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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November 26, 2000
Sunday, October 31, 2004, 05:06 PM
NYT Headline: "With Deadline Near, Florida Recount Grinds On".

How to reduce lawsuits while multiplying them:

"After bludgeoning Democrats in the court of public opinion for a week with accusations that they had tried to disqualify overseas military ballots, Republicans abruptly withdrew one suit over the ballots form a court of law today before filing four new ones."

They decided to file in each of several counties over the military (overseas) ballots. The dropped the suit in Leon County because it looked like the ruling might go against them; this suit would have covered all relevant counties in Florida.

Here's what the numbers looked like, after Broward County finished its recount:

Official Bush lead: 930
Broward County: gain of 567 for Gore
Palm Beach County: gain of 10 for Bush
Additional overseas ballots: gain of 45 for Bush
Miami-Dade "sample" recount: gain of 6 for Gore
Nassau County revision: gain of 52 for Bush

Grand total: Bush lead now cut down to 464 votes.

Demonstrators not only gathered at the reocunt sites but at Gore's Washington residence, in two camps, separated by police.

There was talk of reform of the system, yet again. Here are some of the proposals:

Eliminate same-day voter registration in Wisconsin, where there was evidence that aome college students voted twice/

In Illinois and New Jersey, where Gore won handily, Republican state legislators were going to introduce bills that would allocate electoral votes proportional to the popular vote.

In Connecticut, old lever machines would be replaced by electronic voting machines.

In Washington State, laws would be introduced to allow some absentee ballots to be counted before election day, and some form of Internet-based voting qould be allowed as well.

In Florida, there would be one statewide ballot. Oh well, there's always the next election.

In Florida, 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats from the Florida Legislature were assigned to look into "voting irregularities" in Florida. Which irregularities those were, depended on which party the committee memebr belonged to.

Also in Florida, we learned that the elections supervisor in Seminole County who let Republican Party workers correct thousands of absentee ballots, the two workers were left in the office unsupervised, for around 10 days. We also learn that the supervisor only knew the name of one of the workers. The other guy just showed up one day in tow of the person she knew; she never bothered to find out who he was.

An editorial is the Week In Review section was titled "Once Again, America Needs to Believe in Its Courts." It opened this way:

"At least no one will call the United States Supreme Court a banana jury. Not yet, anyway."

(Apparently some Bush aides described the Florida Supreme Court that way, off-camera.)

And it continued:

"So the United States Supreme Court's announcement promised, intentionally or not, to put the imprimatur of a sound, impartial institution on what would otherwise be a dubious victory for either candidate. But the court is also taking a risk, counting on the respect it commands to ward off the brush that has tarred every other institution in this battle."

Maybe it's good to outgrow beliefs that don't reflect the real world. Painful? Yes, but necessary before real change can begin.


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