[Mb-civic] The Mourning after, exit polls reveal electrofraud, how Kerry blew it, more

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Friends--at the end of the 1st sad day after our sad and 
disappointing Tuesday, I send you this collection of reactions--one 
inspirational, one about the possibility that the election was stolen 
thru electronic voting fraud (I concur on this), a scathing critique of 
how Kerry ran his campaign, and an indictment of the American 
people in the eyes of the world.  All worth chewing on to help digest 
our disappointment.  But first a quote from the fabled union 
organizer Joe Hill, as he was taken to face a Utah firing squad in 
1915 after being framed on a false murder charge:
"Don't mourn....organize!"
--------
The Mourning After - Where Do We Go 
>From Here?
By Tom Ball
http://www.politicalstrategy.org/archives/000752.php
11/03/04
Good mourning all. I know it’s tough..and I can’t really claim to be 
taking it with total grace.
In fact I can’t tell you how much I just wanted to rip into so many 
things -- the BS polls, the blogsphere groupthink, ‘idiot’ voters, 
‘worthless’ members of ‘worthless’ demographics
on and on and on. 
In one fit of rage, I actually contemplated wiping out the archive of 
this site – at least the posts that suggested the Democrats were going 
to win. Anyone care to re-read “The Top 35 Trends that Point to a 
Kerry Victory”? I didn’t think so. Such things only remind me of my 
naivety.
How could we have been so wrong? Regardless of what happened in 
Ohio, Kerry still lost the national popular vote by 4 million votes.
My best answer points to a matter of nation-wide thought processes 
and framing. Simply put, many people don’t think like we do. They 
just don’t. We can present them with the facts, we can give them 
what we think are the most compelling arguments, and yet they just 
don’t get it. They simply see the world differently. Their priorities are 
different. Their fears are different. Their logic is different.
And this is where the real change must take place. We have to make 
them see things the way we see things. We have to convince them 
that our priorities should be their priorities. We have to persuade 
them that our fears are appropriately placed and that those are the 
true issues of dire concern. We have to convince them that our logical 
conclusions are those that also make the most sense to them.

The best - and perhaps only way we can achieve this is through 
FRAMING. The entire mindset of this nation must be reframed to fit 
with progressive values and the progressive agenda. Progressive 
values must be communicated and taught, inspiring the populace to 
identify with the progressive mind-frame.
There's more...
Of course, creating that frame is of little value if we are unable to 
communicate it to the electorate. We need a media infrastructure to 
infuse that frame into the nation’s thinking. On this issue, we have 
come a long way since Bush first took office. We now have Air 
America, Center for American Progress, The RockRidge Institute, the 
progressive websphere, and a host of progressive magazines. Other 
factors in our favor include George Soros, Michael Moore, Moveon, 
and Greg Palast.
I know it doesn’t sound like much next to Fox News, Right-wing talk 
radio, The Washington Times, The NY Post, AEI, The Heritage 
Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, and a host of 
conservative magazines.
But it’s a start
and it’s a Hell of lot more than we had not so long 
ago.
In any event, conservatives have the right idea and a decades-long 
jump on our efforts. They have schools, scholarships, grants and 
other ‘encouragements’ to develop conservative talent in all fields 
including politics and journalism. At every step and at every level 
there is always one eye on the promotion of their agenda. They feed 
off each other and promote one another to ever-higher levels of 
power. They‘ve invested billions in a ‘conservative infrastructure’, 
understanding that the long-term platform is the critical element to 
the sustained placement of their ideology into the American 
psychescape. 
We must do the same.
We must step up to the plate in order to help build a progressive 
infrastructure - something the right has been investing in for the 
past 40 years with the financial support of such right-wing sugar 
daddies as Coors, Scaife, Walton, Moon and Murdoch.
If we can put a billion dollars into advertising and GOTV, then we 
can certainly do the same with an investment in the progressive 
infrastructure, something that will have far longer lasting 
repercussions.
It’s almost ironic that the latest assault on right-wing thinking by the 
left is the “reality-based vs. faith-based” poke at the right’s journey 
into fantasyland. The fact is that, at least in terms of ideological 
domination, it is the right that understands and is willing to 
implement the necessary structures needed to ensure the viability of 
their agenda for decades to come. We should be so ‘reality-based’.
As for our part at PoliticalStrategy.org, we will be focusing on the 
aspect of framing -- framing the issues to help moderates and others 
identify with progressive values -- or, as George Lakoff would put it, 
we have to appeal to the ‘nurturing parent’ within all people. People 
vote their identity and they will only vote for Democrats if they 
identify with the Democrats. Right now that doesn’t seem to be the 
case.
The frame put forth by the Republicans -- particularly regarding the 
‘war on terror’ (their frame), ‘Gay Marriage’, ‘Tax Relief’ and others -- 
have completely overwhelmed the electorate’s judgment and 
identification with any other issue. And this comes despite this 
president having had the most horrific terrorist attack in the history 
of the world happen on his watch... with documented proof that he 
was not only aloof to the threat of terrorism prior to 911, but that he 
also squandered our global good will along with our nation’s financial 
and military resources on an unnecessary and arguable immoral war 
in its aftermath. 
It’s all about the framing.
It’s all about creating a frame that causes the average person to 
identify with progressive values.
It’s all about communicating that frame.
This will be our driving purpose. This is how we will make a 
difference.
The bottom line is that there is another four years of the George W. 
Bush administration. From here, we have to start planning, 
organizing, investing and building immediately. Fortunately, the 
grassroots opposition is on a much stronger footing than it was four 
years ago. 
It’s our responsibility to not only retake this nation from 
neoconservatives, but to also form a rock-solid foundation capable of 
maintaining that ideological, nation-wide supremacy ad infinitum.
Now, chin up. Chest out. Eyes forward
and let’s get moving!

----

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388
Exit polls and 'actual' results don't match
Paperless E-voting states show the greatest discrepancy
RAW STORY 
11/3/2004 
An analysis of the original AP exit polling, which showed Kerry with a tighter 
margin and leading in myriad states, raises serious questions about the authenticity of 
the popular vote in several key states, RAW STORY has learned.
Since the actual outcome of the votes have been called, AP has changed nearly all of 
their exit polling to tighten the margin. A reason has not been given.
The analysis, first conducted by a poster at the popular Democratic Underground, 
suggests possible voter fraud in states that do not have electronic voting receipts, and 
those that limit the media’s access to polls.
Two inquiries placed by RAW STORY with the media contact for the six-network 
exit polling consortium at NBC News has received no response.
The curious result comes after the head of Diebold, which produces much of the 
nation’s electronic voting machines, told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter 
that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next 
year.”
An exit poll involves asking someone after they walk out of the election booth who 
they voted for. While not a guide for proving results, it can be a mechanism for 
ensuring voting accuracy and flagging potential fraud. Exit polls were recently used 
in Venezuela to ensure the vote was accurate and legitimate.
Perhaps more importantly, while exit polling is unreliable, the odds of President 
Bush having gained an advantage from every exit poll in swing states is an extremely 
improbable coincidence.
In Florida, Bush led exit polling by CNN of more than 3 million voters by just 5355 
votes. Yet he led by 326,000 in the end result. This morning, CNN changed their exit 
polling to favor Bush, saying that had over-weighted African American voters.
In Wisconsin, where exit polls put Kerry up seven percent, Bush has a lead of one 
percent, an unexplained difference of eight percent. 
In New Mexico, Kerry led Bush by 3.8 percent, yet Bush leads Kerry by 3 percent in 
actual reported voting.
In Minnesota, where a new law sharply restricts reporters’ access to polls, Kerry led 
9.6 percent in exit polling. Actual voting counts found that Bush trailed by 5 percent, 
with a 5 percent discrepancy favoring Bush.
Ohio, which does have paper trail capability but does not mandate receipts, had exits 
showed Kerry and Bush in a dead heat; in the near-final results, Bush led by three 
percent.
Exit polls put Kerry up by 8 percent in Michigan; actual results show Bush trailing 
by just 3 percent.
Two states with mandated paper trails for electronic voting were within 0.1 percent 
margin of error.
New Hampshire, which has electronic voting but provides verified receipts, exit 
polling is within 0.1 percent of the actual vote. Kerry led by 3 percent in exit polling, 
and 2.9 percent in the actual vote.
Nevada, which also has electronic voting and mandated paper trails, had a variance 
of 0.1 percent as well. Kerry led the actual vote by 1.3 percent; the exit polls had him 
up by 1.2 percent.
Maine, the final state for which analysis of exit polling was conducted before the AP 
“resampled” their data, was in the Kerry column by 7.5 percent; the end result put 
Kerry up 8 percent, a variance of 0.5 percent. Maine has no electronic voting.
Kerry does not gain by any significant margin in actual voting in any state for which 
analysis has been conducted, RAW STORY found.
Exit polling accurately predicted the results in most states with very little error. 
Where there were discrepancies, they were significant in the +5 percent range, and 
always favored Bush.

-----

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-11/04ireland.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Why Kerry Lost November 04, 2004
By Doug Ireland

John Kerry has definitively lost the popular vote by some three and a half
million votes. That makes an all-out lawyers' war in Ohio devoid of moral
force (and I doubt that in the end there'll be one).

Kerry ran a tactical campaign, devoid of vision or explicable alternatives,
utterly lacking in message discipline, and riddled with misjudgments -- it
was one of the most incompetently run presidential campaigns by a 
Democrat in my lifetime.

Kerry's biggest blunder was his failure to focus like a laser on the economy
in the final weeks of the campaign, despite polls showing it was the number
one issue on voters' minds. The lethal character of Kerry's scatter-shot,
flailing, themeless campaign close can be clearly seen in the Ohio exit
polls. In the Buckeye State, 62% of the voters said the economy was "not
good" --but asked who they'd trust with the economy, they were evenly split
between Bush and Kerry, 48-48%. The national number on that question
actually favored Bush, who got 48% on the economy to Kerry's 46%.

By not focusing on the economy, even in a state that had lost 250,000 jobs
on Bush's watch Kerry couldn't make the case that he'd do better. Whatever
economic message (feeble though it may have been) which his campaign 
had was blown out of the water by Kerry's final-week harangues on the Iraqi
explosives issue (about which there was too much reportorial dispute in the
media to provide him a clean shot at Bush).

The Rove-Bush Republicans ran a brilliant, disciplined, and utterly base
campaign that used three principal issues to defeat the Democrats: Iraq,
Israel, and gays.

History will record that John Kerry lost the election on the day he voted the
Constitution-shredding blank check for Bush's war on Iraq. He was hobbled 
throughout the campaign by this vote, which shackled him to a me-too
posture that included endlessly repeated pledges to "stay the course" in
Iraq and "win" the occupation. Kerry could not, therefore, develop and
present a full-blown critique of Bush on Iraq, nor offer a genuine
alternative to him on it.

The non-existent Kerry "plan" (based on the hubris that he could con foreign
allies into sending their troops to bleed and die for the U.S. crimes at Abu
Ghraib) wasn't bought by the voters. Bush won by making the link between
Iraq and the war on terrorism -- the Big Lie which Kerry could not
effectively counter, because he'd bought into it at the beginning. And it
was on that endlessly hammered lie that Bush won the country on the Iraq
issue -- the exit polls Tuesday night showed that voters thought the Iraq
war was part of the war on terror by 52-44%.

There was a missed moment (one of many) in the campaign, right after the
devastating Senate report on the U.S. intelligence failure leading up to the
war, when Kerry could have done what his Senate colleague (and 
Intelligence
Committee ranking Democrat) Jay Rockefeller did then -- say, "If I'd known
then what I know now, I'd never had voted for the war." But the cautious and
spineless Kerry didn't have the intestinal fortitude or the inner conviction
necessary to break with his vote for war. It would probably have worked --
Americans like someone who can admit a mistake. But Kerry listened to his
overpriced, condohead campaign consultants, and instead hid behind his
medals.

The Rove-Bush decision to French-kiss Ariel Sharon was entirely an electoral
one, directly aimed at Florida. It worked. Bush thus was able to peel off
enough of the Jewish vote to reduce the Democratic majorities in Dade
County, Palm Beach and other enclaves necessary to overcome Bush, with 
his lock on the Hispanics and evangelicals. The president won Florida, and 
quite comfortably.

Finally, there was the decision to surf on the anti-gay backlash that first
surfaced in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the so-
called sodomy laws, and intensify it as soon as the Massachusetts Supreme
Court decided (as it was clear it would) that denying marriage equality to
gay people was a violation of fundamental civil rights. The tools to
scapegoat gays were the Federal Marriage Amendment and the 11 anti-gay 
state referenda.

The exit polls showed that 21 percent of voters said that "moral values" --
more than either Iraq or the economy -- was what determined their vote. This
is, after all, a country drowning in censorious, politicized religiosity.
Nowhere did this strategy work better than in Ohio, where the southern tier
is the cultural equivalent of a Deep South state, drowning in
religiously-inculcated homo-hate; and where traditionally Democratic working
class Catholic voters -- whom Kerry failed to bind to him with an economic
program that could arouse their passions -- were peeled off in sufficient
numbers to reduce Kerry's margins in the larger cities.

And the sweeping anti-gay referendum in Ohio -- which outlaws civil unions
or any more minor legal recognition of same-sex couples, as well as gay
marriage -- passed by 2-1. As it did in all the other ten states with
referenda, with the smallest margin of victory for the anti-gay measure in
Oregon (where it won by 14 points).

Undoubtedly, the Corporate Democrats and their liberal power-junkie
helpmates will decide that they lost the election because they didn't squirm
far enough to the right. Where is the institutional leadership -- or the
leader -- who could fight for a reorientation of the party toward a
populist, progressive, passionate commitment to social and economic justice
as a REAL alternative to reactionary Republicanism? Oh, Hillary Clinton, you
say? Don't make me laugh. But she'll undoubtedly be the Democrats' 
nominee
in 2008 -- which is why we can expect, not four more years of Republican
rule, but 12.

Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic, runs the blog
DIRELAND.

---

The Morning After	
By Justin Podur 
November 03, 2004 

The last time I spent a late night biting my nails watching an election, I was in 
Venezuela observing the referendum. Like the US elections of November 2, 
the outcome was important not only to the people who voted, but to the whole 
world. There were, however, some differences.

In Venezuela, the voting machines were the same in every polling station. 

In Venezuela, the voting machines had a redundancy: voters used a 
touchscreen to pick YES or NO. The touchscreen then produced a printed 
ballot, which the voter could check, before folding the ballot and putting it in 
the ballot box. The manual counts could then be checked against the 
computer voting system. A simple, difficult-to-defraud system. 

In Venezuela, the side with the most votes won. 

But tonight it looks like even if the United States had the simple, elegant 
voting system of "authoritarian" Venezuela rather than the bizarre labyrinth of 
the "democratic" Electoral College, George W Bush would still be the winner. 

It looks like even if the United States electoral system was capable of 
expressing the people's choice, the people would choose George W Bush. 

It looks like voters in a dozen states decided to ban gay marriage, by huge 
margins, deciding to ruin other people's lives with no benefit to themselves. 

That means that it is time to admit something. The greatest divide in the 
world today is not between the US elite and its people, or the US elite and the 
people of the world. It is between the US people and the rest of the world. 
The first time around, George W Bush was not elected. When the United 
States planted cluster bombs all over Afghanistan, disrupted the aid effort 
there, killed thousands of people, and occupied the country, it could be 
interpreted as the actions of a rogue group who had stolen the elections and 
used terrorism as a pretext to wage war. When the United States invaded 
Iraq, killing 100,000 at the latest count, it could be argued that no one had 
really asked the American people about it and that the American people had 
been lied to. When the United States kidnapped Haiti's president and 
installed a paramilitary dictatorship, it could be argued that these were the 
actions of an unelected group with contempt for democracy. 

With this election, all of those actions have been retroactively justified by the 
majority of the American people. 

The first time around the Bush people acted without a mandate. Today, the 
only constituency that could have stopped them has given them a mandate to 
go beyond what they have done. 

In recent years, elections in every country have created media noise that 
drowned out radical voices. They were contests between weak liberalism 
gutted of most of its progressive economic and social content against hard 
reaction that promised to use every term in office to erode the institutions of 
liberal government and culture. Presented with such a stark choice, 
potentially radical progressives don't have much time for radical arguments. 
The hole is too deep, the potential losses too great, to gamble on radicalism. 
It seems that the liberals fought very hard this time. Radicals tried to tell 
Americans that the world was full of other people who were being devastated 
by America's policies. Liberals tried to tell Americans that they were being 
deceived, bamboozled, swindled, and sacrificed so that a small elite could 
rule and plunder. The radicals are silenced, the liberals are routed, and the 
field is clear for the fundamentalists. Who is left but bin Laden? Your security 
is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No. Your security is in 
your own hands. And every state that doesn' play with our security has 
automatically guaranteed its own security.
When Bush made his response, talking about terrorism and unity and 
enemies and intimidation, one could dismiss it as a fundamentalist reply to a 
fundamentalist threat. When Kerry did his own posturing, calling the terrorists 
barbarians and saying he'd stop at nothing to kill them, it was, perhaps, just 
cheap electioneering. 
But today the American people have answered as well. They lined up behind 
their killer leaders when they could have rejected them. 
Two years ago, as the Afghan war was starting, before the Iraq war began, 
Pakistani American activist Zia Mian told an audience of Americans: 
"People now will not tolerate the United States behaving like the British and 
the French conquering countries and creating new colonies. The people of 
the Third World did not fight for independence for 200 years against the 
British and the French and the Dutch and the Belgians and every other little 
European country that thought it had the military and economic power to 
push brown and black and yellow people around because they had 
something that they wanted. Well, that period of history is past! The 
Vietnamese should have taught everybody this. You do not go and take over 
somebody else's country."
"There are two ways for George Bush and Washington to learn this lesson. 
One will be a slaughter in Iraq and then decades of violence, where there will 
be people who will step off the sidewalk when they see an American, 
because they are so afraid. Or Americans will realize this is not the world that 
they want. It is a choice between wars of conquest, wars of colonization, 
things of the past, or the future based on a common, shared respect for 
everyone."
Can it really be that Americans have decided that this is the world they 
want?	

----


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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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