The Raven' s Blog, First Half of November 2004 Archive

November 15
Keith Olbermann had an interesting question on his blog November 14. "Oh and by the way: how come the 'Kerry's winning' part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the 'Moral Values' part of the same (italics Olbermann's) polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century?" My take on it is a couple things are going on. The main one is that while the blogosphere was going on about electoral fraud, touchscreen machines, voter suppression etc., the mainstream media mostly missed it, Olbermann obviously being an exception. It's so hard to conceive of American elections being dirty --- it was for me, it's hard for my mother who's been an election judge for a long time --- that is seems like conspiracy theory. Naturally anybody responsible would have a hesitation about passing it on. Even though I've been writing about this stuff as long as I've been blogging, I fact check carefully because errors will undermine my case with a readership I assume is skeptical. The other thing going on is it's chilling to think about the meaning of the election really turning out to be fraudulent. If so, we had a coup, not an election. Al Franken mentioned on his show that he didn't want the election to have been stolen, as that seemed worse than the election having been lost. Okay, so it's chilling. But if we let it go this time, it will keep happening. If Bush is undermined by the truth coming out, good. Even if he gets to keep the fruits of his fraud, the revelation of it will weaken him for the midterms.

One bit of good news is Secretary of State Blackwell is getting in trouble. A bit of bad news if this is right: voter suppression by fraud might be legal? On the other hand, the Greens and Libertarians together have raised enough for an Ohio recount.

November 13
I may have jumped to a conclusion, oddly one that undermined my case rather than supporting it. It came from not understanding something about exit polls, and I'm still not sure, but this may be big. I mentioned yesterday that there were claims that the exit polls showed Kerry doing much better in swing states, but these claims appeared to not hold up. I found something to support that after posting yesterday's entry. A professor from the University of Pennsylvania used exit poll data from CNN like I was looking at, but he saw it before it was "corrected." Apparently "corrected" doesn't mean they got data from the rest of the day. It means they fix the poll results to match the vote tallies, which makes sense in terms of figuring out how white males voted, how new voters voted, etc. CNN fortunately still had the original data on its site in the early wee hours of election night, and a screen shot in this report is rather chilling. It shows Kerry winning Ohio among both men and women. That's all the genders, which means the poll showed Kerry won Ohio, which means the electoral college. The author of the report, Steven Freeman, included a disclaimer that the report hadn't gone through peer review yet, and he reserved the right to make updates. He provided a chart of poll differentials in swing states. Ohio polls put Kerry up 4.2% and the tally said Bush won by 2.5% The chart doesn't prove anything by itself, because the polls had Kerry up 9% in Minnesota, and the tally showed he won by 3.5%. Minnesota has no touchscreen machines, and the optical scan machines aren't on the Internet, so if any hacking occurred it would have to be in the central tabulating computers, assuming they're on the Internet which I don't know.

The confusion might be resolved by a recount, and some progressive groups and two minor parties, the Greens and Libertarians, are trying to raise the funds to pay for it. One of these is a new 527 groups founded by Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org, Help America Recount. She also intends to seek some recounts in Florida. This is in addition to the freedom of information request for tabulation records in Florida.

An interesting development regarding the security lockdown in Warren County, Ohio, which prevented anyone from watching the vote counting, is that the FBI denies there was any alert. In the realm of provisional ballots, Ohio is grasping at any way to disqualify ballots. Secretary of State Blackwell tried a new rule requiring the disqualification of ballots without the voter's date of birth but backed off under public pressure. In that same article, there were 92,672 fewer votes for president than votes cast. They were cast on punchcards, which are notorious for high error rates. Add those to the provisional ballots, and there might be enough for Kerry to win. We're close folks. If only everyone had been allowed to vote the election would be settled, but yes indeed, the voting machne shortages were concentrated in Democratic precincts.

Now if we can just jail some of the people who pulled an unprecedented number of dirty tricks to suppress the vote.

November 12
Some of the causes for suspicion about the 2004 election are being resolved, and those of us who suspect the result need to own up to those so we can not only concentrate on the things that really put the result in doubt, but have credibility when we do it. The discrepancy in some Florida counties between party registration and the results is apparently explainable by the dixiecrat vote. Professor Walter Mebane, who was interviewed today on the Al Franken Show, has studied this and said these counties are mostly in the panhandle, which is very conservative and has been showing this pattern for a long time.

I haven't brought up the controversy over the exit polls because I've heard contradictory things and didn't know what to believe. The allegations are that differences between the exit polls and the results indicate problems, and I'd heard that areas with touchscreens had the discrepancies while other ares didn't, and I'd heard the polls were correct for non-swing states but not swing states. These polls are complex and have a lot of information. CNN has put it together with the ability to look by state. It looks like the final poll results are close the reported result. A study at Caltech found no discrepancies outside a margin of error, including by type of machine. I'll admit, speaking as someone who has been trying to publicize cases of fraud and pushing for investigations, that this weakens the case for Bush losing the popular vote.

This doesn't weaken the case against touchscreens however, because if the margin was closer, then an amount of fraud too tiny to stand out could change the result, and then we'd suffer for the lack of ability to do recounts. Nothing is changed about the conflict of interest in having the machines be completely relied on for the tallies when they're manufactured by Republican activists. The revealed holes in the software may have been fixed, but there's no way to know because states can't inspect the machines. The refusal by partisan government officials to allow a means of auditing remains suspicious, especially when other problems occur or when there is a history of fraud. With no audit possible, the amount of suspicion warrants an investigation, and blocking that investigation will lend credence to that suspicion. Having no problem large enough to change the result this time won't allay suspicion, not when voters wonder if their voting cards are preprogrammed.

Two things still undeniably hold water, but both have problems in proving the election was stolen. One is proven attempts at voter suppression. They don't yet account for the margin, and reports come from people who knew someone was trying to fool or deter them. We'll never know how many people believed they couldn't vote with unpaid traffic tickets or went to the wrong polling place after the nice person on the phone misdirected them, but it occurs to me that fraud shouldn't be excused because there wasn't enough to change the result. They tried to steal the election, so until Republicans will investigate and prosecute miscreants, and I don't buy for a second they can't find any of them, they have no right to claim victory.

The other, and this might account for the "win", especially in Ohio and maybe even in Florida, was the long lines. Was it true that it was consistently Democratic leaning precincts that had too few machines, like only two for Kenyon College? Something else I'm watching for is proof for claims I've heard that some Ohio counties moved machines from inner city precincts to suburbs. Ohio's turnout was lower than expected, 70% instead of the predicted 73%, yet the waits of many hours indicate a terrible lack of planning. Since the Republican secretary of state was state chairman of the Bush campaign, just like his counterpart in Florida in 2000, since he had tried to reject new registrations, almost all Democratic, on the grounds they were on the wrong paper, and since he had tried to require people casting provisional ballots to do so in the right precinct even though the slow pace of processing registrations meant they may not have been told the right place and some were sent bouncing between polling places, it's a bit suspicious.

The problem I alluded to is that there's no way to know the numbers who couldn't wait for hours and left, and since they couldn't vote they didn't make it into the exit polls so the anomaly doesn't show up there either. The solid statistics are: the overall turnout, which was below predictions by enough to account for Bush's margin; the number of punch cards rejected and not yet counted, if they can be, but we won't know until someone looks; and the number of provisional ballots, which historically in Ohio are accepted 87% of the time, making them equal to Bush's margin. That's why many of us out here in the liberal grassroots believe Kerry may yet win Ohio, and if the long lines were in Democratic precincts, he did win. If the long lines were deliberate, then Ohio was stolen. If Kerry won Ohio, then he won the electoral college. For more on not just Ohio, but problems nationally, go to VotersUnite, which is compiling a list of the problems with links to sources. There's a lot more than what I've been able to go into.

November 11
Today is Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, marking the end of World War I. That was a war which was fought when the governments of the major powers saw a chance to pursue some imperial goals, and convinced their populations to join in a patriotic fervor which led them to the biggest killing spree in history. Governments lied, people died, profiteers made out great, nothing came out as intended, and today our government honors veterans by --- doing it all over again. Happy Veterans Day.

A friend of mine got to experience one of the Republican dirty tricks that attempted to stop likely Democratic voters from voting. It's one of those instances of fraud that isn't sufficient to prove the GOP stole the election, but sure indicates they tried and more investigation is warranted:

I got a call from a woman who identified herself as a caller on behalf of the MN Republican Party. Her demeanor and professionalism throughout the call gave me the impression she really was.
After very politely asking for my support of Bush and his cronies, she very helpfully gave me the address of my polling place.
As I have lived in the same house for 12 years (give or take), I happen to know that my polling place is only 5 blocks from my house.
The address she gave me is in another city entirely, about 10 or 12 miles away.
Just before I went to vote, I happened to check the news on the Internet.
I saw reports of similar fraudulent phone calls being made across the nation, with an especially high level of them reported in the so-called swing states.
I found it interesting that the MN Republican Party would make it a point to call a liberal neighbourhood (I live within walking distance of the University of Minnesota) which is full of people who move a lot, and give them bum directions to their polling place.
I very dutifully reported this at the help desk set up by the DFL party across the street from my real polling place after I voted.
The woman staffing said desk had taken similar reports herself, and was aware of many others that were reported to observers and such.
I then ended up volunteering to help people who were having trouble registering to vote.
I hope that helping folks vote helped to offset, even a little bit, the Republican Party's anti-voting drive.

So not only did the voter not go to the wrong polling place, but the voter was motivated to volunteer. Good job caller. The fact the caller identified herself as a Republican would lead me to guess somebody made an honest mistake about the location of the polling place, but lots of such calls is a bit much of a coincidence. There's no way of knowing if anyone was fooled, but so what. Fraud is still fraud when the victim doesn't fall for it, just like a lie is still a lie when it isn't believed. Since Kerry won Minnesota, this obviously doesn't account for Bush's win. What about such incidents in a closer state? Why does no one ever get punished when obviously someone ordered that it be done? A bunch of people in the Republican party know this is happening and who is doing it, but are keeping the secrets. The point is that the fraud that would allow Bush to steal the election looks more plausible. We must demand investigations or they won't happen. If Bush and the Republicans block the investigations, I guess we have our answer.

Sometimes an anecdote puts a human face on a statistic, and provides details like nothing else can. Here's one from a poll watcher in Florida who had a much worse day than I had. Some good news is at least one congressman, Dennis Kucinich, gets it.

One of the lesser known strategies of fraud is the false accusation. Here's an example that's not exactly a lie, because everything is a fact as far as I can tell, but it leads to a false conclusion. It's a study of registration in Missouri and reports such shocking facts as several progressive groups rented space in the same building. They had registration drives that overwhelmed the clerks. How awful, registering so many people. They paid the people who did the registering, and got lots of duplicates. This paying for registrations bit everyone who tried it right in the ass. Surely getting ripped off by employees was a devious sort of fraud, right? Or could some have been people registering twice in hopes of getting in the rolls once in a state where that's been a problem? And they had felons as employees. How dare they give a job to former convicts! They must be denied employment until they resort to crime again and can go back to jail. And get this, an audit found nearly 10% of registrations were questionable. What, do people move and register where they moved to, thus being on the rolls twice? What criminals! Now Republicans, just how many people actually tried voting twice, or claiming non-existent addresses? So far, you haven't shown any. I bet you can find one or two though. Maybe if you can find a few thousand you'll equal the number of people you misled into losing their vote.

The point of this tactic isn't to prove massive fraud. It's probably not even to set up doubt in case of a Democratic win. It's probably like the swift boat ads. The public just hears both sides saying things, doesn't know what to believe, and assumes each is equally likely to be lying and so dismisses the truth.

November 10
We (my wife did the graphical part) made a map of how the electoral vote would look if the close states were purple. I commented quite a lot on the page showing the map, so I won't repeat it all here. I'll just say one color change makes the country look a bit less divided. It shows starkly the rural/urban divide not just in the red states being rural and urban states being blue, blue mixed states come out purple. It's strikingly consistent. It also shows how the electoral college reduces turnout. The swing states had record turnouts, but the whole country had a pitiful 60%. Why vote if you have to win a state to have a vote count and you know you won't win? To truly make every vote count, we need a national popular vote, and then I'd be willing to bet that turnout would rise sharply in non-swing states and a bunch more states would turn purple.

November 9
My wife and I went to our first meetup tonight. I first heard of these as organizing tools for the Howard Dean campaign last year. This one was a meetup of the state senate district DFL. I had no idea what to expect. It turns out there is someone who organizes it and runs it, called a "host". Attendees introduced themselves, talked briefly about why they came, and we vented about the election results. We also heard from some elected officials. There was talk of why we don't connect with social conservatives and how a chunk of the populace votes on 3G (God, gays, guns) issues. We talked of course about how other issues should matter more and that we have values worth talking about and voting for. I spoke aloud what I wrote yesterday about needing to take 3G issues more seriously because many people do, and our case that other issues matter more just doesn't wash. Now here's the important part. Right after an election that could have been demoralizing, a pile of people attended and were ready to fight, not seek consolation, not seek friendly spin. The DFL grassroots, and I hope Democrats and liberals that volunteered with non-partisan organizations, know we came close, we're still angry at Bush, and there's a sense we can keep it up for upcoming elections.

The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) monitors have released a preliminary report on the U.S. elections. The press release is here. Click here for the PDF of the report. Unofficially, they had some not nice things to say about American elections. They were generally denied access to polls, which doesn't prove fraud but doesn't allay suspicion either, not when such access is normally a condition of certifying elections as free and fair. They were troubled by the long lines, saying flat out that people left the lines without being able to vote. They commented on how unreasonable it was to have no paper trail to audit results. They didn't say the election was stolen or seriously in doubt, but they seemed not to intend to make such judgements, but just to say what they saw.

It's been going around the Web and some airwaves that there were some surprising results in some Florida counties. I held off mentioning this so I could check the numbers, but apparently the numbers aren't what is in doubt, but rather the explanation. In small counties using optical scanners and with a preponderance of registered Democrats, consistently the presidential vote was opposite of what registrations would predict. One possibility is the tabulating computers got hacked, which is possible if they're connected to the Internet or the manufacturer applied a software patch before the election. I don't know if either is the case. The alternative is there is still a dixiecrat vote that goes Democratic for local elections but Republican for president. It's hard to believe there are still that many dixiecrats, but I don't know Florida well enough to know. I do know that this is easily proven by hand counting some counties. Even if the count is accurate, it shows the folly of the paperless machines, because no such recount is possible. So lets have some counties recount and put the optical scan concerns to rest, and if Florida won't recount, that tells us something.

Speaking of Florida, they had some machines start counting backwards.

In Minnesota, one challenger managed to protect some voters.

November 8
OK, post mortem time. People will write whole magazine articles, maybe whole books, on the subject, so don't ask me to cover everything in a blog entry. I'm intending more to lay out an agenda of what went wrong and what needs fixing before the midterms. Probably I'll pick up on many of these topics, at least the ones I think are more important or not sufficiently attended to. So, I'll start out with the thing the Democrats really didn't attend to:

We must fix the vote counting. It's hardly proven at this point that Bush stole the 2004 election, but there is plenty of cause for suspicion. We must investigate the allegations, publicize those that prove true so they can be prevented, and beat the GOP over the head when it blocks investigations and reforms, like the House leadership blocking a vote on requiring paper trails despite most members sponsoring the bill. If we can't get a means of auditing touchscreens, I doubt we'll ever win, and if we can, the victory will be as suspect as Bush's.
We must do better countering voter suppression. We countered poll challengers quite well, but why has no one ever been punished for misleading voters, like the flyers giving misinformation, or the phone calls directing people to the wrong polling place? We don't know how much effect this had, but we must stop this stuff. Punish somebody, and beat the GOP with it when we catch them.
This is really part of the bullet above, but it's perhaps the single biggest problem in the last election, maybe more than the touchscreens. Voters in many states found waits of several hours to be routine. Some unknown but presumably large number of people left without voting. Even motivated people can't always take off work that long. Is it true this problem was more in Democratic precincts? We need to investigate that. Since turnout was up for both sides, if it happened mostly to our voters, this might account for Bush's winning margin. If it was deliberate, we need to raise holy hell.
Now getting into the first place fingers get pointed after a loss, the Kerry campaign did make mistakes and we need to understand and avoid them. The big one was conceding so soon. He was probably thinking that the election was settled, but he and the party needed to think further ahead. If we don't do something about the fraud now, it will happen again. I'd rather be labeled a sore loser than be a quiet victim. During the campaign itself, no errors were as big as Bush's lies. It seems a Republican can screw up every which way while a Democrat has to be perfect. Still, maybe we can learn from the errors.
Dump the electoral college. It will be a slog since it requires a constitutional amendment, but my guess is that it's one of the biggest impediments to increased turnout. Only 60%, as self-congratulatory as Americans were, is still pitiful for such an important election. Yet what's the point if your state is safely red or blue? House races are usually settled too, and even Senate races aren't always competitive. The presidency is the motivator. Just because participation in the democratic process is a core liberal value, whether it helps us or not, we must push for a popular vote. We may find a lot of states looking more purple.
Accept the label "liberal". If you're to the left of the acting president, you will be labeled a liberal. It doesn't matter if you want to call yourself a conservative Democrat, a progressive, a moderate, a radical, or if you just express a dislike for labels. You will be labeled a liberal, and attempts to dodge it just strengthen the popular impression that liberal is an insult and make the label an effective attack. To take it away, we must adopt it as ours, as our revolutionary ancestors adopted "Yankee Doodle" as their own. That's why, if you've been reading a while, you've noticed since the election I always say "liberal" instead of "progressive" or any other synonym. Keep saying "liberal" is a good thing, because as the forces of Rove have taught, repetition works. I doubt it'll work by 2006, but we have to start sometime.
3G issues (God, gays, guns) matter. This is one I woke up to on Wednesday. It seems logical to argue that gay marriage isn't as important as war, and Ten Commandments monuments don't matter as much as unemployment. Experience is showing those arguments don't work. They haven't mattered to liberals, but they matter to a big chunk of people, and they turned out for Bush. We don't have to agree with conservative positions, but we have to show voters to whom these issues matter that we take their issues seriously enough to form coherent positions and argue them forcefully. Taking on these issues with better positions is the only way to make inroads with these voters. Arguing that people care about the wrong issues just doesn't work. It looks like social conservatives feel looked down on or ignored rather than persuaded. Moreover, we can make some issues work for us, as we have with stem cell research.
We must take up labor issues. That isn't just an ideological appeal to the left. I would bet that white male union members voted for Bush, just by a smaller margin than non-union white males. And why shouldn't they? Have liberals paid attention to labor issues, aside from railing against NAFTA and outsourcing? That's nibbling around the edges. The core is organizing, and the law is on the employers' side, both in terms of mild penalties for labor law violations and lack of enforcement. We have to make part of our agenda improving the legal climate for organizing, which would strengthen unions and thereby expand the base.
The public is liberal on environmental issues. It's hard to raise these to being equal to war, but if conservatives can make an issue of keeping "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, we make a bigger issue of environmental problems. In fact, opposition to stopping global warming seems to be a matter of faith that the problem isn't real. This is a 3G issue where we can win.
Besides 3G, Bush won on terrorism. He's consistent in his campaign themes, so we know he'll campaign nationally on terrorism in 2006. We must take this issue from him by hitting hard on his failures before 911 and his attempted cover up. We gave him a free pass in 2004 and it cost the election. This time, the seven minutes of silence must come back to haunt him.
Bush opponents must stop the blame game against each other right now. Though some on the Democratic right switched sides, almost all rallied to the cause. Though some moderates think the Democratic left dragged the party too far left, the left is the base. We're the ones who sent in the small contributions that matched Bush and provided the volunteers that did the grunt work.

November 7
Honest, the post mortem is coming, but briefly back to the election fraud. Here's a way to sell touchscreens to skeptical elections officials. Deceive them about meeting federal standards, which it appears Diebold did in Maryland.

Here are some details about the problems in Ohio, with one really problematic statement. Edward Foley, who teaches at Ohio State University, is quoted saying, "In Ohio, there is a cloud over the process, even though there is not a cloud over the result." Huh? If the process was screwed up, how can the result be taken seriously? If it's true the long lines were predominantly in Democratic precincts, then between the inability of many voters to wait several hours in line, the errors in the punch cards, and the Democratic dominance of provisional ballots (challengers were set up just in Democratic precincts, so that's a reasonable presumption), Kerry might have won Ohio and thus the Electoral College. I still think the Electoral College needs to graduate, but it is the law.

And bits of good news if I may. In Minnesota, the icon of wealthy Republican suburbs is Edina. It went blue. The columnist who wrote that, Nick Coleman, reported that he got a lot of nasty mail after that column, so he told his red flamers that several other suburbs went blue too, including the home of our governor, one of the GOP's current fair haired boys. His contribution to the campaign was to propose keeping his no tax pledge in the face of fiscal reality by restoring that traditional American value of stealing from Indians. The state GOP chairman just happens to be chairman of a company which sells slot machines, like to the white owned casino the GOP threatens to push for if the Indians don't pony up the casino profits. But I digress. I wish to point out to the Democratic muckymucks who will complain as always that the left is costing them the support of moderates and that's why we lost that we did win moderates. Look at the heavily suburbanized states we won, like California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. We won New Jersey, which is half New York suburb and half Philadelphia suburb (overgeneralized, but not by a lot). We are quite competitive in suburbs, and in the Twin Cities maybe even the stronger party in the inner rings. While the GOP keeps running these conservatives, we'll probably keep winning these moderates.

The other bit of news: while the DFL's spectacular success in the state house still left the minimum Republican majority (two, so no one has to do the math), Democrats picked up other state houses.

November 6
The post mortem gets delayed again, because this stuff about just can't wait. There's more evidence that touchscreen machines had problems. Thom Hartmann wrote about probable hacking into tabulating computers in Florida. Former Clinton campaign advisor and current Bush supporter Dick Morris says exit polls are almost never wrong, though he thinks the conspiracy was to make Kerry appear to be ahead to suppress the Bush vote. There's no evidence except how different the polls were from the results, so even before looking at evidence, it's at least as good a theory that the polls were rigged. One precinct in Ohio gave Bush 4,258 votes with only 638 voters. That article also mentioned problems in New York and in San Francisco, which used machines by Election Systems & Software Inc., the company owned partly by Sen. Chuck Hagel that made the machines in Nebraska and Florida. Various problems have been reported in other places, but what concerns computer professionals isn't the detected problems. Those could just be user error on the part of judges or voters. Even the cases where votes for Kerry were switched to Bush may have been isolated incidents. What concerns those of us who work with computers is the unseen problems. These things are connected to the Internet, the manufacturers have the ability to install software patches remotely, the software has been found to have many holes, and in short there would be no way to tell if the vote totals were changed. The only audit possible is to see if the total number of votes matched the registered voters who signed in, and that would say nothing about the result. With a 3 million victory margin and over 39 million votes cast without the possibility of recount, even small changes per precinct could reverse the outcome. Add in that these companies are owned by Republican activists, the Republicans consistently oppose making these machines auditable, and the detected mistakes keep favoring Bush.

Though obviously many people are speaking out about these problems, they have not included the Democratic leadership. Even if Kerry felt there was no way he'd become president and he wanted to stop a struggle that would be unwinnable and destructive, he should have considered that the fraud committed this time could be committed again. The whole party leadership needs to realize that if they don't raise a stink now, they might never win an election again or, if they do, there will be just as much doubt about their victory as there should be about the Republicans "win" this time. What's aggravating is they were warned about the problems in 2002 elections in Nebraska and Georgia. More details here (note on Common Dreams articles: these are usually reprints from news sites, and there's usually a link at the top to the original story). It wasn't like they seemed not to hear the warnings. Leaders kept talking about "every vote will be counted" and we here in the base thought they were prepared to fight the fraud this year. I will admit there was a commendable effort to counter voter suppression, I saw it first hand, but they've kept quiet about fraud in the counting, and the base is very disappointed. Though Kerry made mistakes, his premature concession was the first time I was genuinely upset with him. The Congressional leadership hasn't spoken, the party officials haven't either, so maybe they just don't get it. That's possible, since consistently the people who oppose these touchscreen machines work with computers. Common sense would seem to dictate that when people who are most comfortable with computers are the least comfortable with computerized voting, there's a problem.

November 5
Before getting into the post mortem I promised, this can't wait. 4,500 votes were lost in one county in North Carolina because the voting machines leave no paper trail. 40 million votes nationally were cast on touchscreens in a race won by only 3 million, and none except those in Nevada left a paper trail. Half of Florida's votes were on these things, which is scary in a state where the state government is a firm believer in the efficacy of election fraud. One election judge in Maryland witnessed opportunities for tampering, even though he knew of none, but pointed out that it's the stuff we can't see that matters most. While we're wondering why we lost the election, we have to wonder whether the exit polls were actually right, and whether Florida was stolen again, which would give Kerry the electoral college. Maybe we even won the national popular vote. Who can tell? Since Republicans own the companies that make the machines, and since they also fought against printouts, it's at least mighty suspicious. I suspect the nightmare came true, and Bush stole it again, even more blatantly than 2000. If Florida fights the Freedom of Information Act request from Blackboxvoting.org, that will tell us something. Why has the mainstream media been so quick to jump on the "all went smoothly" bandwagon?

November 4
Enough feeling miserable. I'm not even going to start with a message about the fight continues, because there were some silver linings, and failing to learn from success is as dumb as failing to learn from mistakes.

On a national basis, we feel disappointed, maybe even shocked, that such a huge effort didn't win. In Minnesota however, not only did such an effort produce a bigger margin for Kerry than most polls predicted, but did so with the GOP also pulling out all the stops. They did everything they could, and still lost. If they're not aware of it because they won nationally --- good. I doubt they missed it though because of the big win for the DFL. A huge majority in the state House of Representatives got turned into a margin of two, and just a few more votes might have made a DFL majority. This was with a big Republican turnout. Now I don't know just how the campaigns were run in every state, but we need to figure out what went right in Minnesota.

We managed to turn out a lot of new voters. We got a lot more people who never voted before, and more young voters. It's true young voters didn't go up as a percentage of the electorate, but that's because everybody turned out in greater numbers. Congratulations to the Republicans for turning out more of their base, but on our side, our base has grown. New voters went more for Kerry. Young voters went for Kerry, and the odds are overwhelming they'll keep voting, and with a Democratic inclination. Voting habits die hard, so the Republicans have a chore getting them to turn. This bodes well for future elections.

Beating an incumbent president is tough. Beating him when the country is at war and people feel they have to back the president of the moment is tough. This one had 90% approval at one point, and with a war going on, not to mention a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal to win, he should have won in a landslide. Instead, to use a sports metaphor, he won in extra innings.

The formerly lapdog press still felt it had to pass on lies because they had been said, but at least the mainstream press has learned it failed to ask necessary questions between 911and when Iraq clearly was falling apart, so it was more skeptical this time. A bunch still just pass on the spin, but some call the spinmasters on it. Bush still has to keep the press at bay and not speak. Now that the campaign is over, maybe they won't feel they have to balance every report of a big Bush lie with any technicality they can catch Kerry on.

Turnout by minorities was up, despite the voter suppression efforts. In fact, I wonder if those efforts backfired, and explains not just higher turnout, but the willingness to wait in line for such long times.

The Republicans did gain four seats in the House of Representatives, but they were all in Texas, where they expected to make gains thanks to the gerrymandered redistricting. They didn't win as many as hoped, so maybe hopes that Texas voters would punish Republicans for their arrogance were somewhat realized. Nationally, despite the top of the ticket winning, despite the heavy Republican turnout, Democrats managed a draw. That's nothing to celebrate, but nothing to mourn. It's very hard to unseat incumbents without gerrymandering or a personal scandal. There was one close race in Minnesota, where a neophyte in a Republican leaning district nearly knocked off a social conservative. It often takes more than one try to win a House seat, so Patty Wetterling will be a serious candidate if she tries again.

So it wasn't all bad on election day. Now that we've added some reality to the pessimism, some encouraging precedents:

Barry Goldwater got a popular vote trouncing like might be unique in American history, yet his party won four years later and started a long run of white house dominance.
Nixon won reelection in a landslide and was forced to resign.
Reagan's reelection was a landslide, but Bush didn't come close to that, and doesn't have anywhere near Reagan's mandate.
Though he won in a landslide, the only thing that saved Reagan from impeachment proceedings was how late in his presidency IranContra broke. Once the evidence was in, there was perhaps a year left. If it had broken earlier, like Nixon's scandal, who knows --- and Bush has scandals (I know, he also has a friendly Congress, but if there are legitimate grounds we still have to try).
Republican dominance of the federal government seemed permanent as they held it through the 1920's. The Democrats might have wondered if they'd ever compete again when Hoover won in 1928. We all know what happened next. I'm not saying another depression is coming. I'm saying we don't know what events will transpire, and completely turn things around.

Now that we've bucked up our courage, in coming days, let's figure out what we need to work on before the next election. Then we work on it.

November 3
An appeal to the Kerry campaign: Please don't concede yet. I've heard reports of problems with Florida touchscreens recording Kerry votes for Bush, and I heard exit polls were very different from results but I don't have details yet. If you concede now, it will be much harder to get these things investigated. Florida might have been stolen again, and the other reports of voter suppression must be investigated, which will be tougher with a premature concession.

I wrote that paragraph this morning, and I knew full well how astronomical the odds were that it would have any effect. Still, I had to try. Naturally I'm disappointed that everything we tried wasn't enough, but we had to try. I certainly will engage in the post mortem over coming days and look for the silver linings, and there are some, and I still suspect Bush's win in Florida had less to do with the vote and more to do with the touchscreen voting. However the one thing I can add that no one else can is my experience as a poll watcher, a term I prefer to the official "challenger", so I'm going into that first.

I said Monday I hoped I would have no interesting stories to tell, and that's sort of true. Nothing bad happened except the polling place being a dead spot for my phone. It is interesting, to me anyway, that I walked in wondering if there the judges would resent my presence, but they couldn't have been nicer. To people who naysay the concept of "Minnesota nice", I say so there. If you've been following this blog at all you know I've been doing my best to raise a stink about Republican attempts to cheat to win, such as voter suppression, like I was there to watch for. I have to say my Republican counterpart was an extraordinarily congenial guy. He raised no frivolous challenges, and the challenge he almost raised, he decided against, figuring the voter probably wasn't lying, but I have to admit he would have been right. An elderly woman was brought in by an ACT (America Coming Together) volunteer but she had insufficient ID to register and the volunteer didn't live in the precinct and so couldn't vouch for her. A judge vouched for her, being somehow persuaded she lived in the precinct, but she probably couldn't have satisfied the requirement that she know the voter lives in the precinct. I thought people acted decently the whole way around, because the idea that an old lady with a walker would fake her residency was pretty ridiculous. In fact, other judges vouched for new registrants, but they knew them, which showed me the value of judges working in their own precinct.

I also saw the value of same day registration. About a ninth of the voters registered on the spot. Most had no problems, though the message needs to get out better to people just moving into the state that out of state photo ID isn't acceptable. I didn't see anybody unable to register some other way, like a passport or a neighbor vouching, but I am wondering what the difference is between a Minnesota ID with an old address and an out of state ID. More important is how important same day registration was for improving turnout. I can tell anyone who thinks this is a way to get uninformed idiots to the polls that most who registered who just moved or just reached legal age. Almost all came in knowing what ID they needed. There were idiots pre-registered. Such is life. It also warmed this liberal's heart to see how many people hadn't voted before or in many years. Nationally, Democrats are disappointed at having pulled out all the stops and still lost, but the effort paid off in Minnesota with a bigger electorate producing a bigger margin for Kerry than anticipated and we came just one seat from taking control of the state house, despite a big Republican majority. There's no question in my mind that same day registration is a better tool for turning out unlikely votes than registration drives. It also avoided all problems with provisional ballots and voter registrations not being turned in or processed in time, a problem which seemed to plague the swing states.

I'm also confirmed in my opinion of optical scan machines. Yes, there were some problems feeding in heavily folded absentee ballots, but aside from the absentees, voters can tell right away if they spoiled their ballot when the scanner rejects it, and there are the paper ballots afterward. There were none of the problems of votes being changed as reported with some touchscreens, not that I would expect anything nefarious where the voter could see it. It seems the mainstream press has jumped the gun in saying the touchscreen machines had no problems. They didn't look, but here's hoping some people who can look, do.

The most pleasant experience was being bored as things ran smoothly. The problems of voter suppression, registration processing, and touchscreen voting remained geographically distant. I also asked myself what a congenial Republican would think reading this blog. I go after the Republican leadership and punditry, which I'm convinced is corrupt, but I usually just shorten that to "Republicans". I don't hold that opinion of the grassroots. I question why they follow people who serve such narrow interests and get caught in lie after lie, but not their own honesty and sincerity about their positions.

It's late. The post-mortem can begin tomorrow.

November 1
This is it, the day before election day. This is the last chance to appeal to non-voters to vote, and to the persuadable to pick Kerry and a Democratic Congress. I haven't written a whole lot about Kerry because my focus has been on some specific issues like Republican attempts to steal the election, lying about opponents, lying about the war in Iraq, and abuse of prisoners. Even when I've said good things about Kerry, or about Democratic politicians or left wing media, it's been in the context of refuting Republican lies. Nonetheless, to bring someone over to voting my way it's not enough to show Bush is a problem, but that Kerry would do better. One caveat: I can't repeat every blog entry here, so for details and sources, please see earlier entries.

Kerry has been criticized for being the most liberal senator. That designation depends on what votes get counted, what years get counted, and it's a title that definitely can be twisted. Then again, he is liberal. For those who hate choosing between similar candidates, these two are very different. Conservatives control the entire federal government. Even if you're not sure what a liberal is or believes, it has to be better. If you're a progressive who, like me, worried that the Democratic party had become Republican lite, and indeed I supported Ralph Nader in 2000 and voted Green in other races, those days are momentarily gone. Thanks to the effect of Nader, the threat from the Greens, the insurgent campaign of Howard Dean, and of course the shock of Bush, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney etc., the party has moved left. If it's not left enough, then we still need everybody of every opinion who opposes Bush pulling together. If Kerry is the number one liberal, good.

I like to say a word about Kerry's scandals, but there aren't any. The best his opponents can do is twist his words or outright lie. Some hate him for opposing Vietnam when he got home, which he did and it's anyone's right to disagree, but he showed conviction not just in fighting but in telling the truth when he got home. He's accused of calling fellow vets war criminals, but listen to his testimony. He repeated what other vets told him, and made plain that's where his information came from. It seems that in that atmosphere, leading the protests took a great deal of personal courage, just like he showed courage under fire. Speaking of that, unlike Bush who just sat on 911, Kerry showed he keeps his head in a crisis. In the Senate, Kerry was part of the Iran Contra investigation, and though this caught some people in his own party, he investigated the BCCI scandal. I bring these up because I'm convinced Kerry is a scrupulously honest man. Character counts, and there's no question where the better character is. The best attacks Bush can manage besides trying to make liberal a bad word is to claim he didn't do much. In the last debate, he said Kerry had only five bills, Kerry claimed 56, and it took fact checkers just minutes to find 58.

Kerry is attacked for a reluctance to go to war. I think that's a good thing. Unlike the chickenhawks who keep wanting to start things, he shows the caution I've noticed in many combat vets who know what they're asking of soldiers. Kerry's focus on foreign policy in the Senate is good preparation for the problems that every president finds takes up more of his time than he anticipated, though this time Kerry probably knows that already. Domestically, I won't go into every plan Kerry has, but I will point out that he can think about complexity and detail, a quality infamously lacking in the acting president.

That's not to say Bush didn't make me an Anybody But Bush voter. There's no question Bush, not Kerry, is driving the high turnout this year. I listed broad categories of problems in the first paragraph of today's entry, and I won't go into details since that's what the rest of the blog is for. I will explain a bit so you know what I meant.

Bush's party is trying to steal the election. This attempted theft has come in several forms.

Voter suppression, like tearing up registrations in Nevada, and trying to change polling places at the last moment in Philadelphia.
Fraudulent counting, like ending the requirement for witness signatures on absentee ballots in Florida, and leaving security holes in voting computers.
Avoiding accountability, like denying states the right to examine software, and refusing access to international election observers
False charges, like the registration challenges in Ohio, and the accusation of vouching fraud in Minnesota.
Gerrymandering, like House Majority Leader (that's why we need to change Congress) Tom Delay led the Republicans to do in texas, and like they tried and failed to do in Colorado.

Lying about opponents has usually come as twisting words, like "global test" "sensitive war" in the presidential race. There's the tactic of saying something your opponent never said, like Minnesota 6th district Representative Mark Kennedy saying Patty Wetterling opposed the war in Afghanistan because she received money from a group which includes members who hold that opinion. There's the half-truth, like saying Kerry voted against some weapons systems without saying Cheney opposed them as secretary of defense. There's Enron-like accounting, like the number of times Kerry voted for tax increases. Last of course is the outright lie, like the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. All involve the repetition of the lie so it gets believed, or at least the public doesn't know what to believe, therefore assuming everyone is lying which is fine for those really lying.

Lying about the wars is easy to explain. They told us they did everything possible to stop 911 when they didn't lift a finger. They stonewalled the 911 commission and it turned out there was a lot to hide. They said Iraq was working with Al Qaida when it wasn't. They said there were weapons of mass destruction when there weren't. They pulled out inspectors when they were finding nothing and could have confirmed the charges. They said we have a big coalition when aside from Britain, a few countries have added token forces and that's it. None of that even went into the incompetence of how the war is being run.

The abuse of prisoners could be considered just part of the incompetence in running the wars, but it stands apart, and not merely because it relates to the war in Afghanistan too. We're supposed to be the good guys, yet under the Bush administration the U.S. has become a human rights abuser. Detainees have been tortured and sometimes killed in custody. The acting president has not merely turned a blind eye, but internal memos that have come out show the administration deliberately set up an atmosphere where the rules regarding prisoners no longer applied. At a minimum this constitutes malign negligence, ruins the country's reputation, and endangers Americans who are captured.

I know, I didn't go into civil liberties violations at home, education policy, environmental policy, health insurance, tax cuts, poverty, college costs, energy policy, the deficit, or lots of other issues. I can't go into everything here, but I can say to anyone who doesn't plan to vote that all this stuff affects you. It may affect you very directly. Tomorrow is your best chance to take matters into your own hands.

Back to new and specific stuff. I've heard from several sources that voters in Florida have been willing to wait as long as seven hours to vote. That's motivated. The sad thing is it sounds like a third world country having its first free election. I thought immediately of Afghanistan and South Africa where voters would walk all day and wait another day just to vote. I also wonder if this means that Republican voter suppression efforts have backfired, because in Florida blacks seem determined to vote.

The mayor of Milwaukee says 15,000 - 20,000 registrations have not been processed. He blamed the sheer volume of registrations. Fortunately Wisconsin has same day registration, so voters can re-register at the polls, but of course they may get upset and leave if they wait a long time only to find they have to wait in another line. The article didn't mention this, but voters whose registrations have not been processed probably haven't been told their polling place. What if they show up at the wrong one? And what happens in states that didn't get registrations processed but don't have same day registration, and require a voter to be in the right precinct to cast a provisional ballot? They haven't been told their polling place yet, and that's what provisional ballots are for. Not everyone has Internet access to go look it up. People who don't know there's a problem won't have checked into it. The only fair thing with provisional ballots from a voter who turns out to be otherwise eligible is to count it in the right precinct.

Dirty tricks nationwide: flyers are being posted in minority areas giving misinformation, like polls are open on Wednesday, or if you voted in the primary you can't vote in the general election. Targeted groups, all Democratic leaning, are getting calls offering to let them vote by phone. When I finish writing this, my wife and I, living in a mixed race neighborhood, are going to go looking in case these flyers were posted here. Minnesota usually has clean elections, but now that we have challengers at polls, a secretary of state that impeded voting rather than helping it, Republicans having separate closed training for election judges, Sproul conducting registration drives here, and fake charges about the DFL vouching, let's not take chances. I will be a DFL challenger tomorrow, helping voters rather than impeding them despite the title, and I hope I have no interesting stories to tell.

One correction from yesterday: I was wrong that the voter who vouches for someone registering at the polls in Minnesota needs to be pre-registered. The voucher can register at the polls too, but must register with ID.

See the archives for earlier entries.