1) the Republican method of "cooking up a live frog"
Dems:
- throw the live frog in hot boiling water
- the frog jumps out immediately and runs away
Rethugs:
- Put the live frog on a pan with tepid water
- Let him get distracted, enjoying the "bath"
- Slowly, by infinitely small ammounts they raise the temperature
- When the water reaches boiling point it's too late for the frog to notice anything..
2)
Cooking up an "electoral frog"
Small numbers of votes relative to the size of each reporting area being added while lots of smoke was being generated. That would be a reasonable way to not only get sufficient numbers for an EC win, but create just enough of an overall delta to claim 'popular support
How they could have done the "slow cooking"
A possible theory, of how the election was tweaked (From another forum - law)
After following as many threads as I could stand, reviewing available data and crunching a mental whodunit, I came up with a possible scenario:
First I had to start out with a couple of assumptions:
- It was done by remote access To have so many County election officials in so many States complicit in the conspiracy and to train them to continually adjust the percentages over the course of election night flies in the face of common sense. Someone would rat it out. Only a few people were behind the operation.
- Universal access had to be available to the tabulating servers in order to monitor progress of the elections of interest (President, Senate, House etc.) and be able to adjust the results so that the final tally, at least on superficial review seemed legitimate.
- It had to be an automated system that could adjust thousands of values on a continuous basis,in as many State and National races of interest without arousing any suspicion.
So, what could be hacked into that would have access to all the tabulating servers in many states to get a continuous progress report and trigger scripts to adjust the tally?
The Associated Press reporting system
Makes some sense and here's why
Who has mainstream access to AP's central tabulators?
The white house
Who was in the white house on election night?
According to eye witnesses and several on hands reports Karl Rove and his team spent the night at the WH carrying cell phones and sitting down at computers
A "slow cook" of the election, if done well, would render almost any effort to uncover and prove a fraud very difficult, and thereby raise a bar to the scrutiny of any claim and create a risk most would not take.
Some evidence ?
Two University Professors and 1 Research Institute did an analysis on election numbers and got some very odd readings:
Penn State Professor
Daily Kos :: An Academic's View of Exit Polls: Chances are 1 in 250 million
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper : "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," by Dr. Steven F. Freeman who says:
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate.
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
MIT Professor
Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000t
A statistical analysis of exit polling conducted for RAW STORY by a former MIT mathematics professor has found the odds of Bush making an average gain of 4.15 percent among all 16 states included in the media's 4 p.m. exit polling is 1 in 50,000, or .002 percent.
The analysis, conducted by former Associate Professor of Mathematics David Anick, also ruled out any significance of a variance between electronic balloting and paper ballot states, which RAW STORY reported last week.
In fact, the non-electronic voting states of New York and New Hampshire had higher gains for President Bush than states in the exit polls using some electronic balloting: Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada and West Virginia.
Moreover, the analysis found that states using optical scan technology to read paper ballots were not more likely to have exit poll variance than other states. Because New York, which uses lever balloting, had such a large variance, the optical scan variance is within the threshold of being statistically explained by chance.
Tomas Rivera Policy Institute Latino Votes ?
HoustonChronicle.com - Latinos' support for George Bush debated
Exit-poll math doesn't add up, one institute says
Sources: Federal Election Commission, U.S. Census Bureau, Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, Willie C. Velazquez Institute
The institute, essentially a wing of the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, found itself at odds with the numbers put out by the main national exit poll in the previous two national elections. The problem, Gonzalez said, lies in the way the poll goes about collecting them.
At first blush, the numbers seem too significant to be believed. And in truth, they might be.
National exit polls show that President Bush received an impressive 42 percent of the nationwide Latino vote Tuesday, seven to 10 points higher than his first run and possibly unprecedented for a modern-day Republican candidate.
But a prominent Latino organization claims the numbers are as incredible as they appear.
"It ain't true," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Willie C. Velazquez Institute, which researches Latino voting patterns. "Their poll showed more Latinos voting than there are registered Latino voters. That tells you everything you need to know."
That national exit poll showed more than 10 million Hispanics voted, he said, but Hispanic voters groups estimated the number at more than 7 million (great find by mrcomplex, who explains numbers further here)
More Kossacks great finds:
Infinitesimal Ammounts adjusted behind election chaos smokescreen
As you know, it can be helpful to have a testable hypothesis or model of a complex situation.
Based on the various threads and posts concerning manipulation of votes in the 2 Nov 2004 National Election, it might be worthwhile to consider a hypothesis that I'll refer to as the 'imperceptible adjust and gambit distraction' hypothesis.
In testing such an hypothesis, you might consider looking for a distribution of unexplained votes for Bush of 1K here and there in small precincts, 10K here and there in somewhat larger precincts, all of which would be done at the 'counting stage' and not at the level of the 'ballot box', and you might find that the 'imperceptible adjust' fit;
You would also consider where and what type of events would act as 'distraction gambits', for instance, thugs at the polls in a place like OH or underwriting to get Nader on the ballot in places like OH, PN, etc., or locking observers out of a few rooms where ballots were being counted or .....
Small numbers of votes relative to the size of each reporting area being added while lots of smoke was being generated, would be a reasonable way to not only get sufficient numbers for an EC win, but create just enough of an overall delta to claim 'popular support.' If done well it would render almost any effort to uncover and prove very difficult, and thereby raise a bar to the scrutiny of any claim and create a risk most would not take. ( by understandinglife)