Poll: Was the 2004 election rigged?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the question of whether the 2004 US election was rigged, specifically focusing on the potential tampering of electronic voting machines. Participants explore various viewpoints related to the integrity of the election process, public opinion, and the implications of perceived tampering on voter confidence.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants question the validity of public opinion as evidence regarding election tampering, suggesting that sentiment does not equate to factual evidence.
  • Others argue that understanding public opinion is important for assessing voter confidence and the potential need for revamping voting procedures.
  • There are inquiries about the evidence for claims of tampering, with some expressing skepticism about the accusations without substantial proof.
  • Participants discuss the correlation between political leanings and perceptions of election fairness, with some suggesting that opinions may depend more on the outcome for individuals than on political affiliation.
  • Some contributions reference specific reports from blackboxvoting.org, noting that while the organization may have a bias, it raises concerns about electronic voting systems.
  • There are claims of potential voter fraud favoring Kerry, with anecdotal evidence mentioned regarding voting machines in Philadelphia.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express a range of opinions on the topic, with no clear consensus on whether the election was rigged or if there is sufficient evidence to support claims of tampering. Multiple competing views remain, particularly regarding the interpretation of evidence and the implications of public sentiment.

Contextual Notes

Limitations include the reliance on anecdotal evidence and the potential biases of sources cited, as well as the unresolved nature of claims regarding voter fraud and tampering.

Was the 2004 US election rigged electronically?

  • You are left leaning, and think there was electronic tampering of the vote.

    Votes: 29 46.0%

  • You are left leaning, and think there was NO electronic tampering of the vote.

    Votes: 13 20.6%

  • You are right leaning, and think there was electronic tampering of the vote.

    Votes: 6 9.5%

  • You are right leaning, and think there was NO electronic tampering of the vote.

    Votes: 15 23.8%
  • Total voters
    63
pattylou
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Was the 2004 US election rigged?

Specifically, do you think the machines could be and were tampered with, in order to skew a result in favor of Bush.

This is not a question about other forms of vote - tampering (disenfranchisement, etc).

I am also curious for the correlation between your opinion on this, and your political leanings. So, there are four options given to choose from.

Feel free to add comments on this topic as well.

That looks like it worked (whew!)

Option 1: Left leaning, thinks the election was (at least partially) electronically rigged.

Option 2: Left leaning, thinks there was no electronic tamering of the vote.

Option 3: Right leaning, leaning, thinks the election was (at least partially) electronically rigged.

Option 4: Right leaning, thinks there was no electronic tamering of the vote.
 
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Just a question...

What does public opinion have to do with what is a fact and what is fiction?
 
Nothing. I have been curious what the actual sentiment is among the populace and have yet to see Pew or Zogby ask about this.

Question: Why shouldn't the general populace's opinion be ascertained?
 
pattylou said:
Question: Why shouldn't the general populace's opinion be ascertained?

Because there is a risk that people will use it as evidence to establish the truth of the proposition. It is not evidence and as long as it is not used in such a manner then ascertaining that information is fine.
 
It is certainly not evidence.

It may, on a larger scale, have some bearing on how important politicians (etc) feel that it is to revamp voting procedures.
If a decent percentage of the population thinks the machines are tamperable, then voter confidence is pretty low, and that's bad for morale. It affects the vote, etc etc.
 
pattylou said:
It is certainly not evidence.

It may, on a larger scale, have some bearing on how important politicians (etc) feel that it is to revamp voting procedures.
If a decent percentage of the population thinks the machines are tamperable, then voter confidence is pretty low, and that's bad for morale. It affects the vote, etc etc.

Ah..I see. Well in that case I will vote in your poll. :smile:
 
Is there any evidence the vote was tampered with? I personally was very disappointed with the re-election of Bush, but to say that the results were rigged is a big accusation with what seems like no evidence. I would like to know why 56% of people said there was tampering.
 
I'm wondering how the left-leaning/right-leaning part figures in. Is it assumed that all right-leaning folks were pro-Bush and all left-leaning folks were pro-Kerry? Or were you looking for some completely different correlation - left-leaning people have less faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for more government control while right-leaning people have more faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for less government interference?

Actually, I think people's opinion of the fairness of an election depends more on whether their favorite candidate won or lost than overall political alliance, but that's just the cynicism of a former soccer referee.

Personally, I'm left-leaning when I'm walking to the North and right-leaning when I'm walking to the South, but I live on the side of a mountain ( :smile: - okay, that's just plain facetious)
 
BobG said:
( :smile: - okay, that's just plain facetious)

:smile: agreed...
 
  • #10
LeonhardEuler said:
Is there any evidence the vote was tampered with? I personally was very disappointed with the re-election of Bush, but to say that the results were rigged is a big accusation with what seems like no evidence. I would like to know why 56% of people said there was tampering.

Have you looked at blackboxvoting.org's reports on this issue? I can point you to specific reports if you like. The most interesting one in my opinion, came out at the end of May.

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/5921.html?1122737304

(I couldn't find the PDF, sorry!)

See also here for the technical, longer report:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf

BBV is a consumer advocate group that opposes electronic voting. Thus they are biased. That does not necessarily negate the results that they put out.

They are not, however, partisan, and they vehemently maintain that both parties have been cashing in on Diebold's loopholes to fix votes.
 
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  • #11
BobG said:
I'm wondering how the left-leaning/right-leaning part figures in. Is it assumed that all right-leaning folks were pro-Bush and all left-leaning folks were pro-Kerry? Or were you looking for some completely different correlation - left-leaning people have less faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for more government control while right-leaning people have more faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for less government interference?

Actually, I think people's opinion of the fairness of an election depends more on whether their favorite candidate won or lost than overall political alliance, but that's just the cynicism of a former soccer referee.

Personally, I'm left-leaning when I'm walking to the North and right-leaning when I'm walking to the South, but I live on the side of a mountain ( :smile: - okay, that's just plain facetious)


Several reasons - (1) If this site is just a bunch of democrats then that part of the question will give that picture of the community. (2) Also I think I would be a lot less opinionated on the subject if Kerry had won. I would still have faith in the system and no reason to question it. So, I expect that that sort of general bias might be evident from the results.
 
  • #12
Here are some quotes from that website blackboxvoting.org you mentioned:

(OH) Did the GOP steal another Ohio Election?
Jeb Bush Insures Election Irregularities in Florida!
Unconfirmedsources report Florida Governor Jeb Bush has made great strides to insure the November Election will be the model of corruption and unfairness.

This is obviously a website built for the sole purpose of an anti-republican rant that only claims to be non-partisan. Do you have any sources from the mainstream media?
 
  • #13
LeonhardEuler said:
Here are some quotes from that website blackboxvoting.org you mentioned:

(OH) Did the GOP steal another Ohio Election?
Jeb Bush Insures Election Irregularities in Florida!
Unconfirmedsources report Florida Governor Jeb Bush has made great strides to insure the November Election will be the model of corruption and unfairness.

This is obviously a website built for the sole purpose of an anti-republican rant that only claims to be non-partisan. Do you have any sources from the mainstream media?

There are additional quotes attacking the democrats. I can find them if you like. The admins are definitely non-partisan; many participants are angry democrats.

Feel free to dismiss it, alternatively feel free to read the admins analysis that I linked above and decide if the loopholes are of concern to you or not. THey may not be.

As far as mainstream media, Rep. John Conyers (D. MI) has been the front leading reputable source on this in the mainstream media. You could try google news searches with his name and "vote" or "diebold" or "fraud."
 
  • #14
Antiphon replied to pattylou earlier attempt to make a similar thread. By merging the threads, antiphon reponse became the first post of the thread. To reduce confusion, I am posting antiphon reply

Antiphon said:
Hello Pattylou.

I think there may have been voter fraud, but I think more of it existed in
favor of Kerry than Bush. While I didn't follow this as closely as I do other
affairs, I do recall some voting machines (the old mechanical type) in Philly
that had a few thousand votes on them (toward Kerry) before they should have.

Philadelphia, BTW, has the nation's hghest rate of electron fraud so this is
plausible.

Was there enough to have thrown the results of the election? I doubt it.
I give Mr. Kerry more credit than that. If his sources at the time would have
told him that he could come out on top because fraud could be uncovered,
he would not have conceded as quickly and gracefully as he did.
 
  • #15
pattylou said:
Have you looked at blackboxvoting.org's reports on this issue? I can point you to specific reports if you like. The most interesting one in my opinion, came out at the end of May.

The trouble with those sites, and already mentioned on another thread in this forum, is its credibility. Despite my anti-Bush stance, I remain skeptic about rigged elections.
 
  • #16
pattylou said:
Several reasons - (1) If this site is just a bunch of democrats then that part of the question will give that picture of the community. (2) Also I think I would be a lot less opinionated on the subject if Kerry had won. I would still have faith in the system and no reason to question it. So, I expect that that sort of general bias might be evident from the results.
The bias reflected in (2) wouldn't necessarily show up in the results.

For example, I'm right-leaning, voted for Kerry, and don't feel the election was rigged (which is why I selected the fourth choice).

Considering the state of affairs, assuming Democrats voted for Kerry while Republicans voted for Bush isn't necessarily a valid assumption. The 'don't change presidents in the middle of a war' folks would vote for Bush whether they were liberal or conservative, especially if they bought into the WMD in Iraq theme. Some Republicans might find the Bush administration's actions so scarily incompetent that they would have voted for Kucinich ... uh, well, for Dean ... geez ... well, maybe for Al Sharpton then, before they'd vote for Bush.
 
  • #17
DM said:
The trouble with those sites, and already mentioned on another thread in this forum, is its credibility. Despite my anti-Bush stance, I remain skeptic about rigged elections.

Beside bias, credibility and anti bush stance, in those site was the OPEN SOURCE CODE of the diebold voting system, and screenshots of all the steps to hack the software and change the results of the elections..
 
  • #18
Burnsys said:
Beside bias, credibility and anti bush stance, in those site was the OPEN SOURCE CODE of the diebold voting system, and screenshots of all the steps to hack the software and change the results of the elections..

Yes, quite ludicrous to learn that such people expose the weaknesses and flaws to hack the system. Isn't it time for 'intellegence' to eliminate such website contents?
 
  • #19
DM said:
Yes, quite ludicrous to learn that such people expose the weaknesses and flaws to hack the system. Isn't it time for 'intellegence' to eliminate such website contents?

I don't understand you.. what do you mean?? that the cia should take down the site?? or that this people showing the weaknesses of the system are promoting vote tampering? or somenthing like that?
 
  • #20
BobG said:
I'm wondering how the left-leaning/right-leaning part figures in. Is it assumed that all right-leaning folks were pro-Bush and all left-leaning folks were pro-Kerry? Or were you looking for some completely different correlation - left-leaning people have less faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for more government control while right-leaning people have more faith in government's ability to conduct fair elections, hence the need for less government interference?

Actually, I think people's opinion of the fairness of an election depends more on whether their favorite candidate won or lost than overall political alliance, but that's just the cynicism of a former soccer referee.

Personally, I'm left-leaning when I'm walking to the North and right-leaning when I'm walking to the South, but I live on the side of a mountain ( :smile: - okay, that's just plain facetious)
Personally, after the 2000 election and what happened in Florida (good old Jeb's state), I have not had faith in the electoral system. Also, I find the resistance to reforms, such as paper documentation, to be suspect. There is only one reason why individuals/groups would not favor having a paper trail.

I see some similarity between this and the filibuster. The Republicans in the 'Gang of 14' realize that there will likely be a Democrat majority again in the future, and if the right to filibuster is not preserved, they may suffer the consequences as well.

If we really believe in our republic and the preservation of democracy, Americans of all parties should be concerned about unfair elections (and that includes dirty politics).
 
  • #21
Perhaps things were rigged for Kerry, and he STILL LOST!

AH HAHAHAHAHA!

Just like the fraudulent campaign the libs just tried to run in Ohio, and THEY still lost.

In summary,

YOU LOST! GET OVER IT!
 
  • #22
A bit touchy, eh Reverend?
 
  • #23
Old news...

Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate...
http://www.yubanet.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/6/15415

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error...the odds of this occurrence are 250 million to one. ...Remember this has now happened twice with the exit polling and this "anomaly" cannot be dismissed. Given the history of voter fraud and shenanigans in this country are we witnessing the new voter fraud of the 21st century?"
http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf
 
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  • #24
There were irregularities on the part of both parties.

Kerry did a poor job of talking and listening to the people. He often sounded unsure or otherwise unconvincing. He also by-passed states which the Dems had written off. So in that sense, Kerry lost.
 
  • #25
Thanks IvanSeeking. I had forgotten those statistical analyses.

Informal Logic said:
Personally, after the 2000 election and what happened in Florida (good old Jeb's state), I have not had faith in the electoral system. Also, I find the resistance to reforms, such as paper documentation, to be suspect. There is only one reason why individuals/groups would not favor having a paper trail.

I think I read today, that the Sec of State (Harris) during the 2000 Florida debacle is now *running for Senate.* :rolleyes:
 
  • #26
Also, the owner of the company that built the voting machines is a strong supporter of Bush. I remember some memo that was suggestive of foul play.. I'll try to find it later.
 
  • #27
was the election rigged? Does a bear live in the woods?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis

Big business and big oil had to much at stake to risk losing.
 
  • #28
Ivan Seeking said:
Also, the owner of the company that built the voting machines is a strong supporter of Bush. I remember some memo that was suggestive of foul play.. I'll try to find it later.

The CEO of Diebold offered to "Deliver Ohio's electoral votes" to Bush.

He later claimed that he had chosen his words poorly. I'd say so!

In August 2003, Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans. In the letters he says he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

http://www.answers.com/topic/diebold-election-systems
 
  • #29
No conflict of interests there... :rolleyes:
 
  • #30
Burnsys said:
I don't understand you.. what do you mean?? that the cia should take down the site?? or that this people showing the weaknesses of the system are promoting vote tampering? or somenthing like that?

Talk about obscurity...

What's the point of writing:

Beside bias, credibility and anti bush stance, in those site was the OPEN SOURCE CODE of the diebold voting system, and screenshots of all the steps to hack the software and change the results of the elections..

I thought you were chastising the site contents! What's the matter with you?! You actually agree with neglecting websites that administer 'hacks'?
 

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