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November 09, 2004
Prelude to a Recount?
As my last few posts might indicate, I've been a bit fixated on November 7th being the 10th anniversary of WXYC's groundbreaking 1994 webcast. And I still have a few more things to post with regard to some of the WXYC events from this past weekend. But November 7th is also burned into my brain as the 4th anniversary of a very different event: Election Day 2000. Like millions of others, I rode the unbelievable emotional rollercoaster of that evening's network news coverage. My CrowdBurst coworkers and I had stopped working a bit earlier that day so that we could gather around my TV that I'd brought in to work several weeks prior for mass debate-watching. Everyone was in good spirits and many of us started cracking up whenever Dan Rather uttered some ridiculous metaphor like "shakier than cafeteria Jell-O" or "melted faster than ice cream in a microwave". We all cheered as some of the key East Coast blue states started to fall for Gore, and when Florida went blue it seemed like Gore was going to actually take the presidency. Of course we all know what happened next...the networks brought Florida back into the "Too Close To Call" column, and then overshot once more and mistakenly called the state for Bush. Soon after Bush was prematurely declared the winner, I left to go catch the bus, completely dejected and stunned about what had just happened. When I got home, I gave in to my late-night Internet impulses and started reading depressing election returns and excruciating stories about Bush's victory. Within the hour, however, everything started to change all over again...and Gore dramatically reversed his plan to concede. Shellshocked once more, I rushed to print out paper copies of all of the "Bush Wins" stories that my browser had cached, all the while gaining a really strange appreciation for the completely ephemeral and reversible nature of "news" and "official results" in our electronic-based data-driven society. I only wish I'd been able to print some of those earlier "Gore Wins Florida" web pages...that little piece of history was simply erased, in the truest Orwellian style.
As unforgettable as that evening was, I'm not rehashing Election 2000 solely for nostalgic reasons. We all remember the hanging chads and the endless weeks of legal wrangling, but I think one of the most intriguing and important things to remember about Florida 2000 is this: the reason the networks all called Florida for Gore in the first place was because they were all using exit polls performed by the Voter News Service. At the time, the conventional wisdom used to explain the network's collective projection fiascos was the assertion that VNS had terribly flawed/faulty data and that everyone had jumped the gun by using this bad data as the basis for their assumptions. Now I'm not even close to being an expert on this VNS data, and I fully admit that there might be a perfect explanation for actual VNS data flaws. If so, Florida definitely should not have been called for Gore so early. But one possible reason why the VNS data might have been "wrong" was that it reflected who voters thought they were voting for, and not how their votes were actually counted. So what did those exit pollsters hear from the thousands and thousands of Palm Beach County voters who meant to vote for Gore but unintentionally voted for Buchanan? They heard "Gore", because that was the intent. For all we know, they may have also heard "Gore" from lots of people whose Gore chad was not pregnant or dimpled enough, or whose Gore ballot was not counted for some potentially more nefarious reason: fraud, tampering, the hacking of election systems, etc. The exit polls may have conceivably been a better barometer of voter opinion than the actual election results.
I can't speak definitively about Florida 2000, but I believe that it is important to keep some of these mere possibilities in mind as we come upon the one-week anniversary of last Tuesday's historic election. Remember this before it is erased by stupid "mandate" talk: by mid-afternoon on Election Day 2004, the major political blogs, Slate, and even the Drudge Report had all posted exit polls that indicated Kerry was doing really well in Ohio and Florida. The conventional wisdom since the election has quickly become "once again, those exit polls blew it big time". But in trying to dig up some ulterior "liberal media" motive for bad exit polling data, even the extremely sleazy Dick Morris unwittingly let this interesting truth slip out:
"Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
Knowing this, critical minds should avoid jumping to conclusions and at least ask, "Is it at all possible that the 2004 exit polls actually were right and maybe it was the reported results that are wrong?". I don't have enough information to answer that question but there are a hell of a lot of incredibly strange statistical anomalies and disturbing fraud reports floating around the Internet these days. And knowing what we know about Diebold voting machines and how completely hackable and compromised they are (not to mention the partisan Republican leanings of Diebold leaders), I can't see how anyone can have confidence in last Tuesday's election results. Yes, I've been in denial all week, so forgive me if I sound like I'm being naively open to the possibility that Kerry should've won Ohio and thus the election. But I don't trust the system at all given everything that I'm hearing and reading....and at the very least, it seems that a lot of things need to be seriously investigated and re-examined before we march forward with this assumption that Bush won the election.
What I really don't get is why both John Kerry and 99% of the media have been so silent on these matters. Even so-called liberal news outlets like NPR and the NYTimes are avoiding these topics like the plague. As if the nation and even the world cannot handle the truth about how completely flawed and compromised the American election system is. (And this is before even taking into account the pathetic "separate-but-unequal" issue where, say, an urban voter in Cleveland has to wait in line for 7 hours to vote but a wealthy Ohio suburbanite can vote quickly with ease.) Last week my pet theory was that John Kerry was playing the good-PR game, conceding in public and putting those thousands of lawyers to work in private while we all waited 10 days for the Ohio provisional ballots to finally be counted, at which point he might conceivably re-emerge with a serious challenge. But I don't know if I even believe that anymore. The only reassuring sign that this whole debate might actually go somewhere is the fact that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann started covering all of this in a big way on tonight's edition of Countdown. Olbermann showed some of the sketchiest voting statistics, reported that some congressmen have written the non-partisan GAO and asked for an investigation, and interviewed a woman from the Cincinnati Enquirer who has come out with a story about how election officials in one Ohio county played the "Homeland Security" card in an unprecedented maneuver to keep the press away from the election-night ballot-counting.
All of this smells incredibly fishy to me. It is high time to spread the word about the mounting evidence of possible wrongdoing....and it's also time to demand that the news media do its job and pursue this investigation with full force. Read Keith Olbermann's latest blog entries for his very intriguing take on things...and then send him an email to encourage his integrity as a journalist. I always knew Olbermann was sarcastic, witty, and completely hilarious, but now he's my new talking-head hero.
In closing, consider this very interesting fact that Olbermann points out in his posting from Sunday night: "no Presidential candidate’s concession speech is legally binding".
This thing isn't over until December 13th.
Posted by Tim at November 9, 2004 02:56 AM
Comments
Has 'the hanging chads' been claimed as a band name? If not, I'll take it.
Maybe even better, 'remember the hanging chads' . . .
Posted by: toby wong at November 9, 2004 09:03 AM
it is hard to fathom that kerry might be thinking, "hey, gore made a stink, and look what happened to him," but he, or more likely, edwards probably is. here's hoping some of the talking heads think it makes ratings sense to get this info off of the web and onto tv and in the papers.
c
Posted by: toenes at November 9, 2004 04:05 PM
speaking of gore, what is he up to these days. i see jimmy carter's, jesse jackson, al sharpton, hell even geraldine ferraro had TV time when she made a run but i havent seen nann of gore's mug since 2000. what gives
Posted by: cia at November 11, 2004 05:22 AM
Is there a website that tracks actual vote counts as absentee and provisional ballots are counted? I've noticed all the major sites (cnn, ABC, CBS) haven't continued to update their vote totals.
Posted by: Paul at November 11, 2004 08:44 AM