Spintested

Sandra Day O'Connor Doubts Decision To Take Bush V. Gore

Monday, April 29, 2013

You're welcome - I can post more links and will when I have to time to sort through them all. There used to be many more, but over time the media that published them have taken them down.

There aren't any links from "the other side" (supporting Bush's claim that he got more legal ballots) because it's not true, so all they can do is call us names and create havoc and confusion as a distraction.
In the years since we've seen more evidence of how they steal elections (suppression efforts, registered voter purges, dirty tricks like phone banks directing voters to the wrong polls, electronic voting machine manipulation, inadequate ballots and machines) so it's not as big a surprise to many as it was in 2000.

One piece of information that got absolutely no coverage was that the CIA was working on GOP absentee ballots in the weeks leading up to election day in Florida. That was the most amazing revelation from the televised court hearings in the post-election days in Florida -- 'CharlesKane' testified to altering absentee ballots in the Martin County's Registrar's office in the two week period prior to election day (it's against the law and should render the ballots null and void). When Kane was sworn in, he had to identify himself and give his occupation and employer. Retired CIA. The judge asked him why he was altering the absentee ballots, and he answered "I go where I'm told." Verbatim quote. I heard it with my own ears. The judge didn't follow up. There was next to no news coverage of this, and none by the networks.

When you think of CIA's involvement in elections overseas, why wouldn't we also think they're monkeying in our elections?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Sandra Day O'Connor Doubts Decision To Take Bush V. Gore

Published on Thursday, November 15, 2001 in the Long Island, NY Newsday
Not That It Was Reported, but Gore Won

IN JOURNALISM, it's called "burying the lead": A story starts off with what everyone already knows, while the real news - the most surprising, significant or never-been-told-before information - gets pushed down where people are less likely to see it.

That's what happened to the findings of the media study of the uncounted votes from last year's Florida presidential vote. A consortium of news outlets - including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tribune Co. (Newsday's parent company), The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CNN - spent nearly a year and $900,000 reexamining every disputed ballot.

The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That's because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court - as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore - only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.

Gore and the Florida Supreme Court ignored overvotes - votes where mechanical counting registered more than one vote - on the assumption that there would be no way to tell which of the multiple candidates the voter actually intended to pick.

But as the consortium found when it actually looked at the overvotes, one often could tell what the voter's intent was. Many of the overvotes involved, for example, a voter punching the hole next to a candidate's name, and then writing in the same candidate's name.

Since the intent of the voter is clear, these are clearly valid votes under Florida law. And Gore picked up enough of such votes that it almost didn't matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes - whether you counted every dimple or insisted on a fully punched chad, the consortium found that Gore ended up the winner of virtually any full reexamination of rejected ballots.

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1115-02.htm

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/111207a.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2006/jul/14/guardianweekly.guardianweekly1

http://archive.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5111
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Sandra Day O'Connor Doubts Decision To Take Bush V. Gore

Your USA Today link doesn't exist, and if you read the entire opinion piece by John Broder and Ford Fessenden at your NYT link, you'll see that you're wrong. As I pointed out at the time, mainstream media gave everyone something by putting in their headlines that "Bush Won", but if you actually read the analysis you'd see that had all legally cast ballots been counted, Gore won. And like the Brooks' Brothers riots in the post-election days in Florida, the shouting matches prevented the fact that it was a stolen election sink in.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Sandra Day O'Connor Doubts Decision To Take Bush V. Gore

NORC, out of the University of Chicago, conducted the study in 2001. They examined all of the undervote and overvote ballots in all 67 counties of Florida. They built a database containing each ballot and the counters' interpretation of the chads (punch cards) and marks (optical scan and absentee).

Once the database was built, they ran nine scenarios as to which counties were counted according to which standard. They multiplied these nine scenarios times two agreement criteria (majority vs. unanimous) for a total of eighteen possible results.

Of these eighteen possible ways the vote could have been recounted, Bush won seven and Gore won eleven.

Specifically, Bush won if the recount that Gore requested would have been finished (four counties). Gore won if you recounted the whole state.

The whole-state recount is the most important scenario because it's the one that gets to the heart of the question: Who won if every legitimate voter's vote was counted?

See the NORC recount project here.

Even Rachel Maddow referenced it a couple of days ago on her show:

RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: In the 2000s, there have been two amazing stories about voting in the great state of Florida. One of those stories is very well known. The other one is barely known at all but has just become really, really important.

The first one was in the year 2000 when this happened. The nail-bitingly close race between Al Gore and George W. Bush resulted in the race being called and then uncalled. And then a cacophonous, disorganized, politicized, intimidated counting process was ultimately called off in what was considered to be one of the most anomalous and partisan U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the modern era. And so, George W. Bush became the president-elect.

And then a bunch of newspapers from Florida and nationally decided to commission a study—they hired a company to count all the votes that had been cast in that election in Florida. By then, it was more than a year after the fact, but the study showed that if you did count all the votes in Florida that year, Al Gore won. Incidentally, but by then it was 11 months into George Bush‘s presidency.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Sandra Day O'Connor Doubts Decision To Take Bush V. Gore

Eric Alterman summarized it well:

"[T]he inescapable fact is that Gore was the genuine choice of a plurality of Florida’s voters as well as America’s. As the Associated Press reported in its examination of the NORC report, “In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.”

Gore beat Bush by almost every conceivable counting standard.

Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you counted “hanging chads” and he won if you counted “dimpled chads.” He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot—the so-called Palm Beach standard. He even won if you counted only a fully punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter what, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote counted, then Al Gore not George W. Bush, was elected president."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-04/bush-v-gore-decision-looks-even-more-disgraceful-10-years-later/
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

This FAA Sequester Vote Doesn't Smell Right

Sunday, April 28, 2013

I'm an old OLD liberal DEMOCRAT. I've never voted for a Republican in my life, never will, and the way things are going I'll never be voting for another Democrat again.

No offense, but Democratic supporters like you are no different than (and just as ignorant on the issues as) Bushies. Obama's 'most ardent supporters' aren't following the day-to-day intricacies that have taken place over these past years in Washington (and Obama's participation) - It seems as if they go to HuffPo as they would the sports page (or as Republican supporters watch only Fox). Those of us who read the legislation and follow the day-to-day details of sausage-making know that these two parties work together to deliver to the 1%, and their only real conflict is over who is to get the credit/blame (with both their corporate masters and their party's base).

How does "extreme Republican partisanship" cause a Democratic president to offer Social Security and Medicare benefits' cuts?

How does "extreme Republican partisanship" cause a Democratic president to offer across-the-board sequestration that cuts off cancer patients from treatment and kids from Headstart?

How does "extreme Republican partisanship" get a Democratic president to sign off on easing sequestration pain on the upper and corporate classes without (again) lifting sequestration pain also on those most vulnerable (children, the poor and the infirm)?

Obama's either the worst negotiator in the history of the world (in which case he can't be "the smartest/the most adult/the greatest") or he's a DINO (Democrat in name only), a skillful conniving Trojan Horse put into office having tricked voters like you who think he's a populist working on behalf of the 98%.

NEWSFLASH for you - In Obama's own words, he's a Reagan Republican: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r-emodk73w
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost