Recently in Election 2004 Category

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

Technorati Tags: 2000 Election, 2004 Election, Bush, Gore, Iraq, Kerry, Vietnam

Patrick has another interesting analysis of the Pew Report.

This paints a clear picture of:

• Why Clinton Won and Bush Lost
• Why Gore Lost (yes, he really did), and Bush Won
• Why Kerry Lost and Bush Won
• Who the best choice may be for 2008

I won't bother excerpting it, it's short, and worth the trip.

So during our recent flooding, one of our neighbors was venting that “The County should take care of this”. My wife just laughed at him, that he thought that the government was actually going to fix it for us.

Now this was the same neighbor who took it personally when our power was out for a good chunk of a weekday during a storm. I guess he’d lived in town his whole life, and now that he was a bit further out of town, it kind of rocked his world to realize that electricity wasn’t 100% reliable.

So my neighbor believes that Government is the solution to all his problems? Wanna bet he was a Kerry voter? Lifelong Democrat I bet…

From Equal Vote:

McCullogh & Plassmann assert that the Hout study “is entirely without merit and its results are meaningless.” They find that Hout and his colleagues made a basic error in their model, in attempting to quantify the number of “excess votes” for Bush. This can be shown, McCullogh and Plassmann explain, by relying on the same data and model to reach the opposite conclusion — namely that electronic voting favored Kerry.

I said it was bogus when it came out, Patrick Ruffini found it didn’t pass the smell test, and now its been bludgeoned some more.

And shows the Berkeley guys have been smoking too much crack

The conclusion that President Bush was more likely to improve his vote in counties with e-voting is laughable on its face. Using the Excel spreadsheet provided by the authors, I totaled the votes for counties with and without e-voting, and came up with this:

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITH E-Voting: 2.25%

Percentage Change for Bush in Counties WITHOUT E-Voting: 2.54%

It looks like e-voting suppressed the President’s vote by about 0.29%_ — or 7,800 votes!

Taking each of these counties as data points, was the President “significantly more likely” to have increased his support in counties with e-voting? Again, no.

E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 13/15 (86.7%)

Non-E-Voting Counties with Increased Bush Vote: 46/52 (88.5%)

Bad science loses to E-Voting again. Thanks to Pat for doing what I was too lazy to do.

Alleging 130,000 extra votes in Florida, here’s an analysis.

Even taking at face value the findings that the paper makes, those findings don’t support the conclusion that electronic voting caused the increase in votes for Bush.

The Berkeley working paper warrants more careful analysis. I’m sure that more able empiricists than I will, in short order, scrutinize their findings and conclusions. But as I’ve repeatedly warned, we should be wary of making accusations that the election was “stolen” before all the facts are in and have been analyzed carefully. In the end, such hasty judgments will do great harm to the vital objective of making our election system more fair and equal.

It’s also a “working paper”, which means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. My personal opinion? They’ve worked really hard to find the result they wanted by cherry picking their data. It doesn’t mean Bush got extra votes because e-voting machines were used. There could be a number of reasons why that happened, the most obvious being that Gore was not Kerry, so perhaps some voters switched. All that statistical analysis works about as well as polls do, since its based on the same technique.

From a moderate woman, Open Letter to the Democratic Party, How you could have had my vote. Like many of us, see seems upset by the “screaming over substance” tone of this last election.

Hat tip: Winds Of Change