June 06, 2006: Requiem

So what do you blog about when the local paper reduces your net worth to the worst mistake you’ve ever made in your entire life? Hmmm…well…good question. I’ll leave that for others to decide, because I think I’m done blogging for a while. A long while.

Some folks once said that I’m worth more than the worst mistake of my entire life. Too many people think otherwise, so I’m done allowing them to play off of that for their own gain. You know who you are. Enjoy it while you can, folks…even a dog knows when to come in out of the rain. “Don’t let them win!” you say. Wanna trade lives? Didn’t think so.

DG is done for now. I got off of my chest what I needed to get off of my chest. Big ripple in the pond that made, didn’t it? It’s nice that some people with good intentions took it from there, not so good that others chose to just use. Perhaps there’s a special place in hell for them, perhaps not. Some god somewhere cares. I don’t anymore.
I know what you’re thinking….yeah right….this guy’s not going anywhere. Think again. I’d trade everything I’ve ever had right now for someone else’s driver’s license. Blogging can be a huge positive for some, for others it’s a decidedly mixed bag, and for others it’s a ticket to your worst nightmares. Some people are getting sick enjoyment out of observing the latter, and for those, boy I hope that god somewhere is watching. In the meantime, I’ll try to forget that this experiment in redemption turned out the way it has. Have fun without me. With any luck, I won’t be watching.

Posted by Tim Russo at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

June 05, 2006: Welcome PD readers

Anyone got any pointers on how to rebuild credibility? Looks like Connie finally got her story in her paper.

Posted by Tim Russo at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

June 02, 2006: Rolling Stone’s article on 2004 —
DG response Part I

This is some article, alleging Ohio, among other states, was stolen in 2004. I was a Democratic challenger in 2004, I helped develop the training materials for challengers statewide, and I helped recruit, organize, and personally trained about 300 challengers in Cleveland. I supervised 4 polling places on election day, spending literally the entire day in polling places. Plus that whole training thousands of election observers in half a dozen countries thingy. So with all due respect, I think I have a bit more perspective than RFK Jr.

So I’ll take it on in chunks, first, RFK Jr.’s exit poll argument. He alleges that exit polling is an exact science, and is used abroad to reveal electoral manipulation.

In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine — paid for by the Bush administration — exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

That is largely true, and by the way, before it was paid for by the Bush administration, it was paid for by the Clinton administration…I worked briefly with the Ukraine group in 1999. In 1998 in Armenia, we trained IYC to do pre-election polling which showed similar discrepancies – exit polling is now a standard training for election observers all over the world. However, exit polls and the discrepancies they reveal are only one tool in the box for election observers to uncover smoking guns, a sliver of evidence, which has to be combined with actual observed occurrences of fraud in order for, say, the OSCE to declare a vote fraudulent and call for a new election. RFK cites studies that provide some very elusive facts. Emphasis mine.

In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ”27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40) Such results, according to the archive, provide ”virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.”

It’s hard to have “virtually irrefutable evidence” if you don’t have anyone on the record, won’t name the precincts involved, and throw them all into a big bag to come up with your “evidence”. However, another allegation seems fairly new, and potentially troublesome.

What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.

Well…not quite. Democratic challengers statewide were deployed almost exclusively in 80% Kerry precincts, i.e., black precincts, where GOP challengers were the biggest threat, and where Ken Blackwell’s machinations with the election law were targeted (more on this later). So the discrepancies there would almost necessarily be lower than in places where there was no one watching….which is the troublesome part. For instance…

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots — and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ”strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.” (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) — meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn’t vote. (186)

Now we’re getting somewhere. Unfortunately, in the world of election observation, the key to unlock an Orange Revolution in Ukraine or a Rose Revolution in Georgia, or a red, white and blue one in Ohio, is to document this at the time of the election, document a lot of it, and report it in that key window of opportunity when people are paying attention to such things, i.e. the first 24 hours.

RFK Jr.’s exit polling argument isn’t a smoking gun, but it does argue for a broader, better funded, longer term election observation operation in EVERY precinct in Ohio. If indeed the GOP manipulated the vote count in strong R precincts, exit polling discrepancies suggesting this need to be observed and reported factually. It is a lesson most election observation organizations abroad have learned long ago. Crunch all the numbers you want…you need observed, recorded, reported, timely facts supported by a whole lot more than one or two affidavits given to a congressman months later.

Stay tuned for Part II.

Posted by Tim Russo at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Sadly, Part II is unlikely to be forthcoming. JH