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INCREDIBLE_BUSH

                                             February 20, 2007
                                             July     15, 2007
Kevin Drum, "Politcal Animal",
Washington Monthly
November 11, 2004:

   "Finally, you have to posit a way in which
   the Bush campaign was able to rig the              TOO_MANY_ACTORS
   results in every single battleground
   state. Let's face it: it's a lot easier to
   think of ways in which the exit polls
   might be screwed up than to think up
   credible ways in which the Bushies could
   have pulled that off."

   [ref]


I still don't understand this...

The proposed scenario is that the electronic
machines were rigged by a handful of players
working inside the two major electronic
voting machine companies, which have

    (a) known-Republican sympathies, and

    (b) connections to each other (two
    brothers are high up in the management
    chain of ES&S and Diebold).

I could be convinced that this scenario is wrong,
by why is it so hard for people to grasp it?

Trying to explain why exit polls might
be way off strikes me as much harder...

The "reluctant Bush respondant" theory (the
idea that Bush voters don't like talking to        LAST_EXIT_FOR_DEMOCRACY
pollsters) has many, many problems...


   Let's say that there really is
   some odd socio-psychological
   phenomena that explains away
   the patterns in the exit-poll
   discrepancies.

   You wouldn't have             But when new methods
   expected that phenomena       of undetected cheating
   to exist if you hadn't        become possible,              (July 15, 2007)
   seen the discrepancies        wouldn't you expect
   first, would you?             that at some point         Quasi-scientific
                                 someone would take         approach:
                                 advantage of them?
                                                            Pretend that you
                                                            had been making
            On the one hand, a strange,                     hypotheses in
            totally unexpected phenomena,                   advance of looking
            on the other hand, a suggestion                 at the evidence.
            that the inevitable might have
            happened sooner rather than later.




                  If you take an innocent-until-proven-guilty
                  attitude toward these machines,
                  then there *is no check* on the system.

                  Every discrepancy can be shrugged
                  off by peculiar quirks of crowd
                  behavior, and if so we will just
                  go along believing whatever we
                  want to believe.


                  This is no way to run a Democracy.


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