One could take the idiot Freeper position I'm reading that the only explanation to this is that the evil liberal pollsters were lied to.

Great work. Straight-up flips exposed on the ballot issues. No wonder Diebold sent a press release about their successful election in Ohio.

Brad, in your original post, you stated: Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employeeing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

Ok, so half of the counties used them, and the other half didn't. Is there a website or some database that has the statistics on the voting results of each individual county? I think that if you were to compare the counties that had Diebold machines to the ones that didn't, you can get some pretty clear evidence that there was election fraud.

Also, that difference in the polls to the actual results is ridiculous. To get a 30% swing in the vote, you would have to change the votes of 3 out of every 10 people to vote in Ohio. Add the fact that the voting machines were in only half of the counties, thats 6 out of every 10 in those counties you would have to change (which is about everyone who voted yes on the initiatives.) That should mean that somehwere between 85% and 100% of the vote in the Diebold counties was no against the intiatives (assuming that the counties with the machines and without the machines had roughly the same total population.) Does anyone have that data?

I agree Nittany.. the districts need to be laid out to get a better image of what exactly happened..

But, given the poll's historic accuracy, and the dead-on for 1 (and 4 looked reasonable given the "undecided" and nature of the prop.. redistricting failed in CA too, even though voters would have had a vote on the new map.. seems redistricting a sore subject to all voters), I have a hard time believing 3 of the 5 were soooo far off.. It looks, at first glance, like fraud was pretty likely..

though, I too would like to see a breakdown of all districts to get a better grasp of what happened..

Also, saying "44 of 88 rolled out new" doesn't tell us how many actually had electronic voting.. we'd need to know that as well.. If 50% of the remaining 88 counties already had electronic voting, for example.. that would mean 75% of the vote was on electronic.. So, the breakout of counties with electronic versus without, and a total tally of counties/districts with electronic versus all paper (don't forget, we have the tablulators to think about too.. just because they don't have the diebold machine up front doesn't mean a large portion of the vote isn't being filtered through the tabulators.. the place of easiest hacking)

Nevermind, got the county-by-county voting results here : 2005 Ohio Election Results by County

Can someone give me a link that has a list of which counties were using electronic voting machines in Ohio?

"Holy Shit, Batman! They did it again!!!"

OK, I'm not really that surprised...

Perhaps someone can put in a call for Batman to solve "The Mystery of the Ohio Election Polls." It seems that hardly anyone else in American media gives a damn enough to investigate, so maybe a fictional crime-fighting hero could do the job...

Or maybe, to use the phrase Bernie Ellis of Tennessee uses (which he gets from a Native American Indian poem), "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Maybe it's time for us to be heros.

How can we help Ohio? For starters, get 'hold of your Congressfolk and tell 'em to do their jobs for once and support Voter Verified Paper Ballots (VVPB). There's a bill there right now that can't get a hearing in our Pub-controled Congress despite being introduced by a bunch of Dems, nearly a hundred, I think. It's called HB 550, and they need a dozen or so moderate Repubs to sign on in the House. If y'all know any, go get 'em. They are starting to be in a position to have to cover their own asses, and maybe can be persuaded. Even if you don't have such a rep, be sure to contact your rep and your media to support this bill.

Meanwhile, if your state hasn't ruled for VVPB, get 'hold of your local state reps and tell 'em the good news. And that is? "VVPB is already passed in a bunch of states, even such red states as Wyoming and Nebraska. If our state purchases new DREs (electronic computer vote machines), we may have bought a bunch of fo-thousan-dolluh boat anchors..."

Long term what we gonna do? We gonna get VVPB passed in states and nationally and then get busy staying ever-vigilent in guarding our votes.

Let's roll, y'all.

Savantster,

Thanks, I thought that 44 of 88 were using the machines, not 44 of 88 using new ones. That makes it a little easier to change the results, I guess.

Was exit polling done anywhere? I have never found the 5% exit poll discrepancy in 2004 to be a proof of fraud in and of itself. But the spread between the polls and the vote is amazing. If the exit polls were anywhere near that, something is badly amiss.

Nittany #7.. Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that more than 44 were actually using them, just pointing out that the statement was that 44 got new machines, seemingly for the first time. I'd like to know the total number of counties/districts (in percentage) that used electronic (and thereby hackable at some point) voting.. and what the votes were in those places versus what we saw on paper ballots..

Oh, and your link didn't seem to show (that I could find) the vote of yes/no by county, just how many voters turned out.. that doesn't help what we're looking at.. though, it could let us know (with more info) if too many votes were cast (common problem with these machines... or the opposite, large numbers of missing votes)..

easy explanation - people lie on polls, polls have crappy internals(adults .vs. voters .vs. regular voters & so on). If you had data that showed a large skew between polls with similar internals over a similar demographic space, then you'd have evidence. Without that level of rigor, all you have is rant.

Simply amazing how you dismiss polls on one hand, then use them to prove your point on another. Also, did you miss the bit where they said "this particular poll has been historically extremely accurate"? Getting into the "academia" of how polls might not always be reliable and how they have to be done 'properly' to have weight is, again, distraction.. And again, trolls won't win with that here.

Does everything always require an exhaustive display every time it's used? No, it doesn't... we'll take it at face value that this poll is typically conducted in a "valid" manner. If you want to discredit it, then YOU go through the trouble of PROVING it was done "in a questionable manner". Until then, you are just dismissing information, facts if you will, simply because you don't like them.. Kind of like your silly little hero Shrubby does. Closing your eyes doesn't make the truth go away, it just prevents you seeing it when it smashes in your face.

Are numbers available for the district or precinct level? Also, were there polls prior to the elction conducted statewide, or by county, and is raw data available for them?

#11: Dollface,

I am not using polls to prove my argument. When someone proffers "evidence" they bear the burden of establishing it's veracity. This is why nobody takes you or holocaust deniers seriously. I suppose you're not old enough to remember the Truman-Dewey polls. Oh yeah, "shrubby" is not my hero. Do you attempt to be insulting because you recognize the vapidity of your own arguments or because you're such an intellectual fascist that you can handle seeing the distinction between what's true and what you want to believe? Not very liberal of you.

It's another sign of intellectual fascism or failure to evolve beyond the 3rd grade that you call insistance on establishing the bonafides of a poll and adequate control data as a "distraction". It's called due diligence.

Have a SCOOTER PIE on me.

Castro is an ignorant troll, ignore the thing and it will blow away in the wind.

Speaking of odd results....

Voting all over the country mired in fraud and miscounts

Doug E.

I'm trying to imagine what the trolls would be saying if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine if a Republican measure were 30 points ahead in the polls, and lost.

We don't even need mathematics professors from Yale and Stanford to figure this one out. They cheated...again. It's really so easy...just program the tabulator in advance to flip blocks of votes, and SHAZAM! If someone demands to look at the source code, say PROPIETARY! And if eventually somebody can prove fraud, say HONEST MISTAKE (just like Iraq).

Bernadette is under suspicion, so Blackwell took over for her this time in claiming a "good" election.

In response to comment #1:

You forgot to be specific: Only Ohio issue #1, were the polls accurate. The rest of the Ohio issues, the pollsters polled too many "liberals"...only for issue #1 did the pollsters do their job correctly

(of course, I'm being sarcastic...this is what the MSM said about all the polls which showed Kerry won the election over Bush...now, doesn't that "excuse" by the MSM sound silly? It did back then, to US...)

If this isn't in the MSM, then the MSM hates democracy.

The polls which back Blackwell & the Ohio cesspool Republicans are correct...the rest of the polls were not done scientifically. And if you believe that, then you are an asshole.

Hey Bev Harris...doesn't this make you sick? Does it make the citizens of Ohio sick? What are they doing about this? This should be the #1 story in the MSM. I'll bet it wasn't even on the news. Am I write? Someone's going to have to tell me, because I stopped watching the news. I don't even believe that female bomber they caught is a real story. It may be...it may be not. It's sad that I even have to say that, but these are the same people who poo-poo'd the credible polls saying Kerry won the election, they are the same people who said there were WMD's, and they are now the same people who are 'probably' not covering these impossible results in Ohio.

I can't understand why SOME TV news channel doesn't start up and really cover the news. It would be #1, people would watch it the most. Doesn't even greed beat out the "controlled" media? The greed of being #1?

The fact that one of the polls matched the final count, rules out blaming faulty polling, doesn't it? Logically, they can't use the old "the pollsters were biased" propoganda because of this. Isn't that great, that one of them matched? This is a "perfect storm" of proof, because there were multiple issues, and one matched, and the rest were grossly out of whack. If it were one issue, such as Kerry vs. Bush, the "biased" propoganda cannot be disproved. But, isn't this the perfect scenario for proving fraud on electronic voting machines? How do they explain one matching accurately, and the rest being "off the charts" inaccurate? They can't say that the pollsters were biased for 4 of 5 polls. It was the same pollsters as the accurate issue, too!

One last thing, this is what I'm afraid of in the Casey vs. Santorum election. Casey may be ahead by 20+ points in the pre-election polls, but that's meaningless with electronic voting machines, and the fact that the MSM won't even do a story on it, if the polls say Casey won 60-40, and Santorum wins the "final count" 51-49, which it will be. It's always 51-49, when a Republican wins the "final count", and was getting crushed in the pre-election polls. (see Ohio: Schmidt results...see Kerry vs. Bush) The Democrats stink, for doing nothing about this. The Green Party and Libertarian party had to do all the dirty work post-election. All we saw was Kerry-Edwards conceding in record time, and then we saw their asses-and-elbows, as they were running away from us.

Big Dan: It really doesn't matter too much about the electronic voting in Pennsylvania. They will do still do fraud, but just like in Virginia it can be overcome regardless of who's doing the fraud.

Plus Pennsylvania is AUDITABLE because of paper. Ohio is not. That's why Ohio and many of these are THE problem, and need to be used as examples for the rest of the country when it comes to corruption.....

Only criminal convictions will end this bullshit in Ohio, that's for certain. But other states ought to take a good look at the mess, while this horrible voting fraud is decided and persecuted. You listening New Mexico!??? Oh yes I thought so!

And in the meantime, everyone who wins a race despite the fraud needs to START THE BILLS TO REMOVE ALL THE MACHINES IMMEDIATELY no questions asked. The governors who won their states, even the republican governors need to be removing the machines immediately and seeking the immediate outfitting of a paper ballot to every single ELECTION period....and those who are cheated need to take their disputes to court and force the system to overturn. This is how you get democracy back, rip it back out of the neoliberal/neocons hands.

Doug E.

This is the kind of news that we have to spread around ourselves because the mainstream media is very [how shall we say it this time?] unlikely to get out in front of a story like this ... so if you have a printer, please help spread the word:

Ohio '05 Election Results Staggeringly Impossible by Brad Friedman

Knowledge Is Power! Pass It On!!

Another poll had a very similar percentage of Yes votes for Issue 5 as the Columbus Dispatch's poll (42.5% of likely voters as opposed to the Dispatch's 41%). Issue Four had a much higher percentage of Yes votes than Dispatch's poll (43.5% of likely voters as opposed to the Dispatch's 31%).

So, while this poll appears to support the Dispatch's poll results on Issue 5, it also shows that may have been some significant voter trend away from support of Issue 4. Or one of the polls got it wrong. In which case, perhaps the swing was even greater.

The Bliss Institute surveyed 1,076 registered voters between Sept. 28 and Oct. 20. (see The Cleveleand Plain Dealer here for more complete info)

The election corrupters may have gotten too bold and outsmarted themselves on this one. If people like "Castro" weren't so willing to put forward any argument they can, regardless of whether it fits the facts, in order to protect their precious, unalterable beliefs and biases, they would be able to see that their "reasoning" simply doesn't hold up on this one.

Amazingly, the pre-election poll, in this case, can be readily shown to have a solid CONTROL against the common argument that they have "crappy internals" or that the Republicans lied to the evil liberal pollsters and similar bogus arguments. The fact that issue #1 showed such a close match between the poll and the vote tabulation would mean that all of these Republicans (and anyone else who "lied" to the "liberal pollsters") somehow got together and agreed to tell the truth of how they planned to vote ONLY ON ONE SPECIFIC POLL ISSUE, that is, #1, but to lie on all the other issues. There is virtually NO statistical possibility that they would, by chance, have virtually all lied on the one, identical issue OR that virtually ALL of them, coincidentally, held fast to how they told the pollsters they would vote on issue #1 but changed their minds on all the other issues. The accuracy of the poll on issue #1 establishes a degree of internal validity that makes many of the common arguments against the poll untenable (unless you are a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist).

For Steve: You're absolutely right that the accuracy of the polls relative to the vote on Proposition # 1 proves their efficacy, i.e., it's absurd to assume Republicans deliberately lied to pollsters on the other four questions but told the truth about # 1.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media put no stock in discrepancies between polls and tabulated votes.
They'd rather trust Diebold, Kenneth Blackwell, and Bernadette Noe than accept the findings of college professors with doctorates in mathematics who told us a year ago that the odds against a 5-1/2% difference occurring randomly between the exit polls (Kerry ahead by 3%) and the tabulated vote (Bush ahead by 2-1/2%) were 959,000 to 1.

I don't know the answer to the problem. Arguing with trolls certainly won't help, because trolls don't have the intelligence to understand the laws of probabilities. The New York Times' editors are smart enough, but they're inhibited by corporate considerations (exposing the 2004 election would cause a stockholder/advertiser backlash). Our friends on Capitol Hill are restrained by a fear of appearing partisan ("both sides cheated, so let's just move on from here" yada yada yada).

The results from Ohio last week demonstrate clearly that the G.O.P. isn't going to stop cheating.
They aren't intimidated by bloggers or college professors. Only if enough people realize, "Hey, they'll be stealing elections in the year 2040 at this rate!" will the problem be fixed in the near future.

Perhaps everyone should note that on Issue #1, Republican Governor Taft (a co-hort of Blackwell)was in full support, therefore ensuring that it passed!

In response to the attacks on the Free Press article:

I've found on more than one blog that people are lying about Free Press reporting. I suspect this is a deliberate campaign by the Republican Party to end discussion on the obvious electronic theft of votes in Ohio.

Fact: The Dispatch has always used a mailed-in ballot poll. It was completed on Thursday Nov. 3, just prior to Election Day. The Dispatch poll is so accurate at least two academic studies have been published in Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ). The first paper documents that the Dispatch mail-in poll between 1980-1984 was far more accurate than telephone polling. The study showed the Dispatch error rate at only 1.6 percentage points versus phone error rates of 5%. A companion study published in POQ in 2000 dealt specifically with the question of statewide referenda. A quote from the study: "The average error for the Dispatch forecast of these referenda was 5.4 percentage points, compared to 7.2 percentage points for the telephone surveys."

The academic study concluded that the Dispatch's mail survey outperformed telephone surveys for both referenda and candidate's races.

The fact that the Dispatch was nearly 30 points off in predicting the "YES" vote on Issue 3, which reduced campaign contributions from $10,000 to $2,000, has nothing to do has nothing to do with their widely-respected polling technique. Their astonishingly inaccurate poll can best be explained by the introduction of brand new private partisan company-controlled e-voting machines using secret source code in 44 Ohio counties and the chaos that resulted from untrained election workers being totally reliant on Diebold technicians for results.

People need to look at the recent AP story that describes the massive breakdown at the polling places and the Board of Elections wherever these new e-voting machines were introduced.

Bob Fitrakis,
Free Press Editor
Ph.D. Political Science

Mr. Fitrakis,

It's an honor to have you stop by. Please try to reach out to as many people as you can. I'll certainly pass the word. You're word up, brother!

I feel shame because I live in Ohio...

There must be something more than just touchscreen problem. Its a wider republican conspiracy. Its very surprising that Issues 2, 3, 4 and 5 lost in overwhelmingly democratic counties like Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Summit (Akron) and both of them use punch card system. In fact all the issues lost in all Ohio counties.

The astounding thing is the Columbus Dispatch won't stand by its polling, because to do so would peel the veneer off of the whole paperless electronic voting charade. I want to know who are the people on this blog and others that are trying to undermine what Bob has pointed out. It looks to me like a GOP blog hit squad, not unlike what Jan Frel wrote about in Alternet a year ago, when covering how GOP bloggers targeted several big newspaper editorial pages in key Midwestern states. http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21379/

There is another possibility. The G.O.P couldn't have made it this far through stupidity, and making such huge changes in the election results would be really stupid--they know they'd get caught, and their party would be over.

A better tactic for them would be to corrupt the poll. When the press catches wind of this discrepancy between poll and election result, they might start an investigation. A well-played leak would then reveal serious (and true) problems with the poll. Having shown how polls can be dead wrong, the issue would be settled in the public's eye, and the G.O.P would be free to go on corrupting the vote without fear of another investigation.

This chain of events would be a devastating setback for any future attempts to reveal election fraud. Any person screaming "fraud" in the future, under any set of circumstances, would be reminded how they were wrong before. You think it's hard to get election fraud reporting in the press now? Imagine how hard it will be after it's been "disproved" once.

The beauty of this plan would be that they could corrupt the election results and the poll at the same time, as long as the poll problems are leaked to the press first.

This tactic has worked before. Remember the "60-Minutes 2" reporting on Bush's military record? That memo was easily shown to be a forgery, and this put the question of Bush's military record to rest forever, as far as press coverage is concernced.

So yes, please investigate. But don't go assuming the poll hasn't been messed with. And if this is a trap, don't fall into it.

Thank you for your post Mr. Fitrakis. Perhaps you could provide a link to the 2 academic studies you mentioned?

I have some questions that I hope these studies addressed: The average error of the Dispatch's poll is very low. But what is the standard deviation of the errors? (This would help to refute the classic "My heads in the freezer. My feet are in the oven. On average, I'm quite comfortable" argument.) How much of an "outlier" are these results? Has the poll ever been this wrong before? If not, what was the previous maximum error?

The answers to these questions are probably very powerful ammunition in our fight to restore integrity to the electoral process.

The "soothsayer" (that would be me) has been saying for over a year now that voting has essentially been reduced to a placebo.

Now the soothsayer says - Unless and until a Paper ballot is used to VERIFY EVERY RESULT in an E-voting machine, you can kiss democracy bye-bye.
We've all been had and it won't change unless and UNTIL the above comes to pass.

So sayteth the soothsayer

Factoid: I cross-referenced some census data, in Meigs County, with a median income of a hair over $27,000 and nearly 20% living below the poverty line, 79% of them apparently voted that they should be able to make $10,000 contributions to political campaigns.

Doug E: I'm going by memory, but I believe kerry won Pa. by 9% in the polls, but 3% in the "final count". That's how the Bush got a lot of the popular vote...by stealing from landslides that Kerry won. I also think there were several investigations into e-voting machines in Pa. after the election.

That's a lot of popular votes, if you chip away at a few Kerry landslide states. Kerry won Pa. by a landslide, in reality.

I still don't respect that Kerry conceded so quickly, and also said nothing about fraud.

I live in Lorain County in Ohio (just west of Cleveland) and we used the Diebold Electronic voting machines for the first time last Tuesday.

This is how my counties results played out. On the surface it seems consistant with the state wide results:

Issue 1 56% yes 44% no
Issue 2 43% yes 57% no
Issue 3 39% yes 61% no
Issue 4 36% yes 64% no
Issue 5 35% yes 65% no

The opponents of RON (largely conservative) won by using the so far succesful Rovian tactics of tying all of these issues together, and by continuously telling voters via campaign commercials that a "no" vote was a vote against corruption.

The issues themselves were wordy and not well understood by the "common voter". To make matters worse a few County Democratic Party Chairmen, actually campaigned for the anti-Ron group. Democrats coming out against Democrat inspired reform issues.

I think we progressives in Ohio hurt ourselves here, but that doesn't mean that I don't have my doubts

The University of Akron also did pre-election polling that pointed to likely victories for some of the election reform measures. Here's the link to their release on the results: http://www.uakron.edu/ne...articles/uamain_1351.php

The poll Rosenfield (#38) has provide the link to is the same one that I mentioned earlier in #22. (The Bliss Institute is part of the University of Akron.)

According to the Director of the Bliss Institute “These findings must be viewed with caution,” Green says, “because voter turnout in off-year elections is so difficult to predict. The last two weeks of the campaign could well make the difference for all these measures.”

But are they THAT difficult to predict? Perhaps, But if so, why is anyone wasting money on these polls?

COMMENT #10 [link]
...castro said on 11/14/2005 @ 2:06pm PT...

"easy explanation - people lie on polls, polls have crappy internals(adults .vs. voters .vs. regular voters & so on). If you had data that showed a large skew between polls with similar internals over a similar demographic space, then you'd have evidence. Without that level of rigor, all you have is rant. "

Real rigor involves acknowleding that any evidence for a crime can be challenged and should be. That simple fact does not ipso facto dismiss such evidence.

I wouldn't be all surprised that this has something to do with the new computer voting instituted across the state for this election. I read numbers in the Akron Beacon Journal that about 4 million people voted but only about 3.5 million people voted on the issues, that about half a million missing votes.

Focus on the ones that matter. FreePress is being very sloppy, by suggesting Issue 1 is unremarkable while Issue 4 is remarkable. The exact same thing happend in both, that the all the undecideds voted no. This is very poor reporting on FreePress' part. I am sorry to say.

I don't think I'm missing anything here, but if I am by all means someone sort me out.

The discrepancies in Issues 1 and 4 are different than 2, 3, and 5. No one needed to change their vote for Issues 1 and 4.

If this was a poll of people who were going to vote (meaning they were asked if they were going to vote and they said "yes I plan to vote"), 1 and 4 are not impossible. What is possible is that the undecideds were thinking of voting no, and then did so during the vote. I don't think that it is uncommon to have undecideds vote no in a vote like this. They were just voting against any change. Someone should check that out of course, but I think that's what you'll find, that it isn't uncommon.

I really think the focus should be on 2, 3, and 5.

And FreePress needs to run a major correction. Sheesh.

14% missing votes is perhaps not surprsing considering that the Dispatch's poll showed undecided as high as 25% on these issues.

When I remain undecided on a ballot initiative on election day, I usually don't vote on it. Occasionally I cast a "No" vote for no change to the status quo. I think this is the pattern for most voters.

"Doug Eldritch said on 11/14/2005 @ 7:43pm PT...

...

And in the meantime, everyone who wins a race despite the fraud needs to START THE BILLS TO REMOVE ALL THE MACHINES IMMEDIATELY no questions asked.
"

Well said. We need a winner to stand up for elections.

Check out Mystery Pollster's comentary on the Columbus Dispatch poll. Most interesting is that he made these comments before the vote was known. I wonder how he'll explain the massive discrepancy.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/

Some excerpts:

Why would a seemingly old-fashioned mail-in poll do so well? My post last year reviewed some of the reasons provide in the POQ piece:

The average error for the Dispatch forecasts of these referenda was 5.4 percentage points, compared to 7.2 percentage points for the telephone surveys. Thus, it appears that although referenda were more difficult to forecast than candidate races using either method, the mail surveys still outperformed the telephone surveys when doing so. However, in one of the six referenda examined (Victim right in 1994), the telephone survey was much more accurate than the mail poll, so the superiority of the mail polls is not universal [emphasis added, pp. 231-232].

As always, the questions on the Dispatch poll used the exact language that appears on the Ohio ballot, although in this case the pollsters presumably provided respondents with a "don't know" option (they certainly reported answer for "don't know" that varied from 9% to 25%). Those who, like MP, are interested in which methodologies will perform best should once again keep a close eye on Ohio.

GODAMMIT!!!...Are there no Democratic HACKERS out there in O..HA..HA..HO?

Holy Cow. This sucks.

I just happened to come here. Didn't see this mentioned on any other blogs. Nothing on Public Radio, of course.

Don't watch TV.

I think the whole IDEA of politics needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up ,, the pol