votes, polls, and a new HTGBWET

So I was reading the rolling stone tonight when I came across this article. Read it and keep an eye out for Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio. His actions might be the single greatest travesty of any American in the modern millenium. Sure, Bush lied to put us in a war with a nation that had zero relation to Sept 11, but he, himself, has never gone out of his way to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Americans so that a state might be delivered to one party over another.

Vocab lesson of the day:

Disenfranchise: to deprive of voting rights.

That's right. In america there are very few holy grails. We like money. We like power. And we like the power to vote. Life is pretty good too.

A great deal of evidence exists to suggest that Mr. Blackwell may have openly stolen the vote from a minimum of 30,000 people in one day. That's nearly the population of Hutchinson. And those are only the votes that were openly disenfranchised in one fell swoop. We should not forget fear tactics employeed, disqualifications due to home address foul-ups, outright ballot stuffing, and some pretty wild other factors that managed to put Ohio (along w/ New Mexico and other states) on the map with such outstanding nations as the Republic of Georgia, where Eduard Shevardnadze was forced to step down due to vote tampering.

But don't take my word for it. Read the article, then try your hardest not to get depressed. This is not something we should get depressed about. This is something that should piss us off. And if you don't want to read the article, at least read this pleasant excerpt.

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. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.''

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

And, on a lighter note, HTGBWET rule #24: Babes are people too. That's it. Just remember that. As long as you remember that, you are the path to enlightenment.