Something rotten?

OK, I realize a lot of my readers might still think this: "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark."

However, I haven't really blogged about the election irregularities.

If readers want to follow the story, I recommend they check out the Anonymous blogger who has been compiling the various problems around the country.

Or watch Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC. Or just read Bloggermann, Olbermann's blog. If you are interested in this topic, you've probably already read Thom Hartmann's op-ed.

For those who haven't been paying attention, some new datapoints:

Yesterday, a Franklin County Commissioner seat in Indiana switched from red to blue when officials found that an optical scan machine had counted straight ticket Democratic voting for the Libertarian candidate.

Thousands of votes are still inexplicably missing in North Carolina.

Ralph Nader set in motion a recount in New Hampshire, a state John Kerry won. Again, the issue is optical scan machines:

Nader has alleged that “irregularities’’ in the optical scanning voting machines appear to have inflated the totals that Bush should have gotten in several key states.

The machines were manufactured by Diebold.

Even as the count of provisional ballots has started, David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the Green and Libertarian candidates for President, have "announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio." They estimate that they'll need $150,000 in donations to pay for it, and so far have raised $112,500.

Meanwhile, Kerry's lawyers are in Ohio on a "fact-finding mission."

Remember, the real Presidential election is December 13, 2004, when the Electoral College meets.

Just one more month!

Democrats and Foreign Policy

Thursday, November 11, Yuval Rubinstein posted a provocative piece called "Are We Feeling Secure Now?" on the Left Coaster blog:

Lost in all the post-election navel-gazing and recriminations is one undisputable fact: the Democrats are in serious trouble in the national security/foreign policy arena....

Now, I think Kerry did a much better job in criticizing the administration's numerous shortcomings in the war on terror. Indeed, he drew some real blood in pointing out bin Laden's Tora Bora getaway. However, I was extremely disappointed at Kerry's inability to develop a coherent national security strategy beyond vague promises to rebuild international alliances. This is even more inexcusable when you consider that Kerry has been in the Senate for 20 years (no country bumpkin state governor is he) and that he was known for his expertise in foreign policy/national security issues.

I agree with some of Rubinstein's recommendations for change -- yes, Democrats should build a better national security infrastructure, for example) -- just as I previously agreed with many of these same sentiments when expressed two years ago in an article by Heather Hurlburt in the Washington Monthly. Rubinstein references Hurlburt and quotes her approvingly.

However, I don't agree with either of these analysts that Democrats are ignorant, inattentive, and/or indifferent to war and national security issues. Many of my best friends are Democrats who care deeply about war and national security issues.

Maybe the problem for the party is that it is too reliant on Washington hacks and not willing to trust academic wonks? The party seems to have no problem turning to the academy for policy advice about social security or education, but seems to ignore academic thinking on foreign policy -- unless perhaps it is published in Foreign Affairs.

The media doesn't take the academic talent pool seriously either. Does anyone outside the academy remember the open letter penned by the Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy?

I didn't think so. The American media certainly didn't notice. On October 26, 2004, Professor Stuart Kaufman (who was a driving force behind the letter) wrote:

Since the experts' open letter criticizing U.S. foreign policy was released two weeks ago, international media have provided substantial coverage. Major newspapers in Germany, Turkey and Australia ran stories, as did the Guardian in England, and the Straits Times in Singapore.. Broadcast coverage included a radio interview with the BBC and television coverage on al-Jazeera....Though headline news in many parts of the globe and a significant part of the blogosphere, the
letter has remained largely unreported in the mainstream US media.

This was not a radical group:

Far from reflecting a liberal bias, the group of signers includes an array of prominent conservative scholars such as Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, John J Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Michael C. Desch of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, and Christopher Layne, Contributing Editor of The American Conservative magazine. According to Dr. Thomas Volgy, Executive Director of the International Studies Association, this joint effort and broad agreement by such a diverse group of international affairs scholars is unprecedented.

The media yawned and I don't think the national Democratic party cared.

In any case, back to the big picture. Yesterday, I posted a response to Rubinstein in the Left Coaster's comments section, but let me repost that here to preserve it:

Part of the problem faced by Democrats is that they believe in just about the same policies as Republicans, but within more reasonable limits.

For example, Dems obviously don't want to disarm, but most Dems could easily find tens of billion of dollars worth of fat in the Defense Budget that could be cut. The US spends more on its military than any other 20 nations combined! However, if Dems vote to cut that fat, Republicans call them weak.

Another problem is the Republicans don't fess up to their "real" foreign policy agenda. Republicans talk about US leadership, democratization, and security but actually offer the rest of the world take-it-or-leave it unilateralism, bullying, American exceptionalism (now cast as a reason for the US not to abide international laws and norms), and hegemony (with neoimperial aspirations).

Dems have been ineffective at explaining why the "real" Republican agenda is so outrageous and dangerous.

Finally, Dems need to emphasize the non-military policy tools that can and do work to solve foreign policy problems. Democrats put higher value on diplomacy, foreign aid, arms control, genuine multilateralism and economic sanctions. Republicans would rather fight than switch.

Terror: Objective Achieved!

Elections can have a transformative effect on politics.

Don't believe me? Follow this chronology:

1. Tuesday, November 2, 2004: American election day. Republican George W. Bush is elected narrowly in the Electoral College (286-252) and popular vote (51-48%).

2. Wednesday, November 9, 2004: Controversial Attorney General John Ashcroft resigns, effective upon the confirmation of a successor. This is from Ashcroft's resignation letter, dated election day, November 2:

The demands of justice are both rewarding and depleting. I take great personal satisfaction in the record which has been developed. The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

Security achieved! Onward soldiers, sayeth the General.

3. Thursday, November 11, 2004: Terror alert level to be lowered:

The federal government will lower the terror alert status for financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, The Associated Press learned Wednesday.

The reduction from orange to yellow, the midpoint on the government's five-level terror warning system, comes three months after the alert was raised amid concerns the institutions could be al Qaeda targets. Yellow is "elevated," while orange is considered a "high" threat of attack.

Translation: the election is over -- time to shop!

Alberto Gonzales

President Bush has nominated Alberto Gonzales to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General.

This is a shot across the bow to those of us concerned about the torture of prisoners of war and universal human rights. I wonder if 40 Senators will notice?

Gonzales wrote a now-leaked memo dated January 25, 2002 concerning the potential applicability of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. He noted that the President and his advisors could one day be charged in the US with war crimes if they botched the handling of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan.

The memo doesn't defend the use of torture, nor does it call for it. Rather, it defends the recommendation by the Justice Department that prisoners in the "war on terror" are not POWs and are instead something like "enemy combatants." By sticking to this argument, Gonzales reasons, American officials wouldn't have to worry about violating domestic and international law. Implicitly, this means that actions that would violate the rights of POWs under the Geneva Convention might be breached in the interrogation of prisoners in the "war on terror."

The memo, in short, was an attempt to provide legal cover to an administration potentially committing war crimes -- depending upon the thinking of future prosecutors, judges and juries. It justified the creation of the prison at Guantanamo.

The leaked memo can be found on the Newsweek website (pdf file). This is some of the magazine's text about it:

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future...

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote.

According to the memo, the Attorney General is charged by statute with "interpreting the law for the Executive Branch." This means for both domestic and international law.

Gonzales, of course, is now nominated for that post. In the memo, he was acting merely as White House counsel.

Apparently, Colin Powell and the State Department lawyers were arguing that the Geneva convention did apply to the Taliban and should apply to al Qaeda. In the memo, Gonzales acknowledges that the US might be condemned by other states and even lose their cooperation in the war on terror. Bingo:

Joseph Onek, director of the Liberty and Security Initiative of the Constitution Project, says it was this kind of thinking that turned the world from supporting our invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 to standing against us: "When you think about it, Guantanamo became a symbol around the world for American disrespect for law." He calls Gonzales' judgment "a disaster."

Gonzales also advised the President to set up the military tribunals to try terrorists, which a federal court just called unconstitutional. And Gonzales was Bush's legal counsel in Texas when the then-Governor was using the death penalty without a lot of serious attention to the cases before him.


Michael Froomkin at Discourse Net blogged about the release of the memo some months ago.

Center for American Progress already has a fairly thorough "Record of Injustice" about Gonzales.

Time for a filibuster?

Oil for Food Scandal

In early October, Charles Duelfer, the most recent head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) issued a final report on the status of Iraq's weapons programs.

The main findings, of course, have been well-known for quite some time -- long before they were issued. After all, Duelfer's predecessor David Kay has been saying for about a year that Iraq had no significant WMD programs. Here are noteworthy passages from the "Key Findings" summary:

• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

• While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter...

• In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW [biological] weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specifi c work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.

I don't know why the CIA spells "Hussein" as "Husayn."

Conservatives, perhaps worried about what these findings might do to the President's re-election efforts, harped on findings that seemed to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was still a threat that had to be faced by US military might. Benjamin, in comments about my post yesterday, wonders if Kerry supporters even recognized the oil-for-food scandal. Here's Duelfer on this:

Saddam’s primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the Regime.

The introduction of the Oil-For-Food program (OFF) in late 1996 was a key turning point for the Regime. OFF rescued Baghdad’s economy from a terminal decline created by sanctions. The Regime quickly came to see that OFF could be corrupted to acquire foreign exchange both to further undermine sanctions and to provide the means to enhance dual-use infrastructure and potential WMD-related development.

By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support. Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime, both in terms of oil exports and the trade embargo, by the end of 1999.

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized...

This all sounds somewhat worrisome, but the reality should not detract from the basic factual conclusion of the report. Iraq had no WMD programs.

While it was true that the sanctions were hotly debated, it is also true that they cannot be ended without a UN Security Council Resolution. And guess what, the US has a veto there. The sanctions could not have been reversed without US assent.

It is also true that the money Saddam Hussein siphoned from the program could not easily have been used to buy WMD-related goods.

Before getting to that point, however, it is worth looking at just how much cash was Duelfer talking about?

The Regime financed these government-sanctioned programs by several illicit revenue streams that amassed more that $11 billion from the early 1990s to OIF outside the UN-approved methods. The most profitable stream concerned Protocols or government-to-government agreements that generated over $7.5
billion for Saddam. Iraq earned an additional $2 billion from kickbacks or surcharges associated with the UN’s OFF program; $990 million from oil “cash sales” or smuggling; and another $230 million from other surcharge impositions.

So, that amounts to about $11 billion, a figure that has been kicking around for many months -- since a GAO investigation arrived at this figure.

In mid-July 2004, Professor Joy Gordon put the alleged $11 billion in perspective. She published "Scandals of Oil for Food" in Middle East Report Online.

Under the sanctions, Iraq's annual gross domestic product dropped from about $60 billion to about $13 billion, according to a joint Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program estimate released in 1997. Assume that all the accusations of corruption are true, and the government of Saddam Hussein did indeed salt away $11 billion over the six years in which Oil for Food was in effect. Even if those funds had purchased humanitarian goods, the Iraqi GDP would have risen to $15 billion annually -- not an amount that could have compensated for the loss of 75 percent of the economy or rebuilt the dilapidated infrastructure.

In a November 2002 article ("Cool War") for Harpers Magazine, Dr. Gordon pointed out that the US frequently blocked Iraqi expenditures under OFF. Thus, Iraq couldn't even use most of the money it acquired legally -- let alone the siphoned cash:

Since the programme began, Iraq has earned approximately $57 billion in oil revenues, of which it has spent about $23 billion on goods that actually arrived. This comes to about $170 per year per person, which is less than one half the annual per capita income of Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Iraqi diplomats noted last year that this is well below what the U.N. spends on food for dogs used in Iraqi de-mining operations (about $400 per dog per year on imported food, according to the U.N.).

The severe limits on funds created a permanent humanitarian crisis, but the situation has been worsened considerably by chronic delays in approval for billions of dollars' worth of goods. As of last July more than $5 billion in goods was on hold...

Nearly everything for Iraq's entire infrastructure—electricity, roads, telephones, water treatment—as well as much of the equipment and supplies related to food and medicine has been subject to Security Council review. In practice, this has meant that the United States and Britain subjected hundreds of contracts to elaborate scrutiny, without the involvement of any other country on the council; and after that scrutiny, the United States, only occasionally seconded by Britain, consistently blocked or delayed hundreds of humanitarian contracts.

Typically, the US claimed that it was blocking items because they were "dual use" and could therefore be deflected to Iraqi weapons programs.

Though the Duelfer Report notes that Iraq had some connections facilitating illegal transfer of dual use items, the basic facts cited above remain true. Those contacts and purchases did not result in resumption of any serious WMD program.

Worse, for Bush defenders, Iraq didn't want WMD programs to hurt the US. Saddam Hussein wanted WMD, as he always had, to threaten Iran and assure Iraq's position in the region. This fact is emphasized in the story about the Duelfer Report that appeared in The Washington Post, October 7, 2004 (p. A1). It was written by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus:

But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.

Moreover, even if the worst-case scenarios played out after sanctions ended, Duelfer found that Iraq had no concrete WMD plans:

"The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.

Iraq was not a significant threat to US interests.

Iraq had no WMD programs and though Hussein badly wanted such a program (especially a nuclear program) and accumulated billions of dollars to pay for them, he could not acquire material under sanctions. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the US had the unilateral power to assure the continuation of the sanctions and regularly blocked billions of dollars worth of potential dual-use equipment from entering Iraq. If anything, as Dr. Gordon rightly emphasizes, the US was super-cautious and blocked goods that would have helped alleviate significant suffering in Iraq, where perhaps 500,000 children died as a result of the sanctions.

Plus, on top of all else, this had very little to do with 9/11-style threats to American security since Iraq didn't even want to acquire these weapons to threaten the US.

Like the US, Iraq feared Iran.


PS: Note that the Post story helpfully summarizes some additional Duelfer findings:

Nuclear Weapons

Iraq's "crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed.

Duelfer also found no information to support allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after 1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion.

...Although some steps were taken that could have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991."

Biological Weapons

Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.

The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.

There also was no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were "almost certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of hydrogen" gas.

Chemical Weapons

Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years.

The Post also ran a handy side-by-side comparison of Bush administration claims and Duelfer findings.

Were Bush Voters Delusional?

Months ago, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, said that people who failed to recognize that Iraq does not have WMD are "delusional."

So, were Bush voters last week delusional?

Some social science evidence suggests that a substantial portion were at least quite confused. PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland recently published their latest poll results. The survey was conducted in September and October, so it's not exactly an exit poll, but the results are nonetheless quite revealing:

Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.

Does anyone have any reason to think that the Bush voters would have believed anything different just last week, when they voted?

In other words, though this isn't from an exit poll, I think the data probably explain a good portion of Bush's voters.

There's more, much more:

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions....

Despite an abundance of evidence--including polls conducted by Gallup International in 38 countries, and more recently by a consortium of leading newspapers in 10 major countries--only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent assume that views are evenly divided, and 26% assume that the majority approves. Among Kerry supporters, 74% assume that the majority of the world is opposed.

The poll had a lot more.

Apparent lesson: if the lies are repeated often enough, people will believe them, even if they are resoundingly debunked.

It is just amazing.


Footnote: One of my Department colleagues told me that Bob Herbert's weekend column in The New York Times also discusses PIPA and Bush voters.

Feeling Blue in a Red State

I thought of that title over the weekend...and then googled it.

A music student has already penned a song...though it might be a poem. Here are a few lines:

Red is the color of power,
the color of aggression.
Red is the color of the economy,
the color of the deficit.
Red is the color of blood,
that is being spilled in the middle east.
Red is the color of the environment,
the color of the thermometer as the globe heats up.

You might enjoy the entire thing...

Well, maybe I should have said "appreciate."

Who can enjoy these blues?

"Free" Iraq

This is the first sentence in a story from Monday's New York Times (International Herald Tribune):

Prime Minister Ayad Allawi declared martial law across most of Iraq on Sunday

Great, just great.

What a wonderful "liberated" life the people of Iraq have attained since the US invaded their country in search of WMD and al Qaeda sponsorship.

The New York Times also reported over the weekend that 1000s of shoulder fired missiles are missing from Iraq ("Weapons: U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles").

As I said above: Great, just great:

American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

And just in time for holiday travel!

But, note, not in time to influence the US elections!

Everyone wins...er, loses.

The Osiraq Myth

Another of my colleagues from the Working Group on Preemptive and Preventive Military Intervention has completed a useful policy brief. Readers might recall that this group is sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's Ridgway Center (chaired by Gordon Mitchell).

The latest report is by Emory University's Dan Reiter, "The Osiraq Myth and the Track Record of Preventive Military Attacks." Ridgway Center Policy Brief 04-2 (October 2004).

This is the summary:

The 1981 Israeli aerial striike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program, and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the "success" at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track record of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation.

For the edited volume produced by the Working Group, Dan is actually looking at virtually the entire historical set of preemptive and preventive wars involving states with weapons of mass destruction.

This policy brief includes some discussion of the fairly dismal record. Such preventive attacks, he says "generally fail."

It looks like all the briefs will wind up here.

My brief is overdue...

Need any good news?

Who wants some good news for a change? Here are a few items:

1. The stem cell ballot initiative in California passed. The state will spend $3 billion over the next 10 years.

2. Colorado may be trending purple. The best news is that Colorado just elected a new Democratic Senator, Ken Salazar.

However, I'm not sure that this portends anything for 2008. Bush got 174,000 more votes in this red state in 2004 than he did in 2000. Kerry got 206,000 more than Gore. However, Nader went down almost 80,000, so I'm not sure how much ground the left actually gained in Colorado.

Update: Democrats also took the majorities in both houses of the Colorado state legislature that were previously Republican. Also, as I learned from a friend, voters passed a ballot initiative that will "require Colorado's largest utilities to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, by 2015."

3. Barack Obama is officially a US Senator! And he replaced a Republican!

4. Rumors are flying that Attorney General Ashcroft will resign. Let's face it, who could be more polarizing and frightful?

Some say Rudi Giuliani is a leading candidate to replace him. Anyone remember seeing him on Saturday Night Live?

One Early Pick

Do you recognize this man?


He's one early pick for the Dem candidate for President in 2008.

Lots of lefty bloggers are talking about all the things the party is going to go through in the next few years. Great.

After all that is said and done, this is where they might end up in 2008: The Official Website of the Governor of Virginia - Mark R. Warner.

Quick, someone needs to get him in the Council on Foreign Relations -- ASAP.

I'm serious.

My mother-in-law, a Virginia resident, likes Warner. I don't know much about him. Is he a good speaker and campaigner? Is he smart? Can he connect to the average voter?

Given that he is Governor of Virginia and comes from a high-tech background, he must have some assets that the Dems could use.

More to come on this thread.

Election recap

Kerry concedes. Game over. Blah, blah, blah.

My excuse for the incorrect predictions? The election polls were wrong and turnout apparently wasn't so high.

CNN, in fact, has changed the results of its exit polls since this morning at 1:30 am. Now, after "reweighting" them, they show Bush winning one age demographic and tying in the other. This is the same simple demographic breakdown I cited last night which predicted a big Kerry victory.

I'm not going to talk about why the polls were apparently so wrong, but someone should.

After all, election polls are frequently used as a tool to monitor the veracity of elections.

This is from Michael Barone's Reuters column soon after the last Venezuelan election:

"Were NY Pollsters Just Playing a Joke on Chavez?" That was the typically cheeky headline on an item about the Venezuela election in The Hotline political digest (nationaljournal.com) this week. The item quoted a press release from the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Assoc. saying, "Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for Chavez." The release, dated 7:30 p.m., said, "With Venezuela's voting set to end at 8 p.m. EST according to election officials, final exit poll results from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an independent New York-based polling firm, show a major victory for the 'Yes' movement, defeating Chavez in the Venezuela presidential recall referendum." The poll showed 59 percent in favor of recalling Chavez, 41 percent against.

The next morning, Chavez was declared the winner by an almost exact opposite margin. "About 58 percent said 'no' to a recall, while 42 percent said 'yes,'" wrote the Washington Post.

How could the election polls have been so wrong in Venezuela? Barone's answer is one-party authoritarian rule. In other words, there weren't any checks and balances in Chavez's regime:

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has been running an authoritarian regime. By various means he has taken control of the legislature, the courts, the armed services and the police. His thugs have been intimidating and even killing the regime's opponents. The literature on this is voluminous....He sought to block the referendum by extralegal means and, having failed at that, resorted to intimidation to win it. There is no reason to believe that he would stop at election fraud.

Maybe I'm just paranoid since I watched most of "Bush's Brain" the night before the election.

Anyway, Barone says election polls are a valuable tool against fraud:

One weapon against such fraud is the exit poll. As Doug Schoen of Penn Schoen points out, his firm has conducted exit polls in Mexico and, just a few days ago, in the Dominican Republic, which produced results very close to the election results. His partner Mark Penn points out that the firm conducted two previous exit polls in Venezuela, both of which were on the mark. Warren Mitofsky's firm, Mitofsky International, has produced exit polls with similar results in Mexico and Russia. Mitofsky recalls that in 1994, Mexican President Carlos Salinas, seeking credibility with foreign investors for that year's Mexican elections, asked him for advice on what to do. Allow independent exit polls, Mitofsky advised, sponsored by the media, and allow the results to be announced soon after the voting. Mitofsky's exit poll results, announced soon after the polls closed, did in fact come close to the official results, as did another Mitofsky poll in 2000. More important, they provided independent confirmation of the fairness of the count.

Hmmm.

Again, why are accurate polls so necessary? Another part of the reason is that electronic voting machines are easily manipulated and there's no paper trail:

The Penn Schoen exit poll was conducted at about 200 polling places and produced more than 20,000 responses. Changing those results from something like 42-58 (the Chavez announced figure) to 59-41 would be quite a feat. The firm employed supervisors to make sure the polling was done right. And its results by precinct can be checked against the official results reported for that precinct.

In contrast, it would be far easier, given the touch-screen voting method and central tabulation used in Venezuela, for the central counting center to falsify the results. All you would have to do is program the computer to count every sixth "yes" vote as a "no." That would transform a 59-41 vote to 42-58. And the results would still show pro-Chavez areas voting for him and anti-Chavez areas going the other way—just by different margins.

....Schoen has little doubt what happened. "I think it was a massive fraud," he told me. "Our internal sourcing tells us that there was fraud in the central commission." This was not the first time he has encountered such things. "The same thing happened in Serbia in 1992, by [President Slobodan] Milosevic. He did it again in the local elections in 1996. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people died. Had he been caught [in this fraud] in 1992, this would not have happened."

In Venezuela this year, as in Serbia in 1992, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the exit poll was far closer than the officially announced results to the way people actually voted.

This is all just FYI.

You know, backgroud, historical information.

I haven't joined the tinfoil hat anti-Diebold crowd.

I'll just keep typing my book about the Bush Doctrine, which should now find a publisher and an audience.

Who is Michael Barone? He:

is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications–including the Economist and the New York Times. Barone graduated from Harvard College and then Yale Law School and was an editor of the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Law Journal.

You can see, he's your typical left-wing conspiracy theorist.

Ohio Mess?

According to the news reports, there are apparently 200 to 400,000 provisional ballots outstanding in Ohio and none of those have been counted.

None.

The Bush-Kerry margin is currently about 102,000 votes with 92% of precincts counted. Dems claim that the lead will likely be cut to 50,000 by the time all the rest of the regular ballots are counted. I assume they know where the missing precincts are and how those areas usually vote.

In any case, Kerry would have to win 60% of 250,000 provisional ballots to take the state if that information is true. Obviously, this would mean a higher portion of fewer ballots or a lower portion of more.

The Ohio Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, says that provisional ballots won't be counted for 11 days. That's the election law in Ohio. The absentee (military) ballots from abroad are also going to trickle in over the next 10 days too.

During the next 10 days, Ohio will look at the jackets on the provisional ballots to try to reconcile them. In other words, they are going to try to figure out why the people weren't listed on the voting roster. Some are going to turn out to be valid, others are likely going to be tossed.

I'm confident that both Democratic and Republican lawyers will be deeply involved in this process.

Kerry's camp says the candidate is not going to concede until those provisional ballots are resolved, which makes ABSOLUTE SENSE. How can a candidate concede if the number of uncounted ballots significantly exceeds the margin of the lead?

The networks that have called Ohio for Bush already are jumping the gun. How do they know what those provisional ballots say? Where are they? Who cast them? Why are there so many?


Update: 96% of precincts, the lead is closer to 125,000. Not good for Kerry. Where are the last precincts?

Update 2: Ohio had about 100,000 provisional ballots in 2000; 90% of them were good, and were thus counted. The Secretary of State just said on TV (2:15 am ET) that it looks like there might be 175,000 this time. Kerry would have to win 6 out of 7 of them if the current 125,000 lead holds.

That seems unlikely. I wonder how they went in 2000?

Where are the missing precincts? Can the Dems cut the lead in the last few percent of uncounted precincts?

I think I'm going to bed.

Ohio? Tie?

As for the Electoral College, it looks like Kerry simply has to win Ohio. I haven't really looked at the uncounted precincts yet. I wish the media would say whether those are traditionally Democratic or Republican areas...and the margin in those areas from 2000.

Apparently, some of the uncounted votes are in the Cleveland area.

Also, just how many uncounted votes exist in Florida? Absentees? Early voters? What is left to count?

In any case, likely the next best hope without Ohio is 269-269 if Kerry holds New Mexico. In this tie scenario, Kerry wins all the Gore states, plus New Hampshire and Nevada -- a scenario I blogged about in late September.

In that case, the election would go to the House unless some individual elector was unfaithful (like one Bush elector in West Virginia). Presumably, the Republican advantage would give them the edge there, but that seems to be a place for all kinds of public democratic (small d) pressure.

Indeed, electors could be strongly encouraged to vote for the popular vote winner. It was impossible in 2000 when more than 1 Bush elector would have had to defect, but it seems more plausible in the case of a tie that would otherwise send the election to the House of Representatives.

Some states also send mixed messages and could perhaps be influenced between today and the potential vote in the House. Arkansas, for example, has more Dems in the Congress than Republicans; yet, the state has apparently gone for Bush.

Popular vote for Kerry?

I know Bush has been leading the popular vote all night, but I just took a look at the CNN national exit polling, which has already been posted.

Consider the demographic data...actually there's no need to be complicated. I was going to break it down by all the ages, but CNN conveniently provides this simple split of the data:

Ages 18-64 Kerry 51, Bush 48 (84% of electorate)
Ages 65 & older Kerry 50, Bush 50 (16% of electorate)

Quick, tell me who won the popular vote?

Clearly, Kerry.

It looks like about 50% Kerry to 48.5% Bush.

Exit polls

I'm getting a lot of google hits today for people trying to find "exit polls." Thanks for coming, there's plenty of political analysis on this blog.

However, for exit poll data, I'm visiting MyDD or Daily Kos. Apparently, Slate and Wonkette have also posted them.

Enjoy the parties tonight!

Kerry is going to be President-elect by morning!

Election Day

It is officially election day and I'm pleased to report the first bad news for George W. Bush.

As reported on MSNBC by Ron Reagan, Dixville Notch, NH, just released its complete returns and the result was 15 Bush, 15 Kerry and 1 Nader.

Traditionally, this town votes first in the nation.

Does their vote simply reflect the entire country? Is this a microcosm of what's to come?

No.

Like a bad Gallup Poll, however, Dixville Notch is solid red. They've gone Republican in every presidential election except for 1968 since at least 1960. I found this Detroit News article from January 2004:

In general elections, Dixville Notch went solidly for losers Richard Nixon in 1960, Barry Goldwater in '64 and, Hubert Humphrey in '68, then finally picked a winner with Nixon in '72, only to see him quit at midterm. In 1976, their choice was Michigan's Gerald Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter. In 1980 and '84, they liked Reagan, as did most of the country. George H.W. Bush was their pick in 1988, but Dixville Notch didn't back another winner until George W. Bush in 2000.

Kerry is going to win.

CORRECTION Update: It was actually Hart's Location, NH that went 15-15-1, MSNBC reported it incorrectly. Dixville Notch went for Bush 19-7.

In 2000, these two towns went for Bush by a combined total of 38-15, according to Mark Kleiman and this year it was 34-19. Here's what Kleiman wrote:

That's a swing of nearly eight percent away from Bush and toward the Democrat. Using a likely voter model I just pulled out of my hat, this station can now project a Kerry landslide...

Regular commenter E-Mart pointed this out. Thanks.

Osama's "Endorsement"

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) released their own translation of the latest Osama bin Laden videotape. MEMRI says that OBL was threatening voters in red states!

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera(1) on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state")(2) to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

I do not know if this translation is accurate. I googled a bit and couldn't find any major media that have picked this up.

It is on several dozen right-leaning blogs, however, so I fully expect this to be in the news cycle soon. Volokh has a link from the NY Post...as one of my commenters pointed out.

I'm waiting for Abu Aardvark or Juan Cole to weigh in on this, though I did find this from the Aardvark in late August 2003, when he was still on blogspot:

For me, the problem isn't that MEMRI is run by Israelis - it's that their agenda, more or less explicitly, is to highlight the worst and ugliest of the Arab media. They generally don't mistranslate - I haven't seen any instances of that - but their selections and emphases give a misleading picture of the state of Arab public debate.

Do a search, and you can find more Aardvark critique of MEMRI.

[Update: Abu Aardvark spikes MEMRI's translation.]

I stand behind my initial reactions to the tape. OBL must know that his threats cause Americans to rally behind Bush. It's awfully difficult to see how this is any kind of argument that he wants Bush to lose or wants Kerry to win.

Yet, that's exactly what Republicans and numerous TV talking heads have been saying all weekend. The right-leaning/Republican spin machine is truly awesome to behold isn't it? Consider this story from the AP: "Thompson: Bin Laden wants Kerry elected."

A new videotape of Osama bin Laden was meant to help elect Sen. John Kerry president, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson says.

The former Wisconsin governor said the admitted mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks wants voters to elect someone other but President Bush. Bin Laden’s message was ‘‘obvious to anybody that looks at it,’’ Thompson said Saturday...

Yet, in the same story, Thompson acknowledges that the opposite is actually true. The tape helps Bush:

Thompson said he believes bin Laden’s videotape would help Bush attract undecided voters.

‘‘I’ve come to the conclusion this has got to help George Bush, because if you are undecided and you see a sworn enemy of America - somebody bragging about what he was able to accomplish to hurt our country and kill thousands of Americans, and have the audacity to brag about it,’’ Thompson said.

On Saturday, some Bush campaign advisor said the same thing, though in more gloating terms:

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

A Houston Chronicle columnist used the new talking point openly.

Even Senator John McCain said of the tape, "It's very helpful to the president."