A general strike is proposed for the United States on September11, 2007, the sixth anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks on New York City and Arlington, Virginia. The general strike movement has no clearly named leadership. It’s described as an Internet viral effort. Wikipedia [74] defines viral efforts on the Internet as:

An object (or an idea) is viral when it has the ability to spread copies of itself or change other similar objects to become more like (it) when those objects are simply exposed to the viral object.

General strikes, more common in Europe, are events that shut down the normal operations of a city, state, or nation for a period of time. These strikes aim to force awareness and action on a single issue or broader set of concerns. The 9/11/07 General Strike has a central location - http://www.strike911.org/ [75] - on the Internet, which is linked to and reproduced on a variety of other internet sites. The site states the rationale for the effort:

The General Strike is a national call to action, from citizens to other citizens. It is not about a single issue. It is not an anti-war protest, a civil rights protest, an election fraud protest. It is not about torture, surveillance, corporate media, the 9/11 coverup, or the environment. This strike is about all these issues and more.

We all have different concerns, but we all have the same concern: we are being lied to and this government does not represent us. Join other Americans in demanding truth, justice, and accountability.

This is our country.
And our world.
We just have to stand up.

A National Call to Action: Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
No school. No work. Buy nothing. Hit the streets (Click “ABOUT”) [76]

LOCK DOWN USA – NO Answers (to anything)

The strike targets key issues facing the American public, issues that have not been addressed in any meaningful way by any branch of government. These include enduring questions and inconsistencies about 911, the Iraq War; violations of civil rights; and election fraud. As the statement above indicates, one key means of the coverup is the corporate media.

Citizen discontent with 911 has been expressed in a number of public opinion polls. One of the most shocking surveyed citizens of New York City. The little reported August, 2004 Zogby Poll [77] found that “Half of New Yorkers Believe US Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9-11 Attacks and “Consciously Failed.” National surveys also show substantial skepticism about the efforts of “US Leaders.”

Other concerns of the strike include areas of strong public skepticism. As of August, 2007, 64% of Americans oppose [78] the Iraq War and a majority says it should never have happened in the first place. Massive violations of civil rights are occurring with the aid of the U.S. Department of Justice, as reported by its former voting rights head. Confidence in the legitimacy of the Bush government has been voiced in polls in Pennsylvania [79] and in a national sample [80] of registered voters. Both Zogby polls showed that tens of millions of Americans have little faith in the fairness and results of the 2004 presidential election.

Reflecting the disquiet of the American public, Bush popularity is in free fall. As low as 26% approval [81] in recent polls, his decline has been steady and unending since the peak after the 9/11 attacks (with an odd spike on Election Day 2004).

The strike campaign argues that these and other issues rarely covered in any depth by nearly all of the corporate media leave only one move for citizens - a general strike to protest the policies plus the lack of recognition and response.

Call to action: We just have to stand up

Standing up includes no work or school on September 11, 2007. It also includes “no shopping;” a suspension of all purchasing during the strike. One strike web site claims that this can have a substantial impact even with just a small percentage of the population participating.

The general strike calls for participants to “Hit the Streets.” Significant activity is expected to focus on New York and Washington, DC but, in the viral spirit, the venues of protest can’t be predicted.

General Strikes in the United States

Seattle General Strike Project [82]

The Seattle general strike of 1919 is the first known city-wide general strike in U.S. history. Failing to get promised wage increases, 35,000 ship yard workers were joined by 25,000 other Seattle union members for a 6 day work stoppage. The 60,000 workers and their families represented a huge portion of Seattle’s 315,000 populations at the time.

The most recent U.S. general strike occurred on May 1, 2006 when millions of Latinos hit the streets across the country. The Latino population once, known as the sleeping giant of American politics, awoke that day in a national effort that shocked and awed the U.S. political elite. Millions protested proposed immigration laws that would made a felon out of anyone claimed to have assisted undocumented workers and broader social justice issues. The May Day demonstrations, in effect a general strike, were preceded by a series of protests beginning in March 2006.

This is the type of coalition that may produce major results for the 9/11/07 General Strike. The March 2006 Los Angeles protest saw 500,000 Angelinos join together. It was a predictor of the May Day millions across the nation. It included a majority of Latino civil rights advocates along with anti-Bush and antiwar participants. Image: Michael Sedano (with permission)

Saturday, March 25, 2006, I joined 499,999--heck, maybe there were a million of us-- other gente in the area around Los Angeles' City Hall. Our massive reaffirmation of the US Constitution was one of many such manifestations of community, and concern that the nation's growing repression of people like us requires critical attention. Half Million Immigrant Readers, Voters, Mass in LA [83] Michael Sedano, La Bloga March, 2006

Possible Origins

While viral in nature at this point, recent history may result in a broad based coalition. The pervasive motivation is the clear indifference to pressing issues by all three branches of the federal government. The White House stalled the 911 investigation and then crippled the 911 Commission in many ways, including delay followed by insufficient funds and authority. The Supreme Court of the U.S. recently overturned landmark civil right legislation thanks to two newly appointed justices who convinced key Senators that they would not overturn civil rights protections. The new Democratic Congress of 2006 has failed to pass a meaningful resolution to end the Iraq War.

Specific recent political actions may well have contributed to the general strike. They reflect the joining of antiwar, 911 Truth, and impeachment groups.

• On June 27, 2007, the United States Social Forum [84], a convention of various social justice groups, passed a resolution [85] that called for both the reopening of the 911 investigation and the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. This cooperative effort by the 911 Truth movement, impeachment organizations, and the anti war coalition is a new trend.

• On July 4, 2007, the Philadelphia Emergency Anti War Convention convened in Pennsylvania. Cindy Sheehan pointed out that her audiences have been filled with 911 Truth members who deserved answers to their questions. The convention produced a strong set of demands known as The Act Independent United Front Program [86]. The program calls for impeachment of Bush, Cheney and associates; an end to all wars; restoration of Constitutional Rights; an end to “Bush police-state dictatorship;” a government by and for the people; and 9/11 truth – reopening the investigation and full release of all 9/11 documentation.

Only Four Weeks Left Until Sept. 11, 2007

Should this effort achieve momentum and see hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, “hit the streets,” politicians will be faced with a real dilemma. They can continue to ignore, delay and dissemble, reaping the consequences in 2008. Or they can act promptly and effectively to satisfy the demands of the American public.

Flyer from the http://www.strike911.org [87]/ web site (flyer number 5)

ENDS

Acknowledgment: Special thanks to Internet poster reprehensor for his background information.

Permission granted to reprint in whole or part with a link to this article in “Scoop” and attribution of authorship.

Wednesday, 22 August 2007, 1:37 pm
Opinion: Michael Collins

Notes from the Underground
Why the 2004 Election Matters More than Ever

Notes from the Underground Richard Jacksties © with permission [89]

Part 1: The Meaning of the Legend

Michael Collins [90]
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, DC
Part 1 of series
Election 2004: The Urban Legend [91]

Election Magic

Imagine a night at the theater.* A magician comes on stage with a corpse in tow. A doctor from the audience confirms that it is in fact the very real human corpse of a middle aged white male. The magician passes his hand over the corpse just once. It gets up, dances a gig, and leaves the stage. The reanimated middle age man who was once dead returns for an encore.

You’re aghast! You go back stage and confront the magician, “How did you do that?” The magician responds sincerely, “I have no idea.”

Does that make him a magician?

Now imagine that after you question the entertainer, he rolls out another corpse, which is undoubtedly a quite dead middle aged white male. The magician says, “Just pass your hand over the corpse once.” You do, and the corpse arises, dances a gig and leaves the dressing room asking the first person he sees where to get a cab.

Does that make you a magician?

*************

On election night 2004, the networks came on the air and announced that George W. Bush had won the presidential contest to become 43rd president of the United States.

Earlier in the day, there were leaked reports revealing the results of the networks’ own exit polls conducted by a distinguished polling firm. The reports had the White House in a panic. Bush was sure to lose given the trends. According to the exits, he was losing his base, the rural segment of the population that had carried him to victory in 2000. Turnout in the Republican suburbs was not much greater than in the country as a whole, and new voters were going for Kerry 60% to 40%.

The final leaked poll was enough to bring broad smiles to the faces of Democratic leaders and committed campaign workers who had gathered in union halls and hotel ballrooms across the nation.

Then, as if by magic, the 11 pm Election Day vote tallies told a different story. These were accepted by the network reporters as an ex cathedra dictate from the American electorate. We were told that the pious Red prevailed once again over the decadent Blue, a replay of 2000 we were told. Bush was reelected.

The optimistic mood of the Kerry campaign and Democratic faithful was crushed in the twinkling of an eye. What happened? What about the exit polls?

The still corpse of the Bush campaign had been reanimated. It arose from the death of certain defeat, danced a gig, and trotted off center stage to do its considerable damage for the next three years: death and destruction in Iraq; dismantling of the United States Constitution; the abandonment of Katrina’s survivors (for all the world to see); augmented by an impressive and elaborate parade of other calamities that are all attributed to this feat of magic on election night.

How Did They Do It?

Quite simply … by magic. According to the final exit poll [92], the only heat Bush won, he had two million less votes in the rural segment of the population. That segment went from 23% of the electorate in 2000 to 16% in 2004. Bush made marginal gains in the suburbs. He was headed for disaster rolling into the cities. He picked up steam in cities with populations 50,000 to 500,000, by breaking even in 2004 after a 17% loss to Gore in 2000.

But it was big city dwellers that passed their collective hand over the Bush corpse and brought it to life. He was on life supports before the big city totals were factored in. All that Kerry had to do was match the Gore big city percentage and he would be the next president. According to the day after election final exit poll, big city turnout [93] was up 66%, Bush votes increased 153% (Fig. 5 [94]) over 2000 there, and white voters (Figs. 6 & 7 [95]) in big cities went from five million in 2000 to nine million in 2004.

Had some would-be campaign operative passed his hand over our largest cities and reanimated white males in sufficient quantity to save the seemingly doomed Bush and doom the rest of us?

Election 2004: The Urban Legend

On June 13th of this year, “Scoop” Independent News published Election 2004: The Urban Legend [96]. I wrote the article based in large part on the research of Internet poster Anaxarchos. The figures cited above from the final national exit pool exit poll and the absurdist conclusions forced from those figures demonstrate that there is no reason to have faith in the final poll result and, as a result, no reason to believe that there is a coherent narrative to justify the election results and the Bush victory.

We’re like the incredulous audience member who went back stage to confront the magician. Even though we can do the trick ourselves by passing our hands over the questionable reported results and the final exit poll to justify continued political life to someone who looked like a sure loser, there’s a foul magic to the process.

Where are the Critics of the Urban Legend?

When the article was published, it received wide spread attention across America’s only uncensored news source, the Internet. Multiple sites posted the article in full, not a common event for a 7,500 word analysis. Major figures in the free and fair elections movement provided their endorsement including Mark Crispin Miller [97] and Ernest Partridge. [98]

We anticipated a full scale assault from friends of the network’s long time polling company, Edison Mitofsky (EM). Nothing much materialized. This was surprising since our reporting and interpretation of the network – EM presentation of the urban results dooms that poll to the status of a failed effort, at the very least, and, more likely, one of the biggest ever failures in public opinion polling.

Anaxarchos Responds to the Missing Critics

Recently, I received a letter from Anaxarchos containing his remarkable comments on the few criticisms offered and, more importantly, an elaboration on the initial article. I’d encourage you to read the full letter (see Appendix) as well as this article.

Anaxarchos: “Having looked carefully at the critical reviews, it appears to me that your critics have entirely missed the import of your piece and its underlying analysis. I could review many of the subsidiary points they raise, but that seems unimportant compared to the two larger points that they don’t mention.”

He’s correct. Those who ridicule critics who question the results of the 2004 election were restrained to say the least. This was surprising. The Bush defenders have left no criticism of the election results unturned, particularly those related to the exit polls. Why the restraint?

There were no substantive responses to Urban Legend because there could be none. The claim that turnout in the big cities (500,000 or greater) went up 66% was demolished entirely through simple political commentary. Why would urban residents’ turnout in waves propelling Bush to victory when the rest of the country was only at a 16% increase in turnout? What had Bush done for them to justify this first ever rousing level of support? More importantly, when in our history did an incumbent president lose share and actual votes in his strongest area (in this case, the rural segment) and gain steam and secure an election victory in hostile territory (the big cities)?

The claim of the 66% increase in turnout was also put to a final rest by the incorporation of actual city turnout data made available on election night and finalized shortly there after. Specifically, actual city voting results showed that city turnout increases were only about 16%, (Chart 1 [99]) the reported average for the country. These big city results were, in some cases, reported on election eve by the very networks that paid for the exit polls and by the exit pollsters who claim to reconcile their final results to the election results. One must wonder if the right hand was giving to the left the full story.

Could the polling company and their sponsors, the major networks (plus CNN and the Associated Press) have been this ignorant of what was happening in New York City? The results reported on local news outlets owned by the networks showed a 12% increase in turnout? That’s 54 points below the claimed urban increase of 66%. New York is, after all, the headquarters of the television network poll sponsors and near the headquarters of the polling company. Did they simply ignore these results in their haste to produce their version of the final exit poll the day after the election? And why wasn’t there any comment on the more than obvious disparity between the actual results for big cities, particularly on turnout, and the polling results they continued to show long after the certified vote count for big cities became available to everyone. This is a critical question addressing the integrity of the entire exit polling and reporting process for 2004.

The Entire Narrative of the Election

Anaxarchos elaborates the first big error of the exit pollsters and network consortium

Anaxarchos: “It seems to me that the most important implications of “Urban Legend” are these:

1) The entire narrative of the 2004 election is built on the foundation of the exit polls. There is virtually no other real-time source of data on who voted how, why, and where. Indeed as the critics of the use of exit polls for fraud detection have pointed out on many occasions, this voter survey is precisely what the exit polls are “intended” to provide, and why they are funded by the consortium of media outlets, the NEP. The Charlie Cook reference in your piece was typical. The Exits provided the sum total of the data behind his analysis of the election.”

Based on the final exit poll two distinguished analysts, Charles Cook and Ruy Teixeira stuck their necks out in different directions. Cook called the Bush victory a display of political genius and immediately made a fundamental mistake. He claimed that defections [100] from the Kerry camp by black, Latinos, and Jewish voters had done the trick for Bush. Had he examined the data available at the time, he would have known that there were only marginal changes in these groups. Teixeira [101] was more precise as Anaxarchos points out:

Anaxarchos: “Unfortunately, so committed was Teixeira to the impossibility of widespread election fraud, that he assumed that there was disconnect between urban data as the NEP defined “urban” and county data, with the observation that, “urban doesn’t mean urban and rural doesn’t mean rural”. Teixeira promised a detailed county analysis to reconcile the differences. Of course, no such “reconciliation” was forthcoming. My guess is that Teixeira, like Cook, underestimated the magnitude of the “reconciliation” that would be required and also underestimated the final turnout of the 2004 election which only further widened that gap.”

One of the most astute analysts, Cook, jumped to the self-informed conclusion that the Bush urban victory had to be due to a shift in ethnic voting. It’s easy to see why. He was unaware that the white big city vote increased from five million in 2000 to nine million in 2004. We can suppose that it never occurred to him that such a thing could or would happen. Why would we expect him to check the exit turnout rate against actual city voting totals?

Teixeira’s response and follow up are even more perplexing. He’s the author of The Emerging Democratic Majority [102] and a recognized polling expert. After dropping his confusion of terms argument, he promised a county analysis to show how Bush won, a common response of establishment Democrats. But he never produced the study? Why? Maybe he stared into the abyss and the abyss stared right back.

He dismissed claims of fraud based on exit poll analysis by writing “… it is possible that the magnitude of these corrections has been greater than normal.” That depends on what your definition of normal is. What’s normal about increasing turnout by a factor of four (16% actual to 66% claimed) to achieve an absurd result? The basis for the urban data correction (actual city results) was available when he made this statement. Had he bothered to look? We’d like to hear from him on this and the questions we outlined clearly in the original article (presuming he’s given up his role as a Democratic apologist for questions about Bush election integrity).

So what does this mean?

Anaxarchos: “ It means at a minimum that either one must try to support the indications of the Exit Polls that the Bush winning margin in 2004 came in the Urban centers, implausible as that seems, or one must craft a new narrative of the 2004 presidential election. Believe it or not, the former option is not nearly as difficult as the latter. Your critics have missed what it means to simply declare that “the Exit Polls must have been wrong”. With that dismissal, much of the supporting evidence for how Bush “won” in 2004 disappears as well.”

For over 30 years, the way we’ve made sense out of “who voted where and why” is through exit polls which are designed to and accepted as answering those very questions. There have been few complaints, other than Florida 2000 when the exit poll showed a narrow Gore victory. Given the trashing of 100,000 mostly minority spoiled ballots, who could criticize the pollsters if they initially showed a Gore victory as a result of interviewing voters in minority precincts whose ballots had been “spoiled [103].”.

If we don’t know how Bush won, ratifying the election results is mindless magic. If we don’t demand an understanding of how he won, then can we dismiss the notion of election fraud made over and over with to an ever widening and receptive audience? Are elections the one area of administration activity that escapes critical analysis? Perhaps the election fraud doubters have been listening to Alberto Gonzales and his crew on these questions.

Anaxarchos offers a compelling case for the election polls failure across the board, not just in the big cities.

Anaxarchos: “Consider the following:

If the Bush winning margin did not come in the cities, where did it come from? If the urban vote as reported by the Exits is incorrect, then the remainder of the Exit Poll narrative must also be incorrect. It is true that the big city vote underlines the anomaly but take a look at the three-category demographic (Urban, Suburban, and Rural) and you get a slightly more muted version of the same story. If the cities don’t hold Bush’s winning margin, then that clearly means that it must have come from somewhere else. While the erosion of the Bush rural margin is significant, reversing it is not enough. We must also “offset” the loss of Bush’s urban margin in the suburbs and we must do this while constantly living under the overhang of an 18% increase in turnout (which clearly favored Kerry). The result is that the Exit Polls must not only be “wrong” in the cities, they must also be “wrong” across the board and this to a significant degree. In truth, the degree of this “wrongness” must increase as we go from city to countryside because, as we have seen, the Exit Polls weight the Bush urban margin into existence.”

Painful choices regarding the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

We can accept the official election results simply as reported by discarding or denying any and all questions and anomalies. Doing so makes us no better than the uncritical magician in the opening passage. It just happened. We don’t know why. We agree that it doesn’t make much sense but that’s just the way it is (in this best of all possible worlds). Move along.

We can accept the election results and totally dismiss the exit poll adjustments as indicative of a flawed poll that should be dismissed. Our argument here is no better than in the first option. Its faith based. That’s just the way it is but we’ll discuss it a bit, feign erudition, and impress you with our obscure knowledge of polling methods and math.

Or we can face the reality and the dreadful conclusion. There’s no way to tell if Bush truly won the vote total in 2004 while there are many reasons to doubt that he did. The parallel measurement of the actual vote, the exit poll, can only concoct a Bush victory through egregious adjustments to its own raw data for the big cities. Why would such adjustments be required? Was the measurement off for the smaller cities where Bush gained 17 points over 2000? Was it off for the suburbs and rural segment? What about the voluminous reports of voter suppression and voting irregularities across the nation; reports including consistent vote flipping from Kerry to Bush?

If there were no problems with the actual vote count, problems that the exit poll analysis clearly indicates, why on earth would two thirds of Ohio counties destroy the ballots [104] and election records from 2004 well before the required retention period?

And what about this question, perhaps the simplest of all with the greatest potential for understanding just what happened in 2004? Why does the network consortium refuse to release the raw data for 2004? The raw data has been closely guarded by the pollsters and the networks despite at least two requests for examination of this data by now Committee on the Judiciary Chairman, John Conyers [105], Democrat, Michigan.

Has that data suffered the same fate as the destroyed Ohio ballots?

Would the handling of the raw data that produced this unbelievable narrative embarrass the networks and indicate that they should have known shortly after the election; that they certainly know by now, without any doubt, that there are huge problems with the final exit poll, the poll the national election pool and its polling company have defended to consistently and vigorously?

Or would the freeing of this privately held data concerning our public election show what many suspect: the real winner of the 2004 election is not sitting in the White House.

You can be sure that the four major networks, CNN, and the Associated Press would be in court right now demanding the release of the exit poll data were it any concern other than them holding back the data from the rightful public review demanded.

ENDS

*Metaphor based on a story from S. John Macksoud, Other Illusions, 1977. Published by the author.

Permission to reprint in part or whole with a link to this article in “Scoop” and attribution of authorship.

Link: "Scoop" Independent News [106]

Appendix: Full Letter from Anaxarchos to Michael Collins

Dear Mike,

Thank you for sending me the reviews for your article, “Urban Legend”, and congratulations on the overwhelmingly positive response you have received. I was a little disturbed at the few negative criticisms that you sent along. Having looked carefully at the critical reviews, it appears to me that your critics have entirely missed the import of your piece and its underlying analysis. I could review many of the subsidiary points they raise, but that seems unimportant compared to the two larger points that they don’t mention. It seems to me that the most important implications of “Urban Legend” are these:

1) The entire narrative of the 2004 election is built on the foundation of the exit polls. There is virtually no other real-time source of data on who voted how, why, and where. Indeed, as the critics of the use of exit polls for fraud detection have pointed out on many occasions, this voter survey is precisely what the exit polls are “intended” to provide, and why they are funded by the consortium of media outlets, the NEP. The Charlie Cook reference in your piece was typical. The Exits provided the sum total of the data behind his analysis of the election. Unfortunately, the data he relied on was “implausible” and thus his “analysis” was equally so. Neither was Cook the only one to trip over that anomaly. Ruy Teixeira also noticed the same “implausibility” within days of the election. Unfortunately, so committed was Teixeira to the impossibility of widespread election fraud, that he assumed that there was disconnect between urban data as the NEP defined “urban” and county data, with the observation that, “urban doesn’t mean urban and rural doesn’t mean rural”. Teixeira promised a detailed county analysis to reconcile the differences. Of course, no such “reconciliation” was forthcoming. My guess is that Teixeira, like Cook, underestimated the magnitude of the “reconciliation” which would be required and also underestimated the final turnout of the 2004 election which only further widened that gap. AlterNet.Com [107]

So what does this mean? It means at a minimum that either one must try to support the indications of the Exit Polls that the Bush winning margin in 2004 came in the Urban centers, implausible as that seems, or one must craft a new narrative of the 2004 presidential election. Believe it or not, the former option is not nearly as difficult as the latter. Your critics have missed what it means to simply declare that “the Exit Polls must have been wrong”. With that dismissal, much of the supporting evidence for how Bush “won” in 2004 disappears as well. Consider the following:

If the Bush winning margin did not come in the cities, where did it come from? If the urban vote as reported by the Exits is incorrect, then the remainder of the Exit Poll narrative must also be incorrect. It is true that the big city vote underlines the anomaly but take a look at the three-category demographic (Urban, Suburban, and Rural) and you get a slightly more muted version of the same story. If the cities don’t hold Bush’s winning margin, then that clearly means that it must have come from somewhere else. While the erosion of the Bush rural margin is significant, reversing it is not enough. We must also “offset” the loss of Bush’s urban margin in the suburbs and we must do this while constantly living under the overhang of an 18% increase in turnout (which clearly favored Kerry). The result is that the Exit Polls must not only be “wrong” in the cities, they must also be “wrong” across the board and this to a significant degree. In truth, the degree of this “wrongness” must increase as we go from city to countryside because, as we have seen, the Exit Polls weight the Bush urban margin into existence. In fact, the weightings decrease significantly as we move from more to less urban territory, and this has been previously presented as an indication of the rural accuracy of the Exit Polls in comparison to the tallied vote count. How do we now reverse that? At the very least, this begs for a serious investigation as you called for.

Yet, the story gets worse. The election narrative starts with the vote count but it doesn’t end there. Certainly the accepted narrative of the election, universally reported by the major news outlets, of “values voters”, “security moms”, and the like, all derived from the Exit Polls and all the products of “weighting”, become much less compelling if the overall narrative is undermined. But, this part of the accepted narrative is also the more trivial. There are some much more important implications here. It is not simply that the election narrative based on your unlikely “Urban Legend” is wrong by itself. It also undermines the use of that story to refute competing narratives which were unceremoniously rejected at the time of the election itself. Consider this:

”In a stunning admission, an elections manager for NBC News said national news organizations overestimated President George W. Bush's support among Latino voters, downwardly revising its estimated support for President Bush to 40 percent from 44 percent among Hispanics, and increasing challenger John Kerry's support among Hispanics to 58 percent from 53 percent. The revision doubles Kerry's margin of victory among Hispanic voters from 9 to 18 percent. Ana Maria Arumi, the NBC elections manager also revised NBC's estimate for Hispanic support for Bush in Texas, revising a reported 18-point lead for Bush to a 2-point win for Kerry among Hispanics, a remarkable 20-point turnaround from figures reported on election night.

"Latino presidential partisan preferences did not change significantly from four years ago," said WCVI's president, Antonio Gonzalez, in his presentation before the National Association of Hispanic Journalists…

"”But I repeat, NBC has set an example for network poll integrity by taking a giant step away from the Edison International/Mitofsky election results, and toward WCVI's findings. For example, today NBC stated that 70% of its respondents came from non-urban areas and 30% from urban areas, while acknowledging that 50% of Latino voters come from urban areas. This admission could explain the difference in their results and WCVI's. They under-represented Latino urban voters (who are more likely to vote democratic) and over-represented Latino non-urban votes (who are more likely to vote republican). We hope the other networks follow suit with more adjustments in their findings," Gonzalez concluded. HispanicBusiness.Com [108]

According to its exit poll survey, the Institute [109] found that Latino voters supported democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over President George W. Bush by a margin of 65.4% to 33%.”

The problem with the story above is that the real implication of such a sampling error among Hispanics was not considered. According to the “official” narrative, the shift of Hispanic voters toward parity was one of the most important pillars of the Bush “victory” in 2004. From “Urban Legend”, we know that this problem was most likely a weighting problem and not a sampling problem per se. But, the issue is not confined simply to Hispanic voters. Another pillar of the victory was a small but significant shift among black voters away from Kerry, universally reported as an artifact of the Republican use of political or religious “wedge issues” in the election. Perhaps one of the most important facts revealed in the “Urban Legend”, however, was that the Exit Polls reported a 40% increase in the black vote overall in comparison to 2000, but, simultaneously, virtually no increase in the black big city vote. We thus have widespread examples of exit poll responders appearing where they are not: black and Hispanic voters, with more conservative and Republican tendencies popping up in the suburbs, and a mass of urban GOP whites materializing in the cities. But… if these things didn’t happen, how could Bush possibly “win”?

The inverse of this is equally striking. The suggestion from the Exit Poll anomalies, above, is that 2004 was actually a rerun of the 2000 election with 16 to 18% greater turnout. In fact, you also saw that the pattern of both the weighted and unweighted Exit Polls for 2000 and the unweighted Polls for 2004 are remarkably similar. But if this was true, how is it possible for Bush not to lose?

Did the Exit Polls really pick up “ghost voters” in the cities and thus expose widespread election fraud? Who knows? There are actually some states in which the Bush urban margin improves through a process similar to the one implied, by “Urban Legend”. Yet, it is more likely that the Exit Polls picked up an anomaly in the larger election and the attempt to reconcile this anomaly creates the “ghosts”. It is also possible that something completely different occurred which actually gave the election to Bush, but nothing in such an outcome is possible without overturning the Exit Polls in their entirety and creating not just a new narrative for the election itself but also explaining the massive variation of the Polls themselves. To attempt to take any other position is fundamentally dishonest and genuinely “faith-based”.

2) I have already run on too long but, while point #1 above explains the extrinsic implications of “Urban Legend”, there are some intrinsic implications as well. In the spring of 2005, Edison/Mitofsky, the polling organization responsible for the 2004 exit polls, released their analysis of the exit poll discrepancy. Instead of blaming precinct selection or methodology, the polling organization made a spirited defense of both. The alternative explanation was that a breakdown had occurred in the sampling of voters in what Mitofsky claimed were accurately chosen precincts. Since that time, numerous panels representing the statistical establishment have convened and, each time, have supported Mitofsky’s original conclusions. Explanations of various presumed sampling problems, “within precinct errors”, “shy voters” and the like, have been numerous and tiresome. Because of “Urban Legend”, it also seems that these were entirely irrelevant. How is it that the august scholars and expert panels missed the most fundamental anomaly of the urban vote? This isn’t just missing the forest for the trees. This is more like missing the forest fire for the toadstools. I will go into this in some depth in the future if you have an interest.

Stay safe…

Yours,

Anaxarchos

Note to Anaxarchos: I have an interest. Mike

Greenpeace [110]

Link: "Scoop" Independent News [111]

© 2004-06 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps
With Permission [112]

Making the World Safe

For Voting Machine Vendors

Michael Collins [113]
Scoop Independent News [114]
Washington D.C.

At a New Jersey town meeting this July, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said of his bill, House Resolution 811 [115], “It’s not my bill anymore.”

Why shouldn’t the world be safe for vendors? Microsoft in particular? After all, they pay the bills. Just let them have whatever they want and let the rest of us be thankful we’ve got jobs. This is the prevailing philosophy in Washington, DC, your capitol and the supposed heart of modern democracy.

House Resolution 811 (“The Holt Bill”) is coming up for a vote this week, word has it. The questions are stark. What will our Congress be voting for? Whose interests are represented in the final mark up of this legislation?

Voting in the United States is hardly inspirational. In fact, it’s become down right depressing for both those who follow it closely or those who keep their distance due to the dreadful outcomes in terms of legislative performance.

Let’s look at the close up. But first an acknowledgment. It’s hard arguing with those who say they wouldn’t let us vote if it made a difference because it hasn’t. It’s been eight months since the new Congress was seated and where are we? We’re still hip deep in Iraq and the Senate has done nothing to prevent the president from starting his next project [116], a military attack on Iran [117]. We have no solutions to universal health insurance. and the rebuilding of New Orleans has been paid for but not begun. What a record! No wonder so many people don’t bother to vote.

For those of us who do vote, what is on the line with H.R. 811, the Holt Bill?

The Vendor Protection Act: Microsoft Uber Alles

A cardinal principal of almost all factions of the election integrity movement has been open computer source code for voting machines. Open source code is defined [118] as, “…source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions.” The basis for computerized voting machine software and methods could be examined by any citizen. As a result, it would be much easier to examine those nail biting elections we have so often or simply check on the integrity of any election, no matter how close. For the technically informed, this is one of the key elements required for transparent and fair elections where computerized voting (e-voting) is in place.

Advocates argue that open source computer code in voting machines will give greater access to understand how the machines operate. Quite simply, open source code will make it easier to assure that the votes cast are those counted. Not only will it be easier to check on any private vendor’s voting machine operations, with open source, this inspection will take place on an even playing field.

That was the original idea behind H.R. 811. The 2003 version of Holt’s bill was very clear. It stated:

No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software.

The bill, as introduced in 2006 was just as clear:

…source code, object code, executable representation, and ballot programming files [shall be made] available for inspection promptly upon request to any person.

The current version of Holt’s bill up for vote this week backs off of the public right to inspect voting machine software, open source code, in a big way and lets vendors keep secret the software and methods that determine your elections. Let me put it another way, you don’t get to see how the voting machines work that elect the officials who govern you – ever!

Washington to Citizens: Drop Dead

Citizens of the United States of America still believe that the government is a servant, hence the designation public servants for politicians and government officials. The idea wasn’t for them to serve themselves or private interests, like voting machine vendors. They’re supposed to serve us!

Here’s the new Holt Bill language:

an accredited laboratory that inspects voting machines shall hold the technology in escrow (read hold in secret). The laboratory (a private company, likely) can disclose technology and information to another person, if and only if that person or entity is a government agency responsible for voting, a party to litigation over an election or an academic studying elections. H.R. 811 [119]

What happened to disclosure of software and methods upon request of any person?

The Washington Two Step

Here we go again. We elect people to make our laws more open and transparent in order to know what is being done by those whose job it is to serve us. What do they do? They take the most fundamental right that we have, voting – electing our representatives – and they make it secret. Sure, a government agency can look at the software that counts the votes, the agency run by the politicians elected by the machines that need inspection. That will do a lot of good won’t it? Oh, and if you have the six or seven figures required to bring a law suit, you might be able to look at source code. Finally, as if to show that they‘re not as anti-intellectual as they seem, the bill says academics can look at the source code and other software and methods. That will do a lot of good, years from now …. maybe.

Nancy Tobi of Democracy for New Hampshire wondered how this all happened. The word from Capitol Hill [120] was “take up your concerns with Microsoft and others in the proprietary software industry.”

It’s Official – Voting is Now a Rigged Game Run by the Government

Why not just change the name from elections to voting lotto? Except in this lotto game, the contestants are the very same people who make up the rules, pick the winners, and hand out the cash. It’s all so elegant and logical:

Politicians administer elections that determine whether or not they keep their jobs. They expect us to believe that they’ll catch each other when there’s any cheating going on and that they’ll report it to us right away. But we’re not allowed to see how the game works, how the equipment operates, or who does what behind the scenes.

Can any of you imagine how Mr. Trump would respond to any casino machine vendor who said, “Look buddy, it’s our software, our machine, and our game – mind your own business.” The words are (correct me if I’m wrong), “You’re fired!”

Long term researcher and activist Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite has supported the Holt Bill in its various forms since 2003. This is no longer the case. Theisen outlined her objections to the current Holt Bill clearly on June 11, 2007 [121]. I recommend a review of this brief but comprehensive editorial. She pulled her support because the current bill leaves some ballots uncounted; endorses secret vote counting and secret voting software; allows some wireless communication to slip through the cracks; and perpetuates the Election Assistance (sic) Commission, appointed solely by the president.

But I’ve saved the most ironic and outrageous aspect of all of this for last. If you’re still reading, check out these articles by voting issues author Michael Richardson. He did a comprehensive series of articles on the laboratories that will have the honor of holding tight the computer software, source code that determines the outcome of our elections.

Here they are, the laboratories who will store voting source code software; the vote taking and vote counting software that elects our representatives:

Banned Lab Certifies Nearly 70% of US voting machine 15 Jan 2007 [122]

State Elections Directors approved test labs rejected by National Institute of Standards and Testing 19 Jan 2007 [123]

CIBER Voting Machine Test Lab Failures is 'Old News' Known by Top Election Officials for Years [124] 02 Feb 2007 [125]

U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair, Donetta Davidson, Knew About Problems of Voting Machine Test Labs But Kept Quiet 20 Feb 2007 [126]

This is not quite as outrageous as giving the president the ability to start a war with Iran, but its damn close. Great legislating Congress! We knew you had it in you.

ENDS

Disclosure: I’m an advocate for an immediate return to hand counted paper ballots. However, since my view has not prevailed, I’m more than willing to discuss and critique improvements in any system in use.

Permission to reprint in part or in whole with a link to this article in “Scoop” and attribution of authorship.

In addition to being a huge political event, the activity surrounding the Holt Bill, H.R. 811, is highly symbolic,.  The symbolism is that of diversion and denial.   Holt is the apotheosis of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).  That nihilistic effort was supposed to take care of the problems of Florida in 2000.  Unfortunately, Congress missed the point.  Instead of dealing with the 57,000 voters wrongfully removed [129] from the state of Florida’s registration records (50% minority voters) and the 100,000 plus “spoiled” ballots in Florida which were spoiled along racial lines [130] (predominantly black precincts), HAVA served up the new voter suppression and disenfranchisement through its emphasis on voting machines and centralized registration databases.

This is important to understand.  Congress passed a bill that gave us lousy voting machines run by Republican companies and an emphasis on state based centralized voter registration, the same type of databases used by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush to remove the 57,000 voters from the rolls in 2000.  It did nothing about spoiled ballots in minority precincts, other than provide a new vehicle for spoilage, electronic voting machines.  HAVA also ignored the potential for disenfranchisement via state based voter registration databases.   What could they have been thinking?  One wonders.  But, they weren’t thinking very well.

HAVA is the Somnambulist controlled by Dr. Caligari.  The Holt Bill is the magic elixir that keeps the Somnambulist from ever awakening from his dangerous and mindless sleepwalking journey that devastates the community.  Quite an accomplishment!

I’m not questioning Holt’s motives.  He introduced bills on voter intimidation and misleading election practices in the 109^th Congress and he’s heading up the election contest brought by candidate Christine Jennings in Florida’s 13^th congressional district.  I fully expect his considerable intellect will not be able to tolerate that obvious miscarriage of justice [131]. 

Nevertheless, we need to wonder what kind of input Holt’s getting to produce such a flawed bill.  It’s not all right to perpetuate electronic voting.  At the very least, touch screens should be tossed in the nearest recycle bin immediately, if not sooner.  It’s not all right to have election systems so complex that we need experts [132] to decipher the election results.  There will always be hired guns on one side or the other who make the case leading to endless controversy, litigation, and public distrust.

Can’t the Congressional faction get over it?  They don’t get to control and manipulate with abandon using complexity and magic shows which they think continue to confuse and dazzle the public.  People are well aware that electronic voting is a joke [133] perpetuated by special interests; the interests who take but do not give and promise but never deliver.  Congress needs to provide a suitable election approach that speaks to the peoples’ need to know and understand.  Instead, we have an expertise in diversion that focuses us on the machines while we avoid the real issue, the issue that’s been with us since the Compromise of 1876 [134], the suppression and disenfranchisement of minority and poor voters. 

Compounding the diversion is outright denial.  It’s more than simply denying the real problem; that’s easy to see.  It’s a denial of the original 1960’s Civil and Voting Rights legislation.  In an excellent article in AlterNet [135], Steve Rosenfeld [136] points out the following:

As election integrity activists focus their attention on pressuring the House Committee on Administration to ban electronic voting machines when Congress reconvenes next week, the question of whether voters can individually sue -- known as a private cause of action -- has received scant public attention. But that legal right, which was a cornerstone of the federal Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, is not in the panel's bill, H.R. 811. Instead, the bill says citizens can sue under other preexisting law. 13 April 2007 [137]

Think about it.  What would our history look like had citizens been denied the right to sue to gain their civil and voting rights? 

In a previous article [138] on the subject, Rosenfeld criticized election integrity activists for focusing on the negatives of the Holt bill while ignoring its implications.  He suggests that H.R. 811 will effectively ban touch screens (DREs) and assure that optical scans with durable paper ballots are the standard.  Should Holt pass, I hope that he’s right.  He’s certainly a thorough analyst.    

However, I disagree.  It doesn’t matter if Holt passes.  The regulatory arm of the federal government for voting rights is the Department of Justice with U.S. Attorneys fired for political reasons and replaced by political operatives [139].  The name of the game is voter fraud [140], the sham election crime wave that produced a grand total of 24 convictions [141] between 2002 and 2005.  Those attorneys will not likely enforce much of anything that Holt offers, unless it’s advantageous to the White House game plan for 2008, perhaps the most important election in our nation’s history given the stakes [142].

The reality is simple. If the Holt bill passes, it will be enforced by Alberto Gonzales or his replacement aided by one of those famous presidential signing statements where the laws passed by Congress are changed with the stroke of an autopen.  And we’ll have voting machines, optical scan or touch screen, built, sold, and, in many cases, maintained by politicized corporations of a Republican kind.

Congress is doing a much better job on Iraq than it is on elections.  At least we’ve got people willing to stand up and say that the war is a disaster.  When will we get a major political figure to stand up and say that our election system is a disaster designed to maintain those in power in perpetuity; most often at the expense of the least powerful?

Until we have a thorough exposure of the various forms of election fraud, the situation will remain one where we pretend to vote and they pretend to get elected.

END

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