NYTimes Attempts to Smash Vote Fraud Allegations - more Judith Miller, anyone?

We can start with the very first sentence of this article –

“The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster”

– which tries to paint an image of anyone questioning the election who is posting online as cheap mystery writers spinning fiction tales, to bias the reader.

And then we can take almost every sentence of this thing and expose it as it’s own type of biased fraud – rather than attempt an honest examination of the fraud, better to trash the ‘bloggers’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ (even Common Dreams now!) as nutcases and purveyors of ‘faulty analyses.’

Just for fun, let’s take a look at some examples of how they try to bias our view as we read –

-- “Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust”
(Twitchy? What?? Like an insect, I suppose.)

-- “an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied”
(Dark ideas? You mean, like the ones about being lied to again? Maybe more dark to be pretending one isn’t being lied to.)

-- “Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election”
(Note that now, lawsuits, recounts and investigations being called by COMMITTEES in CONGRESS are to be rewritten as RUMORS.)

-- “involved real voting anomalies”
(Because afterall, Tom Zeller and the NYTimes are the one who decides what is REAL and what is FICTIONAL. This is the ‘compensatory’ paragraph, where they try to show that they can admit to the ‘real’ anomalies – still can’t be considered fraud – but that the fake and fictional ones by those idiotic conspiracy bloggers are the problems. See, we can be balanced, honest! We can!)

-- “But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah.”
(The rumor mill, not the letters from congress to the GAO or the lawsuits being filed across the country or the recounts now being paid for . . . just rumors).

-- “Kathy Dopp, an Internet enthusiast living near Salt Lake City”
(Time to trash Kathy Dopp now – easiest to zero in on one woman they can take down. Note that rather than list her credentials first – as a statistician – she must be nothing more than an ‘enthusiast,’ like some sort of retiree who collects figurines on the internet. And yes, Salt Lake City, home of the Mormons . . . )

-- “In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories”
(Granted, the internet has the quality of breathless cycles and theories – so what? Rather than try to trash all those who are a threat to the professors at Yale (pundits and profs that are still trying to blame the election on Clinton, Nader, or ‘Values,’), the ability of people all over the nation and the world to come together to say ‘Stop the presses! We want a recount!” is something to laud. Naturally, because the powers that be are threatened by breathless accounts of the latest findings - findings which primarily can inch people closer and closer to understanding that they have been lied to over and over for the sake of extracting oil from the Middle East – its time to bring out the Psy Ops patrol at the NYTimes to trash everyone who questions.)

Etc., etc., etc.

You get the picture. Now read for yourself and see what the agenda of this article is. Take it apart if you have the time. For me, this is too much of a waste to spend another moment on. If you think it’s time to roll over for the Black Boxes to decide your ‘leader,’ as though you ever needed one, you might as well go get a subscription to the NYTimes and the Nation Magazine, another CIA bastion of thought police.

Makes you wonder how the Times is supposedly so well-informed when earlier this year they were having to print apologies and cover-ups about why they were trying to jam WAR down our throats . . .

Chalabi duped us on WMD, says New York Times
By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 27/05 2004)
The New York Times, one of America's most influential newspapers, published a sweeping apology yesterday for being too credulous in its coverage of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, blaming its reliance on leading exiles including Ahmad Chalabi.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/27/wirq27.xml

Also note, NYTimes author of this piece, Tom Zeller is no stranger to trying to protect the voting machine corporate interests. I did a google and came across this:

"Reporter Tom Zeller of the New York Times erected straw men and then knocked them down. "...electronic voting represents a corporate conspiracy is probably overblown," he writes, in his article about our press conference demonstrating the flaws. No mention of "corporate conspiracy" was any part of the press conference. Zeller makes sure to publicize Avi Rubin, who was not there and has never examined the GEMS central tabulator, which was the subject of the news conference. Yet Zeller neglects to mention the names of anyone who conducted the press conference, does not bother to interview Dr. Herbert Thompson, a world-renowned security expert who participated in the press conference."
http://scoop.agonist.org/story/2004/9/27/213242/102

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Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: November 12, 2004

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, http://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.