Summary of Primary election outcomes.

This is my blog so I can play news anchor if I want. But this is your browser so you can wince and go elsewhere if you want. This is a wrap up of the May 6th primaries...as I happen to see them.

10 oclock news: the margins of victory have shrunken for both candidates vs earlier counts. That is interesting since that means a 2% flip in the count would make Obama the winner in Indiana. Lake county has not reported at this time and we know it has problems.

2 AM: Lake county, saying the delay was to count absentee ballots comes in. I am relieved it was nothing worse. Hillary gave a speech at 11 PM that sounded like it was written as her victory speech for Denver in August, but the margin is now 49/51, far slimmer than her lead in the polls of only two weeks ago. ...Maybe her last chance to deliver that speech.

This morning's papers generally treat yesterday's voting as a modest win for Obama and critical reality check for the seeming success of Clinton's recently more negative tack. The Huffington Post front page was brutal, dismissing Clinton by showing Obama vs McCain as all that's left. But the story under the headline is a well written summary by a name brand journalism professor. Not so heralded, Obama actually is moving on to the bigger fight. It may not literally be over for Clinton at this point but for Obama, reports were that he was already working to focus on repairing the demographic rifts that were aggravated by the recent desperate campaigning tactics.

Was I too harsh on Hillary? Not as harsh as Arianna Huffington who appears to have a grudge against dishonesty and stupidity. How on earth is that Arianna going to write about politics with that attitude?
The coverage of the so called "Limbaugh effect" [yes, we do call this a democracy!] in Huffington Post graphically pairs HRC with worse company than even McCain:
But Limbaugh aside, what does a woman have to do to get elected? I do not know how her campaign determined that dumbed down petro-populism would give her an edge. I am sure she is smarter than that but she also has the stomach to strike any pose that will get her the nomination, which is pretty similar to the spinning compass of the explosive Capt. Windsock. It sure isn't working with me. Anyone can stand on the bed of a pickup truck at a gas station and milk the anxiety over gas prices with unworkable promises. The bed of a pickup truck is not much of an altitude from which to talk down to voters but talking down is what she is doing. Not all voters are that dumb. Not everyone is unaware that the gas mileage of pickup trucks is part of the problem. At least 49 percent of them in Indiana are not that dumb. Campaigning with a new-found and shallow populism that underestimates voters maturity, even if it properly assesses their pain, is more elitist than anything Obama has pulled. After three weeks of helping McCain by directly and indirectly raising every doubt and rumor, Clinton is as tarnished as her target.

More voters blamed Hillary for negative campaigning -- 63% of Indiana voters and 67 % of North Carolina voters thought Clinton attacked Obama unfairly. Only 43 % in Indiana and 40% in North Carolina thought the reverse.

Note that when republicans were given a choice between McCain and political corpses, 20% voted for corpses. I don't think that particular 20% would provide any help for Obama except by staying home in November...but Ron Paul supporters are strange creatures to me.

The economy is reported to dominate the choice voters make. What about the war? Two good signs I found:

1. A down ticket election where the anti-war republican overcame all expectations
2. NC counties where the military is a big employer STILL went for Obama over Clinton

Have we reached the point beyond which Clinton can only do damage? Definitely!

the headlines alone make my head asplode!

Key Findings From Early Exit Polls

The economy is the major driving issue, with 65% In Indiana saying it was the most important issue, and 60% saying the same in North Carolina.

Exit Polls: Indiana, North Carolina Latest Information

WORRIED ABOUT THE ECONOMY

The economy was on voters' minds in Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. Two-thirds of Democratic primary voters in Indiana and nearly as many in North Carolina said the economy is the most important issue facing the nation. That's more than have said so in 28 previous competitive Democratic primaries with exit polls this year.

Clinton Gas Tax Holiday: Hillary Attacks Economists

When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

2 + 2 = 0, apparently. Perhaps Clinton plans to have none of those rascally economists appointed into her administration. That makes her as similar to Bush as the hazardous old Capt Windsock. Repeat after me and the newspapers: "The economy is the big issue" and then say "Economists are the wrong people to ask about taxes" . Either you will come to understand one of our candidates or you have a stroke.

You call that a democracy? Cowboys and Indianans

I lifted this straight out of the newsfromunderground google group posting. And that in turn was content supplied by Blackboxvoting.org.
Over and above the internecine negative campaigning Clinton introduced into the Democratic primaries, we now have a catalog of voting irregularities in Indiana...most of which involve disenfranchised voters in districts that were expected to go for Obama. What a surprise that is! Please note the plea for support to BlackBoxVoting.org that appears at the bottom of this material. If you appreciate the access to the broken guts of your democracy that these people provide you then show it. You are not going to get this info on your foxxing cable news channel. In their words "We are supported ENTIRELY through small citizen donations". Do I have to tell you, mere citizen, that you are getting smaller every day?

There are voting machine problems, tens of thousands of voters who will be disqualified for reasons no officials have made clear yet...lots of dirt here and some tools you can use to obtain information and digest results. If Obama is going to be hit as only Rove used to be able to hit opponents, its going down today in IN. Is this what Hillary was talking about when she claimed greater electability?

In April 2008 when Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced the release of "record high" voter registration rolls, with 4.3 million voters set to vote in the Tuesday May 6 primary, he didn't mention that a whopping 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled.

Now, the voter rolls are supposed to be tidied up prior to each election. Indiana's last general election was in Nov. 2006, and they have had a slew of special and general elections since then. So how have 1.1 million voters -- 26 percent of the current statewide list -- escaped the voter registration cleanup squad? Who are these million voters and where do they come from?

One quarter-million of them come from just two northwestern Indiana counties: Lake and Porter. Lake County reports purging 137,164 voters and neighboring Porter County cancelled out 124,958 voters.

Lake County, the home of Gary, Indiana, has spawned the Jackson Five and a great old musical (The Music Man) and has been referred to as "the second most liberal county in America." Lake County also has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you'll find anywhere in the USA.

Nearby Porter County, the home of Valparaiso, is 95% white and went solidly for Bush in the 2004 election. It's also got a lot of college students.

For whatever reason, these two counties had ... what ... massive data entry problems? Exceptionally messy records? Lots of dead people who climbed back into their graves? I truly hope we aren't going to see a lot of disappointed voters on Tuesday, when they perhaps learn that they were among the lucky million people who got purged.

HERE'S WHERE THE HEAVIEST INDIANA PURGES ARE:

Lake	137,164	48% (Gary)
Porter	124,958	115% (Valparaiso)
Marion	68,120	10% (Indianapolis)
Monroe	66,009	85% (Bloomington)
Tippecanoe	53,456	58%
Madison	42,952	47% (Anderson)
Hamilton	42,325	26%

Here's a picture map with the numbers and percentages for the whole state:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/cancelled-from-indiana-voter-rolls.png

The percentage represents the ratio of the number of purges to the current voter list. Example: If a location currently has 100,000 voters on its rolls, and purged 53,000 along the way, we assign a ratio of 53% to the purge vs. current list.

It would be nice to have the original quantities, it would make for a cleaner number, but this is not available on the Secretary of State's Web site, so I haven't got a tidier statistic for you, wish I did. I also wish the time period for these purges was clearly indicated, but it is not indicated -- nor can it be derived -- from available information at Indiana's official election Web site.

TOOLS YOU CAN USE

It's always interesting to look for impossible numbers on election night, like the "more votes than voters" situation that sometimes crops up. It speeds things up to have a place to plug the information in. Here is a spreadsheet -- quick and not too fancy, I'm sure you can improve on it. It has every Indiana county, along with their official registered voter statistics for the 2008 primary, and some historical data from 1992 to the present, along with links for the source documents from the secretary of state:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/IN/state/quickrank-INDIANAreg.xls
(Excel file, 71 KB)

Here are links that may be very good to provide additional statistical information which you can plug in:

http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/elections/index.html

And here is a link to the source document containing the cancelled registration information used for this article:

http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/Statewide_Voter_Count_by_County5.1.08.pdf

Here's a quick spreadsheet with the Indiana voting machines by county -- you can get that on the Sec. State's Web site too, but it's not in a database format. You can cut and paste these into your analysis sheets if you'd like to get comparisons of results by county.

AND NOW ABOUT THOSE VOTING MACHINES

Another press release on the Indiana Secretary of State's Web site deals with the $360,000 penalty he's hitting Microvote with for failing to follow the law. Oh yes, and the Microvote Infinity voting machine, which will be very widely used in the Tuesday May 6 primary, has been DECERTIFIED!

That's not going to stop anyone in Indiana from using it, however. The decision was that anyone who already bought these things gets to use them -- despite the fact that these machines have been embroiled in lawsuits in at least three places, one in Pennsylvania for machines that just didn't work, and two in Tennessee where candidates have asked to redo elections due to bizarre anomalies -- like vote totals that wandered away in the wee hours of the night.

Microvote's insurance company declined to cover the firm, according to yet another lawsuit, because the insurance company alleged that Microvote was selling defective products. The judge ruled against the insurance company, saying the product wasn't defective, it just didn't work.

I haven't plugged this in yet, but those of you who are comfortable with spreadsheets can quickly add the voting machines by county to your voter registration spreadsheet, using that voting machine spreadsheet I linked above, to see how many votes all together will be subjected to Microvote.

Ah, but we aren't done with Indiana voting machines yet. Indiana is also fond of the ES&S paperless iVotronic touch-screens, the ones that lost 18,000 votes in Sarasota County Florida and were the subject of a blistering report by Dan Rather. In Rather's report, he showed shocking footage of the touch-screens being manufactured in a sweat shop in the Philippines. Their quality control test was to shake the machine and if it didn't rattle, it passed the test.

THINGS YOU CAN DO ABOUT INDIANA

1. Do some public records requests to either the state or the counties, and ask for their VRG-5 form, which is the NVRA tracking form on which the number of voters purged must be reported.

For tips on how to do the records requests, here's our tool kit, scroll down to the section on public records:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html

Post the documents and ask for any advice you need here, and report your front-lines information for both Indiana and North Carolina here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/73.html

I'm pushing hard right now to get TOOL KIT 2008 done -- it's a stripped-down model with emergency measures for the fall election. Unless you tell me not to, I'll let you know as soon as it's ready for download.

2. Another useful form you can request: The CEB-9 form, which is the Indiana County Election Report that must be turned in after the election. Here's one, take a look at the information it contains:

http://www.in.gov/sos/elections/pdfs/CEB-9.pdf

3. If you are a number-cruncher, grab the spreadsheets here and wail on 'em during Election night. You can get additional historical information from this site:
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html
(Choose the drop-down menu "general by state" and select Indiana, then choose the year you want. Confusion factor -- this site color-codes Republican as blue and Democrat as Red. Has lots of good stuff).

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE: People usually catch things like "more votes than voters" weeks after the election. The dang Indiana information doesn't break voter registrations out by party which makes crunching the primary numbers a little harder. But you may still get the jump on some red flags if you track this stuff as it's coming in on spreadsheets that tell you what the stats are going in.

A WORD ABOUT THE TV PROJECTIONS

You'll notice that those projections often change -- sometimes dramatically -- just an hour or so later. That's because we have learned that they are paying elections officials (through their associations or otherwise) to call and fax them the results off the voting machine poll tape.

In fact, the National Election Pool (used to be Voter News Service) is getting this stuff BEFORE the election officials and way before the secretary of state.

The first number they quote is the adjusted exit poll number, and it comes from asking people about who they voted for. The point here is, when what you thought was "exit polls" suddenly changes, that is the impact of those called-in poll tape results. Yep. That's the voting machines talking, and when they say something different than the people answering the exit pollers' questions, we should be looking at the programming on the machine, not the exit pollers, for answers. I expect to see early projections altered significantly as soon as those poll tape numbers are called in to NEP.

So to recap, good things to do Tuesday:
1. Public records
2. Number crunching
3. Pray

Good luck to us, all,

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting

Please help us protect 2008, muster up the "Dream Teams" for field
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Hair of the dog

It is not too far fetched to say that America is a high risk debtor. Long before the sheriff comes to evict a man who has habitually borrowed more than he can pay and squandered it on luxuries, his borrowing habits show a pattern. It is essentially the pattern of addiction. Among people addicted to alcohol, the expression hair off the dog that bit you is a junk rationalization that has turned into an accepted bad practice: having a drink in order to dull the pain of a hang over. That practice looks like the only line our nation's money mavens can recite.

Here is an article from Asia Times that is quite clear about the world's disdain for Fed policy. I don't think highly of it myself.

We have been a vocal critic of interest rate cuts in the US because, in our assessment, they do much more harm than good: subprime borrowers or holders of illiquid debt instruments are shunned from the markets in the current environment because of general risk aversion, not because of the level of interest rates. Lower interest rates, however, may cause inflationary pressures to build further and may cause further downward pressure on the dollar.

I don't have that informed an opinion but if the current mess in bank liquidity is largely the blowback of Greenspan's shortsighted means of putting off the credit drought caused by a trillion dollar republican borrowing spree, how on earth is enabling yet more dubious borrowing a solution? I suspect the certainty of inflation has been accepted as a collateral damage if it comes. The current administration can blame inflation on oil prices and, in any case, it will fall more heavily on the next administration. That overdue and oft forestalled recession would hit soon if not expensively repelled and dent McCains Same Talk express.

Thomas Friedman Gets It

He says he gets it from you and me: Ordinary people are finally asking why is the US fighting the world when it should be fixing its own tattered house? Friedman knows and claims many of the people he has talked to around the country are aware as well: we can't afford to do both and, surge hype be damned, the fighting is not doing us any good. Whence hope when leaders treat you like a dope? Well, Thomas has his preference.

I got the wrong Wright

I have been reluctant to say a word about the Wright imbroglio. I knew from his autobiographical Dreams from my Father that Obama had been recruited to the church by Wright more than the other way round .... and that was all so long ago. While I have said little because I knew little and don't put much stock in the religious associations of people who wear their faith lightly, I was still lapping up opinions that painted the angry Reverend as his own worst enemy. But Shokai over at his resumed blog has done more home work than many an editor or news anchor. Its good to get the whole picture. I would not hang McCain for Hagee's sake and I won't hang Obama for the anger of Rev. Wright...who is a more complex man than your TV news or even most editorials can communicate.

Immigrants: "may day! may day!"

Yes, the crowds are smaller this year than they were last year. But so are the remittances to struggling relatives that the immigrant workers send back to Brazil and Mexico. What a brilliant solution America has devised for its impasse over immigration! Become as third-worldly as the places immigrants fled ...and back they will go!

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Time travel policy: I am at a Bat Mitzvah on the 3rd, you wouldn't want me typing in the middle of the drash now would you? So the third comes a little early