sold as a subscription service, in the same way that others are?
That would enable the licence fee to be abolished and replaced by a subscription fee by those who wish to take it up. Where there is a genuine public interest in running a service at a loss, certain subsidies could be given, in the way that the FO does to the World Service at the moment. I’m thinking Arts Council for the orchestras etc.
At the same time, it could be made clear that the Beeb’s charter would not be renewed (or revoked if it clashed with the necessary legislation) and it would be regulated in the same way as any other equivalent media organisation.
Peter the Punter@20: Give Mike a break here - the poor bloke has to come up with a new thread several times a day to prevent his server from croaking under the weight of hundreds of comments, and if the topic isn’t thought-provoking enough he ends up with pages of people banging on about the BBC.
So for the sake of argument let’s grant the basic premises of that piece:
1) The voting machines are riggable and the audit trails are crap.
2) The system is riddled with crooked Republican insiders who would like to help steal the election.
* Incidentally, (1) is clearly true in a lot of jurisdictions. I have no idea about (2).
You can see how this would be used to steal an election in 2004 and 2008. The Democrats road to the White House went through a couple of predictable swing states - Ohio and Florida - which were both controlled by Republican administrations. A fairly small number of insiders would be enough to steal a state,
But what about now? Obama is fighting a whole range of states, with different voting systems and technologies, controlled by different people. With lots of states in play, the chances that rigging one will help are much smaller, so the risk/reward factor for a would-be rigger is greatly reduced. Many of the people involved in running the elections are now Democrats, where they used to be Republicans. Obama has a history of winning procedural wars - both on-the-ground experience in voter registration and getting his opponents thrown off the ballot because their signatures were dodgy. And if anybody does attempt a coup, he has a massive movement on the ground that he can motivate by the sheer force of his charisma via the internet, bypassing the mainstream media completely, just waiting for the signal to go out and string up the conspirators from lamp-posts and carve backwards “B”s on their faces.
Come to think of it, if the Democrats believed that elections were being systematically stolen and wanted to come up with a foolproof way to stop it happening this time, Obama, his current team and his current strategy would be exactly what they would come up with. Spooky…
Sorry, that bit in the middle should have said, “You can see how this would be used to steal an election in 2004 and 2000″.
(In fact, I’m sure that’s what I wrote. Clearly Neo-con dirty tricks or something…)
Well done Mike for bringing this piece into mainstream credible consideration within the UK pollyanorak circles.
Too many people are willing to simply scoff and dismiss any and all whiffs of conspiracy theories as nothing more than a joke.
Sometimes this simply enables the perpetrators to carry on without serious challenge.
The bottom line - the Repubs do not want to lose this or any election - there is a understated but very deep desire in some quarters to prevent a black presidency - there are many ways the outcome can be ‘influenced’. All these ways will have been seriously considered and deployed where possible by a Neo-Con circle that are used to getting their own way and acting without restraint.
Anyone remember that computer-animated movie from a couple of years ago, ‘Cars’? Anyone remember that one of the characters was a hippie VW van?
“It’s all a CONSPIRACY, man!!!”
14. Having just come back from Barbados where they run one of the American ‘evangelical Christian’ (in my mind pseudo-cultist money grabbing charletans, & yes I am a Christian) channels constantly there is no doubt that the Dominionist agenda not only exists but is putting its full force behind the Republicans. For example, there has been a series when one of these ‘pastors’ has been going through issues like climate change, war & taxes & using the bible to ‘prove’ that the right wing Republican agenda is ‘the word of God’. Another ‘pastor’ even uses the declaration of independence as a religious document (a funny thing for a so called evangelical to do) & again uses it as a denunciation of things like redistributive taxes through selective reading & connecting the document to obscure passages from the Old Testament (where else?). These people want a theocratic state, no more no less & soon (before the Rapture).
And now the on-topic post. By the way, I think Mike is right to put the piece up. While I don’t accept the slightly hysterical tone, it is a good way of looking at the subject and also reacquaints us with some of the rules of the process, which may be helpful.
I agree with Stephen that it is far from being completely beyond the realms of possibility that at least dodgy practices will be used to influence the outcome of the election, though I don’t think it will be critical this time. YSub gives good reasons at [2].
My understanding is that the result has to be ratified in the Senate, although I didn’t find the requirement in a quick scan of the US constitution so presumably it’s a result of legislation. In 2000, when the result had been predicted to be very close (as it was), it only took a tiny shift to produce a different winner. Whether or not that election was ’stolen’ is, in the context of this discussion, a lesser point (though looking back at it, it was a massively important election - how would Gore have handled 9/11? Surely not by invading Iraq). What matters is that if it was done, it was done with a large enough element of doubt that insufficient congressional support came forward to challenge the result.
This time would be different. This time, Obama is expected to win by some distance. For McCain to get to the White House would require him to overturn Democrat leads in several states where it has been in the high single figures at least for some time. Were that to happen, without a similar swing in other states, and without a consistent swing across the state (or at least in demographically consistent terms), I very much doubt it would go similarly unchallenged.
New Newsweek national poll :
McCain 41% .. Obama 53%
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165570?tid=relatedcl
38 — what has race to do with it?
The conspiracy theory has the GOP using dirty tricks against Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, and then there is Watergate.
It is not Black presidents Republicans object to: it’s Democrat ones.
Sorry to see you giving space to a lying Democrat. oops, sorry about the tautology.
New PPP poll for Ohio :
McCain 44% .. Obama 51%
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_Ohio_1024938.pdf
As to the rate at which voters are removed from electoral rolls in the US - you might want to check out the population change rates for the states in question. Alot of people move from one state to another, in any given year - part of the reason the labour market in the US is considered so flexible.
The problem with this piece is that it doesn’t start doing analysis like this.
On weird and nasty people - a few years back, I was living in Hampstead. At a dinner party, a local Labour party activist announced that uncontrolled immigration was *planned* to dilute/replace the racist white people in the country with nice melanin blessed foreigners who would always vote Labour. Went down like a lead balloon - everyone there apart from me and her were first generation immigrants…… She was, of course, a racist twit who had no power, influence, or knowledge. But there she was, providing fuel for the BNP and conspiracy theorists.
Oh and another thing - given the fervour of support for Obama, I could just as easily see some bright eyed types “saving America” by backing the ballot box.
There is always election fraud - sadly it’s a bit like police corruption. But please try and gather some evidence.
By the way, NeoCon refers to a small subset of the Republican Party - most Republicans (including Bush) have never been Liberals. Using it as a term of abuse is not useful to anyone.
New Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll for Colorado :
McCain 40% .. Obama 52%
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/oct/24/rockycbs4-poll-obama-has-12-point-lead-state/
SOunds like the GOP are tooling up to fight the 2000 election.
even the crazy left wing blogs i read don’t think something like this is realistically going to happen.
Latest Muhlenberg College/Morning Call tracker for Pennsylvania :
McCain 41% .. Obama 52%
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/pa_obama_52_mccain_41_muhlenbe_1.php
Alex seems to be either lying or stupid. If you scrap the licence fee and demolish the BBC, you aren’t left with Sky - you just buy a TV with a digibox, and you get a zillion freeview channels, quite apart from the Beeb. So you save £130 a year, not peanuts to some people, and you’ve still got telly. So poor people save money.
And anyway the Beeb would still continue without the licence fee, it would just have to be funded by advertising, or subscription.
I don’t want yet another thread piffling on about the Beeb, but Alex’s argument is so daft it needs rebuttal. And anyone who can quote “Strictly Come Dancing” as a brilliant reason to KEEP the BBC, needs to visit the local mental health unit, perhaps as an inpatient.
We like to congratulate ourselves about the BBC being this wonderful institution but I think it is a shibboleth of Britishness, a bit like the NHS, i.e. its one of those things we just presume is great - but if you actually look at the BBC you have to ask yourself Is it really that good?
Take News. This is done just as well in America by CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and Fox, without a licence fee. You get a range of opinions, from soft left to hard right. The political/electoral news coverage in America is BETTER than anything we have here, as has been rehearsed many times on pb.com
What about drama? OK the costume dramas are pretty good, but the best of them (Jane Austen, Rome, &c) are done in co-production with HBO or other channels. Same goes for Documentary and Natural History - these are good on the Beeb, but no better than anything produced commercially.
As for contemporary drama, the BBC is lamentably poor: the multiculty PC piffle of something like Casualty or Bonekickers doesn’t remotely compare to the best American drama: House, the Wire, West Wing, the Sopranos. Again, America produces all these challenging and brilliant dramas without a licence fee.
Comedy? Laughably poor. When has a BBC sitcom, apart from maybe the Office, ever matched the consistent quality of the Simpsons, Seinfeld, Cheers, South Park, Frasier…?
But then again, the BBC has produced… Strictly Come Dancing, which apparently justifies its compulsory pickpocketing of the general public.
The BBC is not as good as we like to think it is. In fact, given that it receives £3bn quid of taxpayers money, making it one of the
richest broadcasting corporations in the world, it is a pile of sh1te.
Enough already.
This guest article like most Black Boxer stuff is about 99.46% garbage. Amazing how many Democrats are helping the GOP with the voter suppression strategy, by convincing millions of Americans that their entire electoral system is rigged and thus best avoided.
These guys have created a wonderful little cottage industry for themselves. Too bad that almost all of them are too lazy or whatever to actually observe the actual election process at their local election offices.
43. There was even a conspiracy theory that Major stole the 1992 election from Kinnock.
52. A small but interesting point - when digital TV was being brought in, the original plans mandated that a mechanism to hand subscription channels be built into every receiver.
This requirement was dropped - at the request of the BBC. They were worried that if every receiver could deal with subscription TV, the argument to make the license fee a subscription fee would be unstoppable.
Is Keith Mothersson Martin Day with a spell-checker?
53. looking at the early voting from Colorado, i note that the party ID’s are virtually level, but then i note that 83% of early votes are absentee, is it likely these types of votes are skewed towards Republicans?
New thread - “Could Mandy end up being the biggest loser?”
Great to see that the GOP is restoring to the circular firing squad BEFORE Election Day. They just cannot wait! Would rather point fingers than try to save a few still-salvagable Senate seats.
For example, what about Liddy Dole. Granted, she’s a tremendous waste of space as a politico. But would still think the Republicans would like to save her worthless hide. But apparently not.
Almost as funny as the fiasco the Sarah Palin “Hail Mary” nomination is turning out to be. Truly a gift that keeps on giving . . . for the Democrats.
My guess is her real slide began when she was stupid enough to become a mouthpiece for the seg academy dropouts (Stars & Stripes old pals) who are currently running the McCain campaign into the ground. Lee Atwater must be doing cartwheels in hell, watching his gormless disciples trying to use his Willy Horton playbook . . . except they’re holding it upside down!
23. …and some would say £11.50 a month is cheap for radio alone let alone the full BBC output. Sky currently charges nearly £50 a month for a considerably inferior product and it carries commercials as well.
There was even a conspiracy theory that the Soham murders were committed by an American serviceman stationed in the UK, and then ‘they’ hypnotised Ian Huntley into confessing to avoid an international incident. I mean, yeah, sure — and the anti-gun lobby were behind Dunblane too!
Sea Shanty Irish, I’m wondering what you think the effect of the voter-suppression activities / anti-voter-fraud measures will be, as it hasn’t been discussed much here and is presumably one of the factors that the polls won’t have picked up. Do you think there will be any states where voter roll purges and things make a significant difference? Colorado, for example?
Roger’s seal of approval…..the beeb is doomed.
Americans love conspiracies. Just watch Eagle Eye, not a great film but backs up the point.
Is it real, I very much doubt it. I usually find that cock ups are more prevalent than conspiracies but maybe I am being naive.
I’m sure there’s some low-level US attempts by local officials to mess around with voter registration. But the vast conspiracy stuff seems to me seriously nuts in a way that’s quite familiar to MPs. The election is between the neo-con conspiracy and the neo-liberal conspiracy? Kerry conceded last time because he used to bleong to Skull and Bones? Please.
It reminds me of the chap who turned up at an Amnesty meeting last month, who refused to stay for the discussion and said, “I just want to ask Mr Palmer how as a Jewish immigrant he defends Israel and immigration.” “Er, I wouldn’t mind being Jewish or an immigrant but I’m not…” “Answer the question!” “I was about to go on to the qu…” “Answer the question!”
52: “Alex seems to be either lying or stupid.” A harmless hobby that brings pleasure to many is to start an argument with seanT on anything - the value of the baht, the role of the monarchy, the future of the BBC, whatever - and count the number of replies before he starts to have a go at you personally. If you top five, you win! It’s hard.
2. Seems about right to me. McCain’s too far behind.
3. That’s why I backed Huhne in the Lib Dem leadership contest. Love him or loathe him he gets himself noticed. Clegg is the wrong style of leader to take on Brown and Cameron, especially when all the focus is on the economy.
So the Democrats think they have a big enough lead to overcome ‘discrepancies’? Complacency, anybody?
You have to win the argument. But that is only step 1. Then you have to make sure people want to vote you. Then that they are allowed to vote for you, and will vote for you. Then you have to make sure the votes are properly counted. Anybody is thinks winning the argument is sufficient is a simpleton.
There are parallels in betting. There are some simple souls who believe that the only key to winning betting is ‘finding value’. That is step one. Getting on is step two (impossible with firms like Bet365). Step 3 is getting paid (I was owed £2K when premier bet was put into receivership, which will never be paid).
Good leading article.
Re. 31, 52, apart from Freeview, there’s Freesat ( Freesat from Sky and the new Freesat) where you pay a one-off charge (£40 for the Sky version) for a card and dish and then you get the free to air channels.
33. The electoral fraud committed in Birmingham was from backwards people exercising a backwards culture, they just happened to live here.
Re. 68, £40 for the card, probably about £150 overall.
“”In the Red corner McCain fronts powerful Neo-Con interests, who imposed Christian Dominionist attack-dog Palin as running mate precisely to gee up Christian Rightists who will be prepared to fiddle the election (to stop Satanic Democrat baby-killers) and redneck racists prepared to fight in the post-election period.”"
WTF? I don’t like Palin (in fact I loathe her) and she has some very dodgy associations that weren’t properly vetted. But to claim that she was pushed by ‘neo-conservatives’ is not true. Palin was the last candidate people who support McCain’s foreign policy wanted. Indeed, she is the reason why people like myself are disillusioned with McCain.
I also think that talking about post-election rioting, civil disobedience etc is deeply irresponsible. Not only does it run the risk of being a self-fufilling prophecy but it could be seen as an attempt to intimidate people to vote a certain way. Obviously, the majority of readers on this site (like myself) are not American but that sort of talk generally is not positive. I won’t deny that there is a bit of low-level dodginess on both sides but this article is completely over the top.
The Republicans stole the election last time. They can’t be allowed to get away with it again.
It mkes me laugh at how quickly people rush to dismiss all these ‘conspiracy’ theories - have they forgotten the 2000 race so quickly? And the whole tranch of dubious details that emerged years later about the Kennedy victory? The willingness to effectively turn a blind-eye to the potentials of electoral fraud on a massive scle simply makes it so much easier to get away with - infact, I reckon everyone here who rushes to dismiss the conspircy thories are actually in on it themeselves and are all in the pay of Palin!
51. PPP polls looking devastating for the GOP. I’m sure I read that PPP are doing a VA poll this weekend. Any signs?
I wonder if this isn’t a way of trying to head off a Republic victory in that “if Obama loses, it’s because the Republicans will cheat”. Yes, Obama is likely to win, but if he loses I think it will be because people lied about their voting preferences or decided not to vote.
I really hope that if McCain wins, Democrats will result to legal means of challenging the decision - articles from some “leading” Democrats to launch civil disobedience and surround the White House would cause more harm than good to America and themselves.
Sorry Sean, the Freeview channels are extremely limited in their output (and BBC and Channel4 public funding aside) are heavily overdependent on advertising.
The point about Strictly Come Dancing is that it is EXTREMELY POPULAR. The fact that you think it is tat is neither here nor there. It seems strange that you should invoke the average “poor person” in your argument when many of the average “poor person’s” shows would be the first to go in your brave new world.
And of course one can always cite existing popular shows and claim that they could survive as subscription services. The point is that many popular shows would never see the light of day without an organisation like the BBC to introduce them. You cite a whole load of shows produced in partnership with private companies. That just reinforces the point. The private sector would not produce these shows on their own - they need an organisation like the BBC to bear the risk and meet the upfront costs if such productions are going to go ahead.
An appalling piece. Lots of accusations and name-calling, and no evidence. Shame it can’t be taken now, as that would just provide additional fodder to the conspiracy theorists.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, pieces like this do nothing but discredit all accusations of electoral fraud, which makes me wonder whether they aren’t part of some sort of double bluff.
>There is no doubt that the Dominionist agenda not only exists but is putting its full force behind the Republicans. Another ‘pastor’ even uses the declaration of independence as a religious document (a funny thing for a so called evangelical to do) & again uses it as a denunciation of things like redistributive taxes through selective reading & connecting the document to obscure passages from the Old Testament (where else?). These people want a theocratic state, no more no less & soon (before the Rapture).
I’m not disagreeing with any of this
My point is that this article states as fact that Sarah Palin is a Dominionist, and provides no evidence whatsoever, except guilt by association.
The linked article provides no such evidence, and until some evidence is provided, that claim is a smear.
77
evidence
http://www.ideamouth.com/voterfraud.htm
Sorry Mike, this article is just ridiculous, and not worthy of an appearance on your usually excellent website.
This guy seems like nothing more than a Republican-hating conspiracy theorist. A lone Pakistani gunman waiting to pounce! I mean, I ask you!
can we have normal election coverage resumed please?
All the people blindly criticising this piece because everything out of their comfort zone counts as a crazy conspiracy theory should watch the clip linked to in the article, and the follow on ones as part of the same interview.
Here’s the link again http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyEfovA404&feature=related
The guy is a Republican and has worked on GOP campaigns and clearly knows his stuff about electronic fraud. Ignore the stuff in this article and elsewhere about new world orders etc if you like, but his point that the use of electronic voting machines is incredibly dangerous is convincing
Or on a lighter note-
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks
McCain can’t cheat his way out of this one, Obama might seem like the nice guy in this race but he hasn’t got where he is by playing nice. He’s gonna fight for every vote, he’s got teams of lawyers on the ground already - lawyers that McCain just can’t afford. In a straight fight between McCain and Obama, Obama will wipe the floor with him and hand him his nuts in a bag.
Just back from a long day out to find Mike has posted my scenario, so I will try to reply.
First MANY thanks, Mike, for allowing this taboo issue to be at least aired in semi-mainstream circles.
Incidentally Mike asked me to write it on the suggestion of a fellow ERS dissident who is utterly opposed to allowing STV (with its complicated counting) to be the Trojan horse for computerised elections in the UK let alone in the ERS itself, or its enormously ‘strategic’ (as MI5 perhaps considers it) balloting arm, which (usually behind closed doors) counts votes in unions, parties, housing associations, companies and other bodies and contexts of enormous public importance, such that Judicial review would potentially apply, which makes it incoherent for the current ERS leadership to oppose use of e-voting in ‘public elections’ on cyber-security grounds but allowing it (and enormously profiting from it) in ‘private contexts’ like aforesaid NGOs, Companies and the ERS itself.
Second, if Obama wins narrowly, I don’t think that we can rule out the possibility of massive election fraud by the Republicans to lessen the damage, as happened in 2006: see Greg Palast: How they stole the Mid-Term elections http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=2772&blz=1, allowing the Dems the appearance of a 51-49 majority but with Joe Liebermann ever ready to defect effectively ensuring Cheney the casting vote in Senate …..
I do think I provided a lot of evidence of election theft in 2000, and 2004. For those who haven’t yet twigged the hotlinks system [hint: it is the fainter bits of bold text] – or prefer not to click on them on the See no Evil principle – why not try the following websites and articles? : http://www.blackboxvoting.org – with all is links and references, etc including a complete brilliant e-book of the same name by Bev Harris.
Also http://www.hermes-press.com:80/criminal_vote.htm
http://www.hermes-press.com:80/criminal_vote2.htm
Thanks to Joan Brunwasser, almost every daily edition of OpEdNews carries further news of the hand-to-hand struggle in the US between election-integrity activists and corporate/Republican fraudsters. Its crazy for betting people not to be aware of the strong likelihood that the next election will be stolen as the last four or more have been (inc midterms).
After so many stolen elections there is a HUGE election integrity movement with dozens of organizations which have produced analyses of fraud and dirty tricks etc in state after state, demonstrated successful hacks of Diebold and other election machinery, launched several full scale reports and legal challenges, made several full length films, many books, lots of video shorts accessible through YOuTuge, such as the amazingly coherent and sharp Republican cyber-security expert McCaindefector Stepen Spoonamore. Like Rove and Co this movement has been preparing for next week for years, so the situation is enormously dynamic.
Further reading: Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again - How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections; and his recent Loser Take All book (edited by him).
Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America - 11 Experts Expose the Truth, edited by Abbe Waldman Deloit and Vickie Karp;
Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by Steven Freeman and Joel Bleifuss.
‘None so blind as willnae see’.
More specific replies coming up …
Now some thoughts on ‘Conspiracy theory’. Although the conspiracist mindset is a real phenomenon, so is the naive mindwet which finds itself anxious whenever it has to consider the possibility of big Power having done something wrong. The truth emerges fromall-round skepticism usually, even if it is just the truth that we CAN NO LONGER KNOW whether such and such an election was stolen, or WE CAN NO LONGER RULE OUT whether such and such a politician was murdered by big power using ‘patsies’ as the evidence seems to show IMO ocureed with JFK,RFK, King and more recently with Senator Paul Wellstone (using engine-trouble but no patsy) …. hence my feeling that it is quite rational for us to fear for Obama life, and if he is killed to watch for the political bounce/steer which is procured through the identity of the alleged assailant …. I wasn’t suggesting a lone Pakistani gunman would act without being set up to either do it and/or take the blame.
Since the Iraq War non-WMD story you would think that fewer people would buy the notion that it is the height of intellectual sophisticaton to sneer at ‘conspiracy theories’. However we all have secret identifications with power, painful aspects of our biographies which predispose us to accept a degree of secrets and lies in our lives, especially if it could cost us punishment, ridiucle, status if we question Power.
In the post war world Karl Popper tasked the social sciences to guard the ramparts of power by protecting Big Power from the suspicions of little people (who sometimes through their work are well informed about details they aren’t supposed to know the significance of), ill-eduated and confused by the fast moving complex times in which we live, who were ever-ready to attribute blame when things go wrong, when really noone is to blame, conspiracies don’t happen, and it is the job of the social sciences to make sure that ‘the poor man’s cognitive coin’ finds few takers.
So ever since then this mindless snobby mocking has set in which effectively works much better than the CIA, MI6, Mossad etc working through private companies (plausible deniability) because this ‘conspiracy implausibility’ meme establishes ‘outright unthinkability’ in the minds of the commentariat. Or do you want to be called a nutjob?
I was a little indignant when someone accused us election-integrity activists of never bothering to observe counts!!! Dammit that is all that we want to be able to do!
I stood in the last Scottish Council elections and quickly realized that we could no longer observe the computerized count in any meaningful sense, merely stand around and be told what the result was. When the system stopped outputting results about 1 o’clock (as also happened in 6 other Council/Parliamentary count centres [and in Ohio when the results continued to be fed via a backdoor to Karl Rove who has missing hours from his e-mail log]) I asked the Council official charged with managing the count on the technical side whether he could differentiate between DRS officials wielding laptops and perhaps screwdrivers in order to fix the problems and any such who may have been fixing the result. Not really, was his reply.
The paradox of our traditional system is that by resolute distrust wee arrived at a transparent locally-based system which people could trust that the declared results reflected people’s votes. Now in Scotland, and ironically because of STV with its complex counting being used as a pretext for the introduction of what could easily be electronic Trojan Horses, we have made a great leap backwards to ‘faith-based voting’ with Trust-Us High-Tech electronic oracles, nobody knows how to check, or who to trust to certify the certifiers, etc (Why not save money on the machinery and hire in Druids to sacrifice a sheep and read the entrails? – it would scarcely be less transparent.)
Those not allergic to the thought of the possibility of wrongdoing by our rulers in the Scottish election might like to read my lengthy analysis here: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/370366.html
(and see the next post about how real conspiracies can be disguised as voting fiacos - just a cok-up old boy!)
Distinguished US TV presenter and investigative reporter Dan Rather had a great exclusive interview with print wokers who told him that the management deliberately suppied punch cars to Florida which were on substandarad paper and misalligned so they would cause the hanging card problem which
a) in itself stole the election for Bush (as things turned out),
b) functioned as great distraction from the much bigger stories of voter purge and e-ballot stuffing adn switching; and
c (problem, reaction, solution) was used to sell HAVA = Help America Vote Act on new shiny computers not fuddy duddy old machines which caused that fiasco in Florida, remember? = licence to print poltical money
http://election-reform.org/dan_rather.html#bad_paper
http://election-reform.org/dan_rather.html#palm_beach
Now with reference to the Scottish election ‘fiasco’ recall if you will that the the Gould Report says that partisan election advantage considerations influenced the Scottish Secretary who was ultimately reponsible for allowing the ballot papers to have two columns the way they were (regional to the left this side) and accepted pathetic levels of trialling which in fact did show up people having difficulty with the design …. and in the two big cities with the biggest working class populations where SSP/Solidarity had the best chance of getting a regional list MSP, blow me but the arrows at the top of columns one and two (linked to You Have Two Votes) goes AWOL (for lack of room, supposedly, but can’t they work a photocopier for print-size reductions?) - thus guaranteeing maximum likelihood that people not compeltely au fait with the regional/parliamentary distinction would use up both their votes on the left of the paper as they came to parties they liked, especiallay the AArdvark Alex Salmond for First Minsiter being allowed as the Regional list name for the SNP in order to soak up these regional votes?? - with people not realsing that there were two lists (thnking that right hand list was just continuation of the left hand list).
Maybe just a cock-up. Maybe a conspiracy disguised to look like a fiasco. Remember hanging chads (take two), thanks to Dan Rather!
2- Reply to Yellow Submarine:
“Even the Military-Industrial complex might work out that this is a good election to lose.”
It is never a good election to lose: these people are nuts, completely caught in permanent emergency mindset which mandates US defence spending be as much (if you count all the black budget stuff, like the 2.3 trillion dollars siphoned off and admitted by Rumsfeld the day before 9/11) as all the rest of the world combined. Even if they can live with an Obama presidency - and even garner capital to invade Africa through the fact of a black president - the neocons inner circle just don’t know how to lose and are terrified of investigations into 911 and much else.
“1. This time the media want obama to win and won’t put up with shenanigans.”
My whole article began by puttin gthe election struggle in the context of the ongoing struggle for supremacy in the US between neocons and neo-liberals - so of course many media do kind of support liberal norms, just so long as they dont blow the gaffe on the whole show, i.e their dilsence about the last four stolen elections oin their own country and curious lack of curoisity about the 110th floor of the South Tower ‘falling’ at faster than falling (Govt NIST report), ‘falling’ at virtually vacuum speed, not through air (13 secs) or through 109 other steel framed floors = (98 secs according to http://drjudywood.com/articles/BBE/BilliardBalls.html)
2. “Even if they fiddle the Presidency this time a Democratic House and Senate won’t sit idly by.”
To recap my article: It all depends on a) the success of voter-purge and voter-suppression techniques; b) how they manage their electronic vote-swindle technically despite election-integrity activists doing their best to limit their room for maneouvre; and c) the battle of the plausible narratives which goes on surrounding the election including the manufacture of ‘real’ events which can be pointed to as having given McCain - or dozens of at-risk Republican Congresspeople - ‘much needed late-swings’ …. [more on this in next post]
Remember that they have pulled off out of blue double-digit ‘catch-ups’ in Georgia and Nebraska and etc with a straight face before - and everyone too frightened to say boo - No Baas, I didn’t see nothing …. (like no one saw anything when IN Coaml County Texas in 2002 three Reps got elected with exactly the same five digit number, also came up in two other states …. which is statistically impossible short of a miracle …. and the number chosen for the in yer fce fix was 18181 = first and eighth letters of alphabet AH AH A = Neonazi number. (cf Combat 18).
3. AA disenfranchisement could well lead to civil unrest.
“That is why the Bush jungta has moved troops from iraq for crowd and civil unrest missionin the US itself - clean against Posse Comitatus and Constitution of the US - which troops have with all latest crowd control techniques and hitech sonar and directed energy fry-the-skin gear. Plus back up from FEMA, Blackwater, Halliburton concentration camps, pastors geared up to preach Romans 13 to help the nation out through this time of trouble, and dogwhistler Palin’s redneck racist constituency geed up to do whatever it takes to stop the new ‘black Hitler’ terrorist-friend anti-American sore losers etc taking over.
“4. More state governments in Democratic hands this time. eg Ohio”
But they are still using D8iebold software,etc which no one can check. Remember how many fake Dems gave cover to Bush in Florida, e.g. the butterfly ballot woman. Hardly anyone has gone to jail for the blatant fraud last time, proven up to the hilt in several books and Reports. Spoonamore says the Christian Right are usually behind the software swindles, and they have a Higher duty, so feel free to work away in State civil service and contracted companies involved, whether or not in Rep hands.
I’m no Labour voter but I thought Douglas Alexander was unfairly blamed for the ‘fiasco’ at the last Scottish elections. It wasn’t his fault that some people were too stupid to distinguish between council and parliamentary ballots. I don’t have a problem with such people being disenfranchised - although now that the two elections will in future be held on different days they’re even less likely to turn out. Fine by me - let those of us who bother to follow politics decide elections.
Last one - promise!:
Probably for reasons of length, but doubtless also cos he worried that some of his regulars would be put off by my Conspiracy theorising …. Mike did underplay the last side of my triple-sided analysis {Jim Crow: Boss tweed: Narrative Battle): The effect ws to reduce the ‘battle of the narratives’ options available to McCain, which depend IMO on readiness to use extra-psephological and extra-electoral manipulations:
Mike mentioned two of the lines of thought I had here, but I would like to reinstate the first three I had under battle of the Narrative [below] - and remember - one is the more likely to say ” i guess that adds up, McCain did get a late swing (or too bad the Dems just missed the clear sweep levels needed to able to stop filibusters and change the Costitution)” if concluding otherwise requirs you to go out into the street and be fried with Directed Energy Weapons and battoneed by Blackwater and other racist and Christo-Fascist militia…..
Reinstating some cut bits re Making the Plausible Narrative for massive last minute catch-up:
A) failed attempt on Cindy McCain,
or another video-faked resurrection of Bin Laden (RIP) http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/osamatape.html?q=osamatape.html
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/osama_dead.html?q=osama_dead.htm
or even a full scale ‘false-flag’ attack in the US - as per 9/11 when though deployment of some kind of Directed Energy Weapons floor 110 of the South Tower ‘fell’ at vacuum speed of 9 seconds (NIST) much faster than even though air, let alone through 109 other steel floors http://drjudywood.com/articles/BBE/BilliardBalls.html.
The Obama-not-American-born allegation and law case http://www.obamacrimes.com could also serve as a plausible explanation for ‘McCain’s late surge’ [KM adds now: whether or not they have actually swung significant numbers of voters against Obama, it is perception that counts, and I don't believe that the 'liberal media' are all raring to tell the truth against the ruling Junta, though there are sings of spilts in the ruling class, which historically does open possibilities for new popular forces to springup through the cracks ...].
b) Courtesy of their owners close to the Bush-dynasty or other
‘players’, one or two opinion polling companies report ‘late swings’ and ‘new values-issues emerging’ to ‘narrow the gap’. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Setup-for-a-Stolen-Electoi-by-Michael-Collins-081024-291.html
[KM adds now: NB the Christian Right high turnout of 'Values voters' story for Bush winning in Florida in 2000 turned out to be hogwash, but served well enough for the vital weeks of the post-election fight. Remember, these people have no shame, will say anything to keep in power.]
c) After the Republicans appear to have won - or only narrowly lost - psephologists conclude their polling had been skewed by ’shy Republicans’. The same alleged factor was subsequently discredited through analysis of the cross-tabs in both 2000 and 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-32.htm , and is likely to be wrong again in 2008 (reverse Bradley effect is also possible), but expect to hear masses about ‘the Bradley effect’, whereby
“whites hadn’t wanted to admit they weren’t going to vote for a black man”.
http://fabians.org.uk/debates/democracy/kellner-obama-polling
NB: the level of dog-whistle racism in the Republican campaign.
So finally here is evidence that ‘the faith-based community’ are prepared to create facts which the rest of us don’t understand:
When we act, we create our own reality”
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’
I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore… We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’”
Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New York Times, October 17, 2004
OK. Let’s see.
But what if
- Obama wins the election, the voting is straight, he wins the electoral college and governs.
What would the explanation of that be, from this perspective.
(If we will be told he must have done a deal with the powers-that-be then this would become a set of predictions which can not be falsified. Hence useless).
If an Obama election would falsify this hypothesis, then let’s see what happens in a couple of weeks time.
Keith
Thanks for the replies. I appreciate people who follow up.
Would you care to address my Palin-Dominionism “guilt by association” point?
Having watched all 8 parts of the video referred to, I’ll agree with you that the possibility for abuse definitely exists with Diebold (spelling?) machines.
I am concerned how the analyst he seems to jump from “the possibility of abuse” to the claim that abuse has occurred with no specific first hand accounts, while declaring that certain statistically highly unlikely scenarios “are impossible” - they are highly unlikely, not “impossible”.
I like the sound of his demand for a return to paper ballots, though.
Writing as a 20 year IT Professional, I don’t find his “Local Inspection of Code” point *that* convincing, as a local inspection of compiled computer code is hardly going to be meaningful, unless I have misunderstood something.
Rgds
Matt Wardman
I sent this URL to contacts in the election integrity movement in the US, and had this very helpful (and complementary) reply from San Diego based election lawyer Paul Lehto:
“Presently, the election is outside the realm of plausible cheating. People won’t stand for a McCain win announced election night or the next day. It therefore, it it is going to happen, will have to be drawn out, to tire us out and make us think that we’ve had a fair shot and some sort of process has occurred that can be perceived with the help of propaganda and fear of “chaos” and “debacle”. Very strong evidence of this is the radical departure from the previous bipartisan code of confidence/silence about US elections and more and more talk about “the fabric of democracy being ripped”
I’ve been saying for some time that if it’s to be stolen it will be under cloak of legality more than cloak of secrecy, because it’s outside the margin of cheating that’s plausible. It will have to be massive “breakdowns” of machines, legal invalidation of votes or even entire states. The best “hope” for stealing the election is to throw the machine into reverse, adopt some or all of our movement’s arguments and say the election, or parts thereof, were illegitimate as a way to cherry pick away some blue votes or states OR just scuttle the ship USS Ohio and perhaps others as a way to keep the enemy from capturing “her”. In that respect, there’s already 8 filed legal cases in Ohio alone, and everything happening there is consistent with what I’m saying: it’s not prophetic it’s a description of what’s being built on legal grounds. Though it could be another US Supreme Court opinion (recalling nary a broken window in 2000) it’s more likely to be a lower court decision that the Supreme court lets stand and pundits praise the Supreme Court for “staying out of politics” when in fact they were just pleased with the lower court ruling and let it stand.
If and when the election is deemed to be a “train wreck” fatal to result legitimacy, a new election might be debated. It will be used as an excuse for a federal power grab or power transfer on the level of the bailout bill in order to impose a top down uniform federal system of elections instead of all this “chaos” where each state interprets things their own way. Just as Bush v. Gore was a legal coup d’etat and change in power structure (change in the Constitution) as well as deciding the presidency, so too will this shift be a submarine restructuring of our government. In a way, that will be a huge improvement over restructuring the infrastructure of democracy via private contracts between the government and vendors (creating or purporting to create secret vote counting rights that never passed any legislature or congress), because at least there will the the semblance of a staged debate in Congress and the public claim of necessity and emergency, with a greater portion of the restructuring iceberg being visible to our eyes. But it will still be illegitimate and corrupt.
Paul Lehto
Juris Doctor
PS For those of you outside the borders of the USA do you have any media contacts to help the truth get out, both now but especially on 11-4 and thereafter?”