2004 VOTE FRAUD: Hell, I don't know what to think

The corporate media are doing their best to put the whole "stolen election" meme to bed. Here's an example from the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

Allegations of massive voter fraud
turn out to be unfounded, fortunately

After the election, Internet bloggers seized on voting machine malfunctions and alleged widespread fraud. Adding gasoline to this tinderless and low-oxygen fire was the discrepancy between early exit polling and the actual vote count. The exit polling seemed to indicate that Sen. John Kerry would win handily; the opposite resulted.

The helpful principle that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is apt to be the best explanation fully applies to postelection fears. It is easier to explain the inaccuracy of the exit polls -- they have a large margin of error built in, and did not exceed that margin -- than to prove or even plausibly allege massive voting fraud spread over at least two states and many voting jurisdictions.

The director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, said the wave of election fraud allegations on the blogosphere amounted to "a snowball of hearsay." He has a point.

Click here for the rest.

So, the Chronicle dismisses outright the possiblility of any Republican vote scam, but I wonder how they can be so sure. For them, it all seems to come down to a brief explanation of the fishy exit poll results. However, there's quite a bit of story that their essay fails to mention. Leave it to David Corn of the left-leaning Nation magazine to examine the issue more thoroughly, but even he seems to be skeptical of a vote scam:

A Stolen Election?

Electronic voting that does not produce an auditable paper trail is worrisome--as is the possibility that the machines can be hacked. The proponents of these systems claim there are sufficient safeguards. But in this election there were numerous reports of e-voting gone bad.

And

Only a few companies manufacture electronic voting machines. They are not transparent. They do not use open-source code. Last year, Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen machines, declared in a fundraising letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

And

Making a different we-wuz-robbed claim, journalist Greg Palast, in an article bluntly titled "Kerry Won...," contends the Democrat would have definitely triumphed in Ohio had the final tally included the uncounted ballots--by which he means 92,672 ballots that did not register a vote when run through a counting machine--and the 155,000 provisional ballots.

However

Clear away the rhetoric, and what's mainly left are the odd early exit polls (which did show Kerry's lead in Ohio and Florida declining as Election Day went on and which ended up with the current national Bush-Kerry spread), troubling instances of bad electronic voting, and curious--or possibly curious--trends in Florida. This may be the beginning of a case; it is not a case in itself. Investigative reporter Robert Parry observes, "Theoretically, at least, it is conceivable that sophisticated CIA-style computer hacking--known as 'cyber-warfare'--could have let George W. Bush's campaign transform a three-percentage-point defeat, as measured by exit polls, into an official victory of about the same margin. Whether such a scheme is feasible, however, is another matter, since it would require penetration of hundreds of local computer systems across the country, presumably from a single remote location. The known CIA successes in cyber-war have come from targeting a specific bank account or from shutting down an adversary's computer system, not from altering data simultaneously in a large number of computers."

Click here for the rest.

Like the Chronicle, Corn seems to think the whole thing is mostly to do with the exit poll results, and dismisses the probablility of a vote-hack by painting it as too difficult. Well, okay. This seems to be a popular media point of view, but I can't help but remember how the media, including the Nation, behaved when a vote scam actually occured in Florida four years ago: they rushed to confer legitimacy on the illegitimate election. (Okay, the Nation, first, and then the Washington Post, eventually reported on it, but much too late for anything to come of it.) A little part of my brain keeps telling me that this may very well be happening again.

From Media Matters for America courtesy of Dr. Menlo:

Beyond "conspiracy theories," election
irregularities get scant media attention

Though articles about the prevalence of Internet-based "conspiracy theories" regarding voting irregularities have appeared in several major newspapers -- including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe -- these articles focused on general speculation about voter fraud rather than on the voting irregularities that actually occurred. Media Matters for America previously noted the failure of most television and cable news networks to report on the glitch in one suburban Ohio town's electronic voting system that resulted in 3,893 extra votes for President George W. Bush; the three media outlets cited above did cite that glitch as an incident that has fueled speculation about vote fraud, but each ignored the negative-25-million-vote episode and other irregularities.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, despite how I titled this post, I do know what to think: there is no hard evidence of a vote scam; it's all circumstantial at this point. However, given that there was a flurry of GOP vote scamming tactics (scroll down a bit for the article) in the run-up to the election, which the media by and large ignored, given that there was more going on with the exit poll results than simply a mismatch with actual election results, given that Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has illustrated that it's much easier to hack electronic voting machines than one might suspect, given that these dismissive essays seem to be making as many assumptions as the "conspiracy theorists" are, and given that the Republicans have already stolen a presidential election four years ago, I have to say that it's just too damned soon to say that we know for sure that nothing happened.

Like Tom Tomorrow over at This Modern World, "I'm remaining agnostic on this one for the time being." But I'm an agnostic with an open mind. Actually, I suppose that's a bit redundant.

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