No, not the Mets. 🙂
Fox News never ceases to amaze me. I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, and believe it’s an honest mistake until I see otherwise, but… damn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn7qCzV5sNM.
Screenshot:
I saw this on another blog while reading through bloglines, and now can’t remember which. Sorry for not giving credit.
Update: OK, I can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re doing this intentionally. They did it several other times, including this one:
Note: For anyone confused here, Foley is a Republican, not a Democrat.
Well, my site is back anyway. What I initially thought was a hacked server is looking like it was actually a dying hard drive. I had backups of everything on it except my site, for some reason. I was lucky to be able to restore things. I need a better backup solution.
When the site went down last week, I was trying to make my first post in two weeks. Now it’s been three, and I have a lot more to write about, but as usual, no motivation to do so. Go read some other poker blogs for great write-ups of the 2006 WPBT Summer Classic. I’ll have one up eventually, I hope.
For now, I’m just happy to have this damn place up and running again.
Almost forgot: The House passed a ban on internet gambling yesterday. The Senate hopefully will not. Go join the Poker Player’s Alliance if you care about the issue. I did.
Florida law says a tie may be settled by “lots.” Assistant County Attorney Ken Tinkler told the candidates that could include drawing straws, choosing cards or a coin flip. Coin tosses have been popular in settling other ties around the state.
But Whitaker and Castro had talked.
“I think we’d prefer cards,” said Whitaker, an attorney.
“Ace high?” asked Castro, a Dillards sales associate.
Whitaker agreed.
Update:
More cards: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Nov-04-Thu-2004/news/25170219.html
Cointoss: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/12/national2033EST0732.DTL
This time in Indiana: Glitch causes Franklin Co. recount
Kerry’s votes went to Badnarik. It’s only a few hundred votes, and clearly won’t change the outcome for Indiana, but it’s yet another error in favor of Bush by the electronic voting machines.
Can anyone point me to any errors they made that took votes away from Bush or gave votes to Kerry? I haven’t seen any.
Update: It did change the outcome of one local election. This is proof enough that the system needs to be fixed. It should also be noted that the machine in question was sold to the state by Fidlar Election Co., but was manufactured by (guess who?!) Diebold.
It seems the third party candidates want recounts more than the Democrats. At least, they can request them without looking crazier than they already do, anyway.
Ralph Nader has requested recounts in New Hampshire and Ohio, and wants to do so in Florida. Cobb and Badnarik are working to make sure a recount happens in Ohio.
This is all good news. I don’t expect this will change the outcome of the election at all, but I have no doubt it will reveal massive errors or fraud with the new electronic voting machines. We need auditable machines with paper trails, or we just can’t trust the voting results in the future.
Republicans seem to want to move the other way. There were huge problems with Florida with hanging chads and dimpled chads in recounting the ballots in 2000, so what did they do? They eliminated that problem by using machines that you just can’t do that sort of recount with. Brilliant. Now, they want to do away with http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html. (Sorry, that link is to a highly biased website; I can’t get at the article it links to, and can’t find this anywhere else. Thanks, mainstream media!)
After early exit polls in Tuesday’s election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.
In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. “I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession — look at the precincts and the turnout, see who’s turning out to vote,” Mr. Gillespie said. “Don’t build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be.”
Exit polls aren’t perfect, but they’re one of the few remaining tools we have to ensure a fair voting process. If they’re broken, we need to fix them, not get rid of them. Either way, if we keep eliminating the possibility of a recount, the exit polls become more important than ever.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has resigned!
Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.”
Woohoo! We’re safe from terror! Ashcroft’s job is done. He is no longer needed. Do we still need Bush?
So, all the extra votes in Florida may be due to absentee ballots not being on those pages initially. It certainly is possible, though the pages had a nice big “Y” in both the Absentee and Final Report columns. They’ve since been updated with new numbers, but no other changes. (See here.)
In Ohio, though, absentee ballots cannot quite account for this. There weren’t just more votes than turnout… there were more votes than registered voters. In some cases, by huge margins. See here. All the data on that page comes directly from Cuyahoga county’s website. I’ve again made a copy, in case the original changes. Copy is here. Some of these number might be explainable by people voting in the wrong precinct. However, I don’t think 8296 extra votes in a precinct with 558 registered voters (Woodmere Village) can be shrugged off easily. Similarly, 8062 extra votes in a precinct with 760 registered voters (Highland Hills Village) can’t be an accident.
All in all, there were 97,489 extra votes in Cuyahoga county. That’s just one county in the state. I’ll see if I can find data on the rest of the state.
Update: Several things I’ve read on this say it might be absentee ballots here, too. Apparently, they might be counted in all the precincts in a ward (or all the wards in a precinct? or precincts in a municipality? I don’t know) until it’s sorted out where they all belong, or something like that. I don’t know what to believe. Several of the precincts have counts that have the exact same numbers of extra votes, though. link
Do I believe that any of my recent posts about election results will get anything changed in this election? Not at all. It would be nice, but it’s just not going to happen. That doesn’t mean I should just stop. There were clearly problems with vote counting this year, and I have no idea who the country really voted for. By pointing this out, and getting people to look at them, hopefully we can fix them for future elections.
I can accept the fact that John Kerry wasn’t a great candidate. I can accept the fact that George Bush won reelection, if that is the case. What I cannot accept is that I don’t trust the vote count results. Honestly, I don’t think any of these things I’ve mentioned are enough to push Kerry over the top. Bush won the national popular vote by a huge margin, and both Florida and Ohio by significant amounts, probably more than can be accounted for with fraud.
What I want to accomplish with all this is to clean up the election system to the point where I will trust it in 2008 (or 2006, really). We need to get for-profit companies out of the business of making voting machines, or at the very least make all of their systems auditable with a paper trail. It doesn’t look good when the CEO of Diebold says he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” It doesn’t look good when the exit polls (yeah, yeah) are so far off. It doesn’t look good when there are hundreds of thousands of extra votes, and lots of reports of missing votes. It doesn’t look good when vote counts are walled off from observers under the “threat of terrorism” excuse.
I have no delusion that I can fix the problem for this year. I have no strong evidence that, even if fixed, Bush wouldn’t still be the President-elect. I want to help restore my faith in our election process for the future. It’s going to take a lot of work to do that.
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