"Mystery Pollster" Mark Blumenthal follows up his recent post on the matter of the extraordinarily questionable results of Ohio's November 8th, '05 Elections. All four of the Election Reform initiatives on the ballot that day mysteriously and spectacularly failed to win approval in stark opposition to the pre-election polling by the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch which had predicted most of them would win by large margins.

That they lost by large margins instead, has been the subject of some controversy. We've blogged about it (here and here) and responded (here) to Blumenthal's analysis of tweaks in the Dispatch polls methodology that he feels "might" have skewed their findings this time around. Despite the major changes in the "methodology" used to gather the actual Election Results in Ohio this year (44 of Ohio's 88 counties installed all-new Touch-Screen Electronic Voting Machines for the first time ever) Blumenthal's presumption is that it must have been the tweaks in the Dispatch poll's methodology rather than any problem with the Election Results as gathered by these all-new, untested, unaccountable, untransparent and demonstrably prone-to-failure Electronic Voting Systems.

In his latest article on the matter, he follows up by suggesting that citizens in Ohio take advantage of Public Records Laws in the state which --- according to Blumenthal's information gathered from the Ohio attorney general website --- allow for the examination of "paper ballots" 60 days after Election Results have already been certified by the state. Says Blumenthal:

While Blumenthal later calls for "more formal routine audit procedures with far more transparency," he stops short of accepting my previous invitation that he join those of us calling for a truly transparent democracy by ending the use of Electronic Voting Machines employing secret software protected by the Voting Machine Companies who have claimed that examination of their source code by the public would violate "proprietary trade secrets". So the privatization of our Public Elections by private (and partisan) corporations, paid for with our tax dollars is presumably just fine for Blumenthal. Which is good, because billions of tax-dollars are now being given to those corporations to do exactly that, even though millions of us agree with the non-partisan GAO that reported recently on how all of this is a threat to our democracy.

Beyond that, there are apparently a number of points the Mystery Pollster mysteriously doesn't seem to understand about all of this, or that he simply does not wish to acknowledge when he calls for "an enterprising voter or investigative reporter" to "check the ballot paper trail" in Ohio. For example...

Faster even than the Lefties at Air America were able to embarrass themselves with missteps not long after their launch, the new and well-monied hard Right-leaning "Open Source Media" bloglomerate has been forced to change its name back to its original working title: Pajamas Media. The founders explain, blame others.

Last week, we briefly covered their launch featuring the dubious selection of disgraced former "reporter"/jailbird Judith Miller as keynote speaker. We might recommend that OSM PJM now focus a bit more on content rather than parties and/or names, since they have yet to offer much of a reason to stop by the joint. (Other than to enjoy the brilliant and airtight performance of yours truly in one of their early online debates about the Left/Right Politics of Shame.)

For the moment, it seems that Arianna doesn't have too much to worry about.

(DISCLOSURE: We should also mention again that they've been in talks with us about adding The BRAD BLOG to their list of paid homies. Discussions to that end continue to continue.)

Were it not for our world gone mad, this is the sort of thing I wish I was able to report more about. According to a recent report in the Houston Chronicle it appears that an innocent man was likely executed in the state in 1993.

The prosecutor, the jury forewoman and the one lone eye-witness all seem to now believe they executed an innocent man.

From Reuters coverage of the Chronicle's story:

Perhaps the worst part is that Cantu could not have been executed today since the Supreme Court "ruled this year that executions are illegal for crimes committed by minors."

In the meantime, I haven't been able to find where I read it recently, but as I recall there has been a move afoot by lawmakers to decrease the length of time that Death Row inmates have to appeal their cases and/or prove their innocence. (I welcome any BRAD BLOG readers who might have links to post on that in comments.)

Prior to the systematic killing of thousands of innocent folks around the world, I might have liked to have spent more time in the pursuit of stopping the shameful practice of our government killing its own citizens...whether they are guilty of a crime or not. No government should be in the business of putting its own citizens to death. Period. Our country has plenty of shame to go around for this continuing and morally reprehensible practice.

(Hat-tip RAW STORY for the reminder about this story!)

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Yesterday the CA SoS held a hearing regarding the state certification of the Diebold TSx DRE. The hearing was held in a room that was difficult to locate and was held in front of a microphone attached to a tape recorder. This is what the SoS seems to think of as democracy. In regards to the Diebold machine and Diebold's actions so far, Jim March of BlackBoxVoting had this to say, "If you don't want to be accused of cheating at cards, don't let aces fall out of your sleeves at every step." Bev Harris and Jim March are going to be allowed to do their ‘hack' into a Diebold machine on Nov. 30....

ADDITIONAL INFO FROM BRAD: The California Secretary of State's office will accept public comment on the certification of the Diebold TSx touchscreen voting machine until next week. To submit a comment, visit www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm, call (916) 653-6814 or email votingsystemcomment@ss.ca.gov.

Mark Crispin Miller, author of the new book FOOLED AGAIN, which makes the case that Election 2004 was stolen, and so will be the 2008 Election unless something is done --- and quick! --- responds in a letter to the editor to critical coverage by both Slate's Farhad Manjoo and Mother Jones' Mark Hertzgaard.

Manjoo has written numerous articles for Slate pooh-poohing the theory that anything went particularly wrong in the 2004 Presidential Election and recently wrote a critical review of Miller's new book. In his foolish review of Miller, Manjoo embarrasses himself by suggesting that he --- and the rest of the media --- would bother to give a damn about the mountain of demonstrable problems in our democracy if only John Kerry or the mainstream Democrats bothered to complain about it. He thus sets aside any responsibility that he might have as has a watchdog for our democracy...unless instructed to do so by some politician or another. Shameful.

In Hertzgaard's long feature article at MoJo, he claims to have done "some reporting of [his] own" to look into the claims made by Miller and others who have been investigating the mountain of problems from last November. And yet, the work Hertzgaard turns in --- while it looks and reads a whole lot like reporting --- contained damned little of it. What it did contain was little more than half-baked. His recurring tactic in "reporting" on each of the "irregularities" he chooses to examine can be summed up this way: "Folks who challenge the election claim this, but those who disagree say that, therefore, that proves there's nothing here to worry about, folks!" It's really ludicrous and atrocious, --- as many astute MoJo letter writers point out --- and just one of the reasons I haven't bothered to highlight his article until now.

We won't comment on Miller's book itself, since we've yet to read more than just the excerpts from FOOLED AGAIN as published recently in Harper's. But we did read the two articles by Manjoo and Hertzgaard and came away less than impressed as you can tell. Most disappointingly so in MoJo since we like them, and indeed have an article upcoming ourselves in their January '06 issue.

Miller's money quotes from his full letter:

The Marine Corps Reserve Colonel whom freshman Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-OH) claimed she was quoting last week when she delivered his "message" on the floor of the U.S. House that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do" has disavowed that statement and denies having made it to Schmidt.

The comment was directed to 37-year Marine colonel and combat veteran, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA). says she got his comments wrong.

Schmidt's comment on the floor of the House has caused a firestorm of debate since they were uttered, forcing the recently-elected Congresswoman to apologize and retract them shortly thereafter.

Nonetheless, Schmidt has a long working relationship with Bubp. Schmidt has worked alongside him advocating for far-Rightwing and Fundamentalist Christian causes together over the years as reported by Max Blumenthal.

Cincinnati Enquirer has more on the fallout in wake of Schmidt's comments pointing to some of her statements, during her swearing in just a few months ago, that she would never do such a thing...She must have just been kidding.

And one more point on the shameful Schmidt --- a report from BluegrassReoprt.org [linked fixed] yesterday suggests that "Mean Jean" may also be flaunting a few laws and House rules on her own website.

We're shocked...shocked...to see such behavior by a Republican...from Ohio.

Firedoglake has more on the pride of Clermont County...

UPDATE: Chickenhaw Rush Limbaugh calls Murtha a "useful idiot" and questions his "hawk" credentials. Media Matters has the deets and the audio.

LATE UPDATE: Josh Marshall has more on Schmidt who is now, apparently, playing the victim card! Not kidding. Amongst "the attacks from the Left" that she claims to be getting, she also says, "There's no way that I remotely tried to impugn his character." heheh...

The Marine Corps Reserve Colonel whom freshman Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R-OH) claimed she was quoting last week when she delivered his "message" on the floor of the U.S. House that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do" has disavowed that statement and denies having made it to Schmidt.

The comment was directed to 37-year Marine colonel and combat veteran, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA). says she got his comments wrong.

Schmidt's comment on the floor of the House has caused a firestorm of debate since they were uttered, forcing the recently-elected Congresswoman to apologize and retract them shortly thereafter.

Nonetheless, Schmidt has a long working relationship with Bubp. Schmidt has worked alongside him advocating for far-Rightwing and Fundamentalist Christian causes together over the years as reported by Max Blumenthal.

Cincinnati Enquirer has more on the fallout in wake of Schmidt's comments pointing to some of her statements, during her swearing in just a few months ago, that she would never do such a thing...She must have just been kidding.

And one more point on the shameful Schmidt --- a report from BluegrassReoprt.org yesterday suggests that "Mean Jean" may also be flaunting a few laws and House rules on her own website.

We're shocked...shocked...that such behavior would occur from a Republican from Ohio.

Guest blogged by David Edwards

Democrats are further honing their message on the misuse of intelligence by the White House during its' attempts to sell the Iraq invasion to the American people. Accusations of war critics with the phrases "lied us into war", "twisted the intelligence" and "manipulated the intelligence" are being slowly replaced with more moderate arguments.

Ray McGovern uses the term "corrupted intelligence" in this recent article. Former Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) chooses an even milder criticism by saying that the administration engaged in a "selective use of intelligence" to garner support from Congress and the American people.

Regardless of the PC-ness of the allegations used, the truth remains... The Bush Administration engaged in immoral, unethical and most probably illegal tactics to achieve the unnecessary goal of a pre-emptive war on an invented enemy. Let's hope that future intelligence can be "selected" (misused or twisted) to help us invent a victory.

Video in Windows Media format...
Video in QuickTime format...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Holy Cow! A blast and a half from Maureen Farrell. Although it's only the first in a three-part series, she's floored me already!

Or, as Gandhi writes:

I'll give you a short excerpt, which I hope will entice you to read the whole thing.

I didn't get to read this NY Times article from Saturday until just now. Gentelmen...start your shredders...

But before anybody gets too excited about all of this, remember: this word is coming out of the Bush Justice Dept. which means it will all depend on who gets ahold of the case --- the crime-fighting career professionals or the Bush appointees. Notice this passage from the same article:

Given just some of what we already know about the corruption and cronyism at DoJ and their willingness to follow the marching orders from above, it would be little surprise if Cullen's "prediction" comes to pass.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The amount of news has finally dwindled down to a normal amount for a Monday. Of interest today are two opposing editorials in the Atlanta Journal Constitution regarding the Voter ID issue. Also of interest are the articles from Lucas County, OH where they have finally decided that they had better do an investigation to figure out what went wrong and why it happened....

The oft-cited pollster Mark Blumenthal, who writes about all matters related to polling and its methodology on his Mystery Pollster blog, has posted the results of his analysis/investigation into what he feels may have gone awry in the Columbus Dispatch polling just prior to the November 8th election in Ohio.

We've previously reported on the final results of the five initiatives on the ballot in the Buckeye State two weeks ago - four of them part of an Election Reform package --- and the "staggeringly impossible" disparities, as we described them, revealed by those results when compared to the results of the Dispatch's final pre-election polling. To catch anybody up who hasn't seen the numbers, here's one set of them:

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

Blumenthal deserves kudos for his serious and detailed investigation into both the Dispatch survey's "long and remarkable history of success," as he describes it, and where he feels they might have gone so astoundingly wrong this year for the very first time. He points to a few changes in the methodology for the poll; the Dispatch didn't use the precise text of the initiatives in its survey; included an "Undecided" option for the first time; an examination of the data seems to show the poll occurred at a time that the electorate was in the process of changing its opinions on the issues; and finally that many voters found the text of the actual ballot initiatives to be long and confusing leading them to take the safer vote of "No" when they were not clear about what they were actually voting for.

Where he doesn't deserve credit is in his approach which presumes from the start that there must be something wrong with the polling itself --- but not the Election Results --- to explain the unprecedented disparity between the polling and the final results of the actual election.

As a pollster himself, he surely knows that it's quite simple to construct a poll in such a way that one can get back results which match just about any pre-determined outcome an unscrupulous pollster may hope for. Similarly, as with Blumenthal's earlier efforts to examine the disparity of Exit Poll Results vs. Final Election Results in last November's Presidential Election, his approach presumes from the get-go that the polling, not the results, are incorrect...and now we just need to figure out why.

Fair enough, in general. No doubt the articles we've written about the Ohio '05 election results, as well as the one from Fitrakis and Wasserman at Free Press, tend to presume that the election results are suspect, more so than the polling or its methodology.

The difference, however, is that while we welcome the search for reasons why the Dispatch's historically accurate poll might suddenly have failed for the first time in such an unprecedented matter, we have as much or more reason to be skeptical of Ohio's Electoral System which has been documented as full of unquestionable corruption and all-sorts of top-to-bottom malfeasance. Particularly over the last year or so since the Presidential Election.

In other words: Sure, we can, and should, go looking for reasons why the Dispatch poll might have failed so mightily for the first time in its history, as others (including Blumenthal) did with the Exit Polls from November '04 which also --- just a coincidence, we know --- failed so hugely for the first time in their history. We can likely find anomalies to somewhat explain what might justify a pre-determined conclusion that Election Results are right and Pre-Election Polling must be wrong. But why would Blumenthal, or anybody else, have reason to believe that scientifically run polls with methodologies developed and honed over decades, run by pollsters with (theoretically) no dog in the hunt, should be less reliable than an Electoral System being run on newly developed, newly introduced technology employing secret software that nobody inspects for validity or integrity? All of which is run on machines which have a tremendous and documented known failure rate and are run by partisan officials with not just a stake in the outcome, but whose very livelihoods (in the case of the recent Ohio initiatives, as well as last November's election) are at stake in the final results. ...

Boston Globe highlights the abject failure of the Republican led Congress to perform their oversight duties, pointing to --- amongst many other examples --- the 140 hours of sworn testimony taken on Bill Clinton's Christmas cards versus just 12 hours taken about Abu Ghraib.

Pre-empting the partisan issues involved here, the Globe points out that the Democratic-controlled House in '93-'94 held 135 "oversight" or investigative hearings during the Clinton Administration, while the GOP House was only able to muster 37 such hearings last year with Bush in the White House.

In the meantime, Kevin Horrigan in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlights the "transcript" from one of those rare hearings...

(Hat-tip to RAW STORY for the Globe link and to my father for Chicken Little.)

Stephen Oravecz of Mahoning Valley's Tribune Chronicle notices that there were a few problems in Ohio's ‘04 Presidential Election, and more problems persist still today...

Fadiman is a wonderful filmmaker, citizen and human being, by the way, who we've come to know since first meeting her at the Election Reform Conference in Nashville earlier this year. We've also been interviewed for the documentary mentioned above. Whether we'll make the final cut will remain to be seen

Oravecz also discusses the still un-reported recent non-partisan GAO report confirming the problems with Electronic Voting Machines that we've tried to make noise about (to little, but somewhat growing, avail) of late:

Also, an editorial in yesterday's Star-Gazette in New York references the GAO Report.

And in this week's Rock River Times, in Illinois, Senior Editor Joe Baker notices as well.

So that's one paper in New York, and another one called "Times". We guess we're getting closer...

Keep sending those cards and letters, people! The wingnut (ironcally enough) Townhall.com makes it very easy for you to do so! And yes...as you can see above...it matters!

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's press release says the November 8th election was "a great success" and "a great day for Ohio voters."

And, what do you know? Diebold agrees!

The story on the ground in Lucas County, OH, however, seems to tell a very different story. More than just the 14 voting machines left in a hallway unattended for 10 days at the University of Toledo as reported by Joshua Boak in the Toledo Blade (so much for that secure chain of custody!), dozens of investigations are now underway in Lucas County for all number of problems that occurred on Election Day two weeks ago according to another Blade report, this one from Boak along with Jane Schmucker...

Note, that the investigation will begin after the results are already certified.

And a few more troubling items from the same article...

And finally, let's not forget that Lucas County is where Bernadette Noe, the head of their Board of Elections and Republican Party --- as well as the wife of indicted "CoinGate" hustler Thomas Noe - reportedly was found to have been instrumental in gaming the November ‘04 Presidential Election in that county.