Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried

[TaleWgnDg]

New York Times Newspaper

Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
by Tom Zeller, Jr.

"For the Record

"The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. 'Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,' trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. 'Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines,' declared BlackBoxVoting.org."



"In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.

"But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

(snip)

" 'We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset,' said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, 'I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering.'

"A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found 'no particular patterns' relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

" 'The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet,' the study concluded, 'appear to be selectively chosen to make the point.'

"Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.

" 'I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true,' said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, 'but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite the past.' "


"Ford Fessenden and John Schwartz contributed reporting for this article."

"For the Record: Nov. 13, 2004, Saturday"

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?pagewanted=all&position=
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[cornermouse]

1. "the most popular theories were being proved wrong"

I'm not sure I've seen any proof. I've heard a lot of broad, grandiose statements, but I don't believe I've actually seen much that resembled proof.

[Patriot Acts]

5. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED??

The media is doing a hell of a job keeping everyone calm the past 2 elections.... Must be the Peterson trial, maybe now that it's over people will give a shit!

ANYWAY>>>>>>

Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold ...a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers" ......quoted saying "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year"

IT CALLES FOR AN INVESTIGATION.... AND THE LIST GOES ON AND ON. WHY IS OUR VOICE NOT BEING HEARD? Media control and dis-information??


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09

In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.

That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race.

READ THE FULL STORY>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09...

[Patriot Acts]

2. What else did you expect?

Unless or until the masses start really raising some hell about things we will never be listened to.....

AND IT WILL NOT GET BETTER... ONLY MUCH MUCH WORSE.

[TaleWgnDg]

3. At the present moment . . .

this newspaper article is the New York Times' most emailed article.

[shib]

4. bllleeeet

bleeeet

[MrModerate]

6. They can keep burying the theories, but . . .

Like corpses in the New Orleans delta, or auto tires buried anywhere, they'll keep coming to the surface.

If the truth is out there, the blogosphere will prevent it from being buried, despite the pooh-poohing of "experts" who wish the world was tidier than it really is.

I'm a sometime-optimist. The tinfoil theories won't stand up, but the truth will. I think this thing will break open within a week or two.

Or fade away entirely.

[a new day]

7. First they ignore you... n/t

[Francesca]

8. what a horrible post to wake up to! n/t

[Seattlewaguy2004]

9. NO THEORIES ARE **PROVEN** WRONG OR RIGHT UNTIL BALLOTS ARE HAND COUNTED!

This fact will not be changed no matter how much you repeat the theories
are disproven....disproven by what?

If there was fraud, the perpetrators of the fraud will not email their escapades to the public or victims.

GIVE ME A BREAK!!!

The only thing proven so far is that THERE HAS BEEN VOTING IRREGULARITIES!!!!!

[TaleWgnDg]

12. No, the election was conceded quite eloquently on . . .

Wednesday, November 10, 2004, when it was correctly discerned that Kerry had lost. He was gracious. And he was thankful to his supporters and workers.

It's just that some folks, a small minority, cannot seem to accept it.

[cornermouse]

13. Where's the factual proof to refute the belief?

Why don't they produce it?

[bowens43]

15. How do you know that it was 'correctly discerned '

the votes were not and still haven't been counted. You sure seem to be going out of your way to squash any rumors or evidence of problems.

[kcwayne]

10. This article ignores the obvious

"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.

Unusual and remains unexplained????? Give me a break. The only defense of black box voting is its supposed certification. If a machine can malfunction to produce 4000 votes incorrectly, the testing is abysmally flawed, and the certification is meaningless. There is simply no way to know whether similar defects were "caught and corrected" because there are no audit trails, and presumably no way to reconstruct and validate the voting transactions.

Whether the malfunction was a programming error or fraud is an open question, nothing has been proven to refute that. In either case, how can anyone trust the validity of the count?

[blitzburgh55]

11. Big Media, Some Nerve!

Nice rebuttal to the MSM conspiracy theory claims.


You might think that the major media that got suckered by George W. Bush’s Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction claims just last year would show some humility about its own fallibility.

But, no, the elite U.S. news media is now criticizing common citizens who have raised questions about voter fraud in the Nov. 2 election. The New York Times has joined the Washington Post and other major news outlets in scouring the Internet to find and discredit Americans who have expressed suspicions that Bush’s victory might not have been entirely legitimate. The New York Times' front-page story was entitled, “Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.”

As odd as these attacks might seem to some, this pattern of protecting the Bush family has a history. It actually dates back a couple of decades, as the major media has either averted its eyes or rallied to the Bushes’ defense when the family has faced suspicions of lying or corruption.

That was the case in the 1980s when then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was implicated in a string of scandals, starting with the clandestine supplying of Nicaraguan contra rebels.

When one of Oliver North’s secret supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, the surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, correctly named Vice President Bush's office and the CIA as participants in the illegal operations. But for years, the big media accepted Bush’s denials and dismissed Hasenfus’s claims.

After the Nicaraguan contras were implicated in cocaine trafficking – when Vice President Bush was in charge of drug interdiction – again the New York Times and other leading publications pooh-poohed the stories. They even put down then-freshman Sen. John Kerry when he investigated. However, the charges again turned out to be true, as CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz concluded in a little-noticed report a decade later.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111304.html

[newyawker99]

16. Hi blitzburgh55!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[bowens43]

14. You seem to be working quite diligently

to sweep the irregularities under the rug. I wonder why that is? Hmmmm.