Zogby Vs. Mitofsky (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  loud
Topic: Voting
NEW YORK - It was a spectacular irony - a Republican senator using the word ?fraud? about the presidential election. More spectacular still, he was visiting his condemnation of apparent election manipulation on the incumbent party. And beyond all that, he and others based their conclusions largely on the incredible disparity between the last exit polls and the vote count itself. Of course, Indiana?s Richard Lugar was talking about the presidential election in the Ukraine. But in so doing, he underscored that once again, the exit polls appear to have fulfilled the time-honored international tradition of the canary in the mine shaft. If only we could have used them in that way here.

?I don't think that exit polls can be used as a barometer for the accuracy of an election itself,? noted pollster John Zogby explained to me on last night?s Countdown, in what we think was his first full-scale television interview since the election. ?At least until we find out if there's something broken with this round of election polls? I think that the gentlemen who are responsible for the exit polls should be fully transparent, release their data, discuss their methodology. Let us see what exactly it is that happened, and why it happened.?

It turns out one of those gentlemen doesn?t think anything happened.

In an unsolicited e-mail to Countdown, Warren Mitofsky wrote that he was ?struck by the misinformation? in our program. He heads Mitofsky International, which along with Edison Media Research, conducted the election night exit polling for the television networks and the Associated Press. I referred to the variance among the early and late exit polls, and the voting. Insisting ?there were no early exit polls? released by his company or Edison, Mr. Mitofsky wrote ?the early release came from unauthorized leaks to bloggers who posted misinformation.?

Mitofsky compared those leaks to ?the score at half time at a football game? and said the ?leakers were reading complex displays intended for trained statisticians. The leakers did not understand what they were reading and the bloggers did not know they were getting misinformation.?

His defense of his work grew more strident. ?The presidential exit polls released at poll closing time when they were completed had an average error of 1.9 percentage points. There were no mistaken projections by Edison/Mitofsky or any of the NEP members.? One more thrust: ?All the professionals correctly interpreted the numbers.?

While Zogby spoke of a ?blue ribbon panel? to investigate both the voting irregularities and the exit polling, Mitofsky asked rhetorically, ?Did anyone really think that 51% in an exit poll two hours before voting was finished in the western states gave Kerry a lock on the presidency??

John Zogby, meanwhile, was more concerned about the short end of another poll this week -- one that indicated that about four in five Americans thought President Bush had been legitimately elected three weeks ago. ?But, Keith, 20 percent don?t think the president is legitimate. And worse yet, if you take the other half, those that didn?t vote for him, about half of the other side doesn?t think the president is legitimate. That just hasn?t existed for a long, long time in our system. We need to restore, I think, some semblance of legitimacy and honor to the system.?

Warren Mitofsky seemed to disagree. ?The exit polls have been better in the past. They were far from perfect, but nowhere near as bad as your broadcast made them sound.? He never mentioned Zogby in his e-mail, but he did blast others. ?Only the unauthorized leakers and bloggers were misled - a fate they richly deserved.?

Mitofsky?s pride in his efforts is understandable. But the so-called ?early waves? of exit polling information were disseminated in generalized form to all the networks as darkness fell in the east on November 2nd. They were intended as background, as material that could be used to anticipate patterns and results. Those who characterized them loaded them heavily with caveats and disclaimers, and kept numbers virtually out of their characterizations. But the effect was impossible to misinterpret. Merely in their intended spheres, they helped shape coverage and tone, on-air and off.

And they, along with the voting irregularities so thoroughly chronicled on the net (and still just seeping into the mainstream media), created an atmosphere that Zogby thinks requires broad remedy: ?I think it's in the interests of the nation that we study what happened in this election and widen that, let's study what happened with the exit polls, and let's come out with a definitive conclusions by a blue ribbon panel to restore the legitimacy of this election.?

Zogby thinks he knows the steps to take to do that. The first is for those who are raising questions, to keep doing so. ?I can reassure them they?re not crazy for asking. It?s not just those who are far out, it is indeed many respectable, responsible people.? The pollster says he?s heard from thousands of them, asking him to get involved in their various causes and investigations, so many he can?t answer them all.

But he used Countdown as his mass e-mail reply. ?I?ll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it?s in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls.? Zogby called for the proverbial blue-ribbon commission into the voting irregularities, and the full release of the exit polling data.

And he encouraged the recounts, even when, as they have in the first three of the nine precincts in New Hampshire, they have varied by just fifteen votes from the original count. The second tally in Ohio, Zogby says, ?certainly is useful, but I don't think its enough?I called this election for months the Armageddon election, and in that context, one of the things that we discovered throughout our polling was the fact that there were going to be significant numbers, on both sides who were not going to accept the legitimacy of the other guy winning, especially if it was close election.?

Do they have reason? With three weeks? reflection, he?s not convinced there was an altered vote - accidental or otherwise - at least not on ?a grand scale.? But Zogby says the ?system is not geared for a close election like this? and if ?many millions of people? don?t think that their vote was counted accurately,? the results are almost as bad as if an election was rigged, or decided by static charges in a thousand computers.

Zogby says he?s at peace with his own Election Night forecast - made not with the Mitofsky or Edison exit polling, but with his own polls. He saw Florida and Ohio both ?trending? towards Kerry, and producing a triple-digit victory for the Democrat. Within the pollster?s margin of error, he made no mistakes. But he may not be as thoroughly sanguine as he suggests. Off-air, in the preparatory interview standard for all guests, his November 2 forecast was mentioned.

?Thanks,? he said, ?for reminding me.?

Which reminds me that it was mildly encouraging to see some focus given to this entire topic Tuesday night by my old CNN cohort Aaron Brown. A carefully-worded segment included a laundry list of the problems we?ve been reporting on Countdown for the last three weeks, and compared them to ?the kind of dumb mistake that ruined the Hubbell telescope.? Brown referenced the UC Berkeley study on the prospect of 130,000 phantom votes in Florida (though he didn?t mention its conclusion that all of them went to President Bush), and even had about fifteen seconds of Blackbox?s Bev Harris and her slog through the computer printout records in Florida.

Such as they are.

Thoughts? Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Ohio Dems join recount effort (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  happy
Topic: Voting
SECAUCUS? The headline might be a little expansive since the national headquarters has not yet echoed it, but it's still pretty impressive as it is:

"Kerry/Edwards Campaign Joins Ohio Recount."

The news release was issued this afternoon over the signature of Ohio's Democratic chairman, Dennis White: "As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change, however, we believe it necessary to make sure everyone's vote is counted fairly and accurately." White called for witnesses, volunteers, and donations.

The statement ends nearly three weeks of official Democratic ambivalence towards the formal recount process in the election's decisive state. As late as Friday, Senator Kerry's email to 3,000,000 supporters contained a seemingly ambiguous reference to that process, which began with the phrase "Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted, and believe me they will be counted, we will continue to challenge the administration."

It had been left to the independent parties, the Greens and Libertarians, to do the initial work demanding a recount in each of Ohio's 88 counties. Their combined effort led to a bond of $113,600 being posted with the state last Friday to guarantee the coverage of expenses incurred. Just today, the "Glibs" amplified their demands in Ohio, filing a federal lawsuit that, if successful, would require the completion of the "full, hand recount" before the meeting of the Electoral College on December 13.

The Ohio Democrats did not attach themselves to the lawsuit. "The recount can begin after the official results are certified, which likely will be in the first week of December," reads the news release. "The Democratic party wants to be fully prepared to begin a recount immediately."

Howard Fineman joins me on Countdown tonight at 8 and Midnight eastern to discuss the ramifications.

E-mail KOlbermann@MSNBC.com

Hanging Chads and Hanging Participles (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  happy
Topic: Voting
NEW YORK - You don?t have to wait for the Ohio Presidential Recount to get confused. Just pay attention to the recasting of news releases from the Ohio Democratic Party.

Early Monday afternoon, Ohio Chairman Dennis White released a comparative bombshell inside the still tiny world of the Recount-Conscious. It bore the headline ?Kerry/Edwards Campaign Joins Ohio Recount? and advised that ?assuring Ohioans receive an accurate count of all votes cast for president has prompted the Democratic Party to join the initiative to recount the results of the November 2 presidential election.?

But by 8 p.m. Eastern,
a second press release was out, with two notable tweaks. Now the headline read ?Kerry/Edwards Campaign Participates In Ohio Recount,? and the lead sentence read ??has prompted the Democratic Party to participate in the initiative to recount the results??

The switch from ?join? to ?participate? reduces the Democratic commitment from virtual co-sponsorship to nearly the level of acquiescence. In late afternoon, Ohio Dems? spokesmen Dan Trevas told us that the remains of the national Kerry/Edwards campaign had approved the original press release and ?gave us the authority to proceed with this. Tomorrow we expect to have a letter from them to Kenneth Blackwell? which would ask Ohio?s Secretary of State to proceed with a recount.

But the lead Kerry lawyer on the ground in Ohio, Daniel Hoffheimer, was more cautionary. ?What they meant to say is that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will be putting witnesses in the Boards of Elections if a recount is asked for? We are not requesting a recount.?

At this point, the words are being that carefully chosen and, evidently, debated. So don?t think when John Kerry said in his web-exclusive statement and video Friday that ?Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted?? he wasn?t being deliberately vague. Similarly nuanced were the words of the Ohio Democratic chair, Mr. White: ?As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change??

Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent of Newsweek and since the days of our old The Big Show an MSNBC analyst, summed up the exact inexactitude of Kerry and the Democrats about Ohio, on the Monday Countdown. ?They keep saying these little things designed to make clear, at least to their supporters and the whole blogosphere out there, that they take the possibility (of a Kerry victory) and the need for a recount seriously.?

Fineman put it in terms that the mainstream can?t ignore. He told me he?d talked to Ohio?s Mr. Blackwell earlier in the evening. ?There in fact will be a recount,? Howard said with a sigh that encapsulated all of the Florida 2000 Experience. ?We will be talking about chads once again.?

As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bush?s 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out ?
and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger ? the Provisionals plus the ?Undercount? could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots ?where it looks like nobody marked anything? when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohio?s strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid.

In Ohio, the reality of the recount is beginning to sink in, and local governments aren?t happy about it. The Associated Press ran a story Monday afternoon in which its reporter quoted the incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, Keith Cunningham. ?The inference is that Ohio election officials will not count every vote,? said the man who is currently head of the Board of Elections in Allen County (that?s the Lima area, northwest of Columbus). ?That?s just insulting; it?s frivolous and simply harassment.?

Advised of the recount push by the Green and Libertarian Parties, and their plan to sue to force a second tally even before Secretary of State Blackwell is scheduled to certify the first count, Cunningham said his statewide group might sue back to prevent a recount. ?I need to see if this is merely my opinion or reflects the opinion of the association.?

The issue may boil down to money. The Glibs had raised $235,000 as of Monday morning, an amount which covers the $113,600 bond they had to provide as demanded by Ohio election law, plus some of their own organizational expenses. But Cunningham said the actual expenses would ?crush county governments,? and a spokesman for Blackwell said the final cost could be $1.5 million.

So there it is. There will be a recount in Ohio. Unless there won?t be. And the Kerry campaign staff will participate in it. Unless that?s too strong a word for them.

Keep those e-mails coming at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Relax about Ohio, Relax about the guy tailing me (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Voting
NEW YORK? Anybody else notice that when you politely refer to the Secretary of State of Ohio, you have to call him ?Mr. Blackwell,? just like that guy who compiles the goofy worst-dressed list?

Mr. Kenneth Blackwell is the subject of three actions regarding the Ohio vote that you haven?t seen on television yet. Each (the Cobb/Badnarik Recount bid, the Alliance for Democracy legal challenge, and the Ohio Democratic Party suit over provisional ballots) has an undertone suggesting time is of the essence, and that he is wasting it. The accusation may or may not be true, but it also may or may not be relevant.

The Glibs? recount effort was underscored last week by their letters to Blackwell insisting he hurry up and finish certifying the count well before the announced deadline of December 6, because otherwise, there won?t be enough time for the recount before the voting of the Electoral College on December 13. The Alliance attorney Clifford Arnebeck told The Columbus Dispatch that his quite separate legal challenge to the election must be addressed immediately because ?time is critical.? The local Democrats haven?t been commenting on their low-flying suit - more about that later. They?re just smiling quietly to themselves.

Cobb, Badnarik, Arnebeck, and everybody else actually has more time than they think. I addressed this topic with the wonderfully knowledgeable George Washington University Constitutional Law professor, Jonathan Turley, back on Countdown on November 9th. He noted the election process is a little slower? and has one more major loophole? than is generally known. It begins on December 7th, the date ?when you essentially certify your electors? it gives a presumption to the legitimacy to your votes. And then, on the 13th, the electors actually vote.?

But, Turley noted, ?those votes are not opened by Congress until January 6. Now, if there are controversies, such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge.? In other words, even after the December 13th Electoral College Vote, in the extremely unlikely scenario that a court overturns the Ohio count, or that the recount discovers 4,000 Gahanna-style machines that each recorded 4,000 votes too many for one candidate, there is still a mechanism to correct the error, honest or otherwise.

?It requires a written objection from one House member and one senator,? Turley continues. Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses is discontinued. ?Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.?

In these super-heated partisan times, it may seem like just another prospective process decided by majority rule instead of fact. But envision the far-fetched scenario of some dramatic, conclusive new result from Ohio turning up around, say, January 4th. What congressman or senator in his right mind would vote to seat the candidate who lost the popular vote in Ohio? We wouldn?t be talking about party loyalty any more - we?d be talking about pure political self-interest here, and whenever in our history that critical mass has been achieved, it?s been every politician for himself (ask Barry Goldwater when Richard Nixon trolled for his support in July and August, 1974, or Republican Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas when his was to be the decisive vote that would have impeached President Andrew Johnson in 1868).

The point of this dip into the world of political science fiction is that the Ohio timeframe is a little less condensed than it seems. The drop-dead date is not December 13, but January 6.

It is noteworthy that the announcement of a legal challenge made it into weekend editions of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, the Associated Press wires, and other publications. The Columbus paper even mentioned something curious. ?Earlier this week, the Ohio Democratic party announced it would join a lawsuit arguing that the state lacks clear rules for evaluating provisional ballots, a move the party said will keep its options open if problems with the ballots surface.?

This makes a little more sense out of a confusing item that appeared in an obscure weekly paper in Westchester County, New York, last Wednesday, in which a reporter named Adam Stone wrote ?A top-ranking official with Democratic Senator John Kerry?s presidential campaign told North County News last week that although unlikely, there is a recount effort being waged that could unseat Republican President George Bush.? Stone quotes Kerry spokesman David Wade as saying: ?We have 17,000 lawyers working on this, and the grassroots accountability couldn?t be any higher - no (irregularity) will go unchecked. Period.? Gives a little context to Senator Kerry?s opaque mass e-mail and on-line video statement from Friday afternoon.

The Ohio newspaper coverage suggests that even the mainstream media is beginning to sit up and take notice that, whatever its merits, the investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action. Tripe does continue to appear, like Carol Pogash?s column in today?s San Francisco Chronicle. Its headline provided me with a laugh: ?Liberals, the election is over, live with it.? I?ve gotten 37,000 emails in the last two weeks (now running at better than 25:1 in favor), and the two most repeated comments by those critical of the coverage have been references to the ratings of Fox News Channel, and the phrase ?the election is over, (expletive deleted), live with it. I hesitate to generalize, but this does suggest a certain unwillingness of critics to engage in political discourses that don?t have no swear words in ?em.

Meantime, The Oakland Tribune not only devoted seventeen paragraphs Friday to the UC Berkeley study on the voting curiosities in Florida, but actually expended considerable energy towards what we used to call ?advancing the story?: ?The UC Berkeley report has not been peer reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted.?

In fact, he - MIT Arts and Social Sciences Dean Charles Stewart - said more than that. ?There is an interesting pattern here that I hope someone looks into.? Stewart is part of the same Cal Tech/MIT Voting Project that had earlier issued a preliminary report suggesting that there was no evidence of significant voting irregularity in Florida. Dean Stewart added he didn?t necessarily buy the Berkeley conclusion - that the only variable that could explain the ?excessive? votes in Florida was poisoned touch-screen voting - and still thought there were other options, such as, in the words of The Tribune?s Ian Hoffman ?absentee voting or some quirk of election administration.?

Neither MIT nor Cal Tech has yet responded to the comments of several poll-savvy commentators, and others, that its paper was using erroneous statistics. Its premise, you?ll recall, was that on a state-by-state basis, the notorious 2004 Exit Polls were within the margin of error and could be mathematically interpreted as having forecast the announced presidential outcome. It has been observed that the MIT/Cal Tech study used not the ?raw? exit polls - as did Professor Steven Freeman of Penn did in his study - but rather the ?weighted? polls, in which actual precinct and county official counts are mixed in to ?correct? the organic ?Hey, Buddy, who?d you vote for? numbers. The ?weighted? polls have been analogized to a football handicapper predicting that the New Orleans Saints would beat the Denver Broncos 24-14, then, after the Broncos scored twenty points in the first quarter, announcing his prediction was now that the Saints would beat the Broncos 42-41, or even, that the Broncos would beat the Saints 40-7.

None of the coverage of the Berkeley study clarified a vitally important point about its conclusions regarding the touch-screen wobble in the fifteen Florida counties, and that has led to some unjustified optimism on the activist and Democratic sides. Its math produced two distinct numbers for ?ghost votes? for President Bush: 130,000 and 260,000. This has led to the assumption in many quarters that Cal Tech has suggested as many as 260,000 Florida votes could swing from Bush to Kerry (enough to overturn the state). In fact - and the academics got a little too academic in summarizing their report and thus, this kind of got lost - the two numbers already consider the prospect of a swing:

a) There may have been 130,000 votes simply added to the Bush total. If proved and excised, they would reduce the President?s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 220,000;

b) There may have been 130,000 votes switched from Kerry to Bush. If proved and corrected, they would reduce (by double the 130,000 figure - namely 260,000) the President?s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 90,000.

On the ground in Florida, uncounted ballots continue to turn up in Pinellas County. Last Monday, an unmarked banker?s box with 268 absentee ballots was discovered ?sitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it,? according to The St. Petersburg Times. On Friday, the same paper reported that County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark found twelve more?ten provisionals in a blue pouch at a loading dock, and two absentees in a box headed for a storage facility. ?I?m sick about this,? the paper quoted Clark, whose office also whiffed on 1400 absentee ballots on Election Day 2000, and counted another 600 twice. Asked by a reporter if the election is over, she replied ?I certainly hope so.?

Well, I know how Ms. Clark feels. To close, a little anecdote from Big Town: I approached Seventh Avenue from the east and the guy in the black trenchcoat was walking north.

He got that little surprised look of recognition in his eyes and said ?Keith! How are you?? We shook hands and he added, with apparent nervousness, ?I?ll just be tailing you for the next block.? I laughed and said I was used to it.

Now, I?ve been getting recognized in public since 1982, and I had a stalker for eight years who once talked her way into ESPN and wound up being escorted to my desk? so I think I can tell the difference between a fan and a threat (this was a fan; a threat doesn?t come up and announce he?s going to tail you). I relate this just because of the timing. In the last week, I have read that I?ve been fired, suspended, muzzled, threatened (that, I think, was my NBC colleague Kevin Sites, who reported the Marine prisoner shooting in Iraq? our mailbox had a couple of those), and in the middle of it, I get a ?What?s the frequency Kenneth moment? from a fan who was just trying to be funny.

The laugh was genuine. As was my decision to cross the street.

Write me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

All I know is what I don't read in the papers (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? I?m beginning to think like Jim Bunning now.

So far in this post-election trip through Alice?s looking glass we?ve had:

?a University of Pennsylvania professor defending the accuracy of exit polling in order damn the accuracy of vote counting;

?a joint CalTech/MIT study defending the accuracy of exit polling in order to confirm the accuracy of vote counting;

?a series of lesser academic works assailing the validity of the Penn and CalTech/MIT assessments;

?and now, a UC Berkeley Research Team report that concludes President Bush may have received up to 260,000 more votes in fifteen Florida counties than he should have, all courtesy the one-armed bandits better known as touch-screen voting systems.

And, save, for to the CalTech/MIT study "disproving" the idea that the exit poll results were so wacky that they required thoroughly botched election nights in several states, the closest any of these research efforts have gotten to the mainstream media have been "Wired News" and "Countdown."

I still hesitate to endorse the ?media lock-down? theory extolled so widely on the net. I've expended a lot of space on the facts of political media passivity and exhaustion, and now I?ll add one factor to explain the collective shrugged shoulder: reading this stuff is hard. It?s hard work.

There are, as we know, lies, damn lies, and statistics. But there is one level of hell lower still? scholarly statistical studies. I have made four passes at "The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections,? and the thing has still got me pinned to the floor.

Most of the paper is so academically dense that it seems to have been written not just in another language, but in some form of code. There is one table captioned ?OLS Regression with Robust Standard Errors.? Another is titled ?OLS regressions with frequency weights for county size.? Only the summary produced by Professor Michael Hout and the Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Time is intelligible.

Of course, I?m reminded suddenly of the old cartoon, with the guy saying ?I don?t understand women,? and the second guy saying, ?So? Do you understand electricity??

In his news conference yesterday at Berkeley (who attended? Who phoned in to the conference call? Why didn?t they try?) Professor Hout analogized the report to a ?beeping smoke alarm.? It doesn?t say how bad the fire it is, it doesn?t accuse anybody of arson, it just says somebody ought to have an extinguisher handy.

Without attempting to crack the methodology, it?s clear the researchers claim they?ve compensated for all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida. They?ve weighted the thing to allow for an individual county?s voting record in both the 2000 and 1996 elections (throwing out the ?Dixiecrat? effect), to wash out issues like the varying Hispanic populations, median income, voter turnout change, and the different numbers of people voting in each county.

And they say that when you calculate all that, you are forced to conclude that compared to the Florida counties that used paper ballots, the ones that used electronic voting machines were much more likely to show ?excessive votes? for Mr. Bush, and that the statistical odds of this happening organically are less than one in 1,000.

They also say that these ?excessives? occurred most prominently in counties where Senator Kerry beat the President most handily. In the Democratic bastion of Broward, where Kerry won by roughly 105,000, they suggest the touch-screens ?gave? the President 72,000 more votes than statistical consistency should have allowed. In Miami-Dade (Kerry by 55,000) they saw 19,300 more votes for Bush than expected. In Palm Beach (Kerry by 115,000) they claim Bush got 50,000 more votes than possible.

Hout and his research team consistently insisted they were not alleging that voting was rigged, nor even that what they?ve found actually affected the direction of Florida?s 27 Electoral Votes. They point out that in a worst-case scenario, they see 260,000 ?excessives? - and Bush took the state by 350,000 votes. But they insist that based on Florida?s voting patterns in 1996 and 2000, the margin cannot be explained by successful get-out-the-vote campaigns, or income variables, or anything but something rotten in the touch screens.

It?s deep-woods mathematics, and it cries out for people who speak the language and can refute or confirm its value. Kim Zetter, who did an excellent work-up for "Wired News,"got the responses you?d expect from both sides. She quotes Susan Van Houten of Palm Beach?s Coalition for Election Reform as saying ?I?ve believed the same thing for a while, that the numbers are screwy, and it looks like they proved it.? She quotes Jill Friedman-Wilson of the touch-screen manufacturer Election Systems & Software (their machines were in use in Broward and Miami-Dade) as responding ?If you consider real-world experience, we know that ES&S? touch-screen voting system has been proven in thousands of elections throughout the country.?

What?s possibly of more interest to us poor laymen is what isn?t in the Berkeley report.

As I mentioned previously, they don?t claim to know how this happened. But more importantly, they say that they ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any ?bump? that couldn?t otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor.

In other words: No e-voting machines spontaneously combusting in Ohio.

?For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting,? Professor Hout concluded, ?someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida. We?re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.?

Anybody want to belly up to this bar?

Thougths? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Didn't you run for president once? (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? There has been a John Kerry sighting.

?Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted? and they will be counted? we will continue to challenge this administration,? the 2004 Democratic candidate said in a prepared statement released today. ?I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It is unacceptable in the United States that people still don?t have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.?

Since his concession, Kerry?s silence on the questions of voting irregularities in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere, has perplexed those pursuing those questions, helped render largely passive the media who should?ve been doing so, and provided virtual proof to others that there weren?t any questions at all. His supporters have been mystified at news this week that millions of dollars from his war chest went unspent. His lawyers have been characterized as flying below the radar as the Libertarian and Green Parties have pushed their recount in Ohio.

He has seemed to his supporters and many neutrals, in short, as being AWOL.

The statement doesn?t exactly dispel that aroma. It came by way of an e-mail to supporters? but not to the media? and a video on his otherwise update-free campaign website, which maintains the frozen-in-time November 2 front page that makes it look like the political equivalent of Miss Haversham?s cobweb-strewn house in Dickens? "Great Expectations."

The primary topic of the mass e-mail isn?t even this election or future ones. It?s about a petition drive for universal child health care legislation Kerry intends to introduce on the first day of the new Congress. Whether the voting stuff was added as a sop to supporters loudly wondering where he? and the unspent $15,000,000? has been, is conjecture.

But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage??Regardless of the outcome of this election?? is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. Those seven words are extra-temporal; they are tense-free. In them he could be describing an election long-since decided, or one whose outcome is still in doubt.

And the timing and delivery of the message are equally confusing. No notification to the media? When much of the mechanism of political coverage is kick-started by statements like this one? And its issuance on a Friday afternoon? the moment of minimum news attention so famously titled ?Take Out The Trash Day? on the NBC series ?The West Wing??? is perplexing, if not suspicious.

It has the vague feel of deliberate ambiguity, as if Kerry is saying to those who are plagued by doubts about the vote just seventeen days ago, that he agrees with them, but they shouldn?t tell anybody. It?s exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion.

Thoughts? E-mail KOlbermann@MSNBC.com

Scholars on the votes, Ohio undervotes (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? We return to Academic Dueling In Our Time, already in progress.

A UC Berkeley sociology professor, director of his school?s Survey Research Center, is scheduled to conduct a news conference at 1 p.m. ET today at which his ?research team? will report that ?irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes? to President Bush in Florida.

The advance word of the news conference gives little detail, but suggests Professor Michael Hout might be treading out onto thin ice. His study is said to show ?an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods.?


The Berkeley group may have new material, but if not, it could be pinioned by the fact that some of the apparent variations between optical scanning and other voting methods in Florida, might also be explained by? or, even better explained by? historical voting patterns in Florida?s Dixiecrat counties of the north, and the Panhandle.

Regardless, this is now shaping up as the BCS of presidential election analysis. A joint report out of the CalTech and MIT voting project? suggesting that the much-decried exit polling of election night really wasn?t outside the margin of error at all when analyzed on a state-by-state basis? had already been countered by a Penn professor?s report using the exit polling for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Now it?s not just CalTech and MIT versus Penn? but also UC Berkeley versus CalTech and MIT.

Stay tuned for the halftime show.

And stay tuned for the latest disaster from Ohio.


For 40 years, the Dayton Daily News reports this morning, Shirley Wightman has worked at polling places on election days. Two weeks ago, she says, turnout was high - 611 voters - and she and her colleagues paid careful attention to their punch-card, chad-filled, voting stations in Washington Township, Ohio.

?We checked the machines periodically,? Ms. Wightman told the paper, ?and I could see nothing wrong with them.?

Yet when the votes were tallied, 168 of the 611 voters had made no choice for president. Unless these were the famed undecideds we heard so much about in the closing weeks of the campaigns, something went terribly wrong. 27 and a half percent of the voters in that ?Washington X? precinct in Montgomery County officially didn?t have a presidential preference.

This was the high point of the Daily News? investigative analysis of the still-unofficial voting results in its county? or more properly, perhaps, the low point. The paper discovered that of the 284, 650 votes in Montgomery, a total of 5,693 registered no valid vote for president. And the percentages were significantly higher in the 231 precincts that wound up voting for Kerry (2.8%) than did the 354 that wound up voting for Bush (1.6%).

Besides Washington X, a second County precinct exceeded 27% ?undercount,? as the election professionals, such as they are, call it. Washington X, Kettering 3-A, and five of the other top ten ?undercount? precincts by percentage wound up supporting Bush.

Since, as the papers note, political scientists suggested that the poor and the lesser-educated are presumed to have more trouble with punch card voting, there are several logical disconnects here. Given the outcomes in those two precincts, Washington X and Kettering 3-A, were those mostly Bush voters who managed to blank out more than a quarter of their own ballots, or did the precincts wind up voting for Bush because more than a quarter of the ballots had no valid presidential vote?

What happened in the voting precincts in Moraine, Ohio? 2,557 votes were cast at seven sites there. The President won the city by 2%. The number of ballots without a valid presidential vote was 5.6%.

What do the state undercounts in Ohio look like? Did they reduce Bush?s margin of victory? Did they eliminate votes for Kerry? What the hell happened?

The least likely explanations are that these people couldn?t make up their minds, or screwed up only the presidential part of their ballots.

?It is very difficult to believe that a quarter of the people would not vote for president, especially in a year like this,? University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato? an old friend of Countdown? told the Daily News. ?If I were the election officers in those areas I would be doing some very extensive checks of those machines.?

As the Ohio recount nears, the number of hotspots continues to multiply. You are aware of the remarkable late night voting lines throughout the state, and the mysterious Glitch of Youngstown which initially registered negative 25,000,000 votes. There is the Gahanna machine which gave one presidential candidate 4,000 extra votes in a community of 600. And the farcical ?walling off? of the vote counting in Warren County, because the county head of security was told face-to-face of an FBI terrorism warning there - except the FBI says it didn?t issue any terrorism warnings there.


The Associated Press today carries a report of 2,600 ballots in nine precincts around Sandusky, Ohio that were counted twice? as that paper puts it? ?likely because of worker error.? The Clyde precinct showed a voter turnout of 131%, to the dismay of the head of the elections board, Barb Tuckerman.

Ms. Tuckerman, in one of the great quotes of the election, told the News-Messenger of Fremont, Ohio: ?I knew there was something amiss.?

Tell me about it, Barb.

What do you think? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

I Smell A Rat
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Voting
I Smell a Rat
By Colin Shea
FreezerBox.com

Friday 12 November 2004

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius.

We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered.

Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.

The first sign of the rat was on election night.

The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide.

It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered.

We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory.

Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson.

Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.

"Zogby's calling it for Kerry."

"He smacked the sheet decisively.

Definitely.

He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column.

Kerry only needs one."

Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place.

Victory was at hand.

The morning told a different story, of course.

No Florida victory for Kerry - Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes.

Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted.

The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate.

Onward Christian soldiers - next stop, Tehran.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I work with statistics and polling data every day.

Something rubbed me the wrong way.

I checked the exit polls for Florida - all wrong.

CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

Polling is an imprecise science.

Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns.

Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough.

With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results.

Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican:

this gave an expected Republican vote.

She then compared this to the actual result.

Her analysis is startling.

Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county.

They key phrase is "certain counties" - there is extraordinary variance between individual counties.

Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.

How to explain this incredible variance?

Dopp found one over-riding factor:

whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer.

All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.

The intimation, clearly, is fraud.

Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals.

At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic.

I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data.

In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county.

I compared this 'expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.

The results are shocking.

Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected.

In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more.

This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly.

It is not.

In 11 different counties, the 'actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote.

13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50 - 100% higher than expected.

In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote

- three times more than predicted by my model.

Again, polling can be wrong.

It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong.

Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the 'actual' result.

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result.

In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures

- i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats.

In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats.

This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%.

However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties

- barely exceeding half of Republican turnout.

It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties.

7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model

- an extremely unlikely result.

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents

(versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively).

If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush).

If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots

- not an unreasonable assumption by itself.

However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result

- in four counties, at least 70% would have been required.

These results are absurdly unlikely.

The Second Rat

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio.

Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep 'suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls.

One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.

They did their job too well.

According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average:

in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county.

According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered.

Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote

- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations.

These are not marginal differences

- this is a 39% over-vote.

In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%.

One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots.

As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes.

Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.

What to Do?

This is not an idle statistical exercise.

Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system

- again.

Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000.

But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing:

we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position:

that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed.

Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

This faith has been shattered.

Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division.

Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration.

I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context.

For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy.

It does not even merit discussion.

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one

- massive and systematic vote fraud.

We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained.

From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes.

But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer.

Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the 'Accidental President' of 2000.

One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known.

We must not permit this to happen again!

Ohio Voters Tell of Election Day Troubles at Hearing
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Halo 2
Topic: Voting
Ohio Voters Tell of Election Day Troubles at Hearing
By Reginald Fields
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Sunday 14 November 2004

Tales of waiting more than five hours to vote, voter intimidation, under-trained polling-station workers and too few or broken voting machines largely in urban or heavily minority areas were retold Saturday at a public hearing organized by voter-rights groups.

For three hours, burdened voters, one after another, offered sworn testimony about Election Day voter suppression and irregularities that they believe are threatening democracy.

The hearing, sponsored by the Election Protection Coalition, was to collect testimony of voting troubles that might be used to seek legislative changes to Ohio's election process.

The organizers chose Ohio because it was a swing state in the presidential election as well as the site of numerous claims of election fraud and voter disenfranchisement.

"I think a lot of us had a sense that something had deeply went wrong on Nov. 2 and it had to do with the election process and procedures in place that were unacceptable," said Amy Kaplan, one of the hearing's coordinators.

Kaplan said the hearing gave everyday citizens a chance to have their concerns placed into public record.

Both a written and video report on the hearing will be provided to anyone who wants a copy, especially state lawmakers who are considering mandating Election Day changes, Kaplan said.

Many of the voters who testified were clearly Democrats who wonder if their losing presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, was able to draw all the votes that were intended for him.

"I call on Sen. Kerry to un-concede until there is a full count of the votes," said Werner Lange of Trumbull County, who claimed that polling places in his Northeast Ohio neighborhood had half the number of voting machines that were needed.

"This caused a bottleneck at polling stations, and many people left without voting," he said.

Others said they were testifying not on political grounds but out of concern for a suspicious election system that should be above reproach.

Harvey Wasserman of Bexley said he tried to vote absentee with the same home address he has used for 18 years but was told he couldn't because his absentee application had the wrong address.

"But the notice telling me I had the wrong address arrived at the right address," he said. "I wonder, how many of these absentee ballots were rejected for no good reason?

"My concern is not out of the outcome of the election," Wasserman said, "but that this could go on and an election could be stolen. And we simply can't have that in a democracy."

Mounting Evidence of Voter Fraud - Audits Abound!
Mood:  loud
Topic: Voting
To View The Site - Help Protect Your Vote

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: Black Box Voting has launched a fraud audit into Florida. Three investigators (Bev Harris, Andy Stephenson, and Kathleen Wynne) are in Florida right now. We will initiate hand counts on selected counties that have not fully complied with our Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request by Monday (Diebold counties) or Tuesday (other counties).

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: We have reports that both David Cobb (Green Party) and Michael Badnarik (Libertarian Party) will be filing for official recounts in Ohio. Black Box Voting is also launching a fraud audit in Ohio. Gotta be replaced: Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. Please invoke the following name change on Blackwell immediately, as he is 2004's Katherine Harris. He should now be referred to at all times as "Katherine Blackwell." Please retain this moniker for any future runs for governor. How to be your own media. Spread the word. Latest Katherine Blackwell outrage: Failure to properly account for provisional ballots, and refusing to allow citizens to see the pollbooks.

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: Black Box Voting is implementing fraud diagnostics on the state of New Mexico. Information we recently received is indicative of widespread vote manipulation. We are not going to publicize the specifics here.

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: Black Box Voting is requesting legal assistance for a specific county in Georgia. Indications of corrupt voting processes, with possible criminal actions by local officials.

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: Black Box Voting is launching a fraud investigation on Pima County Arizona.

BREAKING -- SATURDAY NOV 13 2004: Black Box Voting is launching a fraud investigation on the state of Nevada. Pro bono legal help certified to practice in Nevada, needed immediately. Multiple irregularities. Need people to take affidavits from election workers, statewide.

BREAKING -- FRIDAY NOV 12 2004: Ralph Nader to audit Diebold machines in New Hampshire. According to Nader, the current situation with voting machines warrants investigation. Several elements make voting machines "probative" for investigation, according to Nader, a consumer affairs lawyer: proprietary ownership, secret code, vested interests, a high-value reward, and lack of any real consequences, or likelihood of getting caught, for vote manipulation. "We are told that shenanigans are just politics," said Nader at a press conference on Nov. 10. "Well, it's not politics. It's taking away people's votes."

SUNDAY Nov. 7 2004: Freedom of Information requests at BlackBoxVoting.ORG have unearthed two Ciber certification reports indicating that security and tamperability was NOT TESTED and that several state elections directors, a secretary of state, and computer consultant Dr. Britain Williams signed off on the report anyway, certifying it.