NEWS: What Were the Odds That Bush Would Win? [View All]

[AmyCrat]

What Were the Odds That Bush Would Win?
by Alan Waldman - November 25, 2004
http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91472
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Despite mainstream media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with theories about how John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2 -- claiming Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting to steal the election for George W. Bush.
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Reports from Ohio indicate that the state´s chief elections official J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, arranged for ample voting booths in GOP areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts. Despite the huge increase in new voter registration (91 percent of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer total voting machines than were used in 2000. Lawyer Ray Beckerman reported, ¨Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio. People waited in line for as long as 10 hours -- but only in Democratic precincts. All day long, touch-screen voting machines in Youngstown registered ¨George W. Bush¨ when voters pressed ¨John F. Kerry,¨ despite complaints to police throughout the day.
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Kerry´s victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris and Zogby pre-election polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule -- an incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses (Bush had 47 percent, requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the challenger -- as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this time). Nor is it credible that: the surge in new young voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for hours on campuses nationwide) miraculously didn´t appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who´s lost support; and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail, and grossly underestimated Bush´s appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that Bush beat mathematical odds of 99 to 1 in winning the election. Election results are not final until the electoral college votes on Dec. 13. There is still time to investigate, to find the truth and, if the results match the probabilities, to swear in legitimately elected President John F. Kerry. Alan Waldman is a Los Angeles
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