>November 12, 2004
>Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
>By TOM ZELLER Jr.
>
>
>For the Record
>
>The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy
>cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence
>mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on
>the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004
>election through electronic voting machines," declared
>BlackBoxVoting.org.
>
>In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas
>surrounding last week's presidential election took root and
>multiplied.
>
>But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for
>the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it
>has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were
>soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and
>feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a
>stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being
>proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.
>
>Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved
>real voting anomalies in Florida and Ohio, the two states on which
>victory hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems,
>was Utah.
>
>"I love the process of democracy, and I think it's more important
>than the outcome," said Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living
>near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp's analysis of the vote in
>Florida (she has a master's degree in mathematics) that set off a
>flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who
>were certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that
>were leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning handily, that
>something was amiss.
>
>The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site,
>www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of
>Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of
>votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with
>other statisticians contributing to the site, suggested a
>"surprising pattern" in Florida's results showing inexplicable
>gains for President Bush in Democratic counties that used
>optical-scan voting systems.
>
>The zeal and sophistication of Ms. Dopp's number crunching was hard
>to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their
>own bar charts and regression models in support of other theories.
>In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories - along
>with their visual aids - were distributed by e-mail messages
>containing links to popular Web sites and Web logs, or blogs, where
>other eager readers diligently passed them along.
>
>Within one day, the number of visits to Ms. Dopp's site jumped from
>50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number
>tipped 17,000. Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web
>logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three
>Democratic members of Congress - John Conyers Jr. of Michigan,
>Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida - sent a
>letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an
>investigation of voting machines. A link to Ms. Dopp's site was
>included in the letter.
>
>But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick.
>Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford,
>pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the
>news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties
>in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in
>presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens
>of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the
>suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and
>the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete
>support.
>
>Still, as visitors to Ms. Dopp's site approached 70,000 early this
>week, other election anomalies were gaining traction on the
>Internet. The elections department in Cleveland, for instance, set
>off a round of Web log hysteria when it posted turnout figures on
>its site that seemed to show more votes being cast in some
>communities than there were registered voters. That turned out to
>be an error in how the votes were reported by the department, not
>in the counting.
>
>And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of
>television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely
>inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio,
>continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow
>cheated.
>
>But while authorities acknowledge that there were real problems on
>Election Day, including troubles with some electronic machines and
>intolerably long lines in some places, few have suggested that any
>of these could have changed the outcome.
>
>"There are real problems to be addressed," said Doug Chapin of
>Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of election reform information,
>"and I'd hate for them to get lost in second-guessing of the
>result."
>
>It is that second-guessing, however, that has largely characterized
>the blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have
>become frustrated by the rumor mill.
>
>"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the
>director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting
>machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes
>to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation.
>That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it
>was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.
>
>"Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation," he
>said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to
>know what really happened.' "
>
>Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online
>pundits, however, is a matter of debate.
>
>Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive
>telecommunications program at New York University, suggests that
>the online fact-finding machine has come unmoored, and that some
>bloggers simply "can't imagine any universe in which a fair count
>of the votes would result in George Bush being re-elected
>president."
>
>But some denizens of the Web see it differently.
>
>Jake White, the owner of the Web log primordium.org, argues that he
>and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely
>by partisan politics. "While there are no doubt large segments of
>this movement that are being driven by that," he said in an e-mail
>message, "I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the
>election was held."
>
>Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems
>in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.
>
>John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says
>it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being
>inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer
>an alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too
>timid. "Of course you can say blogs are wrong," he said. "Blogs are
>wrong all the time."
>
>For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the
>conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is
>to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be
>overturned.
>
>"We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very
>upset," said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry
>campaign in Ohio. But, he said, "I have not seen anything to
>indicate intentional fraud or tampering."
>
>A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a
>cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology
>and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar
>conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to
>voting systems and the final results of the election.
>
>"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study
>concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."
>
>Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.
>
>"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to
>be true," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but
>blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't
>rewrite the past."
>
>Ford Fessenden and John Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.
>
>For the Record: Nov. 13, 2004, Saturday
>
>A front-page article yesterday about the rise of conspiracy theories
>on the Internet regarding the presidential election referred
>incorrectly to FreePress.org, which carried some of them. It is the
>Web site for The Free Press, a community newspaper in Columbus,
>Ohio; it is not a blog.
>--
>Michael Pugliese
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA http://www.martarussell.com/