Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1 of every 34 Ohio votes), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15% when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.

The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal in both subsets.

Wednesday, 22 August 2007, 1:37 pm
Opinion: Michael Collins

Notes from the Underground
Why the 2004 Election Matters More than Ever

Notes from the Underground Richard Jacksties © with permission [41]

Part 1: The Meaning of the Legend

Michael Collins [42]
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, DC
Part 1 of series
Election 2004: The Urban Legend [43]

Election Magic

Imagine a night at the theater.* A magician comes on stage with a corpse in tow. A doctor from the audience confirms that it is in fact the very real human corpse of a middle aged white male. The magician passes his hand over the corpse just once. It gets up, dances a gig, and leaves the stage. The reanimated middle age man who was once dead returns for an encore.

You’re aghast! You go back stage and confront the magician, “How did you do that?” The magician responds sincerely, “I have no idea.”

Does that make him a magician?

Now imagine that after you question the entertainer, he rolls out another corpse, which is undoubtedly a quite dead middle aged white male. The magician says, “Just pass your hand over the corpse once.” You do, and the corpse arises, dances a gig and leaves the dressing room asking the first person he sees where to get a cab.

Does that make you a magician?

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

On election night 2004, the networks came on the air and announced that George W. Bush had won the presidential contest to become 43rd president of the United States.

Earlier in the day, there were leaked reports revealing the results of the networks’ own exit polls conducted by a distinguished polling firm. The reports had the White House in a panic. Bush was sure to lose given the trends. According to the exits, he was losing his base, the rural segment of the population that had carried him to victory in 2000. Turnout in the Republican suburbs was not much greater than in the country as a whole, and new voters were going for Kerry 60% to 40%.

The final leaked poll was enough to bring broad smiles to the faces of Democratic leaders and committed campaign workers who had gathered in union halls and hotel ballrooms across the nation.

Then, as if by magic, the 11 pm Election Day vote tallies told a different story. These were accepted by the network reporters as an ex cathedra dictate from the American electorate. We were told that the pious Red prevailed once again over the decadent Blue, a replay of 2000 we were told. Bush was reelected.

The optimistic mood of the Kerry campaign and Democratic faithful was crushed in the twinkling of an eye. What happened? What about the exit polls?

The still corpse of the Bush campaign had been reanimated. It arose from the death of certain defeat, danced a gig, and trotted off center stage to do its considerable damage for the next three years: death and destruction in Iraq; dismantling of the United States Constitution; the abandonment of Katrina’s survivors (for all the world to see); augmented by an impressive and elaborate parade of other calamities that are all attributed to this feat of magic on election night.

How Did They Do It?

Quite simply … by magic. According to the final exit poll [44], the only heat Bush won, he had two million less votes in the rural segment of the population. That segment went from 23% of the electorate in 2000 to 16% in 2004. Bush made marginal gains in the suburbs. He was headed for disaster rolling into the cities. He picked up steam in cities with populations 50,000 to 500,000, by breaking even in 2004 after a 17% loss to Gore in 2000.

But it was big city dwellers that passed their collective hand over the Bush corpse and brought it to life. He was on life supports before the big city totals were factored in. All that Kerry had to do was match the Gore big city percentage and he would be the next president. According to the day after election final exit poll, big city turnout [45] was up 66%, Bush votes increased 153% (Fig. 5 [46]) over 2000 there, and white voters (Figs. 6 & 7 [47]) in big cities went from five million in 2000 to nine million in 2004.

Had some would-be campaign operative passed his hand over our largest cities and reanimated white males in sufficient quantity to save the seemingly doomed Bush and doom the rest of us?

Election 2004: The Urban Legend

On June 13th of this year, “Scoop” Independent News published Election 2004: The Urban Legend [48]. I wrote the article based in large part on the research of Internet poster Anaxarchos. The figures cited above from the final national exit pool exit poll and the absurdist conclusions forced from those figures demonstrate that there is no reason to have faith in the final poll result and, as a result, no reason to believe that there is a coherent narrative to justify the election results and the Bush victory.

We’re like the incredulous audience member who went back stage to confront the magician. Even though we can do the trick ourselves by passing our hands over the questionable reported results and the final exit poll to justify continued political life to someone who looked like a sure loser, there’s a foul magic to the process.

Where are the Critics of the Urban Legend?

When the article was published, it received wide spread attention across America’s only uncensored news source, the Internet. Multiple sites posted the article in full, not a common event for a 7,500 word analysis. Major figures in the free and fair elections movement provided their endorsement including Mark Crispin Miller [49] and Ernest Partridge. [50]

We anticipated a full scale assault from friends of the network’s long time polling company, Edison Mitofsky (EM). Nothing much materialized. This was surprising since our reporting and interpretation of the network – EM presentation of the urban results dooms that poll to the status of a failed effort, at the very least, and, more likely, one of the biggest ever failures in public opinion polling.

Anaxarchos Responds to the Missing Critics

Recently, I received a letter from Anaxarchos containing his remarkable comments on the few criticisms offered and, more importantly, an elaboration on the initial article. I’d encourage you to read the full letter (see Appendix) as well as this article.

Anaxarchos: “Having looked carefully at the critical reviews, it appears to me that your critics have entirely missed the import of your piece and its underlying analysis. I could review many of the subsidiary points they raise, but that seems unimportant compared to the two larger points that they don’t mention.”

He’s correct. Those who ridicule critics who question the results of the 2004 election were restrained to say the least. This was surprising. The Bush defenders have left no criticism of the election results unturned, particularly those related to the exit polls. Why the restraint?

There were no substantive responses to Urban Legend because there could be none. The claim that turnout in the big cities (500,000 or greater) went up 66% was demolished entirely through simple political commentary. Why would urban residents’ turnout in waves propelling Bush to victory when the rest of the country was only at a 16% increase in turnout? What had Bush done for them to justify this first ever rousing level of support? More importantly, when in our history did an incumbent president lose share and actual votes in his strongest area (in this case, the rural segment) and gain steam and secure an election victory in hostile territory (the big cities)?

The claim of the 66% increase in turnout was also put to a final rest by the incorporation of actual city turnout data made available on election night and finalized shortly there after. Specifically, actual city voting results showed that city turnout increases were only about 16%, (Chart 1 [51]) the reported average for the country. These big city results were, in some cases, reported on election eve by the very networks that paid for the exit polls and by the exit pollsters who claim to reconcile their final results to the election results. One must wonder if the right hand was giving to the left the full story.

Could the polling company and their sponsors, the major networks (plus CNN and the Associated Press) have been this ignorant of what was happening in New York City? The results reported on local news outlets owned by the networks showed a 12% increase in turnout? That’s 54 points below the claimed urban increase of 66%. New York is, after all, the headquarters of the television network poll sponsors and near the headquarters of the polling company. Did they simply ignore these results in their haste to produce their version of the final exit poll the day after the election? And why wasn’t there any comment on the more than obvious disparity between the actual results for big cities, particularly on turnout, and the polling results they continued to show long after the certified vote count for big cities became available to everyone. This is a critical question addressing the integrity of the entire exit polling and reporting process for 2004.

The Entire Narrative of the Election

Anaxarchos elaborates the first big error of the exit pollsters and network consortium

Anaxarchos: “It seems to me that the most important implications of “Urban Legend” are these:

1) The entire narrative of the 2004 election is built on the foundation of the exit polls. There is virtually no other real-time source of data on who voted how, why, and where. Indeed as the critics of the use of exit polls for fraud detection have pointed out on many occasions, this voter survey is precisely what the exit polls are “intended” to provide, and why they are funded by the consortium of media outlets, the NEP. The Charlie Cook reference in your piece was typical. The Exits provided the sum total of the data behind his analysis of the election.”

Based on the final exit poll two distinguished analysts, Charles Cook and Ruy Teixeira stuck their necks out in different directions. Cook called the Bush victory a display of political genius and immediately made a fundamental mistake. He claimed that defections [52] from the Kerry camp by black, Latinos, and Jewish voters had done the trick for Bush. Had he examined the data available at the time, he would have known that there were only marginal changes in these groups. Teixeira [53] was more precise as Anaxarchos points out:

Anaxarchos: “Unfortunately, so committed was Teixeira to the impossibility of widespread election fraud, that he assumed that there was disconnect between urban data as the NEP defined “urban” and county data, with the observation that, “urban doesn’t mean urban and rural doesn’t mean rural”. Teixeira promised a detailed county analysis to reconcile the differences. Of course, no such “reconciliation” was forthcoming. My guess is that Teixeira, like Cook, underestimated the magnitude of the “reconciliation” that would be required and also underestimated the final turnout of the 2004 election which only further widened that gap.”

One of the most astute analysts, Cook, jumped to the self-informed conclusion that the Bush urban victory had to be due to a shift in ethnic voting. It’s easy to see why. He was unaware that the white big city vote increased from five million in 2000 to nine million in 2004. We can suppose that it never occurred to him that such a thing could or would happen. Why would we expect him to check the exit turnout rate against actual city voting totals?

Teixeira’s response and follow up are even more perplexing. He’s the author of The Emerging Democratic Majority [54] and a recognized polling expert. After dropping his confusion of terms argument, he promised a county analysis to show how Bush won, a common response of establishment Democrats. But he never produced the study? Why? Maybe he stared into the abyss and the abyss stared right back.

He dismissed claims of fraud based on exit poll analysis by writing “… it is possible that the magnitude of these corrections has been greater than normal.” That depends on what your definition of normal is. What’s normal about increasing turnout by a factor of four (16% actual to 66% claimed) to achieve an absurd result? The basis for the urban data correction (actual city results) was available when he made this statement. Had he bothered to look? We’d like to hear from him on this and the questions we outlined clearly in the original article (presuming he’s given up his role as a Democratic apologist for questions about Bush election integrity).

So what does this mean?

Anaxarchos: “ It means at a minimum that either one must try to support the indications of the Exit Polls that the Bush winning margin in 2004 came in the Urban centers, implausible as that seems, or one must craft a new narrative of the 2004 presidential election. Believe it or not, the former option is not nearly as difficult as the latter. Your critics have missed what it means to simply declare that “the Exit Polls must have been wrong”. With that dismissal, much of the supporting evidence for how Bush “won” in 2004 disappears as well.”

For over 30 years, the way we’ve made sense out of “who voted where and why” is through exit polls which are designed to and accepted as answering those very questions. There have been few complaints, other than Florida 2000 when the exit poll showed a narrow Gore victory. Given the trashing of 100,000 mostly minority spoiled ballots, who could criticize the pollsters if they initially showed a Gore victory as a result of interviewing voters in minority precincts whose ballots had been “spoiled [55].”.

If we don’t know how Bush won, ratifying the election results is mindless magic. If we don’t demand an understanding of how he won, then can we dismiss the notion of election fraud made over and over with to an ever widening and receptive audience? Are elections the one area of administration activity that escapes critical analysis? Perhaps the election fraud doubters have been listening to Alberto Gonzales and his crew on these questions.

Anaxarchos offers a compelling case for the election polls failure across the board, not just in the big cities.

Anaxarchos: “Consider the following:

If the Bush winning margin did not come in the cities, where did it come from? If the urban vote as reported by the Exits is incorrect, then the remainder of the Exit Poll narrative must also be incorrect. It is true that the big city vote underlines the anomaly but take a look at the three-category demographic (Urban, Suburban, and Rural) and you get a slightly more muted version of the same story. If the cities don’t hold Bush’s winning margin, then that clearly means that it must have come from somewhere else. While the erosion of the Bush rural margin is significant, reversing it is not enough. We must also “offset” the loss of Bush’s urban margin in the suburbs and we must do this while constantly living under the overhang of an 18% increase in turnout (which clearly favored Kerry). The result is that the Exit Polls must not only be “wrong” in the cities, they must also be “wrong” across the board and this to a significant degree. In truth, the degree of this “wrongness” must increase as we go from city to countryside because, as we have seen, the Exit Polls weight the Bush urban margin into existence.”

Painful choices regarding the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

We can accept the official election results simply as reported by discarding or denying any and all questions and anomalies. Doing so makes us no better than the uncritical magician in the opening passage. It just happened. We don’t know why. We agree that it doesn’t make much sense but that’s just the way it is (in this best of all possible worlds). Move along.

We can accept the election results and totally dismiss the exit poll adjustments as indicative of a flawed poll that should be dismissed. Our argument here is no better than in the first option. Its faith based. That’s just the way it is but we’ll discuss it a bit, feign erudition, and impress you with our obscure knowledge of polling methods and math.

Or we can face the reality and the dreadful conclusion. There’s no way to tell if Bush truly won the vote total in 2004 while there are many reasons to doubt that he did. The parallel measurement of the actual vote, the exit poll, can only concoct a Bush victory through egregious adjustments to its own raw data for the big cities. Why would such adjustments be required? Was the measurement off for the smaller cities where Bush gained 17 points over 2000? Was it off for the suburbs and rural segment? What about the voluminous reports of voter suppression and voting irregularities across the nation; reports including consistent vote flipping from Kerry to Bush?

If there were no problems with the actual vote count, problems that the exit poll analysis clearly indicates, why on earth would two thirds of Ohio counties destroy the ballots [56] and election records from 2004 well before the required retention period?

And what about this question, perhaps the simplest of all with the greatest potential for understanding just what happened in 2004? Why does the network consortium refuse to release the raw data for 2004? The raw data has been closely guarded by the pollsters and the networks despite at least two requests for examination of this data by now Committee on the Judiciary Chairman, John Conyers [57], Democrat, Michigan.

Has that data suffered the same fate as the destroyed Ohio ballots?

Would the handling of the raw data that produced this unbelievable narrative embarrass the networks and indicate that they should have known shortly after the election; that they certainly know by now, without any doubt, that there are huge problems with the final exit poll, the poll the national election pool and its polling company have defended to consistently and vigorously?

Or would the freeing of this privately held data concerning our public election show what many suspect: the real winner of the 2004 election is not sitting in the White House.

You can be sure that the four major networks, CNN, and the Associated Press would be in court right now demanding the release of the exit poll data were it any concern other than them holding back the data from the rightful public review demanded.

ENDS

*Metaphor based on a story from S. John Macksoud, Other Illusions, 1977. Published by the author.

Permission to reprint in part or whole with a link to this article in “Scoop” and attribution of authorship.

Link: "Scoop" Independent News [58]

Appendix: Full Letter from Anaxarchos to Michael Collins

Dear Mike,

Thank you for sending me the reviews for your article, “Urban Legend”, and congratulations on the overwhelmingly positive response you have received. I was a little disturbed at the few negative criticisms that you sent along. Having looked carefully at the critical reviews, it appears to me that your critics have entirely missed the import of your piece and its underlying analysis. I could review many of the subsidiary points they raise, but that seems unimportant compared to the two larger points that they don’t mention. It seems to me that the most important implications of “Urban Legend” are these:

1) The entire narrative of the 2004 election is built on the foundation of the exit polls. There is virtually no other real-time source of data on who voted how, why, and where. Indeed, as the critics of the use of exit polls for fraud detection have pointed out on many occasions, this voter survey is precisely what the exit polls are “intended” to provide, and why they are funded by the consortium of media outlets, the NEP. The Charlie Cook reference in your piece was typical. The Exits provided the sum total of the data behind his analysis of the election. Unfortunately, the data he relied on was “implausible” and thus his “analysis” was equally so. Neither was Cook the only one to trip over that anomaly. Ruy Teixeira also noticed the same “implausibility” within days of the election. Unfortunately, so committed was Teixeira to the impossibility of widespread election fraud, that he assumed that there was disconnect between urban data as the NEP defined “urban” and county data, with the observation that, “urban doesn’t mean urban and rural doesn’t mean rural”. Teixeira promised a detailed county analysis to reconcile the differences. Of course, no such “reconciliation” was forthcoming. My guess is that Teixeira, like Cook, underestimated the magnitude of the “reconciliation” which would be required and also underestimated the final turnout of the 2004 election which only further widened that gap. AlterNet.Com [59]

So what does this mean? It means at a minimum that either one must try to support the indications of the Exit Polls that the Bush winning margin in 2004 came in the Urban centers, implausible as that seems, or one must craft a new narrative of the 2004 presidential election. Believe it or not, the former option is not nearly as difficult as the latter. Your critics have missed what it means to simply declare that “the Exit Polls must have been wrong”. With that dismissal, much of the supporting evidence for how Bush “won” in 2004 disappears as well. Consider the following:

If the Bush winning margin did not come in the cities, where did it come from? If the urban vote as reported by the Exits is incorrect, then the remainder of the Exit Poll narrative must also be incorrect. It is true that the big city vote underlines the anomaly but take a look at the three-category demographic (Urban, Suburban, and Rural) and you get a slightly more muted version of the same story. If the cities don’t hold Bush’s winning margin, then that clearly means that it must have come from somewhere else. While the erosion of the Bush rural margin is significant, reversing it is not enough. We must also “offset” the loss of Bush’s urban margin in the suburbs and we must do this while constantly living under the overhang of an 18% increase in turnout (which clearly favored Kerry). The result is that the Exit Polls must not only be “wrong” in the cities, they must also be “wrong” across the board and this to a significant degree. In truth, the degree of this “wrongness” must increase as we go from city to countryside because, as we have seen, the Exit Polls weight the Bush urban margin into existence. In fact, the weightings decrease significantly as we move from more to less urban territory, and this has been previously presented as an indication of the rural accuracy of the Exit Polls in comparison to the tallied vote count. How do we now reverse that? At the very least, this begs for a serious investigation as you called for.

Yet, the story gets worse. The election narrative starts with the vote count but it doesn’t end there. Certainly the accepted narrative of the election, universally reported by the major news outlets, of “values voters”, “security moms”, and the like, all derived from the Exit Polls and all the products of “weighting”, become much less compelling if the overall narrative is undermined. But, this part of the accepted narrative is also the more trivial. There are some much more important implications here. It is not simply that the election narrative based on your unlikely “Urban Legend” is wrong by itself. It also undermines the use of that story to refute competing narratives which were unceremoniously rejected at the time of the election itself. Consider this:

”In a stunning admission, an elections manager for NBC News said national news organizations overestimated President George W. Bush's support among Latino voters, downwardly revising its estimated support for President Bush to 40 percent from 44 percent among Hispanics, and increasing challenger John Kerry's support among Hispanics to 58 percent from 53 percent. The revision doubles Kerry's margin of victory among Hispanic voters from 9 to 18 percent. Ana Maria Arumi, the NBC elections manager also revised NBC's estimate for Hispanic support for Bush in Texas, revising a reported 18-point lead for Bush to a 2-point win for Kerry among Hispanics, a remarkable 20-point turnaround from figures reported on election night.

"Latino presidential partisan preferences did not change significantly from four years ago," said WCVI's president, Antonio Gonzalez, in his presentation before the National Association of Hispanic Journalists…

"”But I repeat, NBC has set an example for network poll integrity by taking a giant step away from the Edison International/Mitofsky election results, and toward WCVI's findings. For example, today NBC stated that 70% of its respondents came from non-urban areas and 30% from urban areas, while acknowledging that 50% of Latino voters come from urban areas. This admission could explain the difference in their results and WCVI's. They under-represented Latino urban voters (who are more likely to vote democratic) and over-represented Latino non-urban votes (who are more likely to vote republican). We hope the other networks follow suit with more adjustments in their findings," Gonzalez concluded. HispanicBusiness.Com [60]

According to its exit poll survey, the Institute [61] found that Latino voters supported democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over President George W. Bush by a margin of 65.4% to 33%.”

The problem with the story above is that the real implication of such a sampling error among Hispanics was not considered. According to the “official” narrative, the shift of Hispanic voters toward parity was one of the most important pillars of the Bush “victory” in 2004. From “Urban Legend”, we know that this problem was most likely a weighting problem and not a sampling problem per se. But, the issue is not confined simply to Hispanic voters. Another pillar of the victory was a small but significant shift among black voters away from Kerry, universally reported as an artifact of the Republican use of political or religious “wedge issues” in the election. Perhaps one of the most important facts revealed in the “Urban Legend”, however, was that the Exit Polls reported a 40% increase in the black vote overall in comparison to 2000, but, simultaneously, virtually no increase in the black big city vote. We thus have widespread examples of exit poll responders appearing where they are not: black and Hispanic voters, with more conservative and Republican tendencies popping up in the suburbs, and a mass of urban GOP whites materializing in the cities. But… if these things didn’t happen, how could Bush possibly “win”?

The inverse of this is equally striking. The suggestion from the Exit Poll anomalies, above, is that 2004 was actually a rerun of the 2000 election with 16 to 18% greater turnout. In fact, you also saw that the pattern of both the weighted and unweighted Exit Polls for 2000 and the unweighted Polls for 2004 are remarkably similar. But if this was true, how is it possible for Bush not to lose?

Did the Exit Polls really pick up “ghost voters” in the cities and thus expose widespread election fraud? Who knows? There are actually some states in which the Bush urban margin improves through a process similar to the one implied, by “Urban Legend”. Yet, it is more likely that the Exit Polls picked up an anomaly in the larger election and the attempt to reconcile this anomaly creates the “ghosts”. It is also possible that something completely different occurred which actually gave the election to Bush, but nothing in such an outcome is possible without overturning the Exit Polls in their entirety and creating not just a new narrative for the election itself but also explaining the massive variation of the Polls themselves. To attempt to take any other position is fundamentally dishonest and genuinely “faith-based”.

2) I have already run on too long but, while point #1 above explains the extrinsic implications of “Urban Legend”, there are some intrinsic implications as well. In the spring of 2005, Edison/Mitofsky, the polling organization responsible for the 2004 exit polls, released their analysis of the exit poll discrepancy. Instead of blaming precinct selection or methodology, the polling organization made a spirited defense of both. The alternative explanation was that a breakdown had occurred in the sampling of voters in what Mitofsky claimed were accurately chosen precincts. Since that time, numerous panels representing the statistical establishment have convened and, each time, have supported Mitofsky’s original conclusions. Explanations of various presumed sampling problems, “within precinct errors”, “shy voters” and the like, have been numerous and tiresome. Because of “Urban Legend”, it also seems that these were entirely irrelevant. How is it that the august scholars and expert panels missed the most fundamental anomaly of the urban vote? This isn’t just missing the forest for the trees. This is more like missing the forest fire for the toadstools. I will go into this in some depth in the future if you have an interest.

Stay safe…

Yours,

Anaxarchos

Note to Anaxarchos: I have an interest. Mike

Greenpeace [62]

Link: "Scoop" Independent News [63]

Over the past few months America has been exposed to a seemingly never-ending cascade of evidence concerning Karl Rove's efforts to suppress minority and working class vote.

On election night 2004 TV screens across the world bore testimony to the results of his meddling.

The huge queues to vote in some minority and inner city precincts saw people waiting 10 hours or more to vote—Ohio was particularly bad—but it happened in many key urban areas. It was accompanied throughout the country by race-based voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement. In Florida nearly 700,000 ex-felons are barred from voting, in Virginia 200,000; simply for having a felony on their record.

The “Urban Legend” uncovered by Michael Collins and detailed in his report is simply this.

According to the official election night results and the official exit polls (the most extensive ever conducted in the history of elections) it was these queuing voters from the core of America's largest cities who elected George W. Bush.

The full article is at http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/election_2004_the_urban_legend [68]

Excerpts from the Collins report—

The Bush campaign focused its efforts heavily, almost exclusively, on the rural areas and suburbs in order to counter the anticipated big city Democratic margins. But then the miracle occurred just when it was needed. White ghosts never seen before emerged from parking lots, alleys and perhaps even graveyards in big cities across the country to give George W. Bush a stunning victory in the presidential election of 2004. It had to be this way, otherwise the vote count was wrong and who would tolerate such a notion, despite the clear signs on the ground and in the National Exit Poll? But the convenient and wide spread Red versus Blue story of election eve was maintained through inertia. For those with nagging questions, that story was replaced by the Urban Legend of 2004: Bush won the 2004 Presidential election in big cities.

So please ask yourself—if Karl Rove, Bush and the US Attorney Generals were so busy disenfranchising urban minorities as fast as they could, how can the above "official story of Election 2004" be remotely possible?

Where then did the Bush swing in the urban wave come from? The simple answer is that it was weighted into existence. The act of reconciling the exit polls to the official vote count created it. The Bush urban voters came into existence because they had to—otherwise the official vote count would be wrong.

Weighting is a practice used by the US Census, political consultants, public health officials and others who conduct large scale survey research. If you collect data on a population, Latino voting patterns in the 2004 election for example, and your data is unrepresentative of a subset of that population, you can weight certain responses by a multiplier greater or less than one to make your poll consistent with the population measured. The problem though is when weighting is used to reconcile polling data with a “known fact” that may not be known at all. The NEP assumes that the official vote total must be accurate and weights accordingly.

Curiouser and curiouser—

Generating the Bush urban wave was effortless. Only 10% of urban voters required a call. They were not required to attend rallies or watch television ads. In fact, many of them didn’t even need to vote. That was taken care of by the weighting process conducted when the national exit poll was found to be inconsistent with the announced vote tallies. After all, how could the unintentionally released Election Day NEP be right in showing a 3% Kerry overall victory margin when the vote tabulators showed a 3% Bush win? Rural Americans didn’t produce that margin. Neither did the small towns or the suburbs. Even the improvement in the smaller cities wasn’t enough. The big cities, according to announced totals, delivered the vote for Bush.

For this study, we chose the less controversial approach of using the final, revised exit poll with a focus on the stated purposes of the exit poll, who were the voters and where did they cast their ballots. Why not take the numbers the pollsters finalized the day after the election? Yet after careful scrutiny, we’ve shown that the NEP’s urban demographic data just don’t add up to even a remotely convincing explanation for a Bush victory. The data is clearly inconsistent, incompatible, and results in a conundrum rather than clarity about what happened on Nov. 2 2004. Doubt leads to disbelief.

And then there’s one more problem that casts doubt on the entire process. The NEP reports a 66% increase in voter turnout in the big cities, from 9 million votes in 2000 to 15 million in 2006. This provides foundation for the increases in Bush urban votes and percentages, even though there is no common sense or historical reason to believe such an increase in Bush votes ever took place, as we’ve demonstrated.

Now here’s the shocker. In addition to the analysis above, the 66% vote increase in the urban areas simply can’t be true on the basis of actual reports of big city vote totals. Why hasn’t this been widely discussed?

Well now, many Democrats might say—why go on about 2004 when we retook the House and the Senate in 2006? If the election system is crooked, how could we have done that? An obvious answer was that the Republicans failed to suppress and/or steal enough votes to stop that outcome. If that is the case, the Democratic victory ought to have been even larger than it was, and there is some evidence that it may well have been.

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/landslide_denied_exit_polls_vs_vote_count_2006 [69]

There is an unfortunate tendency of Democratic officeholders, particularly those in comfortably majority Democratic districts, to think that if they got elected what could possibly be wrong with the process? Leave well enough alone. However, Republicans have absolutely no inhibitions about being “sore losers,” or even sore winners. The US Attorney General scandal now unfolding will absolutely not stop them from their efforts to suppress the votes of Democrats.

It is more than past time for grassroots Democrats to insist that Democratic officeholders stop being WEAK ON DEFENSE—defense of their own voters and of the integrity of the election process. There must be an end to secret, unauditable software and the very notion that any private company has the right to own any data about election process whatsoever, now!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Publication of this story marks a watershed in American political history. It is offered freely for publication in full or part on any and all internet forums, blogs and noticeboards. All other media are also encouraged to utilise material. Readers are encouraged to forward this to friends and acquaintances in the United States and elsewhere.

In this edition: Quotes about Michael Collin's "The Urban Legend" [77] Watergates, Watersheds & Manchurian Candidates [78] – The Urban Legend In A Nutshell [79] - So How Is It That This News Was Not On CNN? [80] - The Urban Legend In Context: Inside The Mind Of An Election Thief [81] – How Was Election 2004 Stolen? [82] – The Next Manchurian Candidate? [83]

Quotes about Michael Collin's "The Urban Legend"

"By now, it should be clear to everyone that Bush & Co. stole their "re-election" in 2004-not only in Ohio but from coast to coast. That massive and unprecedented civic crime should now be clear to all Americans, because the evidence has been presented in a dazzling range of books and articles and documentaries, all of which have proven that the Bush regime has never been elected.

And yet the facts are still unknown to most of us, because they've mostly been denied, those crucial books and articles and films suppressed, both by the Democratic Party and the media, whose managers can't bring themselves to face the awful truth (or, in some cases, have colluded with the Bush Republicans). And so we've had to fight to let the people know what has been happening, and is now happening, to their democracy. That we will win this fight there is no doubt; and when we do, the people will, as usual, eventually decide to do what's right--but all of it depends on our continued efforts to disseminate the truth despite the silence of the whole Establishment.

In this necessary struggle Scoop, and Michael Collins in particular, have played a major role; and here again they have produced an indispensable report, which all who still believe in our democracy must read at once, then send out far and wide. "Urban Legend" offers still more solid evidence of a deliberate effort to distort the actual outcome of the presidential contest in 2004--a race that Kerry/Edwards won, and that Bush lost, because the red majority that putatively "re-elected" him did not exist."

- Mark Crispin Miller (Author "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)" [87])

"Michael Collins has added substantially to what we know about the chilling reality of E2004, numbers that don't add up to a legitimate election no matter how they are sliced. His "Election 2004: The Urban Legend" is a blockbuster, an analytical romp through the oddest numbers that were never brought to light, never questioned. And boy is there ever something wrong with this picture.

Many will demur that when it comes to election theft, looking backward is a waste of time. The results aren't going to change. Get over it. But those of us who hope to live to see electoral democracy restored to the United States know that looking back is as important as it is unpleasant. Indeed it is terrifying--and it is critical.

If we were to ask a person to give up their 10 favorite foods because one day they might have a heart attack, we could count on low compliance. But let them have a heart attack and it's suddenly a very different story. So it is with election theft: American democracy has had a heart attack, a silent heart attack, and it needs to make substantial changes in its way of conducting elections and counting votes if it is to survive. Half-baked, easy changes have of course been proposed. But the changes that are really necessary are more demanding: they demand, among other things, more public participation in our democracy, and vigilance over this critical aspect of it, than we are accustomed to.

It is clear to us as advocates that the necessary changes just won't happen if the heart attack remains silent and the public remains unaware. "Election 2004: The Urban Legend" is an EKG that tells us just how dreadfully serious the illness is and just how precarious our situation. I suspect that anyone who takes the time to read it (and goes on to further explore the stunning and ugly forensics of recent computerized American elections) will change their diet from that day forward and put themselves enthusiastically at their democracy's service.

--Jonathan Simon (Co-founder Election Defense Alliance [88]; author "Landslide Denied")"

"Of all the UnAnswered Questions of this decade, the one that will not go away is 'Has George W. Bush ever won a Presidential election?' After many years of fearless reporting on U.S. voter fraud, Scoop has scooped again. Based on Michael Collins' in depth analysis of voting results and exit pools, Scoop has made a compelling case in 'Election 2004: The Urban Legend' that the legitimacy of the current Administration is in question."

-- Catherine Austin Fitts ( Solari.com [89])

CLICK HERE TO READ:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm
Michael Collins: The Urban Legend" [90].

Watergates, Watersheds & Manchurian Candidates

Nearly four long years ago this column "Sludge Report #154 - Bigger Than Watergate" [91] (archive version in original July, 2003 livery [92]) heralded a watershed in the history of US Democracy in the form of a remarkable piece of online citizen research published on Scoop.co.nz – Bev Harris's seminal article " Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program" [93].

Today Scoop publishes a paper on the same subject of possibly equal consequence – "Michael Collins: The Urban Legend" [94].

Accompanying the 2003 article Scoop announced the public distribution of the source code to the Diebold voting systems – source code to both the county central tabulator program and the touch-screen DRE machines which record the votes onto memory cards and which cannot be recounted.

In doing so we helped start an avalanche of research into the innards of the United States election machinery. And what was found was devastating.

Inquiry into U.S. Voting machines reached its nadir in the demonstration by Finnish "Hacker" Hari Hursti that it is possible to rig an election (in an undetectable fashion) on an optical scan voting machine by doing nothing more than compromising the plug in memory card. (See… " Scoop Links: Hacking Democracy Doco On HBO Tonight " [95] to view video.)

The claim here back in July 2003 that the news of the gaping hole in US democractic integrity is "Bigger than Watergate" was justified then on the same ground that it is justified today.

If the parlous state of US Democracy is allowed to stand then American democracy - and the freedom and bravery that accompany it - is all over bar the counting.

There is considerable irony in the fact that it appears Karl Rove's enthusiasm to use the U.S. Department of Justice in general – and the appointment process of United States Attorneys [96] in particular - to pervert democracy through vote suppression, identity cards, caging lists, malicious push phone campaigns, disenfranchisement and scam voter-fraud prosecutions (code for minority and poor vote suppression). This is why election fraud is day by day rising up the "most-likely-reason-Karl-Rove-will-leave-the-White-House- in-handcuffs" leaderboard.

But the corruption of US Democracy as a whole is a bigger news story even than news of the imminent demise of Karl Rove.

From afar – Scoop.co.nz is published in New Zealand – it is sometimes possible to believe that America has already come to accept that they are no longer a democratic nation.

Isn't it a matter of curiosity as to why Manchurian Candidate [97] & shadow Government plots and sub-plots (e.g., 24, Prison Break, CSI (crime scene investigator), Heroes, Standoff ) have become quite so popular forUS television drama series?

Perhaps the answer is altogether too simple. They are credible.

So why not just say it - George W. Bush 43 is already a "Manchurian Candidate". He does not represent the people – he represents oil companies and the American Taliban. And I suspect most of America already knows this, if not rationally then definitely subliminally.

What we decided to publish today is arguably proof that this is so.

The election results of 2004 lack all credibility, and as a result George Bush's presidency lacks all legitimacy.

A year ago Robert F. Kennedy Junior had a compelling shot at claiming election 2004 was illegitimate on the basis that the election was stolen in Ohio (See… Rolling Stone: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [98]).

His critics responded well Bush won the popular vote soundly you "sore loserman!"

Today we show you that in all probability Bush did not win the popular vote either.

However you dear reader are entitled to come to this conclusion yourself - after duly considering the facts as we know them to be - and so I urge you now to read in detail Michael Collins' watershed scoop report published today.

CLICK HERE TO READ:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm
Michael Collins: The Urban Legend" [99].

The Urban Legend In A Nutshell

Over the past few months America has been exposed to a seemingly never-ending cascade of evidence concerning Bush's Brain Karl Rove's efforts to suppress minority and working class vote.

On election night 2004 TV screens across the world bore testimony to the results of his meddling.

The huge queues to vote in some minority and inner city precincts saw people waiting 10 hours or more to vote – Ohio was particularly bad - but it happened in many key urban areas. It was accompanied throughout the country by race based voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement. In Florida nearly 700,000 ex felons are barred from voting, in Virginia 200,000; simply for having a felony on their record.

The Urban Legend uncovered by Michael Collins and detailed in his report is simply this.

According to the official election night results and the official exit polls (the most extensive ever conducted in the history of elections) it was these queuing voters from the core of America's largest cities who elected George W. Bush.

An extract from Michael Collins report:

" The Bush campaign focused its efforts heavily, almost exclusively, on the rural areas and suburbs in order to counter the anticipated big city Democratic margins. But then the miracle occurred just when it was needed. White ghosts never seen before emerged from parking lots, alleys and perhaps even graveyards in big cities across the country to give George W. Bush a stunning victory in the presidential election of 2004. It had to be this way, otherwise the vote count was wrong and who would tolerate such a notion, despite the clear signs on the ground and in the National Exit Poll? But the convenient and wide spread Red versus Blue story of election eve was maintained through inertia. For those with nagging questions, that story was replaced by the Urban Legend of 2004: Bush won the 2004 Presidential election in big cities."

So please ask yourself:

If Karl Rove Bush and the USAs were so busy disenfranchising urban minorities as fast as they could, how can the above "official story of Election 2004" be remotely possible?

CLICK HERE TO READ:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0706/S00165.htm
Michael Collins: The Urban Legend" [100].

So How Is It That This News Was Not On CNN

A dumb question? Probably.

On the night of the election this column was one of many to call foul on the basis of the huge margin by which the National Election Poll (NEP) was wrong.

According to a November 2 early evening exit poll John Kerry was heading to win the popular vote by 1% and at least 1 million votes [101]. But more importantly he was shown leading by a nose in Florida, and by a solid 4% in Ohio. (Because of the way the Electoral College system works this meant that Kerry had almost certainly won the election. If he won either state he would win.)

Yet by midnight he had soundly lost Florida. Ohio was lost by a narrower margin, but the popular vote showed a massive wave of new voters coming out to vote for Bush. His 3 million vote margin is convincing.

Also at around midnight on election night the exit polls disappeared and then a couple of hours later arrived back, fixed. (Note: As Michael Collins shows, even the official exit poll, the day after election final, contradicts itself and shows the massive election fraud.)

On Election night the Johns Kerry & Edwards pledged to wait till "all the votes were counted" before conceding, yet the following morning, largely motivated by the size of Bush's victory in the court-of-public-opinion important popular vote they conceded.

In the days following skeptics here in New Zealand and around the world wished we had taken a copy of the exit polls so we could point to what we had just witnessed with our lying eyes, those eyes which the news networks were now telling us had misled us somewhat grievously.

On November 11 we discovered Jonathan Simon had saved most of the data (See… "47 State Exit Poll Analysis Confirms Swing Anomaly" [102]) and a few days later November 17 we found the rest "Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions" [103].

And then what happened?

Us election skeptics were ignored. Roundly. The story made the front page of the New York Times in terms of a disparaging reference to internet blogs. Many leading left leaning blogs boycotted the story.

Activists and researchers asked the NEP for the full data to do a proper study. They refused to provide any data at all till after George was inaugurated again on January 20th. Eventually some data was released and a phalanx of pointy heads were rolled out to accuse us of being foolish and mistaken.

Warren Mitofsky himself– NEP coordinator & inventor of the modern exit poll (now deceased) – delivered the coup de'grace to exit poll theorising announcing the answer to the mystery in the form of the same answer he gave to why the 2000 exit polls were wrong – and the same answer he gave in interviews the day after the election – the so called "reluctant bush responder" theory.

This theory states that Bush voters are statistically less likely than to be willing to own up to the fact that the voted for Bush. It is a fine theory which is unfortunately not supported by any of the evidence.

As of June 2007 the National Election Poll is still refusing to hand over its raw data for independent analysis falsely claiming that it contains private information.

It is the sincere hope of this columnist that the publication of "The Urban Legend" today will lead to a subpoena from congress to the NEP to provide their data in full for proper academic study.

And so why then is this news not on CNN?

One possible answer is that none are so blind as they who refuse to open their eyes.

As a media professional the only explanation I can seriously profer for the US mainstream media's collective see-no-evil approach to this subject is that they do not see what happened in 2004 because its implications are too huge.

If Bush is a fraudulently elected president – both in 2000 and 2004 – then everything that has happened since including the war, Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, the 911 cover-up everything is illegitimate too.

If Bush is a fraudulently elected president then the United States really is governed by a group of shadowy bankers and invisible power brokers.

For folk who believe in democracy this is not a comfortable place to be.

The Urban Legend In Context: Inside The Mind Of An Election Thief

Four years ago this column noted:

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.

Imagine for example if you could:

• - secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;
• - centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;
• - legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;
• - establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election – at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;
• - get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control – removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.

And imagine further that you;

• - install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.

For the sake of argument most of the above can be taken as read - in fact each of these statements is demonstrably true in relation to the vast majority of the currently deployed vote counting machinery in the United States.

Back to "Sludge Report #154 - Bigger Than Watergate (July 2003)" [104]:

"Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.

Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities.

Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too inquisitive.

And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your governmental program they would be forced to concede that at least it is the result of a democratic process.

Now lets project the above theory onto what actually happened in 2004.

In practical terms votes in all elections are always counted in some kind of predictable order. There is a pattern to these things:

• Small precincts report quickly.
• East coast precincts report early. Pacific ones at least 2 hours later.
• Precincts with some kinds of machinery (say touch-screens) may report slower than those with other kinds of machinery (say optical scans).
• Statistically observed voting phenomena in turnout in areas counted on the east coast can give you a fairly clear idea of what overall turnout is likely to be.

And so everybody who watched the last election can know this information and can project the result on that basis - this is what all the boffins are doing in the background on election night playing with their computers. (Lets leave aside for a moment the fact that the base figures from last years election may already be corrupted.)

Then if you also have access to the exit polls, you have an extra layer of information arriving during the day on election day.

The exit polls tell you precinct by precinct how people have actually voted and why.

With exit poll data picking election results for big presidential style elections becomes child's play.

This is why in the recent French Presidential election the result was announced as soon as the polls closed. While this may seem somewhat disrespectful to the voters America is one of the few places where multimillion dollar scientific exit polls fail repeatedly and spectacularly to pick the result.

How Was Election 2004 Stolen?

Now imagine yourself as a would be election stealer on November 2nd 2004. You know by midday that turnout is up massively, and you have a fair idea from the answers to exit poll questions that this is bad for your candidate. Bush is getting hammered in the small towns and the rural base is not turning up to vote.

By 5pm EST (3pmPDT) you know that you are losing Florida and Ohio and that you are losing the popular vote by a small margin.

What do you do?

You expected this because this is precisely what your pre-election polling was telling you would happen. Your pre-election game plan is focused around winning the electoral college i.e. the swing states.

In each swing state there is a plan and a team in place to push the President's vote over the important margin required for victory. The Exit polls tells you how much vote needs to be stolen (discarded, shifted, padded) in each critical swing state to win narrowly - but convincingly enough to minimise the risk of an recount.

You remember what happened in 2000.

And your pre-election game plan also requires a victory in the popular vote.

In 2000 it was largely because he won the popular vote that Al Gore was able to hold out as long as he did over Florida. Therefore in 2004 Bush needed a significant majority in the popular vote as well to avoid a protracted inquiry in one of the swing states which could potentially go sour.

In order to do that Bush needed to pad the vote all over the country with millions of votes.

This is supported by more of the factual evidence found in the election outcomes. If you look to find the location of Bush's 11 million + new voters you find that they are predominantly on the East Coast and in the Mid-East.

In sheer numeric terms Bush gained far and away the most votes in Texas and Florida, 900k and 700k respectively. 60% of all Bushes new votes, 5.2 million votes, were gained in just 11 states…FL, TX. NY, OH, PA, GA, MI, NJ, TN, NC, IL. Add in another 8 states and you get to 82% of all bush's new votes or 7.1 million… the states are WI MN IND AL OK KY AZ LOU & MD. In percentage terms Florida and Georgia (both heavily Diebold equipment using states) were the standouts with 32% gains respectively.
- Dem Underground: "George Bush's 8 Million New Votes Found – STATISTICAL ANALYSIS [105]

And so as the evening progressed on November 2 2004 it was possible to imagine that the vote stealers got to New Mexico and stopped having ensured that by then Bush comfortably had his margin.

However one can also imagine that winning the popular vote for Bush would not be an exact science.

Padding smaller precincts in Republican controlled areas is more likely to be noticed statistically. You cannot steal enough votes in Utah and Wyoming to even make a dent in the popular vote.

Also, importantly, smaller precincts in Republican controlled areas tend to report earlier and so are harder to steal from – to do so you need to steal in more places earlier.

And smaller precincts also show considerably less scope for padding. A 100 vote precinct may tolerate 10 padded votes. A 100,000 strong precinct might be able to see 10,000 votes added without setting off alarm bells.

In which case the thesis which emerges from Michael Collins' Urban Legend is simply this.

The 2004 election stealers stole the election in the cities because that was the only place they could steal it.

The Next Manchurian Candidate – The 2008 Primaries

Since 2003 and exposure of the flawed election machinery there have been two U.S. Federal elections, the presidential race in 2004, and the 2006 mid-term elections.

Concerns over the 2002 mid-term elections - particularly in Georgia - gave rise to the investigation that led to the 2003 discoveries.

We also know - thanks to Bev Harris and her team - "Diebold Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud" [106] that there is prima facie evidence of tampering in the 2000 election.

This means the results in the last four U.S. Federal Elections are questionable. Consequently the composition of all branches of Government have to be in question.

Moreover election stealing need not necessarily be confined to Federal elections.

And following that vein of thought there is one other particularly valuable opportunity to intervene in the US election process and alter the course of history.

The Presidential primaries.

And there is one particular set of circumstances above all others which would make the primaries an even more important target for election fraudsters: namely, an election when one party has a virtual lock on victory.

And so as we approach the 2008 presidential election it is well worth looking at the primaries.

At first glance the Republicans are not even attempting to choose a credible challenger. Fred Thompson's believers hate Guiliani's mob with a truly impressive internal party ferocity. Meanwhile NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Hagel (interestingly a senator with close ties to one of the largest voting machine companies [107]) are discussing running as independents.

If they do so they will split the GOP vote three ways and it is almost inconceivable that the Democratic Challenger could lose.

And so we have to assume the election stealers –will be making their plans on that basis.

Hillary Clinton vs John Edwards and Barack Obama. Whoever wins that race becomes President.

Now pretend you are an election stealer? Who do you want to win? Why?

You will want someone who does not shut down your nice little vote stealing and power peddling operation for a start.

And so in coming months we will see the beginnings of the message massaging that accomplish all real political clashes.

So listen to what the candidates say about election reform. It may speak volumes.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Publication of this story marks another watershed in American political history. It is offered freely for publication in full or part on any and all internet forums, blogs and noticeboards. All other media are also encouraged to utilise material. Readers are encouraged to forward this to friends and acquaintances in the United States and elsewhere.

More and more evidence continues to accumulate that Voter registration fraud was responsible for a great deal if not the total Bush vote margin in the 2004 Presidential election. The latest evidence comes from Mark Crispin Miller, as documented in his recent book, “Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)”. Added to previously existing evidence, the evidence presented by Miller makes it all but incontrovertible that massive voter registration fraud was a major factor in Kerry’s “loss” of Ohio:

Discrepancies between NY Times reports and official voter registration figures

I initially suspected that there was something very wrong with voter registration in Ohio, and especially in Cleveland, when I discovered a HUGE discrepancy between reports by the New York Times of massive new voter registration in Democratic areas of Ohio (ten times that of Republican areas) and official voter registration figures. I posted a DU article entitled “New York Times Reporters Probably Hold Key to Proving Kerry Victory in Ohio”, in which one of my main points was that the Times reporters identified 230,000 new voters registered in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County in 2004, compared to official Secretary of State figures indicating only 119,000 newly registered voters in Cuyahoga County. I suggested at the time that a major reason for the discrepancy of 111,000 voters was either illegal purging of voters or fraudulent manipulation of the official figures to hide the fact that votes in heavily Democratic areas were electronically deleted on Election Day, or a combination of those things. Along these lines, I later posted another DU article, entitled “What Happened in Cleveland – a Plausible Scenario for a Stolen Election”, where I estimated that if the discrepancy between the official figures and the newspaper reports was due to voter registration fraud, that could have cost Kerry about 46 thousand net votes in Cleveland.

Confirmation by Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition

Having failed to get the NY Times or its reporters to respond to my enquiries, I managed to get a large degree of confirmation from Norman Robbins, leader of the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition. According to his figures, as communicated to me by e-mail, there were160,894 new voter registrations received by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in 2004 (compared to 31,903 new voter registrations in 2000). This was about 42,000 more registered voters than the 119 thousand increase in registered voters between March and November of 2004 indicated by the official figures (though Normans’ number of newly registered voters in Cuyahoga County is somewhat less than that identified by the New York Times.) The discrepancy between Robbins’ figures and the official figures could be due to purging of newly registered voters, or failure to process the new voter registrations, which Robbins describes in his report.

Illegal purging of registered voters

Confirmation of the probable reason for the above noted discrepancies came from research by Victoria Lovegren, who posted a report at Ohio Vigilance which indicates the purging, apparently illegal, of 165,224 voters from Cuyahoga County alone, for no other rationale than that they hadn't voted recently. Dr. Lovegren notes in her report that this practice violates the National Voting Rights Act. This matter is still being investigated. We don't know at this time precisely when these purges occurred, though it was some time between the 2002 and 2004 November elections. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of these reports is that the purging appears to have been done discriminately, that is, with no specific criteria for who would be purged.

Dr. Lovegren's report also notes numerous other issues of serious concern, including the following:
Registration applications beingn rejec