Why Kerry conceded on Nov 3

[suston96]

Boston Globe today by Cameron F. Kerry - John Kerry's brother:

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2005/01/06/counting_every_vote?mode=PF

*****

"These lawyers made a difference. In Ohio they pursued federal court cases that deterred Republicans from carrying out announced plans for wholesale challenges and got local election officials to stop the few that occurred. They got election officials to take malfunctioning machines out of service in Mahoning County and correct the infamous 3,800-vote error in Franklin County. In two lawsuits on Election Day, they got paper ballots issued when lines in two counties were too long and later did the same for students waiting in line for hours.

Thanks to their efforts, by the early hours of Nov. 3, election lawyers had audited the Bush margin. We knew the scope of problems lawyers had been unable to remedy quickly. We knew how many provisional, overseas, and absentee ballots were left to count. We knew there were up to 94,000 "undervotes" or "spoiled ballots," punch card ballots rejected by machines (a far lower percentage than in Florida in 2000 due to education about punching carefully). The distribution of these uncounted votes across Ohio and experience indicated they would not be enough to dent the margin. Only the discovery of wholesale fraud might change the outcome. And, with thousands of observers to the process, this was unlikely. Not every fact was in, but we knew much of what has emerged publicly since then. "

These lawyers took naps during computer basics course, if they even took the courses.

[genieroze]

1. I know as much about law as they do about computers, which isn't much. eom

[roseBudd]

2. Memme: Computers count vote so no one can see, They claim Bush won,

I say prove it to me

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. The amount of legal professionals...

Who truly understand technical issues is incredibly woeful. Furthermore, the people who advise lawyers on technical issues? OMG, some of them are so full of shit it is remarkable. Some are charlatans, others are former officers who know a little bit about technology and massage the data to give a prosecutor grounds to bring charges(and an awful lot of what they provide is bullshit) and some of them are just recycled blackhat hackers. Others are luddites who consider computers and the internet the tool of Satan.

It's a mess.

[suston96]

4. Wasn't about the law.

It was about technology that was easy to corrupt.

All those lawyers were prepared for legal challenges and there were too few technicals looking for the attacks on the voting machines, and most important the "recalibrations" of the tabulating machines.

Stalin was right: it's not the voters, it's the vote counters.

[Catbird]

5. Iceberg

It sounds like they found the tip of the iceberg and convinced themselves it wasn't that big. It is likely that most of the problems were "underwater" in those black boxes. (I say likely because no one will ever be able to audit some of those machine counts properly.)