More Confusion About Ohio Voting

I'm inclined to agree with Steve Gilliard that Ohio was full of old-timey voter suppression and fraud (which is substantiated by eyewitness testimony) and that pinning everything on the discrepancy between the exit polls and the votes counts is foolish. Unfortunately, I don't buy Gilliard's refutation either. He could be right, but I would like to think professional statisticians would have already accounted for those issues (e.g., what has happened previously).

In reading RFK Jr.'s article and the rebuttals, several points are unclear to me, and seem vital to clear up:

1. How well correlated are exit polls versus vote counts in the absence of perceived fraud or voting problems? Both sides disagree on the 'facts': one says the correlation is extremely precise, the other not.
2. Did the exit polling overestimate either Democratic voters or Republican voters? Both sides disagree. This seems vital to understand the issue: if Democrats were overcounted, then there's no good evidence for fraud (in terms of the discrepancy–again, old-time vote suppression is something different). If Republicans were overcounted, then RFK Jr.'s piece has a lot of merit (and is why originally, I thought the article was legit).
3. How exactly are the odds of the discrepancy between the exit polls and the vote count determined? The differences in OH, PA, and FL are large ("1 in 666,000"), but even differences of 1-2% would give a very impressive sounding fraction. Because he's calculating this multiplicatively, you will get a very small number (i.e., the probability of OH being fubar by chance X the probability of PA being fubar by chance, etc.). I'm not sure that's the right way to do this, given that this means the probability each state is fubar by chance is 'only' 0.01. If you correct for multiple tests (i.e., if you do enough comparisons, one or two will appear to be significantly different by chance alone), these values aren't significant.

What is really needed is a group like this to look at the data. I think any time a terrorist emergency is called in a critical Democratic stronghold, and observers are barred, something illegal happened. I don't think the exit polling data will get you there, though.

RFK Jr. Is Persona Non Grata on This Blog

That's the last time I ever listen to that jackass. I should have known after his involvement in the mercury/autism debate that he selectively parses data–just like creationists do. I even remember reading Farhad Manjoo's original debunking of many of RFK Jr.'s claims. I would have thought Rolling Stone would have vetted the piece, and checked some of the arguments; apparently, they didn't.

Did Ken Blackwell do some awful crap in the 2004 election? Absolutely. But RFK Jr. didn't prove it.

Jimmy Breslin Was Right

Between commerating Memorial Day and watching NYC mayor Bloomberg get punked by his Republican friends at DHS, this Jimmy Breslin column from a couple of years ago seems appropriate:

"Mayor Fails to Ask Why"

The soldier's girlfriend, who was weeping quietly in the cold rain, had more sense than all her purported betters in this city.

Informed that the mayor of New York had just made a huge and bold move on the White House and asked for citizenship for her dead soldier, who was a Dominican, she said at the wake, "What good is it now? He can't use it."

He sure can't. He was Private Luis Moreno. He was 19 years old. They were loading him in his box into a hearse for the ride to a cemetery forever.

She also had a question: "Why is he dead?"

She is Jessica Corporan and she is 18 and was going to marry him when he got back from Iraq. If you are going to have your heart broken, 18 is not the easiest age to evade pain, and she showed it on Friday.

Mayor Bloomberg was proud that he sent a hand-delivered note to President Bush requesting citizenship posthumously for Private Moreno.

The idea wilted in the noisy steam coming out of the radiators in St. Francis of Assisi church on Shakespeare Avenue in the Bronx.

Along with Bloomberg's request, here was a general of the army giving a bronze star posthumously to Moreno. The general couldn't speak Spanish.

Bloomberg's request was about a 19-year-old who was shot dead in a war in Iraq that was started and continues because of George Bush and no one else. The blood of 525 Americans is on his hands.

Moreno wasn't listed as a citizen of the country, and that is his country's fault. He died for America.

He is so much more than a citizen here. He died a proud member of the aristocracy of the City of New York.

And any letter to the White House from the mayor of this city should not dwell on some cheap technicality. Bloomberg's letter should demand to know why this young man is dead in a box in a cemetery of our city. Why is this young woman in such pain on a wet Bronx street in one of the worst moments in memory?

And why was Julio Moreno in Iraq to begin with?

Bloomberg is supposed to fight for this city and instead he acts like he is afraid of Bush and these other Republicans. Simultaneously, and worse, he acts like he wants to be one of them. He crowed over bringing the Republican convention to New York. It will put people in hotel rooms, he says. Beautiful! We count money while some young guy from the Bronx gets his head blown off.

What do Bush and his people do for Bloomberg? They tell him they are going to bring him into the parlor. Then they put him outside in a crowded room and have him raise money.

And he not only brings nothing for his city, but he is afraid to complain. George Bush has a program called "Leave No Child Behind" and it stands for all of the Republicans: The program is utterly fraudulent. And of all the mayors of cities in the country complaining about schools being slashed and ruined, only Michael Bloomberg remains silent. How marvelous! He is afraid of insulting his great new friends. And what do these people in Washington and Albany give him? They bring back the great News newspaper headline, "Ford to N.Y.: Drop Dead."

It helped make Jimmy Carter the president. This time, it is George Bush telling us to drop dead, and in this case young people actually die.

Bloomberg's idea of standing up for our city's deaths is to write a letter about naturalization.

On Friday, in the deep slush in front of church in the Bronx, in so much sadness in the rain, I could hear the past that got us here, of George Bush, just before we invaded Iraq, bringing up "Dad" when he mentioned Saddam Hussein. "He tried to kill Dad, you know." He made it a personal family matter, and the Bushes clearly think they are a royal family and if you threaten one of them, then the entire country must take up arms.

And on the eve of invading Iraq, Bush made a speech that was a copy of the one made by Adolph Hitler in the hours before his army invaded Poland in September of 1939.

In a State of the Union speech, Bush said that Saddam tried to get uranium from the country of Niger and blow us away with a nuclear bomb. Afterward, the Bush people said the speech was essentially right although it had some wrong. It did. This could be put in three letters: Lie.

After that, from Washington there was one long, whining lie about weapons of mass destruction. If this Saddam had them, he would have used them in the first 20 minutes of the fighting. He had none. A man called Blix from the United Nations inspected Iraqi arms, including trucks found one week apart and empty. Nothing. Colin Powell got up at the UN and, reading whatever it was that Bush and his people gave him, he said the trucks were there on one day to carry away biological weapons before the inspectors arrived and that is why we have to bomb Baghdad.

The news reporters of the nation, the Pekingese of the Press, never questioned a single, solitary sentence of his presentation. All agreed it was a great moment for America. In doing so they stained themselves forever as cowards.

Private Luis Moreno of the Bronx died at 19 from lying that nearly everybody is afraid to refute. Bloomberg the Mayor doesn't want to open his mouth about it. Therefore the only way to take care of him is with the one picture every cameraman in the city wants:

Bloomberg at the Republican convention standing ecstatically with John Ashcroft, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Armey.

Can you even remember when 'only' 525 U.S. troops had died?

When the Milquetoast Wing of the Democratic Party...

...finds the courage to call you inveterate liars, you know you're in trouble. Kevin Drum (italics mine; bold original):

The obvious conclusion is that they didn't think Iraq was the central front on the war on terror back in 2002. They don't think nuclear terrorism is really that big a deal. They aren't worried about long term finances. And they don't really care very much about democracy promotion. They just say these things because they're convenient.

It's this simple: these guys say a lot of stuff they don't believe. Their words are largely meaningless. There's no paradox, and there's really not much point in trying to make it more complicated.

The Mad Biologist was a wee bit ahead of the curve on this one...

Thoughts on a Stolen Election

After reading The Rolling Stone article by RFK Jr. about the illegal disenfranchisement in Ohio during the 2004 election, I had much the same reaction PZ did:

1. The statistics are rock solid. Sure, it's possible that this is all due to random chance. It's also possible that all the oxygen molecules in the room will wind up in one corner of the room (and no, I'm not carrying around my own air supply). Something illegal happened.
2. Why did it have to be RFK Jr. who wrote this article? (Here's a slogan for you: "After what he did for autism, imagine what he can do for illegal disenfranchisement and vote fraud.")
3. I have no idea how to fix this.

It's the last point that scares the hell out of me. I think RFK Jr. is engaged in the stereotypical liberal fallacy: if we inform people of wrongdoing, the media will report it, and the people will stop it. I'm not sure that will happen in this instance. First, too many people, including those in the celebrity media, don't want to admit to themselves that this could happen. It's very hard to convince someone to reject something–the belief in free and fair elections–in which they have a strong psychological investment. Second, the only thing the Republican'ts are good at is grasping the levers of political power. Nothing shames them into doing the right thing, or as those Andre Aggassi commercials used to say, "Winning is everything" (until, of course, he stopped winning...).

If electoral fraud happens again, our government will face a serious crisis of legitimacy. I remember during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations how angry I was that both these men won elections by inflaming the 'culture wars' and race-baiting ("states rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, welfare queens, and Willie Horton). Nonetheless, I could accept that a majority of my fellow citizens were complete fucking idiots because I could do something about that (such as convince them to think differently).

But a stolen election is different. It is simply a kinder, gentler version of tyranny. Short of political violence (more about that in a bit), there isn't much I personally can do. My fear is that, if this happens, some chucklehead (who probably isn't even politically active or a Democrat) will lob a Molotov cocktail through the window of an RNC office somewhere. A chucklehead from the right will retaliate, and then, and then, and then...

This could get out of control, particularly with the eliminationist Dominionist rhetoric on the right. It could make the Civil War-Reconstruction Era bushwackers and jayhawkers look tame by comparison. What frightens me the most is that I don't think most people realize how easy it is for the zero-sum rules to be adopted. History is replete with example (e.g., Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s) of what was essentially a conflict over civil rights and liberties degenerating into a brutal sectarian, civil war, often due to initial malfeasance by those who held power.

Someone who is very clever needs to figure out how fix this. Getting rid of electronic voting machines would be a good start, but it wouldn't stop premeditated declarations of 'terrorist emergencies' that would make a fair, monitored vote count impossible. We need to fix this now because there are a lot of angry people out there. I'm afraid we're a lot closer to the brink than many realize.

I Think We Found Our Own Flag-Burning

I've always wondered why Democrats haven't been able to find some utterly trivial issue (e.g., the War on Christmas) and hype it like all get out*. Seriously, there had to be something stupid that the Democrats could use. I'm not saying they've always been accurate ('the Social Security lockbox'), but even that was about something important--Social Security.

But I think I've found the issue: that stupid Dominionist shoot-'em up video game. The one where you get to murder shoot all of the unbelievers. I was reading Orcinus' take on the video game, and this bit struck me:

My friend Mrs. Robinson, a Silicon Valley refugee who comments frequently here, sent me a note along with the link to this piece:

I spent eleven years in the games business. I left in large part because I realized that most of what was being turned out by the mid-'90s were games designed to desensitize kids to killing, either covertly or very overtly. I felt like I was helping the right-wing train its next generation of soldiers. It wasn't a good feeling. I needed to do something else.

When something like Abu Ghraib or Haditha happens, I feel the weight of that all over again. This game...well, I guess it speaks for itself.

Here it is: your at-home training camp for the next generation of eliminationists.

It will be revealing, I think, to see how many good "Christians" snap up copies of this game -- and how many actually endorse it or defend it.

Is this video game stupid and trivial compared to the carnage in Iraq, the spiraling deficits, 44 million people without healthcare, or the slow-motion destruction of our scientific infrastructure? Absolutely. But plenty of politicians have prospered with stupid.

Democrats should immediately start asking if Republican'ts support this video game, if Republican'ts believe that those who are not Dominionist Christians should be gunned down in cold blood, and if Republican'ts think Catholics aren't good Christians (just watching Bill Donohue's head explode from that alone would be worth asking the question).

What this does is establish the idea that Republican'ts are beholden to eliminationist religious fanatics (and while we're discussing word usage, the Democrats must begin to use the word 'eliminationist' every chance they get). This is how we win–or at least rollback–the culture wars.

*I've always wanted to blog the phrase "like all get out." I'm better now.

Because Sen. Frist Really Cares About Patients

Republican Senator Bill Frist, whose medical training apparently includes the ability to make long distance neurological diagnoses of brain-dead patients, is one of the major owners of the HCA hospital chain (along with other members of his family). By way of DailyKos, we find out what the Frist-owned HCA is up to:

"HCA tries to shut us up when we talk about the dangerous situations on the hospital floor. This month, they have demonstrated that they will do anything to stop this information from getting out," said Russel Main, a Respiratory Therapist at Riverside Medial Center. "I work with people who are having difficulty breathing. I can't help them because we are so short staffed, so I have to choose which patient is getting the least amount of air. I have to tell patients who can't breathe that I will get to them as soon as I can. This is information that the public needs to know."

Maybe if these patients had feeding tubes inserted into their stomachs, Frist would give a damn. But really, he is very concerned with the whole sanctity of life thing...

At this point, nothing Republican political operatives do surprises me.