Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Attacks Election Integrity, Irresponsibly, Yet Again

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 1/29/2008

SNIP...Also, it shouldn't be necessary to note, but it is, since Kos continues to spread disinformation concerning issues of Election Integrity (and is even banning those who question him or his other front-pagers if they dare to question them, or god fobid, post actual facts), but no serious Election Integrity person that we know of, has charged either "fraud" or "dark conspiracies" in New Hampshire.

Rather that 80% of the ballots were never counted or verified by anyone after they were tabulated on the very same error-prone, hackable Diebold op-scan systems seen flipping an election undetectably, save for actually counting the paper ballots, in HBO's Hacking Democracy (video of that hack here).

Markos seems to be more than ready to believe anything he's told about election results, with no need whatsoever to verify a single vote has been recorded accurately. If he can prove that just one vote on a SC touch-screen system was recorded as cast on Election Day, dinner, a retraction and a full apology are on me.

But he can't. It's literally impossible. So he continues with his self-destructive belief in faith-based elections, and his indescribably damaging assault on Election Integrity experts.

He concludes by defying his own dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" by writing:



http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5621

you think people might actually start giving a shit about their votes counting?

the blog was swimming in positive Edwards information, a nightly roundup, etc.

at all costs.

:shrug:

of chain of command security.

Elections should not be privatized-period

Reread the OP. Reread the MCM quotation. Problem. Changing the subject doesn't make the problem go away.

MCM's assertion that there was "actually no demographic factor that explains the difference" between hand and machine counts. IIRC, some threads about NH indicated that machines prevailed in the urban areas and hand-counts in the upstate and more rural areas. I don't know whether it's counterintuitive or not, that Clinton might score better with urban voters. Some attributed Hillary's showing to large turnout among women PO'd at slams and signs belittling a female. Is there any strong research backing either assertion?

In any case, the main difference between opscans and DRE's is the man-machine interface. Once the signal is captured, the memory card, with its attendant storage AND executable programs opaque to the prying eyes of citizens, is one key to whether electronics should be trusted to "decide" our elections. At least opscans have a paper record...

On average, Clinton did do better in the cities, but statistically this doesn't account for the so-called Diebold effect. For that matter, if one looks only at places that used optical scanners -- or only at places with hand counts -- measured demographics don't explain everything that happened by a long shot.

What's really weird is MCM's apparent assumption that if something can't be attributed to demographics (at least the ones we have handy measures for), there is "no doubt" that it's due to fraud. Clinton generally did well in the same places that Kerry and Gore did. If you control for Kerry's performance, the Diebold effect goes away. Dean won the hand-count towns in 2004, but it would be a pretty big stretch to conclude that he won the election.

The exit poll puts women at 57% of the 2008 NH primary electorate, up from 54% in 2004 (subject to rounding, of course), so that could indicate a turnout surge. The Suffolk tabs seem to show the 'gender gap' exploding in the last few days, but the data are kind of crude. I'm sure someone is looking more closely at this.

DREs are a mess.

"There is no doubt that the op-scans were manipulated in the New Hampshire primary"

HELLO! It is very easy to conceive of a scenario with voters not being in perfect agreement in different jurisdictions, because that happens in every election.

NH is a bird in the bush, while Ohio is a Bush in the hand!

The Challenge:

"If he can prove that just one vote on a SC touch-screen system was recorded as cast on Election Day, dinner, a retraction and a full apology are on me".



Your turn Markos Moulitsas. B-)

so it's just not true there's no action on SC

we have an election going on, the corporate media has "SILENCED" (by excluding him from six debates), one of our candidates, Dennis Kucinich, the election has already been Manipulated by corporate media.

Even if America was to switch to Hand Counted Paper ballots, counted and posted at the precinct level, tomorrow, which is the the best way to know the true intentions of the voters, according to Al Gore,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=469812 ,

WE STILL LOSE, because we are hand counting the ballots of candidates that the corporate media selected for us to pick from. :grr:

At the end of the day, he's an establishment Democrat. Which is why so many mainstream politicians like him.