News From The U.S. Election Reform Movement

Saturday, February 05, 2005
The Invisible War: As the Nation Lolls Into a Second Bush Presidency, Many Statisticians Are Still Fighting Over Whether He Won the Job or Stole It

By Nashua ADVOCATE STAFF

As political junkies the nation over focus their attention on whether Howard Dean will win the position of DNC Chair; whether President Bush will develop a quick exit-strategy in Iraq once the early election returns in that country hit American newsstands (the Bush-backed Allawi Alliance is losing 72% to 18% thus far to an Iran-backed conglomerate; in some areas, Allawi was outpolled by the Communist Party); whether North Korea meant what it said when it threatened to create a "sea of fire" in southeast Asia if the U.S. doesn't back off its aggressive stance: as all these stories dominate the news headlines and attract the attention of smart people with a head for big events, the biggest event of all the contest for Most Powerful Man in the World is still under scrutiny by some of the best and brightest in this country, and they're slinging the mud at one another at a pretty good clip these days.

This is no "cold" war.

On Sunday, the Advocate released an article detailing the findings of a study by U.S. Count Votes which soundly refuted Edison/Mitofsky's explanation for its erroneous Election Day exit polls, and asserted that there remains a possibility the original vote tallies were corrupted.

On Monday, an Assistant Professor of Law at Ohio State University, Daniel Tokaji, responded with a blistering retort which effectively classified the mathematicians and statisticians (Ph.D. holders, all) of U.S. Count Votes as "conspiracy" nuts.

On Wednesday, this view of affairs was made all the more implausible when the historically-cautious Democratic National Committee announced that it would spend half a million dollars to "open up the machines" in Ohio. Said outgoing DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe to USA Today and Gannett News Service (as reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer by Carl Weiser, see excerpt from article, below) "if there's nothing wrong with the machines, we ought to be able to go in and take a look at them."

Think Republican stalwart and gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell will lie down for that legal battle?

Neither do we.

On Thursday, the Miami Herald no friend of those who doubt the results of the 2004 presidential election released an opinion piece comparing the recent election in the Ukraine, which was marred by fraud and ultimately overturned, to the U.S. presidential election held on November 2nd, 2005. Nor was the comparison in the Herald constructed as a distant or attenuated one the two elections were remarked upon as being virtually identical in their suspiciousness (indeed, the piece, upon reciting some of the irregularities in the Ukraine, went on to say that such irregularities were "equally prevalent in the U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 and probably altered the election outcome in both cases").

[The full text of that article can be found here].

And finally on Friday, the Vice-President of U.S. Count Votes, Bruce O'Dell, responded in kind to Tokaji's article, implying that the latter's theory of the exit polling discrepancies was a "joke."

And the war nobody in America is talking about goes on.

[Below is an excerpt from the Cincinnati Enquirer article referenced above, the full text of the essay from Professor Tokaji, and the full text of the response from the Vice-President of U.S. Count Votes, Bruce O'Dell. For the sake of presenting clean copies of these articles, The Advocate has removed all hyperlinks. However, links to the original essays with hyperlinks intact are included at the end of each piece].