Part 4 of Exclusive Series with Richard Hayes Phillips, Author of Witness to a Crime: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election
By Joan Brunwasser, Voting Integrity Editor, OpEdNews

June 24, 2008

My fascination with this author is but a sidebar to the real story – how this important volume came this close to not getting published at all. And how, once again, the mainstream media has failed to do its traditional duty to the American people, to educate and inform. A free press is a critical element in maintaining a healthy democracy. Our founding fathers knew it. That's why the press enjoyed unique constitutional protection. One of the major functions of an emerging postal service was to distribute a myriad of newspapers and gazettes to American citizens. Thomas Jefferson wrote: "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter." He and his cronies would be pulling out their hair over how the press has been so emasculated and co-opted, becoming little more than a mouthpiece for governmental policy and Big Business.

What happened to Phillips is hardly an isolated example. University of Pennsylvania's Steven Freeman experienced this phenomenon regarding his findings on Election Night, which ultimately became Was the 2004 presidential election stolen? exit polls, election fraud, and the official count. Mark Crispin Miller faced a similar media blackout with Fooled Again. The book got no reviews in any magazines or national newspapers, nor would any network radio or TV program have him on to talk about it--not even those on NPR or PBS, although he had appeared on many of their national shows, and more than once. (WHYY-FM, the NPR affiliate in Philadelphia, even refused to run paid ads for Fooled Again.)

Ten-second take away:
It's important that we keep this in mind every time we hear or read something. The story behind the story, what isn't heard, what's left out, tells as much about the state of the corporate media as anything else. Make efforts to become an informed consumer. And don't let Phillips' book fall into obscurity. Buy a copy for yourself and one for your local library. Read it and pass it around. We can get the word out; we just have to get a bit more creative and stop depending on traditional ways of doing it. Do your part. Order a copy of Phillips's book, which is not available in any bookstore*.

~

"How do you feel about the mainstream media not covering the story?" asked a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, referring to evidence of fraud and suppression in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. It was a bit late to ask this question. It was sixty-six days after the election. The Ohio electors had already been challenged, unsuccessfully, the day before, in the United States Congress.

"Every day we gave you leads which, if properly investigated, could have led to a Pulitzer Prize," I replied. Four times during the interview my words made her cry. And still, none of my words made the paper.

Why the silence of the mainstream media? Was it because John Kerry conceded too soon? Or because they don't like to run stories that have already broken on the internet? Or because they are controlled by the corporations that own them, or the government that regulates them?

A rigged presidential election is a major story, possibly the crime of the century. Already we had proof of voter suppression in Cleveland and Toledo; withholding of voting machines in Columbus; vote switching in Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown; and high percentages of uncounted ballots in Democratic strongholds in most of the major cities of Ohio. And we knew about the twelve southwestern counties where Kerry was awarded fewer votes than down-ticket candidates, coincident with false tabulation in Miami County, ballot alteration in Clermont County, and a phony "homeland security" lockdown in Warren County.

During this period I had been interviewed five times, always by affiliates of the Pacifica radio network. No mainstream radio station, and no television or newspaper reporter, had done so. The New York Times and the Washington Post editorialized, without looking at the evidence, that there was no fraud in the Ohio election. Those who questioned the official results were viewed as spreadsheet-wielding internet conspiracy theorists.

Note that the "mainstream" media, calling themselves "experts," were dealing in conjecture, speculating that there was no fraud, while dismissing as "theorists" those who actually examined the evidence. Indeed, if not for the internet, the story might never have gotten out.

It was an unsolicited e-mail from a mountaintop in Pennsylvania that first brought to my attention the rigged election results from Cleveland. The Columbus Free Press, an internet journal, was the first to publish my works; and this brought them to the attention of Pacifica radio. My works began appearing on websites as far away as New Zealand. At last count, a search of my name turned up 126,000 web pages. The very article you are reading was first published by OpEdNews, on the internet.

I seem to be well known and highly regarded among those who get their news from the internet. Those who rely upon television and newspapers do not even know my name.

The internet represents free speech with no quality control. Any computer-savvy web designer can create a website that looks thoroughly professional from an artistic viewpoint, and then post unsubstantiated or scurrilous information and call it "news." Even so, I find this a fair price to pay for the last bastion of free speech. The alternative would be yet another news outlet under government or corporate control.

Readers are well advised to view with skepticism anything on the internet. Blogs, rants, and phony "reporting" create so much noise that it difficult for reliable voices to be heard. Four things gave my work traction: I wrote in plain English; I used simple arithmetic; I presented the raw data; and, most importantly, I gave my real name, my address, and my phone number. I do not need to hide behind a user ID or an e-mail handle.

I stand by my work. And I could defend my work, and elaborate upon it, if the "mainstream" media would only give me the opportunity. I can take on all challengers because my knowledge of what happened in Ohio is far deeper than what is set forth in my book.

The "mainstream" media makes much of "the public's right to know." They chant this mantra in defense of even the most inappropriate invasions of privacy. But only the "alternative" media recognizes the public's right to know that our elections are rigged.

To this day, the most comprehensive and well-documented article on the stolen 2004 election in Ohio, written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was published in Rolling Stone magazine. My own voice has been heard on National Public Radio, but only once, when we filed in federal court to protect the ballots from destruction. The story made the Yahoo home page, and some of the major newspapers. That is as close as we have gotten to the mainstream.

~

To order a copy of Richard Hayes Phillips's book, use this link.
*Update: This book is now available in bookstores in Canton, Ithaca, and Columbus, only. They are, sadly, the exceptions that prove the rule.

Series Archives:

Part One: Why I was able to become an Election Fraud Investigator
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Exclusive-with-Richard-Hay-by-Joan-Brunwasser-080612-229.html

Part Two: Being Multi-faceted in a Two-Dimensional Society
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Exclusive-with-Richard-Hay-by-Joan-Brunwasser-080617-109.html

Part Three: The Broken Contract Lies Upon My Office Floor
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Broken-Contract-Lies-U-by-Joan-Brunwasser-080620-432.html

Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., has been the leading investigator of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. His long-awaited book, "Witness to a Crime: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election," was recently published.

This book is the document of record, based upon actual forensic evidence. Phillips examined 126,000 ballots, 127 poll books, 141 voter signature books, and other records, enabling him to prove that the election was rigged.

The book is hard bound, cloth cover, with 448 pages of text and tables, eight pages of color photographs, and a CD containing 1200 images of evidence from Ohio. Phillips' work was relied upon by John Conyers in challenging the Ohio electors, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in writing his article for Rolling Stone magazine, and Judge Algenon Marbley in issuing his court order protecting the ballots from destruction. Kennedy has called it "irrefutable evidence."

For more information, or to purchase the book, click: http://www.witnesstoacrime.com

To contact the author: richardhayesphillips@yahoo.com

May 5, 2008
By Joan Brunwasser

Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, edited by Mark Crispin Miller

Warning: This book will make you uncomfortable. Mark Crispin Miller pulls no punches. He's happy to spread the blame around – politicians, the Religious Right, corporate interests, election officials, the corporate media, voting machine vendors, fanatics for whom victory is all that matters – all (and more) come in for legitimate criticism. The biggest villains of the piece are those in the GOP who seek nothing less than a permanent power grab and have a grand plan in place to pull it off. Miller described the plan in his previous book:

And right now, as we dawdle, Bush's party and the movement that it serves are busily advancing measures to consolidate their "victory" by making fair elections more unlikely…The point of all such stealthy actions is to rein in, control and thus in essence terminate American democracy – a plan that we believers in American democracy can foil, but only if we acknowledge that that plan is in the works, and that it made great progress in 2004. (Fooled Again, The Real Case for Electoral Reform, p. xvii)

Miller has been diagnosing our electoral ills longer than almost anyone. Over the last few years, he has been continually fine-tuning his message – with Fooled Again, then its expanded and updated version, and now Loser Take All. Miller is meticulous; his analysis is clear, taking the time to connect the dots in a way that is hard to refute by weaving together the chapters of investigative journalists, election experts, and activists. Two highlights from a stellar group: David Moore's "Because Jeb said so: What really happened on Election Night in Florida" starts the collection off with a bang. And in "Election 2004: The Urban Legend," Michael Collins persuasively dismantles the traditional GOP explanation for all their gains. The book bristles with statistics, graphs, and charts, but is not too technical for the average, concerned citizen.

The clock is ticking. Our heel-dragging – borne of naïveté, misplaced idealism, or denial – makes us enablers in our own doom. As Jonathan Simon and Bruce O'Dell explain in "Landslide Denied," the truth endangers the way we see ourselves, both as individuals and as a nation. Ironically, in our never-ending war on terror, we have less to fear from outsiders than we do from the enemies within. Like a flesh-eating disease that consumes its host, the anti-democratic forces are a poison quietly and stealthily diffusing throughout the body politic.

Nancy Tobi has written extensively about HAVA (the Help America Vote Act of 2002) and the profoundly negative effect it has had on the way our elections are run. The EAC, the misnamed Election Assistance Commission, was created by HAVA to be a national clearinghouse for election information. It has failed miserably at that task. In addition, its stated goal is to create an entirely opaque system without any remnant of paper to get in the way, as Tobi puts it, "Where one computer will check (verify) another. In the EAC paperless verifiable voting scheme, the voter is so incidental as to completely disappear..."

She continues,

The destabilizing effect on America's mechanism of democracy has been substantial…corporate voting company employees have become part of the election process, assisting poll workers in the use of voting equipment, administering "fixes" when the equipment malfunctions, and keeping vote data and election results in "black box" secret vaults, far away from public scrutiny. A Republican House attorney involved in the drafting of HAVA once remarked to me that "They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on." (p. 218)

According to a Zogby poll taken in mid-August 2006, 92% of Americans believe that the public should have the right to observe vote counting and obtain information about the election process. We are heading in what the public recognizes as exactly the wrong direction.

Steven Rosenfeld writes about how updated Jim Crow pervades our elections. Rosenfeld points to a stratagem that allows a minority party to overcome serious demographic disadvantage and hold onto power by pre-emptively keeping voters from the polls. Voter intimidation and vote suppression have been enhanced by both HAVA and the wonders of modern technology. The state of Florida succeeded in wresting the presidency away from Al Gore in 2000 by developing a database of supposed felons that intentionally disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal, largely African-American voters. That technique has been expanded and used to great effect in every election since then. HAVA required that all voter registration databases be computerized. This election will be the first time that the system will be in place nationwide. And this is just one of the many disenfranchisement wild cards that can affect the outcome in November.

In the meantime, party loyalists, whose fierce allegiance seems to be the sole criterion for their hiring, have infiltrated every corner of our government and public life. It goes far beyond Katrina's Michael "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!" Brown. The firings of not-political-enough Republican US attorneys who refused to fabricate voter fraud and/or other cases against Democrats right before elections, and the gutting of careerists at the Department of Justice are just two examples. Don't think I'm crying "wolf." Here's what Joseph Rich, former chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil rights division (1999 -2005), has to say on the subject. In "Bush's long history of tilting Justice", Rich writes,

[The DOJ's voting section] has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

So, the critical question arises: cui bono (who benefits) from all this?

Looking toward the 2008 election, it appears the purges – as well as the new voter ID laws, restrictions on registration drives, and stricter rules for counting provisional ballots – could be a new and legal way to accomplish a longstanding GOP electoral tactic: thinning the ranks of likely Democratic voters." (Rosenfeld, p. 238)

The stench of fascism is in the air. The combination of intimidation, the stifling of dissent, the politicization of everything, and the clamping down on whistleblowers rather than their targets, all work together to send a message as clearly as any broken window, or graffitied wall. Give up, you can't win, we're too strong, we will crush you. All they want from us is our acquiescence. Just remaining silent is enough.

If you are still skeptical, you need look no farther than, "The Ordeal of Don Siegelman." Larissa Alexandrova writes about how the former Alabama governor was railroaded in such a travesty of justice that a bi-partisan group of 52 former states attorney generals have called for an investigation. What happened to Siegelman was horrible but, apparently, not unique. I recommend reading this short but thorough article in its entirety to get the scope of the problem. "Break-ins plague targets of US Attorneys"

Here's a taste,

In two states [Alabama and Mississippi] where US attorneys are already under fire for serious allegations of political prosecutions, seven people associated with three federal cases have experienced 10 suspicious incidents including break-ins and arson.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively.

The picture is grim. We can't shoot the messenger; and even if we could, it wouldn't make the message go away. Hopefully, Miller's book will cause people to sit up and take notice. I hate it when people are lambasted for speaking out about our country. Discussion, debate, and dissent are the lifeblood of true democracy. That is a point too often glossed over or forgotten of late.

The Oregonian recently published the following letter by Oregon VRC Chair, Nancy Matela.

Please also see and hear the candidates for yourself. Click the image on the right for Part One of the recent Secretary of State Candidate Forum on Election Integrity! [6]

Walker has Integrity [7]
May 4, 2008

The Oregonian missed an important opportunity to advance election integrity in Oregon in overlooking Sen. Vicki Walker, D-Eugene, for secretary of state.

The Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is the leading election integrity activist organization in Oregon with grass-roots supporters statewide. We have observed that Walker has shown a genuine belief in the importance of election integrity and has demonstrated a superior, objective understanding of Oregon's election system. She is the one candidate to openly acknowledge that our election system, although very good, is tarnished by secret electronic counting processes and that the machine-tallied results are not verified.

She is also the one candidate who promises to address these problems when in office. Her track record in the state Legislature has proved that she does what's right rather than what's politically expedient.

NANCY MATELA
Chairwoman Oregon Voter Rights Coalition Southeast Portland

CONTACT: Judy Barnes 503-232-1911; jbarnes@hevanet.com

**** Press Event Saturday, May 3, 2008 ****

Who: Democratic Candidates for Secretary of State Kate Brown, Rick Metzger and Vicki Walker, Election Integrity Advocates and Portland area voters

When: Saturday, May 3, 2008 from 10 am – 1 pm

10 AM – 12 N: Election Integrity Forum with Democratic candidates for Secretary of State

12 N - 1 PM: Reception. Meet Candidates and Election Integrity Advocates

Where: First Unitarian Church at 1211 SW Main

** PORTLAND AREA VOTERS TO QUIZ CANDIDATES FOR SECRETARY OF STATE ON ELECTION INTEGRITY ISSUES **

[Portland, OR] As May 20th primary ballots hit mailboxes, Portland area voters and citizen activists will raise election integrity issues with Democratic candidates for Secretary of State. Contenders for what many call the “second most important elected office in Oregon” will be asked their views on issues including big money in elections, how to increase voter choice, and the reliability of corporate-owned ballot counting software and hardware. A reception for candidates will follow the forum, with booths by over a dozen election advocacy organizations that are already grappling with these issues.

Study after study reveals that Oregonians are concerned about the health of our democracy and the election process in particular.

“I’m tired of having to vote for the lesser of two evils”, said David Delk of the Alliance for Democracy. “People want real choice, they want elections that focus on issues and elected officials who do what we elect them to do”.

Recent revelations about electronic voting software and hardware being decertified in other states, and hostile takeover bids in the voting machine industry, only add to voter concerns.

“In Oregon our mail-in ballots are counted by optical scanners run with corporate-owned software so secret even the Secretary of State can’t see it. How can I be sure my vote is counted as cast? Am I just supposed to take it on faith?”, asked Linda Schmoldt, a member of First Unitarian’s Democracy Action Group.

Oregon’s next Secretary of State could play a vital role in making elections fairer, more transparent and more reliable, but Oregon’s democracy will only flourish so long as citizens do the work of keeping it healthy.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Hosted by: Democracy Action Group of Portland’s First Unitarian Church and Portland Chapter of Alliance for Democracy
For more information contact: Judy Barnes at 503-232-1911 or visit www.afd-pdx.org/SOS.htm

**** Excellent visuals: all three Democratic Secretary of State candidates, just in time for the mail-out of primary ballots; booths by over a dozen election advocacy groups; participants voting in a “mock” election, using an Instant Runoff ballot.

The Oregon Secretary of State is in charge of Oregon's elections, making this an extremely important position for citizens concerned about election integrity.

Sen. Kate Brown and Sen. Vicki Walker are the SOS candidates who responded to our Survey. Their responses are posted below. We invite readers to share their opinions about these responses by writing to info at OregonVRC dot org.

Senator Walker's response [12]

1. Do you feel any urgency that Oregon’s election system is not as secure as it should be? Do you believe that Oregon’s election results could be compromised (and potentially changed) by faulty, or hackable, software provided by private, for-profit vendors?

Senator Brown's response [13]

Senator Walker's response [14]

2. How would you, as Secretary of State, propose to oversee and verify the accuracy of the machine vote counting given the secrecy that prevents citizens and officials from actually observing the vote count?

Senator Brown's response [15]

Senator Walker's response [16]

3. Do you find it acceptable that Oregon election outcomes can have a 39% chance of being incorrect and placing the wrong person in office? If not, would you support election verification protocols that provide a 99% level of confidence that the votes cast by Oregonians are accurately reflected in the outcome?

Senator Brown's response [17]

Senator Walker's response [18]

4. Could development of an open-source election system be a Win-Win situation for Oregon, providing transparency to and producing greater confidence in Oregon’s elections while also contributing to the burgeoning local open-source industry, and lowering costs by removing for-profit corporations from our elections? As SOS, would you pursue open-source options for counting our votes?

Senator Brown's response [19]

Senator Walker's response [20]

5. What is Oregon’s current process for testing the election systems provided by corporate vendors? Do you feel it is sufficient? Would you conduct a “top to bottom” review of Oregon’s voting technology (including voter databases and tabulating software) if you become SOS?

Senator Brown's response [21]

January 30, 2008
By Mark Crispin Miller
Op Ed News: Click here for original article [23]

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak-and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn't there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America's first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race-and we can't win, because it's fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn't just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don't have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don't yet even know if the election was legitimate, they delegitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of "sore losers."

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

Interview with David Earnhardt, Director of Uncounted
BuzzFlash 1/28/2008

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election ... David Earnhardt

First of all, BuzzFlash wants to commend all those Americans who are working to ensure that every citizen can vote -- and that every vote is properly counted.

Since the debacle of the Florida vote in 2000, there has been a growing movement to ensure voting rights. It involves the unacceptable role of proprietary electronic voting machines (owned in large part by Republican affiliated corporations); the suppression of voting rights (think "Jim Crow" voter "identification cards"); and equal access to voting precincts, among other issues.

It's a complicated and long-term challenge to ensure that the legal right of "one person/one vote" is enforced -- and that a vote count accurately reflects the votes cast. Given the large number of issues involved, the voter advocacy community has, at times, disagreed about some of the potential solutions, particularly when it comes to electronic voting machines.

As for BuzzFlash, we believe that if there is not a count of paper ballots to audit any electronic total, then there is no possibility of ensuring an accurate vote count. We also believe that no private corporations should own any proprietary software that is not completely transparent. Unless one can count paper ballot "receipts," there is always room for monkey business. (In fact, having publicly owned electronic voting machines that produce printed ballots that can be reviewed and checked for accuracy by the voter allows for cross-matching totals to ensure a correct count. Remember that paper ballots alone can also be abused. That's how the term "stuffing the ballot box" came into being.)

All of this leads us into recommending Uncounted, an excellent, informative documentary about the broad range of voter integrity issues that confront us as a nation. Uncounted distills the most important problems confronting advocates for allowing every eligible voter to cast a ballot -- and then making sure that the ballots are accurately counted.

We were delighted to interview David Earnhardt, who produced, directed and wrote Uncounted.

BuzzFlash: We've seen your film, Uncounted, The New Math of American Elections. Your film is exceptional in how it presents a narrative about what is really quite a complex issue to follow. What motivated you to undertake a film like this on the voting issue, let alone distribute it on your own, show it around the country on your own?

David Earnhardt: For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election, and then, coupled that with, after the election was over and after Kerry conceded, watching the media just go away. From a mainstream media standpoint, there was no looking into many of the problems that had been observed on Election Day.

There was lots of great work going on on the Internet. There was great investigating going on in Ohio and New Mexico, from the legal standpoint, from the alternative journalistic standpoint. But in terms of the mainstream media, it did not exist. I was just naïve enough to be shocked. I just could not believe it. I thought we'd sort of fallen into a parallel universe.

And for me, like a lot of people, the 2004 election felt like a very important election. It felt like the stakes were very high. We closed down our office that day. Many of us wanted to go out and get involved, door to door, to encourage people to vote. My wife and I did that kind of thing for the first time. And I was struck by several interactions I had in a neighborhood that we were in.

It was a fairly low economic neighborhood. When I knocked on the door -- and this happened on three or four different occasions -- I would encourage people to get out and vote. The sentiment was something to the effect -- different forms of this - look, I'm not going to vote. This is not for me. This is not anything that has to do with me. They've already decided who's going to win. It's that kind of language. I'm saying, no, no, no, that's what they want you to do -- not go out and vote. You've got to get out there. You've got to. It was that kind of interaction.

I realized later that I was the naïve one. There was a certain truth in there that I was missing, and it upset me. I thought: my gosh, we really don't take this right very seriously. So I went to work. I went to work immediately and started studying everything I could. I decided, I'm going to find everything I can, and at least consider doing a documentary. Eventually I had enough material to where we could pull the trigger and say let's keep going. Let's do something on this. Let's try to get this issue out there.

By Steven Freeman, MIT
http://groups.google.com/group/ElectionIntegrity/web/faq-exit-polls

About Exit Polls

Why should we care about exit poll results? When properly conducted, exit polls should predict election results with a high degree of reliability. Unlike telephone opinion polls that ask people which candidate they intend to vote for several days before the election, exit polls are surveys of voters conducted after they have cast their votes at their polling places. In other words, rather than a prediction of a hypothetical future action, they constitute a record of an action that was just completed. Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections. The United States has funded exit polls in Eastern Europe to detect fraud. Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia.

Are exit polls data better than other polling data? Exit polls, properly conducted, can remove most sources of polling error. Unlike telephone polls, an exit poll will not be skewed by the fact that some groups of people tend not to be home in the evening or don’t own a landline telephone. Exit polls are not confounded by speculation about who will actually show up to vote, or by voters who decide to change their mind in the final moments. Rather, they identify the entire voting population in representative precincts and survey respondents immediately upon leaving the polling place about their votes. Moreover, exit polls can obtain very large samples in a cost-effective manner, thus providing even greater degrees of reliability.

The difference between conducting a pre-election telephone poll and conducting an Election Day exit poll is like the difference between predicting snowfall in a region several days in advance of a snowstorm and estimating the region’s overall snowfall based on observed measures taken at representative sites. In the first case, you’re forced to predict future performance on present indicators, to rely on ambiguous historical data, and to make many assumptions about what may happen. In the latter, you simply need to choose your representative sites well. So long as your methodology is good and you read your measures correctly, your results will be highly accurate.

How do exit polls work?

By Michael Collins / Scoop News
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0801/S00057.htm
1/8/2008

It's primary season. Why not start it off right in this most important election in our lives with a bogus election. 81% of the voting machines in NH are Diebold Optical Scans, purchased from a Mass. distributor. The votes are counted in Mass by another firm, in secret. Sorry, no verification. It's faith-based elections. Didn't this all get fixed? What an amazing series of non events we've had in election reform. Now we'll pay the price. Almost every primary will be characterized by secret vote counting. Some democracy, some primary. The citizens of the country deserve so much more than this cynicism. We are paying attention.

"1st in the Nation" with Corporate Controlled, Secret Vote Counting
By Nancy Tobi, Democracy for New Hampshire
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0801/S00057.htm

Introduction. The more things stay the same, the worse they smell
By Michael Collins - "Scoop" Independent News - Washington, D.C.

Tomorrow's New Hampshire primary represents a major turning point in the presidential primaries. We've got the rising star of Obama, the stunned Clinton camp, and the populist efforts of the fast moving Democrat, John Edwards, just off a 9% increase in the national polls. At this juncture, the Republican race is less compelling unless you happen to be John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Does Obama's highly favorable corporate media image stack up against reality? Is this the end of Hillary, or at least the beginning of the end? Can Edwards kick in the door with a strong showing and demand coverage? Will Ron Paul embarrass Giuliani by edging him out for fourth?

We'll never know for sure.

Why? It's been nearly eight years since the debacle of Florida and nearly six since the miracle Chambliss win against Cleland. Surely we have reliable, verifiable voting systems in place? It's been almost four years since the nationwide disaster of the 2004 election with irregularities still emerging.

Hasn't all this been fixed?