Wisconson: 2004 Redux?

The excerpt below is from Wisconsin Wave; I hope you'll read the whole article, 'cuz it's a great summary of what happened in 2004.

But since I like to include visuals, I dug up the map at right. It was created in April, 2005 based on the exit poll data available at that time (click on the image for a larger version) and shows a "red shift" from the percentages reported by voters in the exit polls, which strongly favored Kerry by nearly five full points, to the percentages of the official, tabulated vote.

Per Richard Charnin, "[t]he unadjusted 2004 exit polls (state and national) were not released until about a year ago" (i.e., ca. June, 2011). According to the exit polls, out of the total respondents, 51.7% reported voting for Kerry and 47.0% reported voting for Bush (with the remainder voting for "Other"). Per the actual vote as tabulated, the final percentages were 50.7% for Bush vs. 48.3% for Kerry. This means the results shifted from Kerry being ahead by 4.7 points in the exit polls, to Bush being ahead by 2.4 points in the votes as tabulated, for a net, actual red-shift from the exit polls to the reported vote totals of 7.1 points. Can't believe you didn't hear more about it? Neither can I.

ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: The 2004 Presidential election was stolen via institutional fraud

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The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark – they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) 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)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

(Emphasis supplied.) Footnotes and much more at the link. The issue of election integrity is, i.m.h.o., among the most under- and mis-reported of our time.

UPDATE: Bob Fitrakis has another great article on vote rigging, at The Free Press.

Mr. R., Autotuned

(Thanks, Ben!)

Just wow.

Jon Kessler at Salon 94

And here's a post leading to images of an earlier Kessler work, seen in the 2009 Armory Show.

Robert Cauble's Guy Debord

A little long, but a wonderful ride; via notbored.org.

Shell Rig Malfunctions at Posh Party (the Yes Lab Strikes Again)

This was a send-off for Shell's arctic rigs at the Seattle Space Needle. The actual rigs were visible outside the window. Incredibly, there was a malfunction of the model rig that was supposed to pour drinks for guests.

Per HuffPo,

The device which sprayed Rainey's face was a model of Shell's drill rig, the Kulluk, which is set to soon depart Seattle for the Arctic. The Kulluk was built-in 1983 by Mitsui, the same company that, two decades later, built the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. . . .

* * * * *
[T]he Yes Lab [also] sent out a press release on Shell's behalf, threatening [legal action against the activists and] attacking . . . the activists' brand-new ArcticReady.com website [, which looks like a Shell site, and] which includes a social media ad generator and a dangerously addictive children's video game called Angry Bergs. The fake Shell release generated additional media coverage.

Earlier this year, Shell obtained a legal injunction stopping any Greenpeace activist from coming within 1km of any Shell vessel. To thank the company, Greenpeace teamed up with the Yes Lab to plan a promotional advertising campaign for Shell's Arctic drilling efforts, which Shell prefers to keep quiet. Besides the ill-fated ceremony and the website, the campaign includes a number of other elements that will shadow Shell's summer Arctic destruction campaign.

(More at HuffPo and YouTube. For more Yes Men or Yes Lab actions, click on those labels below.)

The Knowns and "Known Unknowns" in Wisconsin

What we know (see image right, from Labor's Pains):

What we don't know:

From BradBlog:

The early Exit Poll results had reportedly predicted the race between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett a virtual tie, leading media to plan for a long night tonight. A second round of Exit Polls results, however, were said to have given Walker a broader lead over Barrett. Even so, we were told, the race based on the Exit Poll data alone was still "too close to call." . . .

Of course, the raw, unadjusted Exit Polling data itself is no longer entrusted to us mere mortals. It can only be seen by members of the mainstream media, and we are simply left to trust them to report it all accurately to us or not. And when, after all, have we not been able to rely on the mainstream media to report everything accurately to us? But never mind the Exit Polls. We've got real polls, real votes, actual ballots now to tell us who won or lost. If only we'd bother to actually count them...

Instead, those ballots --- Wisconsin votes on mostly paper ballots --- are tabulated by computer optical-scan systems like the ones in Palm Beach County, FL which, in March of this year, had named several losing candidates to be the "winners". And like the ones in New York City which, in 2010, managed to toss out thousands of valid votes, including as many as 70% in one South Bronx precinct. And like the ones in Oakland County, Michigan where officials found the same machines failed to count the same ballots the same way twice in 2008. And like the ones in Leon County, FL which, in 2005, were hacked to entirely flip the results of a mock election.

In Palm Beach County, FL the failure was discovered during a state mandated post-election spot-check of 2% of the paper ballots. In New York City, it took nearly two years before the failures were discovered after the New York Daily News was able to examine the paper ballots via a public records request. In Oakland County, MI, election officials were lucky enough to discover the failure during pre-election testing. And in Leon County, FL, the hacker --- a computer security expert --- revealed the op-scan system flaw he exploited to flip the results of the election in an Emmy-nominated HBO documentary.

(Links to more info in quoted portions are omitted but can be found at BradBlog.)

And more of what we do know: Item 7 in my previous post here; see also here (and if you live in Wisconsin and don't know who Kathy Nickolaus is, see here); and see also the media-related labels below this post.

Thousands Commemorate Tiananmen Square

More great photos here.