The Great Election Robbery of 2008?

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• Reader Comments (10)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  I think the Venusians are behind this scandalous conspiracy. They want to take over the earth, having already ruined their planet by allowing the republicans to cause global warming there. . . .

  Watch the skies and BEWARE!!!    :)

  Posted by wolf on Jun 19, 2008 at 2:38 PM

  Interesting story on pbs.org about big global cooling 75,000 years ago.

  Three scientists working independently — one taking artic ice cores, one taking deep ocean cores, and one studying volcanic ash — identified a massive volcanic erruption in Sumatra as the cause.

  Apparently all that is needed to offset (not the Al Gore thing) the global warming scare is to get a large volcano to belch.

  Unfortunately it probably requires sacrificing a virgin and there are so few left.

  (Perhaps they could throw in a phone or an airline.)

  Posted by whattheheck on Jun 19, 2008 at 3:27 PM

  its all good to see people writing about election fraud but what are democrats going to do about it?Talk is cheap and so is Mr.
  millers book only 10.95.can’t beat that price.Check out the book man its a little dry but I loved it and you will to.

  Posted by headed on Jun 19, 2008 at 6:52 PM

  Unfortunately it probably requires sacrificing a virgin and there are so few left.”

  You neglect the Dungeons and Dragons game rooms. Lots and lots of virgins, but mostly male—surely in this age of gender neutrality they would do?

  Posted by wolf on Jun 19, 2008 at 8:25 PM

  Well, Laura, sometimes if you want to understand something you just have suck it up and get a little bit technical. Maybe you could mention that to your journalism students at DePaul. Sheesh.

  Posted by SqueakyRat on Jun 20, 2008 at 3:51 AM

  ” There’s a promising ring to the title of David L. Griscom’s piece, “How to Stuff the Electronic Ballot Box: ‘Hacking and Stacking’ in Pima County, Arizona.” But Griscom, a retired research physicist, quickly descends into a messy agglomeration of blurry statistics, indecipherable bar graphs and arcane acronyms. Take this choice excerpt on page 124:”

  Well, with all due respect, David Griscom is brilliant and the technical stuff you refer to is about as layman’s terms and you can break this down. Compared to what we have been dealing with in Pima County in our lawsuit that reads pretty simple.  I don’t think it is a fair assessment to say that he “quickly descends into a messy agglomeration of blurry statistics, indecipherable bar graphs and arcane acronyms.”

  David and I have been on each other’s email lists for years and I haven’t had trouble understanding what he communicates. The Hack ‘n Stack method he refers to was discovered by another election integrity activist here, John Brakey and Mr. Griscom.

  I think this is pretty easy to understand:

  http://www.progressiveazdems.org/hacknstack.pdf

  
  While these more technical folks can get pretty deep into it, a few questions can explain how it works and they are good about conveying it into the average Joe terms. I think if people got more into the issue, it wouldn’t seem so complicated. The Tucson Weekly reporters and the Tucson Citizen—after a lot of effort on the election integrity folks part—really did some good coverage on the issue and became better reporters regarding election fraud issues in the process.

  Posted by Arizona on Jun 20, 2008 at 5:30 AM

  I hate to say this, but ever since 2000 I’ve come to see Democrats as being actually quite juvenile when it comes to heaven forbid—graciously accepting election defeat.

  I mean, to go on literally forever about how every election you didn’t win was stolen from you is wearing a little thin.  Of course the ones you won are just fine, no fraud there.  It’s reminiscent of my 10 year old refusing to accept responsibility for something or admit he was wrong about something.  It’s always someone else’s fault, and someone else is always out to get him.

  But he’s ....... 10.  And he hasn’t declared a party yet.  And yes, he’s a little paranoid.

  No, even if McCain were to win, and I doubt he will, minus some extraordinary changes in the current formula, he won’t really have won.  He will have stolen the election. (Is that perhaps the real reason for articles like this—a type of insurance policy?)  But on the other hand, if say McCain was to LOSE by the thinnest of margins, I’d bet my home on him graciously conceding and accepting his close loss, and forgoing any attempt at challenging the results.

  Now of course there are exceptions, and sometimes there is clear reason and evidence for either side to challenge, but the general behavior patterns are pretty distinct.

  This stolen election conspiracy theory lore sells books and articles to the fringe base, but it would be better for everyone if the same people would write about the value in being gracious losers, when those times inevitably come.  Or, we can just wait for November, and watch John McCain and about 30 out of 31 of his fellow house and senate colleagues, for the lesson.

  Posted by Natalie on Jun 21, 2008 at 5:36 PM

  The Kennedys didn’t need to wait for electronic hacking. Chicago is famous for creative counting.

  Can there be any question that someone could tamper with computer election results? We’ve all heard about the VA personal info which “accidently” was passed to the whole world, protecting ID has become big business, and with all the “emergency” hiring of anyone available to fix the Y2K date panic — we have no idea who is reading corporate and government data.

  As Natalie mentioned the mid-term Democratic congressional gains raised no questions anything like the last two presidential voting scam screams. Last week Bob Beckle, Democrat backer, was on a panel discussing Obama’s anti-smear website. His complaint was the news media pick up on these without any proof of their validity. He attributed them to “right-wing, conservative liars” and demanded the media check them out before spreading them further.

  Interestingly, no one challenged his labeling them as from the right… isn’t it conceivable that an Obama supporter may have planted them just to make the right look bad?

  We get so much information at such a pace that it is impossible to check it. The wonders of the internet, 24/7 news and continuously revised government data are just so much noise.

  I re-read Brave New World a couple years back and the parallels with every day life are boggling.

  We are kept so busy with minutia that the disappearance of our post-war lifestyle (WW2) is only noticed by old guys like me. I was able to start my own business with only $1,000 borrowed from my dad, support a family of four, pay all medical expenses out of pocket ($10,000 deductible med ins.), save enough for retirement, send two kids to college, and pay off the 20-year mortgage on our seven room house — early.

  Many others, including minorities, could do likewise before we started saving money on cheap foreign manufactured goods and poisoned food and prescriptions.

  That is what a “good economy” is like.

  The problem now is not only that voting may be tampered with big time, but that no matter who is elected — we will continue to lose.

  Wake me in time for the revolution.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jun 22, 2008 at 2:10 PM

  one compliant a small one regarding millers book is why

  didn"t he include a essay or piece from our fearless leader

  joel ‘the man"bliefuss?It just ain’t right he is an important

  figure in this debate and deserves his pie.

  Posted by headed on Jun 23, 2008 at 11:46 PM

  Thank you, Laura Washington, for reading the book Loser Take All and recognizing the peril to our democracy represented by (1) the well demonstrated vulnerability of electronic voting to fraud by election officials, voting machine manufacturers, and other insiders and (2) the abundant statistical evidence for nationwide election theft in the 2004 and 2006 Elections—with the implication of a likely repeat in 2008.

  For your general information, I’d like to explain a few things regarding my own chapter. 

  First, acronyms are universally used to reduce the number of printed pages necessary to convey a given amount of information and (in the present case) to instantly call the reader’s attention to certain memorizable strings of words necessary to specify particular types of numerically quantifiable data.

  Second, the purpose of using graphs is to enable the instant visualization of data in relation to the real-life variables that affect these data.  So every time I give a lecture I spend many hours beforehand devising graphs to assist my scientific colleagues in understanding the data that I have obtained and the conclusions I draw therefrom.

  In fact, there are often many ways of graphing the same data.  In regard to my Loser Take All chapter, I spent dozens of hours trying out four or five difference ways to graph the data for some 60,000 Pima County Election-2004 voters that my friend John Brakey had obtained by FOIA request and subsequently spent more than 1,000 hours putting into Excel spread sheets.  Still, I was groping.  Searching for a taint of fraud in these data proved far harder than doing physics, where for 38 years I had been able to draw upon the known laws of physics.  I abandoned most of the graphs of John’s data that I tried out simply because they didn’t “speak to me.”

  But the graphs I finally did select for my chapter in Loser Take All do indeed expose some peculiar and suspicious trends.  Even better than that, because of the way I finally plotted the data, it was possible to apply well recognized statistical methods to assess the probabilities that these peculiar outcomes were innocent accidents, as opposed to the results of fraud due to insiders hacking the election computer.  In fact my analyses prove the latter, to a high degree of statistical confidence.

  I tried my best to explain these things in every-day non-technical language to the greatest extent possible.  I’m sorry it didn’t work for you.  But I urge you and readers of your column to read other chapters in Mark Crispin Miller’s inspired volume.  The two I’ve studied the most closely and can recommend most highly to even math-averse readers are “Landslide Denied” by Jonathan Simon and Bruce O’Dell and “Election 2004: The Urban Legend” by Michael Collins.

  Posted by DLGriscom on Jun 29, 2008 at 5:15 AM

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