If you read liberal/progressive blogs (which you really should do) you’re certainly going to see lot’s of play for this minor story:
COLUMBUS, Ohio – An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.
Why is it a minor story? Because it’s an older touch screen systems not used anywhere else in the state of Ohio. What story are you not going to find?
Votes % Votes
Bush 56,834,147 52%
Kerry 52,165,568 47%
Counting ballots has increased Bush’s nationwide lead from 3.5 million to 4.6 million, and his Electoral Collage total in up to 286.
Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, the numbers above were from the Yahoo elections page, and were a bit behind. Bush’s lead remains in the 3.5 million vote range. The numbers from the page are now up to date, and shown below:
Votes % Votes
Bush 59,651,290 51%
Kerry 56,158,908 48%
Elections are, and have always been, a messy business. This was the most scrutinized election in our nations history, and all things considered probably the fairest ever.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, rubbing the salt into the wounds!!!
I think we need to be careful with the 52-47 thing. Ace has it posted on his site too. All the places I’ve seen that so far (USA today and Yahoo) are only reporting like 91% of the precincts. CNN has 99% of the precincts in and their count is 59,459,765 for Bush (51.5%) to 55,949,407 for Kerry (48.5%)
Saw that on the drudge and the link to yahoo gave weird numbers for New York state only 3% reporting that would prob be where the problem is and explain why the lead is tightened
THESE ARE OLD NUMBERS. They don’t include the Kerry surge from the west coast. The later numbers give Bush 59+M votes and Kerry 55+M, with 400K for Nader, and 51.3%-48.3% percentages.
(rorochub, looks like you forgot Nader votes too)
in the interest of fairness, Nader got like 400 thousand votes. There…hows that? FYI – CBS news has the updated totals also.
http://election.cbsnews.com/election2004/
I myself am an actual suburban Franklin County (Bush) voter, and I have voted on these very machines for the 8 years that I have lived in Ohio.
It is VERY misleading to call them “touch screens” (even “older touch screens”) as there are no “screens” involved whatsoever. They are indeed electronic machines, but they are MECHANICALLY controlled.
Pictures of the inside of the machine can be found here ( http://www.seventy.org/electioninfo/electronic1242.html ).
If it’s not clear from the pictures, the face of the machine is an approximately 3 foot by 3 foot square white plastic sheet, with the voting choices physically printed on it in large black letters.
Beside each vote choice is a red flashing light bulb/LED. When you press a voting choice, you can feel a button click beneath the plastic membrane sheet. When you make a choice, the light goes from blinking to solid red, and any choices you did not select go from blinking to unlit. So there is tactile as well as visual feedback to every choice.
When you have made all your choices and you are done voting, you press a giant green physical button marked “VOTE”. Then the machine makes a loud “click” and all the lights go out. It is VERY obvious when you have completed voting, and nearly impossible to inadverantely press the giant (2×3 inches) green rectangular VOTE button.
Unlike actual computer “touch screens”, there is no “calibration” required as there is no screen of any kind involved, no CRT, no plasma, no LCD, just black ink printed on white plastic, on top of a bunch of actual physical buttons. There is only one page, no paging down or turning.
Admittedly there does seem to have been some kind of error with these particular machines in Gahanna, another Columbus suburb. But it cannot have been related to touch screen technology, as these machines don’t use it. Also, these machines have been in use here in Franklin County for at least 8 local, state, and national election cycles, so it’s not like it’s unproven or newfangled technology.
But of course the MSM will slant a story as much as possible to make it sound like Evil Technology has been subverting the will of the electorate.
-Hilliard, OH
I guess this defeat isn’t big enough for the looney Dems. Oh well. When they nominate Hillary Rotten Clinton they’ll see even bigger numbers. Do the egghead leaders of the DNC and the MSM really believe Americans will elect the former attorney for the Black Panthers? A former backer of the Palestinian Liberation Army? The First Lady who suddenly discovered Rose Law Firm files in her bedroom in the White House? If they run her as their presidential nominee, she’ll get whipped.
Remember, when she and her husband bamboozled they way into the White House there were no bloggers, no Fox News Channel, only Rush Limbaugh and a couple of other conservative radio hosts, and Americans still believe at that time that the MSM was a legitimate purveyor of information. Now the jig is up and a majority of Americans know the MSM is merely part of the DNC.
The liberals will do ANYTHING to try to deny the simple and inarguable fact that Bush won because the American people wanted him rather than Kerry… and to deny that this happened because the Republican ideas on how to do things are better than their own clueless, out of touch theories.
They’re still claiming that Bush “stole” the election; I suppose they think we conservatives “stole” the increased majorities in the Senate and the House, too?
What’s most hilarious is that the liberal blogs are full of comments on how they need to get some Bush supporters to vote Democratic… and about what contemptible worms Bush supporters are… with no grasp that their arrogant, elitist attitude might just possibly prevent any of us “worms” from WANTING to join them… that, and the fact that they’re dead-wrong about pretty much everything, of course. lol
We had those machines in Memphis. Shouptronics? Why does that name stick in my head?
If there are errors they need to be fixed, period.
rorochub is right, these are old numbers. There will likely be a change in vote totals once all provisional and absentee ballots are counted, but the numbers here are almost 3 million votes below Bush’s total as currently reported by CNN’s election report.
Liberals will be running the replay of this for a long time. They just don’t get and I don’t think they ever will.
As per That bastard Michael Moore, he is saying “Bush’s victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.”
So, now… I do a bit of research… obviously, that last election was closer – but I cannot find what Moore is talking about.
Going back to 1960, there have been closer Popular vote election, but as far as electoral college – this may be true. Anyone have more info on this one?
Giving the fat bastard the benefit of the doubt, he did say “win for a sitting president,” which means the only elections he’s looking at are ones where (1) an incumbent was running for re-election, and (2) won.
1916 Wilson
1924 Coolidge
1936 FDR
1940 FDR
1944 FDR
1948 Truman (as in “Dewey Defeats Truman”)
1956 Eisenhower
1964 LBJ
1972 Nixon
1984 Reagan
1996 Clinton
2004 Bush
Check the popular vote margins (I don’t think he means electoral votes; he’s arguing popular support, not legal) for these elections. I’d say 1948 might have been narrower.
Of course, neither Wilson nor Truman had been bashed throughout their first terms by an overtly hostile news media. And certainly neither one would have been the targets of blatant propaganda “documentaries” by a proven liar.
In those days, people like Michael Moore would have been jailed or blacklisted.
Thanks McGehee