clap, clap, clap....very well said!
Posted by emal at January 19, 2008 07:51 AMActually, I think you conflate two separate issues: (1) the media being stupid, vapid, etc., etc.. and (2) the media getting the NH primary results wrong.
I think the media has a lot to apologize for. And you touch on a lot the reasons that pack political journalism is simply embarassingly awful in 2008. BUT, I don't think the media (or pollsters) have to apologize for the "weaknesses of polling" that led to getting the outcome wrong.
The mainstream journalists would still be, as you say, a bunch of "moronic lying corporatists" even if they had correctly predicted the primary results down to the hundreth of a percent. And they wouldn't have anything to apologize for if they were professional, objective, ethical, honest, fair, and mature even if they were twice as wrong about the outcome. The media has no duty to accurately predict elections. They only have a duty to not unduly influence them,
Posted by space at January 19, 2008 08:06 AMAmen, paradox.
Posted by xht at January 19, 2008 08:18 AMThank you, space.
Posted by paradox at January 19, 2008 08:18 AMI took the 2 issues more as the stupid, lying, corporatist media mercilessly creating their own reality only to be shown up by... reality. People aren't believing them anymore...as most of them have a track record that is as bad as Cheney-Bush.
Posted by emal at January 19, 2008 08:28 AMKiss her ass.
Fuck yeah. Twice even.
Posted by Sharkbabe at January 19, 2008 08:42 AMGreat post! Absolutely perfect title!
Posted by Masslib at January 19, 2008 09:10 AMI wouldn't read much into the Newsweek thing - they've been running a long series of candidate profiles on all the GOP & Dems and the profiles are exceedingly rosy for all. If they had harpied Hill while BJ'ing all the others, it would have been too obvious. But the knifing will return at its regularly scheduled time & page next week.
Posted by idiosynchronic at January 19, 2008 09:11 AMTop notch writing, Paradox. These days you have to go all the way to the opposite coast to escape the hallucinogens that makes our media whore 2s feel like 10s.
Posted by Pacific John at January 19, 2008 09:13 AMwell said..a few day before the nh primary a headline on zogby was...clinton suffers shrinkage....i mean come on...
Posted by dennis at January 19, 2008 09:25 AMThere is much conflation here.
First off, polls are used to determine the honesty of elections. That's how election watchers are clued into fraud in places overseas. That the polls in New Hampshire were so out of whack with what the Diebold machines announced (the hand-counted votes matched the polls) is a question that's being explored now.
The recount is only partial and it is slow, but it is already showing inexplicable errors produced by the scanning machines. Unfortunately, the Secretary of State isn't interesting in examining the memory cards to see if there are any programming errors.
As for the jackals of the press, there was Chris Matthews as the most boorish, an intellectual equal to Gloria Steinem's stupid and divisive op-ed on behalf of Clinton. Most people didn't see Clinton's tears, much less cared.
Rather than conflation, perhaps what we're hearing here is an inflation. That is, blaming all of the emotions and opinions directed at Clinton and her showing in New Hampshire on anti-feminist chatter in the 72 hours before the election is an inflation of all this. Clinton is a politician and is liked or disliked for any number of reasons. Some dislike Clinton because she's a woman. Some dislike her for her politics, her personality (that is different than being a woman), some dislike her for her voting record, some dislike her for her political history and proximity to the status quo.
Here in California I have two women senators. I support one and hope for the other's immediate departure from the public stage. I support Boxer for her stands on issues and I don't support Feinstein. My opinions of these two politicians have nothing to do with their genitalia.
The most offensive thing about people who presume all opposition to Clinton has to do with her gender are creating a fantasy.
spoken like a truly clueless human being, boob. I mean bob.
Posted by xam at January 19, 2008 09:57 AMSeeing a Tweety eating a crow almost made it worth it.
Posted by TIKI AL at January 19, 2008 10:19 AMI love you too, Sharkbabe.
Posted by paradox at January 19, 2008 10:49 AMFrom what I see at the Secretary of State website, the counts were 97-100% accurate. This seems about as good as you'll get with any hand count, punch card or any other system, but it does show why paper ballots are needed as a backup. It looks to me that in every case, the recount tally was less than the machine tally--for all the candidates. I'm not sure how the machines are adding votes.
Posted by CG at January 19, 2008 10:51 AMThe above was in response to The recount is only partial and it is slow, but it is already showing inexplicable errors produced by the scanning machines.
To clarify/correct what I said above, in individual wards, vote recounts may have been more or less than machine counts. It was the county totals that were always less.
I would like to see someone go back to the ballots and see why the machines were counting more or less than the hand counts. In Biden's case for example, there are wards where he got one machine-counted vote, but two hand-counted votes, and other wards where the reverse was true with less than 5 votes. Go look at those ballots and those machines and see what went wrong. That's what I'd like to see.
Posted by CG at January 19, 2008 10:56 AMCG, in Stratham 550 votes were not counted because the pollworkers apparently gave voters the wrong pens to mark their ballots with. In the 5th ward of Manchester the Diebold machines gave Clinton 64 extra votes. I wouldn't call that 100% accurate. As written at Brad Blog:
Check the numbers for yourself. Yeah, it's technical true that "a lot of the votes were exactly the same," as [Secretary of State] Gardner says, in the same way that a lot of the troops who go to Iraq don't get killed.
But many more vote counts were not at all the same, ranging anywhere from 5 to 8 votes off in regular cases, across almost all candidates.
And before you say that's no big deal, we'll remind you that in 2004, had just 6 votes per precinct been registered in Ohio for John Kerry instead of George W. Bush, we'd have a different person sitting in the White House right now.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5572#more-5572
As for xam's comment, beyond your namecalling, you offer nothing. That earns you a place next to Chris Matthews. A lot of Democrats don't want Clinton as their candidate and for most of them it has nothing to do with her gender, Matthews or shockjocks. As a center-right candidate many prefer Obama. And the other candidates are to the left of those two. It's not that hard to figure out.
Posted by Bob In Pacifica at January 19, 2008 11:55 AMIt is my understanding that in Germany, the ballots are hand cast and hand counted. It takes several days for the official winners to be announced. There is little suspense, however, because professional exit polling has never (that is not once in decades) failed to accurately predict the winner. Exit polling is a refined science and has indeed has been used by the US to judge the integrity of elections in other countries.
It is only since the United States went to electronic voting and vote tabulation using machines with proprietary (secret) software that the disparity between exit polling and reported results has become an issue.
80% of the votes in the NH primary were counted on the Diebold Accu-vote TS machine. This is the same machine that a University of Princeton Study concluded were insecure and easily hackable. Check out the results of that study here Princeton study. It is also the same machine that was successfully hacked to flip votes in a mock election documented in the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy." See demonstration here: hacking Diebold.
At this point, I have no confidence in the integrity of the vote totals produced by these or any other machine with secret accounting code. Transparency is the mark of an honest election and we are now using voting systems that are shrouded in mystery. I think it was JFK that said that when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, violent revolution becomes inevitable. Let me be clear...I do not advocate violence in any way. But others may not have the same view.
Perhaps preparing for this is a more logical explanation for the repeated and consistent shredding of the Bill of Rights we have witnessed over the past several years including domestic surveillance, the ignoring of habeas corpus, search and seizure without a warrant and other violations of our elected representatives oaths of office, than the increasingly bogus "War on Terror."
Sorry...corrected links
Princeton Study here...http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/
Hacking demo here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs
Posted by brisa at January 19, 2008 12:19 PMBob, my point was that the totals were no more than 3% or so off. The precinct you site was 10% off--yes a very big difference, but the total for all the precincts given was that the recount for Clinton was 98% of the total--so the machine count (assuming the hand count was 100% accurate) was 2% over.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem. I'm saying that this is why we need paper ballots, but I'm also saying that I doubt other systems have accuracy. Way back before 2000, before anyone was talking about this, my state used punch cards. How accurate were those? Probably not better than 98%. No voting system, even paper ballots and hand counts, are 100% accurate.
The system I've seen advocated by the Johns Hopkins guy who originally sounded the alarm on the Diebold systems (Ari something I think) is touchscreen machine that marks your paper ballot for you. You then check your ballot (the paper one) and make sure it's right. That paper ballot is then fed into an optical scanning machine. Since the ballot is machine marked, there is no issue with bad pens, people not filing in the oval well enough, etc. The ballots are machine read for speed (and accuracy?), but there is a paper trail. Ideally these machines would be audited with an automatic handcount of 1% of the ballots.
CG, I was with you until the optical scan part. Hand count the ballots. That's the way the rest of the world does it. Let the people live with the exit polls (not the "adjusted" exit polls) until the votes are counted. By hand.
Myself, I have no idea why Diebolds skewed a 7-point difference between Clinton and Obama, and though am not averse to the concept of a Clinton win (I would imagine that before Iowa most people presumed one). I am suspicious because of the weird breakdown between hand-counted and Diebold-counted votes. While there have been general theories I haven't seen a written essay breaking down, mapping out "Obama" towns versus "Clinton" towns and why one town with handcounts would be different from a neighboring town with Diebolds.
By the way, the touchscreens in South Carolina are really screwing up terribly today.
Posted by Bob In Pacifica at January 19, 2008 01:09 PMStanding ovation for paradox. It wears well with my red lips on my Kiss My Ass jeans.
As I said elsewhere today, the biggest story of this election season IS sexism. Not hard to ignore but it is hard to report on if it is in your mouth and all over your hands. Women are in every single township, city, state, family, which is not true of any other demographic. If you aren't a woman you might not understand that we will be determining this election not the youth vote which are cutting their teeth in politics. Men need to understand that we can't count on them to fight our battles imposed on us by them. We outnumber you, we're seasoned, and formidable. We're backing the most qualified competent candidate most of all.
Posted by Shez at January 19, 2008 03:15 PM