S. O. Damocles
11-11-2004, 09:17 AM
james g. keegan jr. wrote:
> Footprints of Electoral Fraud:
> The November 2 Exit Poll Scam
> by Michael Keefer
>
> www.globalresearch.ca 5 November 2004
>
> The URL of this article is:
> http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html
>
> Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential
> election was widely anticipated by informed
> observers--whose warnings about the opportunities
> for fraud offered by "black box" voting machines supplied
> and serviced by corporations closely aligned with
> Republican interests (and used to tally
> nearly a third of the votes cast on November 2) have been
> amply borne out
> by the results.1
>
> One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud
> was the wide
> divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between
> exit poll results
> and the reported vote tallies. The major villains, it would
> seem, were the
> suppliers of touch-screen voting machines. There appears to
> be evidence,
> however, that the corporations responsible for assembling
> vote-counting and
> exit poll information may also have been complicit in the
> fraud.
>
> Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia
> networks (ABC,
> CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium known as
> the Voter News
> Service for vote-counting and exit poll information. But
> following the
> scandals and consequent embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002
> elections, this consortium was disbanded. It was replaced
> in 2004 by a partnership of
> Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International known as
> the National
> Election Pool.
>
> The National Election Pool¡¯s own data¡ªas transmitted
> by CNN on the evening
> of November 2 and the early morning of November 3¡ªsuggest
> very strongly that the results of the exit polls were
> themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make
> their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.
>
> It is important to remember how large the discrepancy
> was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll
> figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern
> states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush
> leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m.
> EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with
> 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush
> purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by
> 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510,
> giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of
> the vote to Kerry¡¯s 45 percent.
>
> At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national
> exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a
> narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06
> p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women¡¯s votes (54
> percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45
> percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men¡¯s votes (46
> percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47
> percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other
> words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.
>
> The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern
> to the good people at
> the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14 percent
> between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire
> confidence in the legitimacy of an election.
>
> One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were
> issued. The election- massagers working for Diebold, ES&S
> (Election Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of
> black-box voting machines may have been told to go easy on
> their manipulations of back-door ¡®Democrat-Delete¡¯
> software: mere victory was what the Bush campaign wanted,
> not an implausible landslide. And the number crunchers at
> the National Election Pool may have been asked to fix up
> those awkward exit polls.
>
> Fix them they did. When the national exit polls were
> last updated, at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3, men¡¯s votes
> (still 46 percent of the total) had gone 54 percent to
> Bush, 45 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader; women¡¯s
> votes (54 percent of the total) had gone 47 percent to
> Bush, 52 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader.
>
> But how do we know the fix was in? Because the exit poll
> data also included the total number of respondents. At 9:00
> p.m. EST, this number was well over 13,000; by 1:36 a.m.
> EST on November 3 it had risen by less than 3 percent, to a
> final total of 13, 531 respondents¡ªbut with a
> corresponding swing of 5 percent from Kerry to Bush in
> voters¡¯ reports of their choices. Given the increase in
> respondents, a swing of this size is a mathematical
> impossibility.
>
> The same pattern is evident in the exit polls of two key
> swing states, Ohio and Florida.
>
> At 7:32 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting the following exit
> poll data for Ohio. Women voters (53 percent of the total)
> favoured Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent; male
> voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush
> by 51 percent to 49 percent. Kerry was thus leading Bush by
> a little more than 4 percent. But by 1:41 a.m. EST on
> November 3, when the exit poll was last updated, a dramatic
> shift had occurred: women voters had split 50-50 in their
> preferences for Kerry and Bush, while men had swung to
> supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent. The
> final exit polls showed Bush leading in Ohio by 2.5
> percent.
>
> At 7:32 p.m., there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m.
> on November 3, there
> was a final total of 2,020 respondents. These fifty-seven
> additional respondents must all have voted very powerfully
> for Bush¡ªfor while representing only a 2.8 percent
> increase in the number of respondents, they managed to
> produce a swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.
>
> In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered
> with in a similar
> manner. At 8:40 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting exit polls that
> showed Kerry and Bush in a near dead heat. Women voters (54
> percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 52
> percent to 48 percent, while men (46 percent of the total)
> preferred Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent, with
> 1 percent of their votes going to Nader. But the final
> update of the exit poll, made at 1:01 a.m. EST on November
> 3, showed a different pattern: women voters now narrowly
> preferred Bush over Kerry, by 50 percent to 49 percent,
> while the men preferred Bush by 53 percent to 46 percent,
> with 1 percent of the vote still going to Nader. These
> figures gave Bush a 4 percent lead over Kerry.
>
> The number of exit poll respondents in Florida had risen
> only from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful
> numerical magic was at work. A mere sixteen
> respondents¡ª0.55 percent of the total number¡ªproduced a
> four percent swing to Bush.
>
> What we are witnessing, the evidence would suggest, is a
> late-night contribution by the National Elections Pool to
> the rewriting of history.
>
> It is possible that at some future moment questions
> about electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election
> might become insistent enough to be embarrassing. The
> pundits, at that point, will be able to point to the NEP¡¯s
> final exit poll figures in the decisive swing states of
> Florida and Ohio¡ªand to marvel at how closely they reflect
> the NEP¡¯s vote tallies.
>
> The Ohio Fifty-Seven (is there a Heinz-Kerry joke
> embedded in the number?) and the Florida Sixteen will have
> done their bit in ensuring the democratic legitimacy of the
> one-party imperial state.
>
>
>
> Michael Keefer, an Associate Professor of English at the
> University of Guelph,
> is a former president of the Association of Canadian
> College and University Teachers of English. His writings
> include Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture
> Wars (Anansi) and the edited collection War Against Iraq:
> Critical Resources (http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mkeefer ).
> Footprints of Electoral Fraud:
> The November 2 Exit Poll Scam
> by Michael Keefer
>
> www.globalresearch.ca 5 November 2004
>
> The URL of this article is:
> http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html
>
> Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential
> election was widely anticipated by informed
> observers--whose warnings about the opportunities
> for fraud offered by "black box" voting machines supplied
> and serviced by corporations closely aligned with
> Republican interests (and used to tally
> nearly a third of the votes cast on November 2) have been
> amply borne out
> by the results.1
>
> One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud
> was the wide
> divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between
> exit poll results
> and the reported vote tallies. The major villains, it would
> seem, were the
> suppliers of touch-screen voting machines. There appears to
> be evidence,
> however, that the corporations responsible for assembling
> vote-counting and
> exit poll information may also have been complicit in the
> fraud.
>
> Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia
> networks (ABC,
> CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium known as
> the Voter News
> Service for vote-counting and exit poll information. But
> following the
> scandals and consequent embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002
> elections, this consortium was disbanded. It was replaced
> in 2004 by a partnership of
> Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International known as
> the National
> Election Pool.
>
> The National Election Pool¡¯s own data¡ªas transmitted
> by CNN on the evening
> of November 2 and the early morning of November 3¡ªsuggest
> very strongly that the results of the exit polls were
> themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make
> their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.
>
> It is important to remember how large the discrepancy
> was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll
> figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern
> states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush
> leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m.
> EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with
> 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush
> purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by
> 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510,
> giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of
> the vote to Kerry¡¯s 45 percent.
>
> At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national
> exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a
> narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06
> p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women¡¯s votes (54
> percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45
> percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men¡¯s votes (46
> percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47
> percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other
> words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.
>
> The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern
> to the good people at
> the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14 percent
> between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire
> confidence in the legitimacy of an election.
>
> One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were
> issued. The election- massagers working for Diebold, ES&S
> (Election Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of
> black-box voting machines may have been told to go easy on
> their manipulations of back-door ¡®Democrat-Delete¡¯
> software: mere victory was what the Bush campaign wanted,
> not an implausible landslide. And the number crunchers at
> the National Election Pool may have been asked to fix up
> those awkward exit polls.
>
> Fix them they did. When the national exit polls were
> last updated, at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3, men¡¯s votes
> (still 46 percent of the total) had gone 54 percent to
> Bush, 45 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader; women¡¯s
> votes (54 percent of the total) had gone 47 percent to
> Bush, 52 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader.
>
> But how do we know the fix was in? Because the exit poll
> data also included the total number of respondents. At 9:00
> p.m. EST, this number was well over 13,000; by 1:36 a.m.
> EST on November 3 it had risen by less than 3 percent, to a
> final total of 13, 531 respondents¡ªbut with a
> corresponding swing of 5 percent from Kerry to Bush in
> voters¡¯ reports of their choices. Given the increase in
> respondents, a swing of this size is a mathematical
> impossibility.
>
> The same pattern is evident in the exit polls of two key
> swing states, Ohio and Florida.
>
> At 7:32 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting the following exit
> poll data for Ohio. Women voters (53 percent of the total)
> favoured Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent; male
> voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush
> by 51 percent to 49 percent. Kerry was thus leading Bush by
> a little more than 4 percent. But by 1:41 a.m. EST on
> November 3, when the exit poll was last updated, a dramatic
> shift had occurred: women voters had split 50-50 in their
> preferences for Kerry and Bush, while men had swung to
> supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent. The
> final exit polls showed Bush leading in Ohio by 2.5
> percent.
>
> At 7:32 p.m., there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m.
> on November 3, there
> was a final total of 2,020 respondents. These fifty-seven
> additional respondents must all have voted very powerfully
> for Bush¡ªfor while representing only a 2.8 percent
> increase in the number of respondents, they managed to
> produce a swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.
>
> In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered
> with in a similar
> manner. At 8:40 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting exit polls that
> showed Kerry and Bush in a near dead heat. Women voters (54
> percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 52
> percent to 48 percent, while men (46 percent of the total)
> preferred Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent, with
> 1 percent of their votes going to Nader. But the final
> update of the exit poll, made at 1:01 a.m. EST on November
> 3, showed a different pattern: women voters now narrowly
> preferred Bush over Kerry, by 50 percent to 49 percent,
> while the men preferred Bush by 53 percent to 46 percent,
> with 1 percent of the vote still going to Nader. These
> figures gave Bush a 4 percent lead over Kerry.
>
> The number of exit poll respondents in Florida had risen
> only from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful
> numerical magic was at work. A mere sixteen
> respondents¡ª0.55 percent of the total number¡ªproduced a
> four percent swing to Bush.
>
> What we are witnessing, the evidence would suggest, is a
> late-night contribution by the National Elections Pool to
> the rewriting of history.
>
> It is possible that at some future moment questions
> about electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election
> might become insistent enough to be embarrassing. The
> pundits, at that point, will be able to point to the NEP¡¯s
> final exit poll figures in the decisive swing states of
> Florida and Ohio¡ªand to marvel at how closely they reflect
> the NEP¡¯s vote tallies.
>
> The Ohio Fifty-Seven (is there a Heinz-Kerry joke
> embedded in the number?) and the Florida Sixteen will have
> done their bit in ensuring the democratic legitimacy of the
> one-party imperial state.
>
>
>
> Michael Keefer, an Associate Professor of English at the
> University of Guelph,
> is a former president of the Association of Canadian
> College and University Teachers of English. His writings
> include Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture
> Wars (Anansi) and the edited collection War Against Iraq:
> Critical Resources (http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mkeefer ).