The usual Kevin election post.

[crimresearch]

This has been asked and answered repeatedly, which is more than it deserves since it is yet another red herring. It has nothing to do with the facts.

There are scholarly papers, eyewitness affidavits, reports from computer security professionals, letters to and from Conyers, a one hundred page report from members of the Judiciary Committee, in fact you are spoiled for factual material to get your teeth into. But you, Skeptic, Crimresearch and the other lightweights run like rabbits from any discussion of the facts.

You and the other trolls spend all your time trying to scrape up ad hominem arguments attacking individuals, or silly appeals to the authority of the media rather than addressing any of the facts. That's fairly pathetic behaviour for posters on a supposedly skeptical message board. If the facts are on your side you should be able to do better than this.

Shoo, troll. Go poke Ion or something.

No Kevin, your 'scholarly paper' was blown out of water as an amateurish put up job as soon as you tried to pass it off on us, you haven't come up with a single example of an 'eyewitness affidavit' and subsequent law enforcement verification, just woo-woo claims that there were affidavits along with vague promises of future verification, no 'computer security professional' has explained the Triad motivation to rig the vote against their guy Kerry, Conyer's credibility is a joke among his own colleagues by hundreds of votes, and there is no hundred page 'report' from any judiciary comitee, there are hundreds of pages of partisan posturing, without any facts to back them up.

On the other hand, you have studiously ignored the scientific and statistical evidence against exit poll validity, you continue to run away from repeated requests to examine the evidence, such as Wilder, and you have now flip-flopped in a contortion worthy of 1inChrist, to claim that none of the claims that YOU brought up about Bev Harris, the media, political conspiracies and motivations, or the recounts, are anything other than red herrings.

So what is left Kevin? There are multiple threads with hundreds of posts, that serve as a factual record that you can't or won't discuss facts or numbers, *you* are calling your own rationales 'red herrings', and the ad hominems are flying fast and furious from you, not from me ( Yes, you can trot out the stock evasion that you are being abused because I am insisting that you stick to facts, if you wish...it won't work either).

Both liberal and conservative posters are united in pointing out that you haven't met skeptical criteria in discussing this matter.

 

[Skeptic]

Here is a very, very simple answer: Because the facts give enough support to a very worrying hypothesis that a serious investigation is warranted. Facts are the bottom line.

Yes, Kevin, facts ARE the bottom line. But the question is, are what YOU SAY are the facts REALLY the facts? There are two possibilities:

1). What you claim are the facts is accurate, and show evidence of fraud, but EVERYBODY ELSE--not only the evil Republicans, but all the election staff, every worker at Diebold, and above all the Democratic National Committee, and 90%+ of all Democratic Senators and Congressmen--have been either deluded by "not knowing the facts", or are part of the conspiracy, or whatever.

2). You are wrong about the facts, and the facts do not, actually, show evidence of fraud--which is why the claims are going nowhere, including in the Democratic party.

So, there you have it. Which is more likely, Kevin? You are wrong about your "facts", or there is an immense conspiracy is at work?

 

[Ion]

OK, I'll address the facts:

1) Bush won. Get over it.
...

Bush didn't win.

Fraud documented here happened to make it like if Bush has won.

 

[Ion]

It looks like the process rolled itself flat:
...

That's too bad.

There are cowards in the House and Senate.

Like in Congress.
Congress that bought into Bush's WMDs in Iraq, and gave him in 2003 a green light to ruin US and the world in a war explained by greed only.

But Barbara Boxer' stance will stay for the record and history will do her justice.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

No Kevin, your 'scholarly paper' was blown out of water as an amateurish put up job as soon as you tried to pass it off on us,

This is not in fact true. Steven Freeman's paper has weathered criticism reasonably well, and I don't think any serious academics are contesting his conclusion that the exit poll discrepancies are very unlikely to have been due to chance. There is just argument as to the magnitude of that unlikelihood.

you haven't come up with a single example of an 'eyewitness affidavit'

This is not in fact true. I guess you missed the Eaton affidavit business, one of (if I recall correctly) six confirmed instances of Triad technicians fiddling with machines before the recount.

and subsequent law enforcement verification,

Oh, I see your angle now. It didn't happen unless someone has been charged. Sorry, that's not how reality actually works.

just woo-woo claims that there were affidavits along with vague promises of future verification,

Nope. The affidavit in question exists.

no 'computer security professional' has explained the Triad motivation to rig the vote against their guy Kerry,

Sure. We just have an eyewitness affidavit that one Triad technician conspired to nullify the recount process, thus attempting to ensure that the Bush victory in Ohio would not be overturned. I don't think the precise motive of the person in question has been established, but I'm not sure what you think hangs on that.

Conyer's credibility is a joke among his own colleagues by hundreds of votes,

This makes the amusing assumption that because the majority of Democrat congresspeople chose not to vote against the electoral college result that it follows that "Conyer's credibility is a joke".

and there is no hundred page 'report' from any judiciary comitee,

http://www.pdamerica.org/field/final status report.pdf

(mirror)

http://miamedia.com/news/2005-01-05.house.judiciary.democrats.report.pdf

there are hundreds of pages of partisan posturing, without any facts to back them up.

At what stage, crim, does it become safe to call you a liar as opposed to a tragically misinformed loudmouth?

It's possible you've never read any links, haven't bothered to keep abreast of developments and haven't bothered to check your claims before you make them, and that you aren't aware of the need to do that sort of thing, but these kinds of bald-faced and incorrect assertions really do push the limit of what can be reasonably interpreted as honest mistakes.

On the other hand, you have studiously ignored the scientific and statistical evidence against exit poll validity, you continue to run away from repeated requests to examine the evidence, such as Wilder,

There's nothing to "run away from". If exit polls were absolutely reliable then a discrepancy would be proof of fraud. They're not, so it's only circumstancial evidence. Usually they are substantially accurate, but in some cases they have not been, and since you have nothing but speculation as to why they failed in specific instances you cannot show that the same effect was responsible for the 2004 discrepancies. Thus we are back to statistics.

and you have now flip-flopped in a contortion worthy of 1inChrist, to claim that none of the claims that YOU brought up about Bev Harris, the media, political conspiracies and motivations, or the recounts, are anything other than red herrings.

Let me ask you a question.

What is really important?

Is the actual state of the electoral system, and actual events in the actual election that affect the security, honesty and acceptance of the election result important?

Or is what CNN is reporting, or what Bev Harris said a journalist said, important?

The recurring theme here is that individuals like yourself avoid discussing the important issues at any cost, and in your case you even go to the extent of pretending that no evidence of impropriety even exists! You've got a handful of trivial issues, that in the end are far less important, and you whine about them relentlessly in the hope that people will mistake your handful of trivia for an informed case.

As I keep saying, you may or may not be right in the end that fraud did not play a significant role in the outcome of the election. We do not yet know for sure. But you sure are doing a rotten job of advancing your case with logic and facts.

So what is left Kevin? There are multiple threads with hundreds of posts, that serve as a factual record that you can't or won't discuss facts or numbers, *you* are calling your own rationales 'red herrings', and the ad hominems are flying fast and furious from you, not from me ( Yes, you can trot out the stock evasion that you are being abused because I am insisting that you stick to facts, if you wish...it won't work either).

The important difference is that I am requesting that you stick with facts about issues of real importance.

You are requesting that we stick with going back and forth over the merits of ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, and outright misrepresentations of the facts.

If your goal was to hijack discussion into unproductive, acrimonious debate based on inaccurate sound bites you are certainly going about it the right way.

Both liberal and conservative posters are united in pointing out that you haven't met skeptical criteria in discussing this matter.

Appeal to popularity. Believe it or not, it's not actually evidence that a position is correct if you, corplinx, Skeptic, Scrut and RandFan all agree on it. You need facts and evidence, not post volume.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Bush didn't win.

Fraud documented here happened to make it like if Bush has won.

No, he won. He is being inaugurated Jan 20th. Didn't you hear? It was in all the papers.

Oh, that's right....you can't read! I keep forgetting...

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

So, there you have it. Which is more likely, Kevin? You are wrong about your "facts", or there is an immense conspiracy is at work?

Suppose Al and Bert have a disagreement. Al says "foo" is the case, and Bert says "not foo" is the case.

Al is a known liar and a pervert to boot. Bert works for Doctors Without Frontiers and has never told a lie in his life. Who is more likely to be right?

The correct answer is "If this is all the information we have then I'd say it's more likely Bert is right. But if we could actually check whether foo was the case or not, that would settle it once and for all".

What we have here is a case where the facts are all pretty much on the public record, and the good folk at wikipedia have even gone to the trouble of putting most of the solid and relevant links in one place for you so you can go check the primary sources.

I suspect you have figured out, though, that discussing the primary sources and the facts would not serve you well at all. Not only would it be more work, but you might even run into nasty little cases where innocent explanations are hard to come by.

So you just jump up and down repeating "Don't look at the facts! Don't look at the facts, just make a decision based on whether or not you've seen it on CNN! It's easier, and it's bound to get you the right answer!".

The problem is, we have instances on the record (Watergate, Webb) where the media did not pick up on evidence of massive government corruption even after the whistle had been blown. For the third time, the evidence shows that it does not follow from media and political silence that massive government corruption does not exist. Media and parliamentary silence at this stage of an investigation is consistent with a beat-up and consistent with real and massive corruption.

You have not got a compelling, logical argument. You have got an appeal to authority, which is worthless to begin with if we have access to the facts, and you are appealing to an authority which we all know does not behave in the way you want it to. It's a fallacy sitting on a fallacy.

Edited to remove a rogue "an".

 

[WildCat]

http://www.pdamerica.org/field/final status report.pdf

(mirror)

http://miamedia.com/news/2005-01-05.house.judiciary.democrats.report.pdf

Kevin, that is not a report from the Judiciary Committe.

Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in
the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the
Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the
electoral college for president.

It's a report from John Conyers and his staff!

His main problems seem to be that there were not enough voting machines in democratic precincts and that many provisional ballots were rejected.

You should know that in the US, the individual counties or municipalities run their own elections, not the state and not the federal gov't. If there weren't enough voting machines in a specific precinct it's because the Democrats themselves didn't get them there.

Any provisional ballots that were rejected were done so because the voter wasn't registered in that precinct. This is not a conspiracy! I can't vote out of my precinct here in Chicago, if I did my ballot would be rejected. In fact, a few years ago my polling place was moved, my old polling place was now in a different precinct (the boundaries move all the time). I didn't insist on voting in the wrong precinct (and rightfully so, since many of the candidates on that ballot don't represent my precinct). I actually had to walk a block over to the new polling place for my precinct. It never occured to me that this was a result of a Democrat plot to disenfranchise me from my right to vote.

Seriously, do you think anyone should be able to vote in any precinct they desire to? That would be ridiculous!

His comparison the the Ukrainian vote is just silly. The exit poll data was not the main evidence of fraud in Ukraine, it was the busloads of Yanukovych supporters illegally voting in multiple precincts and beating and intimidating opposition supporters. Also, there was rampant fraud in absentee ballots.

This report is just the same BS Conyers has been spewing all along, is nothing new and certainly not the view of Congress, the Judicial Committee, or even the Democratic Party. All of the democrats who spoke yesterday stressed that they thought Bush rightly won the election and weren't going to dispute it. The whole debacle yesterday was pure politicking to the Democrat base, who can't imagine how a genius like Kerry lost to a cowboy buffoon like Bush.

The Watergate story didn't take 2 years to unravel. Within weeks of the break in the burglars had been traced to the Nixon White House and full investigations were underway by the FBI.

I know that none of this will convince you, but perhaps as the years go by and nothing comes of this you will begin to doubt the allegations.

 

[WildCat]

I would also like to declare that I finally figured out how to copy and paste from a pdf file.

 

[Skeptic]

I suspect you have figured out, though, that discussing the primary sources and the facts would not serve you well at all.

What you don't seem to understand, however, when you ask me to "look at the evidence" is that the facts that neither the democrats, nor the media, are taking seriously the fraud claim IS IN ITSELF EVIDENCE--in fact, EXCELLENT evidence--that there is no fraud. It supports very strongly the idea that there is no fraud by the following modes tolens argument (e.g., "If A then B, not-B, therefore, not-A"): if there was actual evidence of fraud, the democrats and the media would be crying to high heaven to get the results reversed; they are NOT doing so; therefore, there is (very probably) no fraud.

My logic here is the same as the argument that Sylvia Browne is not a psychic because she does not clear out the Casinos. The argument there is: "If she could tell the future, she would be able to break the bank in Las Vegas; she doesn't; therefore, she cannot tell the future." My logic here is the same, in fact, as in every scientific investigation: "If theory T is true, then experiment E should have result R; but experiment E has result not-R; therefore, T is (probably) false."

Wildcat and crimesreach had already commented in detail about the internal contradictions, proof-by-assertion, statistical problems, appeals to ignorance (e.g., "nobody showed this claim isn't true so it is"), and various other "internal" weaknesses that make your alleged "scientific evidence" for fraud less than trustworthy. When that is added to the external evidence--the democrats and media ignore you--you are left with, well, nothing; a theory that's both internally inconsistent and weak and externally worthless in passing tests doesn't really have much to recommend it.

Like other pseudoscientists, however, you keep shifting the goalposts. Your "massive fraud" theory fails on both internal (e.g., the "scientific papers proving massive fraud" turn out to be not so scientific, etc., etc., etc.) and external (e.g., the DNC doesn't seem to give a damn about this "amazing proof of massive Republican fraud") grounds? No problem! When your "scientific proof" of massive fraud is criticized on scientific or statistical grounds, note the popular support for your "fraud" theory by dredging up any semi-famous Democratic lawmaker who hasn't dismissed it on sight and claim a theory which is so "popular" could not possibly be wrong. On the other hand, when your vox populi "argument" is criticized by showing that, in fact, nobody who matters agrees with you, claim that is irrelevant and what matters is the "scientific proof" that you have.

And when your debater refuses to change the subject to suit you? Throw a temper tantrum, and claim that our refusal to let you switch the issue from "internal" to "external" subjects at your pleasure shows we are "avoiding" you.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Kevin, that is not a report from the Judiciary Committe.

It's a report from John Conyers and his staff!

Look back at exactly what I said. Not what crimresearch said I said, what I actually said.

His main problems seem to be that there were not enough voting machines in democratic precincts and that many provisional ballots were rejected.

You should know that in the US, the individual counties or municipalities run their own elections, not the state and not the federal gov't. If there weren't enough voting machines in a specific precinct it's because the Democrats themselves didn't get them there.

That does not dovetail with material I have read about the Ohio election, but I'll look into it and see if what you are saying checks out.

(Note to Skeptic, crim et. al.: this is how you do it. You make specific factual claims addressing individual points of concern).

Any provisional ballots that were rejected were done so because the voter wasn't registered in that precinct. This is not a conspiracy!

I believe the claims being made are that precincts and polling places were shifted around in ways that disadvantaged minority voters, and that there were systematic efforts to misinform people about where they should vote. If you do enough of that sort of thing you can shuffle a significant chunk of votes into the "provisional" pile or out of existence altogether.

This is partially how the figure of "Bush won Ohio by 130k+ votes" is arrived at - about 100k votes, which apparently would be likely to break heavily for Kerry, remain uncounted because they cannot affect the outcome. The actual margin of victory for Bush in Ohio is somewhere between 30k and 230k, most likely in the lower end of that range, and no one actually knows what it is.

If a recount closed the gap between the front-runners to within the scope of the provisional votes they would all have to be counted.

Seriously, do you think anyone should be able to vote in any precinct they desire to? That would be ridiculous!

In Australia I can vote in any election from any polling place. I just have to fill out an extra envelope if I am "absentee" voting so that my vote goes to the right place, and pop the enveloped vote into the absentee vote box.

His comparison the the Ukrainian vote is just silly. The exit poll data was not the main evidence of fraud in Ukraine, it was the busloads of Yanukovych supporters illegally voting in multiple precincts and beating and intimidating opposition supporters. Also, there was rampant fraud in absentee ballots.

There are lots of "irregularities" in Ohio and Florida besides the exit poll discrepancies too, to be fair. Including voter intimidation, "glitches" throwing thousands of votes, missing and falsified voting machine tapes, and some highly dodgy rulemaking from Blackwell about the handling of absentee ballots. In neither case was funny exit poll data the sole fly in the ointment.

The Watergate story didn't take 2 years to unravel. Within weeks of the break in the burglars had been traced to the Nixon White House and full investigations were underway by the FBI.

Within weeks of the election fraud or fraud-consistent behaviour had been traced to ES&S, Triad and Diebold and there may well be FBI investigations underway - I believe Conyers has specifically called for them to investigate some irregularities that look illegal.

Watergate also started with enviable breaks - a clear-cut crime, the arrest of the perpetrators, one of whom was involved with the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and a trial environment to lever the truth out of uncooperative people and organisations, plus a leaker on the inside.

To stretch the analogy, where would we have been two months after the Watergate break-in without all those convenient circumstances?

Like I keep saying, the lack of press and Democrat air time is neither here nor there. It's consistent both with a real issue and with a beat-up. (That last paragraph also goes out to Skeptic, in the faint hope that he will get it eventually).

 

[Ion]

No, he won. He is being inaugurated Jan 20th. Didn't you hear? It was in all the papers.

Oh, that's right....you can't read! I keep forgetting...

You keep forgetting that you cannot read, write and think:

'winning' thru fraud like Bush did, is cheating.

It's not winning the fair way.

 

[WildCat]

In Australia I can vote in any election from any polling place. I just have to fill out an extra envelope if I am "absentee" voting so that my vote goes to the right place, and pop the enveloped vote into the absentee vote box.

This would not work at all in the US. If I went to a different precinct to vote, my candidates wouldn't even be on the ballot. There are dozens of races (in Chicago, hundreds) to vote on. Most of these are local races, judges, alderman, and such. I can't vote for an alderman in a ward other than my own, for example. I can't vote for the governor's race in Indiana, or for the Mayor of a Chicago suburb. I can only vote on the ballot made for the precinct in which I live, it will be different than all others. Same thing in Ohio.

 

[WildCat]

You keep forgetting that you cannot read, write and think:

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

You keep forgetting that you cannot read, write and think:

'winning' thru fraud like Bush did, is cheating.

It's not winning the fair way.

But it's still winning.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

I have taken a look through some of the raw (?) exit poll data, and was wondering if anyone could help me out.

I am trying to locate the Mitofsky data for the Presidential race in Utah.

I am not looking for the BYU poll, but the actual data from the national Mitofsky exit poll. Does anyone know where that information might be found (if it can be)? I have tried some web searches and poked around in the leaked data, but have not had any luck. The only results I have seen are broken down by areas, but not states.

Note: the adjusted data from Mitofsky is not helpful for my purposes. I can find that easily on the various news websites, but they are apparently using figures adjusted to make them more in line with the actual vote.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Ion]

But it's still winning.

It's not winning, it's pretending to win, it's cheating.

 

[Ion]

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

It's not winning, it's pretending to win, it's cheating.

You're not getting it. According to our laws, the winner of the election gets sworn in as president on Jan 20th. On Jan 20th, George W Bush will be sworn in as president. So the question is, who won the election?

Hint: His initials are GWB.

 

[Ion]

You're not getting it....
...
On Jan 20th, George W Bush will be sworn in as president. So the question is, who won the election?

Hint: His initials are GWB.

Hint:

the one who cheated the election.