wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "shempmcgurk" <shempmcgurk@>
> wrote:
> <snip>
> > Here's my problem with the RFK jr. piece...and why I stopped
> > reading it.
> >
> > The piece dealt with a problem that is widespread in the US:
there
> > is not one election taking place, as the piece citess, but
13,000
> > different ones. Each of those jurisdictions runs their own
> > election process with their own rules.
> >
> > THAT'S the problem...not that the Republicans bent the rules to
> > their favour, 'cause the Dem's do it when they can do it, too.
> >
> > So once I got to that part of the article I said to myself: why
> > read the rest when I know where it's going; this Democratic
> > partisan -- RFK jr.-- is going to make it seem as if the
> > Republicans are the bad guys and stole the election when the
> > problem is the system.
> >
> > Did RFK jr. cite the problems with Illinois and West Virginia
that
> > many felt were responsible for "stealing" the election for his
> > uncle in '60 when he ran against Nixon?
> >
> > Probably not.
> >
> > So, notwithstanding the very important issue of these 13,000
> > different elections, I'm not interested in reading what some
> > partisan had to say about it. I got the general gist of it and
> > bailed.
> >
> > Now, if I'm off base here and there was something ELSE in the
> > article of importance, share it with me, by all means.
>
> Did you get this far (4th and 5th paragraphs of
> the article)?
Yes, and those paragraphs are the ones I specifically was referring
to.
>
> Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting
system
> is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and
city
> officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,''
> says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and
Election
> Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty
elections.
> We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-
> sovereign counties and municipalities.''
>
> But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was
their
> decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John
> Kerry and benefited George Bush....
...and it was this last line that pretty much told me that the rest
of the article would be biased.
"Almost without exception". Out of 13,000 jurisdictions and "almost
without exception" they hurt Kerry and benefitted Bush? Please.
Perhaps the examples that RFK jr. was going to show indicated that
but to suggest such a one-sided bias is, simply, absurd.
If it's NOT absurd, then why bother reading more anyway? He's
pretty much told us what's going to be in the rest of the piece.
Let RFK jr. write about the '60 election first...THEN I'll consider
reading this one.
>
> Farther down the page:
>
> But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show
> implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit
> polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied
margins
> departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the
shift
> favored Bush....
>
> ...Ihe greatest disparities between exit polls and the official
vote
> count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush
> received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were
off
> by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where
Kerry
> dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate
to
> within three tenths of one percent....
>
> ''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of
data
> that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes
Freeman
> [a research methodology expert who says he "hates the
> Democrats"]. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground
states,
> higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states
with
> greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in
> states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All
these
> are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has
been
> utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.'
>
>
> In the rest of the article, RFK cites many specific
> instances of various types of irregularities (not
> just the exit poll discrepancies) in which the massive
> majority resulted in more votes for Bush and fewer for
> Gore.
>
> If it weren't for this glaring disparity, you could
> explain away the irregularities as business as usual
> with both parties tweaking a flawed, fragmented system
> to their own advantage. If this were the case, you
> would expect to see a roughly equal number of
> irregularities that helped each candidate.
>
Sorry, I just don't buy it.
Let a NON partisan -- someone other than the fanatical RFK jr. --
champion this cause and maybe I'll give it more credence.
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