The concerns expressed in the last paragraph of the previous installment, that we may have to wait till Christmas before the election results are final, were fortunately unfounded. Kerry conceded defeat with remarkable speed and the country seems, so far, to have been saved from court battles. The reason for the cautionary note will become apparent when you keep reading.

When one considers the record of Bush’s first term in an unbiased manner one is forced to conclude that a chief executive who: squandered the world’s good will towards America; allowed the dollar to drop to unprecedented levels against the Euro; embroiled the country, on false pretenses, in a war; and turned a substantial surplus into a massive deficit, ought to have been fired. The election was really Kerry’s to lose rather than Bush’s to win. Kerry probably lost because he failed to meet the criticisms that were leveled at his character, with vigor and honest, plain speech. Suggestions as to what he should have done were made in previous essays and need not be repeated here. They can be found under the key word “Kerry” in the compilation. The most important reason for his loss may, however, have been a lack of desire to take on an inheritance that would cause him only grief and, as mentioned previously, would also bring him into direct conflict with his Senate testimony of 1971. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” would have been the words that could have been thrown in his face. There simply was no plan how to end the war in Iraq. Just as Nixon could not have gotten out of Vietnam unless he turned the South Vietnamese over to a victorious North, Kerry would have been saddled with an unpopular war that cannot readily be brought to a successful conclusion. In his heart of hearts Kerry may well have concluded that Bush brought this misery on by himself so let him eat the broth he has cooked. 

When one reads the papers and listens to newscasters one is told that Bush won for two main reasons. One is that he is a “strong leader” who will protect us from future terrorist attacks and on whom one can rely in times of war. The other is that he stands for “moral values,” which is the code word for denouncing the permissive society we have become. These are important aspects and deserve to be discussed separately. The “strong leader” image comes straight out of Karl Rove’s power point presentation on the ranch during the Christmas holidays in 2002. As mentioned in the essay on “The Great Liberator” (May 1, 2004). Karl Rove’s winning strategy was to portray Bush’s “Persona” as: “Strong Leader; Bold Action; Big Ideas; Peace in World; Cares about People Like Me; Leads a Strong Team.” This was indeed the image, which dominated the propaganda waves during the campaign while Kerry was painted as a “waffler” and “flip-flopper,” who cannot be trusted in these dangerous times.

That this so called Bush Persona had no basis in reality was irrelevant. Every skilled propagandist knows that whatever you say long enough and vigorously enough becomes the truth that people will buy into. I was especially intrigued that during the campaign Democrats and others who saw Bush as he really handled himself rather than what he ought to be, in Rove’s mind, never took him to task for it. The slogan that “he kept us safe from terrorism” was never repudiated by the simple fact that 9/11 happened on his watch and not on somebody else’s. From the propaganda one was led to assume that Bush had been inaugurated on September 12 rather than January 20, and that his conduct during the preceding months was really of no concern, when the opposite was true. He ignored the bin Laden threat and the resulting 9/11 tragedy was not “unforeseeable” as Condi Rice testified to before the Senate. If Bush had taken the August 6, 2001 briefing seriously, as a responsible leader should have, he might have knocked heads together at the CIA and FBI to get at the bottom of the threat. He did not do so and it is this failure which should have been brought out in the election campaign. From it everything else flowed and the consequences will haunt us for years to come.

There were indeed “Bold Actions” and “Big Ideas,” which essentially boiled down to “bringing democracy” to the Middle East at the point of a gun. That this does not tend to work well has not yet sunk in, in spite of the fact that by following Israel’s Likud model we now have our very own West Bank and Gaza problem in Iraq. This is not hindsight but was entirely predictable. “Peace in the World” is farther than it has been even four years ago. But “Cares for People Like Me” was a real hit. It was boiled down to a simple question the proverbial Joe Six Pack can readily understand, “Who would you rather have a beer with: Bush or Kerry?” When this is the level upon which the “Leader of the Free World” is supposed to be chosen, the country is in trouble. Nevertheless, the slogan resonated and worked.

This brings us to the second aspect, “moral values.” These have attained unexpected prominence when it was reported that exit polls ranked the item as the number one concern why people voted for Bush. There is indeed a considerable groundswell of unhappiness in Middle America that our society has lost its bearings but this is hardly the main issue that mattered. The finding confronts us, therefore, with the science and magic of exit polling. As mentioned on another occasion it doesn’t matter so much who you vote for but how the votes are counted and winners are projected. Projection is the key word and it relies on exit polling the results of which are then forwarded to the TV networks and the Associated Press. There was the nasty flap in the 2000 elections when the crucial vote of Florida was first awarded to Gore then to Bush and finally settled by the Supreme Court’s single vote. The networks vowed that this would never happen again. Projections for a given state would no longer be made until all the precincts had closed their doors and in addition a new company would be hired to conduct the polls and provide the results to all the networks. This much is readily known but as usual the devil is in the details and for those one has to go to the Internet.

The exit polls of the November elections are currently regarded as seriously flawed because they predicted Kerry as the winner, especially earlier in the day. Yet the same exit polls are used to document America’s fondness of moral values in its quest for President. This incongruity led me to investigate how exit polls are conducted. This is not a trivial post hoc exercise but shows how election results are actually obtained nowadays. Since it is unlikely that exit polling will be abolished by executive fiat we might as well know what happens in the real world.

The company responsible for exit polling is the so-called National Election Pool. It is run by a partnership of Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International and has a well deserved reputation for producing reliable results. So how does the process work? The company sends out letters to professors of various colleges and universities and asks them to engage the help of some of their students to hand a questionnaire to x number of people in a random fashion as they emerge from the voting booth. The precincts from which the samples are obtained are carefully pre-selected for known demographics in order to get as accurate and divers a sample as possible. One may immediately object that the students, well meaning as they are, may not be truly random in their handing out of the questionnaires because hippy type students may prefer similarly attired voters and vice versa, but these preferences tend to come out in the statistical wash. On the other hand there can be a bias as to who accepts a questionnaire and who runs out of the precinct in order to get back to work or home as soon as possible, especially after a long wait. But again, past experience has shown that this factor is negligible.

The next item is the questionnaire itself. I was so far unable to get a sample of one that was used in November but I do have one from the New Hampshire 2004 Primary which apparently served as the model. It consists of boxes to be marked for questions labeled A-Z, starting with “1 Male, 2 Female,” and ending with “2003 total family income,” where 1 is “under $15,000” and 6 “$100,00 or more.” Column C has the names of the presidential contenders and column H is the crucial one from which the “moral values” emerged in first place. For the November election the column read, “Which One Issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President.” There were seven choices that were listed in the sequence shown and I have added the percentage results in brackets: Taxes (5), Education (4), Iraq (15), Terrorism (19), Economy/Jobs (20), Moral Values (22), Healthcare (8). Although moral values did indeed land on the top of the heap and 80% of Bush voters checked that box; Economy/Jobs were a close second. They were Kerry’s forte who got his 80%.

These data were subsequently tweaked to assuage the grief of the losing Democrats who pointed out that “moral values” is an ambiguous term anyway and if one were to combine Economy/Jobs with Iraq and Terrorism those concerns would clearly appear on the front burner. Thus, multiple choice questions are not necessarily the best way to get at true answers. It has also been pointed out that when the question was open ended as in an October Harris poll only 1% of prospective voters volunteered moral values as their prime concern. But be that as it may; there are more important issues at stake in the exit polls.

We are told that the complete sample, depending upon which site you visit, consisted of 11,027; 13,531 or 13,660 respondents. This fairly small number is, however, not the main issue because there is some indication that something happened with the data later in the day to bring them more in conformity with actually tabulated votes. We don’t know what happened but one set of figures was clearly out of line with the other. The margin of error between projections and actual results tends to be rather small and ranges in general around 1-2 percentage points. But there were instances during the November elections were the early results reportedly differed by 12 or 14 percentage points, which is practically unheard of. This information comes from www.globalresarch.ca under “Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam” by Michael Keefer and I have no independent information to prove or disprove his claims. At any rate Keefer says that in Ohio the exit poll data reported by CNN at 7:32 p.m. EST favored Kerry as leading Bush by a little more than four percent. But by 1:41 a.m., when the final exit poll had been updated, Bush was leading Kerry by 2.5 percent. Many of us saw on TV the long lines of voters during the evening of November 2 and it is difficult to believe from their appearance that they were all staunch Republicans. But appearances aside something else had happened that defies logic, if the mentioned report is accurate. To quote from the report, “At 7:32 p.m. EST there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m. on November 3, the final total consisted of 2,020 respondents. These fifty-seven additional respondents must all have voted very powerfully for Bush – for while representing only a 2.8% increase in the number of respondents, they managed to produce a swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.” A similar event occurred in Florida, the other key state. At 8:40 p.m. EST exit polls showed Kerry and Bush in a dead heat, but by 1:01 a.m. EST the final poll gave Bush a 4 percent lead over Kerry. Now comes the clincher, “The number of exit polls respondents in Florida had risen only from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful numerical magic was at work. A mere sixteen respondents – 0.55% of the total number – produced a four percent swing to Bush.” Thus the question arises: were the exit poll projections completely wrong or was the actual vote count interfered with to provide a victory for Bush? Furthermore, was The National Election Pool forced to massage their data for the final update in order to retain credibility for the future? Something happened but we don’t know what.

One may now say, so what, forget about exit polls and just count the votes. But it’s not as simple as that.  First of all exit polls are regarded as so accurate that their numbers are taken at face value when elections are monitored in third world countries. If the counted votes (remember Stalin: never mind who votes, what’s important is who counts the votes) differ markedly from the exit polls the vote count is suspected of having been fraudulent. This is especially á propos in regard to the Ukrainian vote which is making headlines all over the world at this time. The good people of Kiev, and we must really congratulate them, defied miserable weather to protest an election result that showed Yanukovich as having won the election by 49.4 percent over his rival Yushchenko who supposedly garnered 46.7 percent. The exit polls, on the other hand, had essentially the same result of 49.7% versus 46.7% but in favor of the opposition candidate, Yushchenko!  Now back to the critical state of Ohio and the 7:32 p.m. EST exit poll before the data had undergone a miraculous transformation. At that time Kerry had a four percent lead and on that basis he should have won the election.

The question arises therefore, how the votes that had been cast were counted. At this point we must thank the Internet for keeping democracy alive. If one types “US elections 2004” into Google one is overwhelmed with articles about irregularities and outright fraud. Obviously Internet sites cannot necessarily be checked for accuracy, and there are some very disgruntled citizens around, but it is possible to glean some rather surprising facts. The most important one is that 2 companies: Diebold Election Systems (DES) and Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) were responsible for registering and counting about 80 percent of our votes. Now comes the real surprise: those are not completely separate entities but are run by the brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich, second generation immigrants from the Ukraine. While Bob is responsible for Diebold, Todd’s major contribution is the touch-screen voting machine that runs under the name of Accu-Vox-TSx. The company advertisement states that the equiment “represents a major leap forward in voting technology. Our reliable system accurately and securely captures each vote.” Is this true?

To examine this claim one need to know that Diebold and ES&S use the same software which is Windows based and can readily be hacked into. Diebold found itself in major difficulties after the California Primary in March of 2004 where the machines malfunctioned to an extent that according to The San Diego Union-Tribune of May 1, 2004 California’ Secretary of State asked the State’s Attorney General to open a criminal investigation on charges of fraud and deliberate misleading advertisements. The Attorney General did not bring criminal charges but went the civil court route in September of 2004 and Diebold settled with the State for 2.6 Million dollars on November 10.

These were the same touch-screen systems that had been used in about one third of the votes cast on November 2 around the country. It has now been reported that some of the touch-screen voting machines recorded the wrong choices. When voters checked their vote against the review screen at the end, some found out that their vote for one candidate had been changed to another. When they tried to correct the error the obstinate machine refused to do so and when supervisors were notified of the problem they promised to fix it.

How widespread were the voting irregularities on November 2? This is a difficult question to answer because Internet information tends to be highly anti-Bush on this topic and one does not know what to credit and what to discount. One of the somewhat more objective articles is by William Rivers Pitt in the November 8 edition of www.truthout.org   Some of the “strange things” that did happen were that in Broward County Florida, a Democrat stronghold, machines started counting backwards after 32,000 votes had been cast. In one of Ohio’s precinct in Franklin county Bush got 4,258 votes to Kerry’s 260 but only 638 voters had actually cast ballots. In another Democratic stronghold LaPorte County Indiana “the electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 votes.” Thus, for more than 79,000 registered voters only 22,000 could be counted. The list goes on and the article is well worth reading.

It is apparent, therefore, that widespread and to some extent systematic irregularities favoring Bush over Kerry seem to have occurred. We also know that they were predicted as early as the spring of 2004.  Lynn Landes published on April 28, 2004 in www.onlinejournal.com a fascinating article. She wrote, “Voters can run, but they can’t hide from these guys. Meet the Urosevich brothers, Bob and Todd. Their respective companies, Diebold and ES&S, will count (using both computerized ballot scanners and touchscreen machines) about 80 percent of all votes cast in the upcoming U.S. presidential.election. . . . The ability to rig an election is well within easy reach of voting machine companies. . . . And don’t count on recounts to save the day. In most states recounts of paper ballots only occur if election results are close. The message for those who want to rig elections is, ‘rig them by a lot.’  . . . There is no federal agency that has regulatory authority or oversight of the voting machine industry. . . . The 2004 election rests in the hands of the Urosevich brothers who are financed by the far-out right wing and top donors of the Republican Party. The Democrats are either sitting ducks or co-conspirators. I don’t know which.”

On 10-10-04 William Thomas wrote an article “Rigged.” It starts out with “GW Bush has already won the Presidential election. It doesn’t much matter that the actual vote has yet to be held . . . “ Thomas based this conclusion on the fact that as mentioned around 80% of the votes are registered and counted by Diebold and associates while the remaining are divided between Sequoia and SAIC. Sequoia was, according to the article involved in a corruption case that led to jail sentences of some top Louisiana state officials, while SAIC also has “a long history of fraud charges and ‘security lapses.’ in its electronic system.” Articles of this type may explain why Karl Rove had not presented us with an anticipated last minute October surprise. He may not have needed it when the election was already in the bag.

There is another interesting aspect to this story. Our media report diligently on suspected vote fraud in the Ukraine but there is hardly a word about the Internet furor in regard to our own problems. The Boston Globe wrote a rather non-committal article on November 17 entitled “Media accused of ignoring election irregularities,” but it did not address some of the major issues that were raised here. We might, therefore, add to their headline the words, “for now.” The 2004 election chapter seems far from closed and the Kiev protesters may actually help our democracy here.

But regardless of what happens in the future about the election results for now we have Mr. Bush who has claimed to have been given a mandate (some of his supporters even say that it came from the good Lord Himself) and promised us that he will “spend the capital he has earned.” He feels vindicated and we know, therefore, what we can expect: more of the same. While reformatting his cabinet he is turning it into an echo chamber. He is separating, in biblical fashion, the sheep from the goats where the sheep have to bleat in unison and the goats are banished to outer darkness. This could have worked in an authoritarian state but we still have a democracy where it can’t. There are responsible moderate Republicans in Congress who will try to make their voices heard.

While Bush seems intent to pursue a domestic agenda, such as tax and social security reform, he is likely to be hamstrung by foreign events that are not under his control and will sap his ability to spend money the way he wants. If he tries to nominate ultra-conservative judges to the Supreme Court the Democrats will filibuster and he does not have the necessary two thirds majority in Congress to overrule them. In foreign affairs he will be confronted by the fact that there is precious little he can do about Korea’s nuclear weapons or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He doesn’t have the troops to invade the rest of “the axis of evil.” “Bombing them back into the stone age,” as his Dad promised the Iraqis in days gone by, will likewise not bring peace on earth and good will to men. If and when elections are held in Iraq they will probably not bring the democracy Mr. Bush envisioned and a victorious “exit strategy” is also likely to remain elusive. Although he now proclaims his willingness to bring about a viable Palestinian state it is in all probability too late for that. The chance was in the spring of 2001 and that was missed. Arafat was not the major problem as the accord between him and Rabin showed. But the Likud party, first under Netanyahu and thereafter under Sharon was just as intent on preventing a Palestinian state from arising as some Palestinian factions are on the disappearance of Israel. Regardless what the new Palestinian leadership does, they are likely to get only words from Jerusalem while the deeds will consist of wall building and increasing the settlements in the West Bank. Sharon holds all the cards and he has no interest in allowing this Bush vision to come to pass.

As if that was not enough of the problems our “strong leader” will face there is also still Osama around whom Bush vowed to capture three years ago “dead or alive.”  In October we saw him on our TV screens. Not only did he look remarkably healthy but outright regal in his flowing gold-braided robe. This was not the picture of a hunted fugitive who hides out some place in a cave or hut on the Afghan-Pakistan border, as popular propaganda has it. I also used to subscribe to this opinion but not any more. The man looked too well cared for. So, where he does he live at present?  The Pakistanis gave up looking for him last week and I believe with good reason. Although I have no inside information common sense provides an obvious answer, which has in all probability also occurred to others including members of the Administration who do have facts. Bush’s words that, “we will pursue the terrorists wherever they hide out and we will hold the countries which hide them responsible” ring very hollow indeed if my suspicions are correct.

Ask yourself for a moment what you would do if you were the son of one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia and you find yourself with a price of $25 million on your head? Where would you go and who could you trust? I believe that the answer is obvious: you go home where the family ties are strong and nobody would dare to deliver you to the enemy. This obviously occurred also to the Saudi Royals who are hanging on to their monarchy by the skin of their teeth. They would be more than happy to make some quiet arrangement with the Mullahs for whom Osama is a hero, while expressing “plausible denials” abroad. In Saudi Arabia, in the bosom of his family and likeminded friends, Osama can now wait patiently for the fruits of his labors to ripen. If I am correct in my assumption about Osama’s whereabouts we are not likely to hear much about him from our administration because there is absolutely nothing it can do. What the Arabs have going for them is patience. This is what we lack and that is what they know and bank on.

Osama doesn’t have to send terrorists to the US any more. Our government is doing all the terrorizing of the population by itself with intermittent alarming news and increasing strictures on our lives to promote “security” and thereby produces further drains on our resources.

Our intelligence services are now blamed for the 9/11 failure and the Iraq debacle. A brand new super agency is about to be created which will consume considerable amounts of money and will be even more unwieldy than what we have at present. It is also predictable that if it were to come up with facts which don’t fit the purposes of Bush&Co. they will be ignored again. While some reform of the CIA and more collaboration with the FBI may well have been appropriate, the current effort seems to have as its main purpose to divert attention from the person who was really responsible for getting us into this fix, the President.

Let us wish the President and his family a happy Christmas season but the way things look this may be the only peace he is likely to enjoy for some time to come. If even only half of what we are told on the Internet is true the resulting scandals, if they were allowed to hit the major media, may well dwarf ENRON and Watergate. Let us remember that President Nixon had won the election by a landslide in 1972 and by 1974 he had to resign in disgrace.  There are now more than enough scandals in the administration to potentially bring both Bush as well as Cheney down, if the media were to follow up on them. Even John Edwards, who is currently out of a job, and who has promised us that he’ll make sure that every vote will be counted might find his calling and he will be difficult to ignore.

The hand-picked new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, may not be able to provide immunity for the administration either. Although the President had praised him with, “His sharp intellect and sound judgment have helped shape our policies in the war on terror,” Gonzales’ advice to disregard the Geneva Conventions was not particularly enlightened. The resultant abuses in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have brought him sufficient enemies that each and every one of his actions will be examined with a fine tooth-comb, even if the appointment were to be confirmed by the Senate. Finally, if the administration keeps insisting on having been elected to provide “moral values,” for our country the American people may well demand them from those who govern us. When that happens our leadership is likely to be in deep trouble, because morality goes beyond what has been called “pelvic issues.”