August 22, 2004
More News On Election Fraud

Apparently, 46,000 snowbirds are registered to vote in both Florida and New York. There is no cross-checking of registrations, so quite a few people could be double-registered. This means they can physically vote in one state and vote absentee in another, and no one is the wiser.

From the New York Daily News:

Officials in both states acknowledge that voting in multiple states is something of a perfect crime, one officials don't have the means to catch.

"I can't imagine how the supervisors would have access to that information," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state. "As far as I know, cross-state registry has not been discussed."

The News' investigation also found:

- Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68% are Democrats, 12% are Republicans and 16% didn't claim a party.

- Nearly 1,700 of those registered in both states requested that absentee ballots be mailed to their home in the other state, where they are also registered. But that doesn't raise red flags with officials in either place.

Efforts to prevent people from registering and voting in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system.

If you live close to a state you *used* to live it, it seems fairly straightforward to vote in two places.

I've mostly been looking at black box voting fraud, and this hadn't even occcured to me.

Posted by nicole at 05:34 PM

August 19, 2004
It Just Goes On Like This!

I know I've been writing about this a lot, but I just can't get over it, and most of the media is totally ignoring it.

Today's WSJ Opinion section (Yes, the opinion section) has a piece about the military killing non-violent protestors of the Chavez election in Venezuela.

CARACAS, Venezuela--On Monday afternoon, dozens of people assembled in the Altamira Plaza, a public square in a residential neighborhood here that has come to symbolize nonviolent dissent in Venezuela. The crowd was there to question the accuracy of the results that announced a triumph for President Hugo Chávez in Sunday's recall referendum.

Within one hour of the gathering, just over 100 of Lt. Col. Chávez's supporters, many of them brandishing his trademark army parachutist beret, began moving down the main avenue towards the crowd in the square. Encouraged by their leader's victory, this bully-boy group had been marching through opposition neighborhoods all day. They were led by men on motorcycles with two-way radios. From afar they began to taunt the crowd in the square, chanting, "We own this country now," and ordering the people in the opposition crowd to return to their homes. All of this was transmitted live by the local news station. The Chávez group threw bottles and rocks at the crowd. Moments later a young woman in the square screamed for the crowd to get down as three of the men with walkie-talkies, wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded "Bolivarian Circle," revealed their firearms. They began shooting indiscriminately into the multitude.

A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back as she ran for cover. The bullet ripped through her aorta, kidney and stomach. She later bled to death in the emergency room. An opposition congressman was shot in the shoulder and remains in critical care. Eight others suffered severe gunshot wounds. Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol.

I know this is an incredibly long quote, but it's just unbelievable to me that this isn't all over the television. Non-violent protesters were *shot* for demonstrating about possible election fraud. Venezuela is supposed to be a civilized place. It's a rich country. It's the world's fifth largest oil exporter, and it's come to this.

You have not heard the last of this, and things are not hunky dory down there. It's not just Iraq causing the ever-escalating oil prices. I think the traders and oil companies are looking at Venezuela too. I just wish people in this country would wake up to the idea that it's quite possible to steal an election with unauditable electronic voting machines.

If this doesn't show them, what will?

Posted by nicole at 09:53 PM

Yet More About Venezuela

I'm sorry if I'm like a broken record on this, but even if you're happy Chavez won, you should care that he might have stolen the election. Electronic voting is dangerous and does not provide any benefits for the added danger. We're about to experience the wide-spread joy of electronic voting here in the US, which is why I *can't* believe the way the media is treating the Venezuelan election.

From the Associated Press:

Any casual observer of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections knows exit polls can at times be unreliable. But the poll has become an issue here because the opposition, which mounted the drive to force the leftist leader from office, insists it shows the results from the vote itself were fraudulent. The opposition also claims electronic voting machines were rigged, but has provided no evidence.

...

But results of the Penn, Schoen & Berland survey were sent out by fax and e-mail to media outlets and opposition offices more than four hours before polls closed. It predicted just the opposite of what happened, saying 59 percent had voted in favor of recalling Chavez.

Basically, this article is about how one of the exit polling organizations is in deep doodoo for giving a report that was the exact opposite of the election results. Since fraud is alleged, I don't see how they should be vilified at this point.

As far as I can tell, the opposition hasn't been given access to come up with any evidence to show that the election was a fraud. From the NY Times:

On Wednesday, though, leaders of the anti-Chávez movement in Venezuela announced that the audit should not proceed because they had evidence that hundreds of machines had been manipulated to limit yes votes on the recall.

...

Officials of both the Carter Center and the Organization of American States said the audit was an infallible method of detecting irregularities. They also said that the voting machines had worked flawlessly on Sunday and that there was no evidence of tampering.

The opposition took part in a smoothly conducted pre-election audit of a sampling of voter machines, after tamper-proof software was installed that allowed the machines to record votes and transmit results to a central vote-counting bank.

That's right -- they can't provide the audit that the opposition would like to do, and they dare to call this system "infallible"? Who on earth believes that a black-box electronic voting system is "infallible". Check the blogs I referenced recently if you want to see how "smoothly" and "flawlessly" the machines behaved on Sunday.

I think, I hope at least, that the news media is out of step with what real people think about electronic voting and the Venezuelan elections. Here are some letters to the NY Times that might indicate they are leaning the wrong way:

Jimmy Carter has served as an independent election observer in many countries, including the recall referendum in Venezuela last Sunday. In January 2001, when asked about Florida's system, he said, "If we were invited to go into a foreign country to monitor the election, and they had similar election standards and procedures, we would refuse to participate at all."

...

The possibility that my vote may be counted toward an unintended candidate is the issue. The voting machines are just the vehicle.

Dysfunctional or rigged machines enable a form of theft and should be viewed as a crime rather than just a technological boo-boo.

That any government would shrug at this potential tells me that it has no regard for the individual vote or, chillingly, that the fix is in.

...

It is ridiculous that federal elections can be hijacked by states with uncheckable voting machines.

...

There is nothing more important right now to the American people than the integrity of the fall election. As a Florida voter, I am doubly concerned. I believe that the 2000 election was stolen in this state, and I do not, as Paul Krugman put it, fear "sounding conspiracy-minded" (column, Aug. 17).

...

I think this is bigger issue than the media does. The only people I see talking about this are technical types, libertarians and people from the left and right who are unafraid of sounding like wack-job conspiracy theorists. Clearly, the media thinks we *are* wack-job conspiracy theorists.

Waiting until after the election and alleging fraud looks like sour grapes. This needs to be addressed *now*, before a likely close election turns into a circus in multiple states instead of just one.

Posted by nicole at 01:54 PM

August 16, 2004
More on Chavez's "Victory"

An opinion piece in the WSJ today has a good summary of the problems with the Venezuelan elections.

Just before 4 a.m. Monday, Mr. Chavez's hand-picked CNE director announced that Mr. Chavez had won with exactly the opposite result of that indicated by the exit polls. As Dow Jones writer Charles Roth reported, the opposition said the "CNE didn't allow an audit of the paper receipts issued by the touchscreen machines, or allow opposition representatives to be present during its tallying of the vote."

If you can't get to the link above, I have the text archived here.

Posted by nicole at 09:11 AM

Two Different Stories

Last night before bed, I peeked at the WSJ Online headline. Here it is:

Doom and gloom. Clearly, the Sunshit Blowing Team that usually controls the WSJ Online is fast asleep. I took a snapshot because I thought it would change by morning. It did.

OK, that headline dropped in importance, but the first headline is about oil. The second says stocks will rise based on positive news following the Venezuelan election. This is so far from reality, that I'm stunned they'd be so credulous.

Last night, exit polls and/or early results showed Chavez to get booted out of office. They *clearly* showed this. Since blogs frequently change, I took snapshots of two from Venezuela this morning.

Both were quote sober last night, and one even claims that "SI" votes printed out from the touch screen machines as "NO" votes. Search this blog for the word "print". Note also as you're reading that some people waited in line 12 hours to vote and there were many irregularities.

The headline calls it an "Electoral coup d'etat" and the closing line of the entry is: "Our country is in great, great danger."

The other blog says many of the same things, and sums up their blog entry with "this is the worst possible [result]."

I'm seriously annoyed at the WSJ's pollyanna call on this. They used to be a *real* paper, now they just take what the (stock) futures are doing and MAKE UP AN EXCUSE to match it. Clearly, they haven't read the stories, or they would be baffled by the positive action in the futures. Or, maybe they have and they are unwilling to say so. The latter truly horrifies me. I'd rather believe they are uninformed, as awful as that is.

Watch the news for what the Carter Center (yes, former president Jimmy) has to say about the elections they monitored. This isn't over.

Posted by nicole at 08:41 AM

August 09, 2004
Yeah, I'm sure it's just chance

I'm not directly opposed to outsourcing and offshoring. Companies are working within the system to make the most post-tax profits. I think it's a crummy idea to outsource parts of a corporation, but I suspect it will take at least five years for Wall Street to see the errors of outsourcing overseas, longer than that for the MBAs who thought up outsourcing to give in and see the problems with it and longer yet for the U.S. government to figure out how to discourage offshoring without destroying business.

Like it or not, offshoring and outsourcing have changed the structure of the labor market and therefore the economy of the United States. It will undoubtedly change again as nothing is more constant than change, but it has undeniably made things harder for laborers and new college grads. Those who are experienced or highly skilled have less to fear from it, in my opinion.

Are you still with me? Am I wrong here?

Fed Vice-Chair Ferguson sure doesn't see it that way:

However, I think that important weight should be given to idiosyncratic features such as the causes of the preceding recessions and the occurrence of additional shocks after the recessions ended that exacerbated the economy's problems. This view implies that monetary policymaking probably does not need to be altered in a systematic way to accommodate a new sort of business-cycle dynamics. On the contrary, the fact that the two most recent recoveries have involved slow job growth in their initial stages may best be attributed to chance rather than a new structure of the economy.

That's right. It's idiosyncratic. It's chance. Setting aside the points I've made above about labor, we could consider the changes (massive increases, really) in debt loads on consumers and governments and the derivatives complex. But the changes in the economy are just random occurances.

Maybe they should leave monetary policy up to chance too.

Posted by nicole at 08:38 PM

August 06, 2004
Say What You Will

Say what you will about the New York Post, but their business writer, John Crudele, was right again.

This is a snapshot from the WSJ Economic calendar, the place where they post predictions for economic numbers as well as the actual numbers and the last period's revisions.

Yesterday, Crudele said the following:

WALL Street thinks the gov ernment will report strong U.S. job growth tomorrow.

I think Wall Street is wrong.

...

Unless the Labor Department deviates from its previous assumptions this July, the economy will have to have created an awful lot of jobs to get over the statistical hump and meet Wall Street's forecast.

There's more in the article, including some numbers, but you get the idea. He's been right consistently with his predictions about the job reports. I don't have time to dig up past months, and, in fact, I might not even be able to get what I want from the NYPost archives. In any case, it's nice to see someone not blinded by what they *want* to see.

Posted by nicole at 09:16 AM