Crunch, crunch, crunch
Friday, November 5, 2004, 08:19 PM
That's the sound of the number-crunchers gathering over at Black Box Voting (see link on righthand sidebar), getting ready to do a full audit of anything they get back from hundreds or perhaps thousands of FOIA requests. What do they want? To be able to check the electronic voting machines and see how well they did, instead of just... assuming they worked fine.

And a fine thing, too, given the extra 3800 or so votes cast for Bush in a precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, even though only 638 votes were cast in total. They were using
Danaher (Guardian) ELECTronic 1242 machines there. Wonder what went wrong? Good thing some sharp-eyed reader noticed the error in returns posted on their web site. I think the data used to be here but the pdf files have been removed already. Hmmm...

I've signed up to help with the bbv audit; more news as it becomes available.


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Lies, white lies...
Thursday, November 4, 2004, 12:38 PM
Let's look at the traditional left-leaning voters. According to Counterpunch, we have this breakdown:

23% of gays voted for Bush; 36% of union members voted for Bush; 42% of folks earning between $15k and $30k voted for Bush; 11% of African-Americans voted for Bush, and 44% of Latinos voted for Bush.

Not huge percentages, I suppose, but it must have added up. Contrast this with some other percentages:

61% of white men voted for Bush, and 54% of white women.

Vote by income is striking; I'm going to put the whole list up here because it's so informative.


Income Bush Kerry
------- ------ -----
Under $15,000 (8%) 36% 63%
$15-30,000 (15%) 42% 57%
$30-50,000 (22%) 49% 50%
$50-75,000 (23%) 56% 43%
$75-100,000 (14%) 55% 45%
$100-150,000 (11%) 57% 42%
$150-200,000 (4%) 58% 42%
$200,000 or More (3%) 63% 35%


More of this at ZNet.

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Ohio Stats
Thursday, November 4, 2004, 07:41 AM
Some analyses of theOhio turnout the night of the election and the next morning relied on a supposed increase in turnout for Bush's base in the counties that had voted for him before, a big enough increase to outweigh any agins Kerry might have made over the turnout for Gore in those counties four years ago.

I decided to run my own check of this. You can download the results and see for yourself. I looked at only fifteen or so counties of the nearly 90 available, taking the first fifteen in alphabetical order that were listed in both the 2000 and 2004 tables from CNN.

The margin of victory is bigger this year in almost all of those counties, whether they were won by Kerry or by Bush. Let this be a lesson to politicians who want to make concessions to the center: no compromises!

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No News
Wednesday, November 3, 2004, 07:28 PM
That's right, I'm not going to read any news for awhile. It's too damn depressing.

How can there be *that many* evangelicals Christians in this country who hate gays, subjugate women, and shoot first and let God sort 'em out? How??

Hell, the one lesson everyone else ought to take form this (besides the lesson of moving to some other country), is that "moral values" has nothing to do with these folks' agenda. *Nothing*. Power and control over other folks, with a healthy dose of fear, on the other hand, has everything to do with it.

A little harsh? Well, you caught me on a bad day.


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Live from the War Room
Monday, November 1, 2004, 07:28 PM
I'm typing this live from one of the national call centers for the Election Protection Coalition. We have over 50 workstations and attorneys coming in to rotate shifts every few hours. Our center covers about 7 states, California not among them. OTOH we get Colorado where things have been quite active.

I haven't had time to check the news, but when I got up this morning to head to SF, I heard that Ohio was spinning out of control. I guess all poll challengers have been barred from being at the polls. The Sixth Circuit was expected to weigh in on it, but if they're gonna do so they'd better hurry up! I've lost track of how many lawsuits on that issue are in the works there.

Also, I heard that Rehnquist was overly optimistic about returning to work today and so stayed home.

I'll try to get a real update in later when I get out of this zoo.


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