Kerry won... [Archive] - Two Plus Two Older Archives

dana33

11-04-2004, 06:31 PM

but Karl Rove used mind control to make people who wanted to vote for Kerry actually vote for Bush.

For details, check here. (http://www.livejournal.com/community/pagan/)

Excerpt:

Ok, I can understand the restlessness I've been feeling since yesterday. There's a lot riding on this election, and passions are running high on both sides, so naturally eceryone and their naked brother who has an ounce of Power and no clue about Shielding is leaking energy like a hair dryer in a bathtub. So it's Shields Up for me, but I'm still getting enough bleedover to make me jittery and a little manic if I don't concentrate. That's all to be expected.

What wasn't expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a calm, resonable, and powerful head-voice saying things like "Kerry doesn't have the experience we need in these troubled times." and "Give Bush a chance to make it better."

Anyone who knows me KNOWS these are not my thoughts! And besides, I voted last week. No, there's no way in Hades these are my thoughts.

Gods-damn it! The f*cking Republicans have got Magical help pumping out a clear, unified, focused broadcast, and you can be sure, every sensitive is picking it up...

YourFoxyGrandma

11-04-2004, 06:32 PM

Incoclusive ballots are considered such because they are not punched properly. This occurs most in minority areas where voting machines are out of date.

MaxPower

11-04-2004, 06:40 PM

I don't know why conservatives reserve all their hate for Michael Moore. This Greg Palast guy is much worse. Michael Moore as least has sources for Farenheit 911. You may not like his sources, but he has them.

AleoMagus

11-04-2004, 06:51 PM

I wanted Kerry to win as much as the next guy and stories like this made me want to fight for a Democrat victory... 4 years ago. Gore won the popular vote and it was so close that it made sense to fight. In fact the Democrats should have fough a lot harder.

Not this time though.

Kerry lost the popular vote by about 4,000,000. Enough about how he really won, because he didn't. I probably am bothered by this as much as you are but it's the truth.

Regards
Brad S

GWB

11-04-2004, 06:59 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Gore won the popular vote and it was so close that it made sense to fight. In fact the Democrats should have fough a lot harder

[/ QUOTE ]

How much harder could you fight?

They manufactured votes, brought phony lawsuits, spun like crazy....

He clearly lost, but convinced a lot of people that he somehow won. Gore is a sore loser, Kerry is a realist.

MMMMMM

11-04-2004, 07:01 PM

Palast is really out there....somewhere.

BobH42

11-04-2004, 07:02 PM

[ QUOTE ]
What wasn't expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a calm, resonable, and powerful head-voice saying things like "Kerry doesn't have the experience we need in these troubled times." and "Give Bush a chance to make it better."

Anyone who knows me KNOWS these are not my thoughts! And besides, I voted last week. No, there's no way in Hades these are my thoughts.

Gods-damn it! The f*cking Republicans have got Magical help pumping out a clear, unified, focused broadcast, and you can be sure, every sensitive is picking it up...

[/ QUOTE ]

Glad to see someone noticed the 'campaigning' I did this election year /images/graemlins/laugh.gif

YourFoxyGrandma

11-04-2004, 07:28 PM

I won't say that I'm bitter as to the outcome of the election. I would've liked it to have gone otherwise, but, well, what happens happens.

That said, I will agree; I think Bush deserves the presidency as he did win the popular vote by a substantial margin. However, I don't think that the issue of these spoiled ballots should be overlooked as it is most likely going to be.

I bring up Palast's article not because I think that Kerry should be the current president of the United States, but because he points out some very tragic flaws in our election system--flaws that could potentially change the outcome of an election. It's unfortunate that these problems go relatively unnoticed and I think that the existence of such problems should be absolutely apalling to everybody, liberals and conservatives alike.

I find it troubling that some people found it more constructive to tell me to shut up and to quit being a sore loser than recognize the fact hundreds of thousands of Americans are, in many cases, not getting the representation to which they are entitled.

AleoMagus

11-04-2004, 07:28 PM

[ QUOTE ]
How much harder could you fight?

They manufactured votes, brought phony lawsuits, spun like crazy....

He clearly lost, but convinced a lot of people that he somehow won. Gore is a sore loser, Kerry is a realist.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sure we have each done our own homework on this one and I don't intend to argue the 2000 election here in any great length.

My point is, Gore won the popular wote and in many people's minds, that made him the most reasonable choice for president with so much controversy surrounding Florida's statistical dead heat.

This time around, that is simply not the case (even if Ohio actually was close).

Can we agree on that?

Regards
Brad S

Cooker

11-04-2004, 07:37 PM

This article was obviously written by someone in a severly delusional state. Apparently, the exit polls, where you only ask about 2% of the voters are accurrate and the vote where some small percentage is thrown out due to the voters own incompetence is untrustworthy. This is idiotic. Kerry obviously lost Ohio, and I will show you why. Bush won the counted vote by 136,483. According to this article, there are 247,672 uncounted votes (most provisional ballots are illegal anyway, but lets go ahead and included them). So what percentage of this 247,672 must Kerry win to actually win Ohio by 1 vote? 77.55% to win by 1 vote. Did Kerry win 78% in any state? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these votes could possibly break this much in Kerry's favor. Case closed. Kerry lost Ohio by a quite significant margin.

I assume a little similar common sense applied to the New Mexico part of this article will show that these "uncounted" votes would have to break in an enormous way for Kerry for him to win and it can equally be discounted. Furthermore, Bush didn't need New Mexico to win, since the House would break a 269 to 269 tie and they would obviously re-elect Bush. The New Mexico part of this article is therefore irrelevant.

YourFoxyGrandma

11-04-2004, 08:05 PM

[ QUOTE ]
This article was obviously written by someone in a severly delusional state. Apparently, the exit polls, where you only ask about 2% of the voters are accurrate and the vote where some small percentage is thrown out due to the voters own incompetence is untrustworthy. This is idiotic. Kerry obviously lost Ohio, and I will show you why. Bush won the counted vote by 136,483. According to this article, there are 247,672 uncounted votes (most provisional ballots are illegal anyway, but lets go ahead and included them). So what percentage of this 247,672 must Kerry win to actually win Ohio by 1 vote? 77.55% to win by 1 vote. Did Kerry win 78% in any state? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these votes could possibly break this much in Kerry's favor. Case closed. Kerry lost Ohio by a quite significant margin.

I assume a little similar common sense applied to the New Mexico part of this article will show that these "uncounted" votes would have to break in an enormous way for Kerry for him to win and it can equally be discounted. Furthermore, Bush didn't need New Mexico to win, since the House would break a 269 to 269 tie and they would obviously re-elect Bush. The New Mexico part of this article is therefore irrelevant.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's clear that you fail to understand two key things.

1.) Voter incompetence is not to blame for discarded ballots, rather, they are a product of faulty ballot-punching machines commonly found in low-income minority precincts. And, according to this article, these faulty machines can affect up to 2.68% of the voting population.

2.) The precincts where the majority of these discarded ballots originate are overwhelmingly democratic areas where is it quite possible for 80% of a local population to vote for a given party. (Washington D.C. for example, a relatively small area, voted 90% Kerry, 9% Bush)

And you're still missing the point. A significant number of people are voting and are not being counted. Apparently, that doesn't seem to bother you, especially since it worked in your party's favor.

CORed

11-04-2004, 08:17 PM

The argument seems to be that African Americans aren't bright enough to vote properly with punchcard ballots, so nearly all of the "spoiled" ballots would have gone to Kerry. Note, this is not my belief, this is my interpretation of the beliefs of the writer of this article. I think punchcard ballots are obsolete and should be phased out. OTOH, I think anybody (of any race) who isn't bright enough to make sure they get punched properly deserves to have their votes voided. FYI, I voted for Kerry and I am disappointed in the result of the election, but this is just plain silly. I can believe that Florida might well have been miscounted in 2000 resulting in the election being won by the wrong man, but to claim that punchcard problems in Ohio, created a 100,000+ vote margin is just plain silly. This clown seems to think that exit polls are more reliable than the actual count. I think maybe the people conducting the exit polls need to examine their sampling methods and figure out where the bias came from.

CORed

11-04-2004, 08:24 PM

Gore's biggest mistake in 2000 was not demanding a recount of the whole state. IIRC, the recount conducted by some journalists concluded that had the counties he wanted recounted been recounted, he would have lost, but if the whole state had been recounted, he would have won. His position would have been much more credible had he not tried to cherry pick counties to recount that were heavily Democratic. He would have had much more credibility if he had asked for the entire state to be recounted. Whether Supreme Court would have allowed that to happen is another question. To put it bluntly, he tried to steal an election that he probably had actually won.

CORed

11-04-2004, 08:28 PM

The popular vote does not determine who is president. The electoral college does. Whether you like this system or not, that is the reality. Had Kerry won by a narrow margin in a few more of the close states, he could easily have won the election while losing the popular vote.

AleoMagus

11-04-2004, 08:33 PM

Of course I know this. I'm just saying that as far as any kind of morally defensible fight for electoral college votes goes, it's a lot easier to do it with a popular win than with a 3.5M pop. vote loss.

Regards
Brad S

CORed

11-04-2004, 08:33 PM

As I said before, I think that punchcards should be phased out. However, I think the voter has to bear some of the responsibility for making sure he votes correctly, regardless of whether he is using paper, puchcards, or electronic machines. I don't believe that punching holes in a punchcard is so complicated that somebody of normal (or even somewhat subnormal) intelligence can't do it correctly, so I guess I'm not as bothered by the spoiled ballots as some people.

Jedi Flopper

11-04-2004, 08:42 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Incoclusive ballots are considered such because they are not punched properly. This occurs most in minority areas where voting machines are out of date.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are kidding me right? I live in an affluent area and voted on punch cards. When I was done, I carefully checked it to make sure there were no "hanging chads" Any fool who did not do this after 2000 does not deserve to have their vote counted.

Cooker

11-05-2004, 01:11 AM

I think it is ridiculous to suggest that in a state where the vote was fairly even, the error in the counting will magically favor the candidate you want to win by a huge margin. No counting system will ever be perfect, so in that sense, I am not bothered by small errors in vote counting. Bush clearly won Ohio with a margin that is above pure counting errors. Most of the "uncounted" ballots truly should not be counted, because they are either not legal votes (in the case of the provisional ballots) or they were incorrectly punched, which is more the fault of the voter than any one else. Would I object to improvements? Of course not, but I think it is quite clear that the vote in Ohio clearly favored Bush.

Of the incorrectly punched ballots, which are really the only ones that could possibly be a systematic problem with the election, Kerry would still be behind if he was given 100% of those votes. Do you know what a provisional ballot is? It is what they give you when you do not appear to be properly registered, but let you vote just in case they made a mistake. Do you know how many turn out to be good votes? Less than 7% on average in past elections. If you give Kerry all the incorrectly punched ballots and all 7% of the likely good provisional ballots, he still would lose.

I like how you just assume that I am a Bush supporter. I did not vote for Bush, because I disagree with many of his policies. I simply responded to an obviously flawed article with a clear line of reasoning. I think it is you that fail to understand many more things about this situation than I.

Abednego

11-05-2004, 01:56 AM

Kerry lost

Abednego

11-05-2004, 01:57 AM

Somethings are just too easy

wacki

11-05-2004, 02:04 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I can never understand this...

If Democrats have higher IQ's than Republicans, why are they so bad at voting properly?

[/ QUOTE ]

Hahahahah.... good post.

wacki

11-05-2004, 02:08 AM

[ QUOTE ]

I don't know why conservatives reserve all their hate for Michael Moore. This Greg Palast guy is much worse. Michael Moore as least has sources for Farenheit 911. You may not like his sources, but he has them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Max Power, I know you are an intelligent person capable of understanding complex ideas. However, this statement has made me lose alot, if not all, respect for you.

http://www.fahrenhype911.com/

wacki

11-05-2004, 02:13 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I find it troubling that some people found it more constructive to tell me to shut up and to quit being a sore loser than recognize the fact hundreds of thousands of Americans are, in many cases, not getting the representation to which they are entitled.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it more troubling that we have voter fraud at all. No ID required to vote? WTF?!?!? If you don't have the ability to aquire identification, you shouldn't be able to vote. ...........
/images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif /images/graemlins/mad.gif

emonrad87

11-05-2004, 02:37 AM

So let me get this straight.

In 2000, President Bush won the electoral vote (the one that actually matters), but lost the popular vote. Liberals start whining that it should be the popular vote that matters because the nation "clearly" wanted it the other way.

In 2004, President Bush wins the electoral vote by a larger margin. OOH! Time for liberals to whine about the popular vote again right? But WAIT! President Bush won that by the largest margin in history! So now they attempt to do the thing they accused the President of doing in 2000 by demanding that inconclusive ballots (which are BY LAW VOID) be given to Kerry.

It's too bad (for the liberal whiners, great for the country itself) that SOMEONE (Kerry himself) had a lick of sense and realized that he lost so the country can move on... For a group of people that call the President "the most divisive in history", liberals sure as hell like to attack and polarize the country...

SlyAK

11-05-2004, 03:10 AM

[ QUOTE ]
OOH! Time for liberals to whine about the popular vote again right? But WAIT! President Bush won that by the largest margin in history!

[/ QUOTE ]

Not even close to true.... We dont have the "official results" yet, but Bush won by maybe 4 million votes. A little research into the '84 election, Reagan defeated Mondale by more than 16 million votes. I didnt look for other ones, but I imagine there are more examples.

Sly

SlyAK

11-05-2004, 03:16 AM

Bush did have the Highest number of total votes in history... is that what you meant?

Sly

Sandstone

11-05-2004, 05:16 AM

Yeah, for better or for worse, this is over

MaxPower

11-05-2004, 11:22 AM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

I don't know why conservatives reserve all their hate for Michael Moore. This Greg Palast guy is much worse. Michael Moore as least has sources for Farenheit 911. You may not like his sources, but he has them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Max Power, I know you are an intelligent person capable of understanding complex ideas. However, this statement has made me lose alot, if not all, respect for you.

http://www.fahrenhype911.com/

[/ QUOTE ]

Don't worry wacki, I don't need your respect.

I have been through the various sites that you have posted regarding the movie.

If you would like to see Michael Moore's sources look here:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/

He does have sources for everything he said in the movie.

If it turns out that some of his sources were wrong or that he cherry picked sources that support what he wants to believe that is a different matter. If that is a good enough method for the President of the United States to do regarding proof of WMD in Iraq, then it should be OK for Michael Moore.

Well, I don't think it is OK no matter who does it. However, Michael Moore is simply expressing his opinion. Bush was sending off thousands of young Americans to fight a war based on false pretences. I'll let you decide which is more egregious.

MelchyBeau

11-05-2004, 11:47 AM

A few people are whining, not the whole DNC. That would be saying that Because of the Swift Boat Veterans, no single Vientnam veteran sees Kerry's service as honorable. It just doesn't work that way.

I would be extremely pissed right now if Bush lost the popular vote, yet won the EC vote. Now, I am just saddened and scared by the next 4 years.

1.5% is not a huge margin to win by. I think just by the huge turnout of voters and such a slim margin it shows that the nation is divided.

Bush was the polarizing factor. He called anyone who didn't believe the Iraqi war was correct traitors. The conservative pundits on TV used name calling to down liberals. Bush is the one who sees everything in black or white.

Lets not forget it was the republicans during clintons administration that were on the attack.

Did you expect the liberals to be happy about the election? It is our right to complain. It is our right to question the current administration.

Melch

wacki

11-05-2004, 06:39 PM

[ QUOTE ]

Well, I don't think it is OK no matter who does it. However, Michael Moore is simply expressing his opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]

1st half, I agree. Second half, I disagree. He is not simply expressing his opinion. He is distorting facts to get people to believe a different way based on those false facts. I don't understand how you can't differentiate expressing opinions and misleading people. This is what I meant about loosing respect. And I think you shouldn't really take that as a personal insult, but a word of caution. He isn't simply expressing his opinion and I don't understand why so many people can't see how bad this is.

[ QUOTE ]
Bush was sending off thousands of young Americans to fight a war based on false pretences. I'll let you decide which is more egregious.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey, I have said a million times I am not happy with the way Bush sold the war. The problem with this agruement is that all of the major intel groups were basically saying the same thing. In any war, and in any politcal decision, you will always have people that are in CYA mode. In otherwords, cover your ass mode. These people carefully word what they
have to say and reap the benifits if stuff goes right, and exagerate their words of caution when stuff goes wrong. Kerry is an expert at this. I actually had repsect for Howard Dean because he didn't do this. Bush on the other hand is difficult to tell. There will alway be CYA people ready to pounce when something goes wrong. There are many many factors that really make me wonder about the people who say Bush lied. On the other hand, there are curious circumstances that cannot be ignored. I'm not totally convinced either way, but it seems to me that you are convinced about Bush. All I am saying is that if I was in the Oval Office, I could see myself making the same mistake. On the otherhand if undesputable proof comes out that Bush lied or decieved, I would seriously consider impeachment.