Something is rotten in the state of Alaska?

[Thue]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shannyn-moore/stolen-election-in-alaska_b_141704.html

Something stinks. Not just an ordinary low tide smell. Not like something you'd blame on the dog. It smells like an infection. For me to plug my nose, I'd have to overlook some curious facts.

In Alaska, more people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 than for Sarah Palin on Tuesday despite an identical 61-36 margin of victory. Yes. Only four years ago 54,304 Alaskans got off their sofas and voted for Bush, but decided to sit home and not vote for Palin in 2008. In turn, I have to ignore the 30,520 Alaskans who felt progressive enough in 2004 to vote for John Kerry, but weren't inspired to vote for Barack Obama. I would have to glance past the 1,700% increase in the Democratic caucus in February, the 20,991 newly registered voters, and the three largest political rallies in Alaska's history. I would also have to forget the people I stood in a long line with to early vote. It would be helpful not to know every other presidential election since Alaska began keeping records has had a larger turn out than the one we just had with our own Governor on the ticket. Try not to remember 12.4% more Alaskans showed up for the August primary as compared to four years ago, before the Palin nomination. Don't think about the Lower 49's record voter turn out this year either. Try to delete the memory file, though difficult, that 80% of us approved of Sarah Palin just two months ago.

Something stinks. You don't care? Obama won. Yes. He. Did! Free at Last! Wait. Democracy demands all of the votes be counted...if you can find them.

In the balance hangs the fate of Alaska's Senate and House seats. We still don't know if we have elected the now convicted felon Ted Stevens, or Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. We still don't know if Don Young and his million dollar legal problems will defeat former State Representative Ethan Berkowitz and his dreams of Washington DC. Alaska hasn't had Democrat representation in Congress since Mike Gravel lost his senate seat in 1980.

Four years ago, 313,592 out of 474,740 registered voters in Alaska participated in the election-a 66% turnout. Taking into account 49,000 outstanding ballots, on Tuesday 272,633 out of 495,731 registered Alaskans showed up at the polls; a turnout of 54.9%. That's a decrease of more than 11% in voter turnout even though passions ran high for and against Barack Obama, as well as for and against Sarah Palin! This year, early voters set a new record. As of last Thursday, with 4 days left to vote early, 15,000 Alaskans showed up-shattering the old record set in 2004 by 28%! Consider the most popular governor in history-and now the most polarizing-was on the Republican ticket. Consider the historic nature of this race; the first African American presidential candidate EVER! The second woman to ever make a presidential ticket; and she's one of our own. Despite that, we're supposed to believe that overall participation DECREASED by 11%. Not only that, but this historic election both nationally and for Alaska HAD THE LOWEST ALASKA TURNOUT FOR A PRESIDENTIAL RACE EVER!!! That makes sense. REALLY??? Something stinks.

But wait, there's more...

Pre election polls had both Mark Begich-D and Ethan Berkowitz-D solidly beating incumbents Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young by at least 6-10 points. Stevens is currently ahead by 3,353 votes with 49,000 ballots left to count. Berkowitz, however, is behind by 16,887 votes; a 51-43 margin.

Are we to believe Don Young came from an 8 point average polling deficit to win by 8 points-a whopping 16 point turnaround??? Remember how historic the pundits thought Hillary Clinton's come from behind New Hampshire Primary victory was? She trailed Barack Obama by 9% in the pre primary polls and ended up winning by 2 points. It was called the most "stunning comeback in political history." On Election Night, Don Young topped Hillary Clinton's startling and unprecedented comeback.

Furthermore, there were nearly three thousand Alaskans, (2,783) that voted yet left the hotly contested congressional race blank. In the highly publicized senate race, complete with a nationally covered trial that ended with seven felony convictions for the incumbent, 1,392 Alaskans submitted a ballot and failed to register a vote in the senate race. I'm not sure statistically what that means, but it strikes me as odd that well over a thousand Alaskans would wait in long lines and not cast a vote in either the senate race or the congressional race-especially since there was only one ballot measure. In addition, this particular election had an extra high degree of local interest with Governor Palin on the national stage.

McCain-Palin was ahead in Alaska pre election polling by as much as 55-40. The Haysresearch Poll that came out Sunday indicated that gap had closed to 2.7 points! That poll was certainly consistent with Palin's reverse meteoric fall in popularity within the state of Alaska. In that same Haysresearch Poll released on November 2, Question 2 addressed Governor Palin's positive-negative rating. 11% of Alaskans surveyed said their opinion of Palin had become more positive while 37% indicated they were more negative towards Palin. Yesterday's vote contradicts those polls. McCain-Palin won Alaska 61-36! A 25 POINT SPREAD!!! An identical point spread as the 2004 Election.

Alaska has certainly had our share of election hanky panky. Check out this link to our 2004 election results. There are 40 districts in Alaska. The Anchorage area districts run from District 17-District 32. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and pick any district from 17-32. Pay particular attention to the 3rd column labeled % turnout. Hit the back arrow and select another district. There are more precincts with voter turnout over 100% than under 100%. In other words, many more people voted in Anchorage area precincts than there were registered voters. Clearly, this is not possible.

In 2006, the Democrats filed a lawsuit against the Alaska Division of Elections to release public records needed to verify the 2004 election results. The Democrats also sought to have the Alaska Division of Elections release the raw data for the 2006 election. The State requested several deadline extensions and eventually refused to release the "central tabulator data file" taken from the Diebold-supplied computer used to run the "GEMS" (Global Election Management Software) application. A lawsuit was filed in Superior Court seeking release of the records. The Court eventually forced the State to release the 2004 database. The software was found to contain hundreds of edits after the 2004 election, including as late as July of 2006, prior to the release of the data.

With all that history, and the bizarre anomalies in polling and voting and reports from the field of ballots not being scanned on-site due to broken machines, could this election have been stolen?

The world is watching Alaska's US Senate race. When President-Elect Barack Obama is sworn in on January 20, he will be greeted by a Senate with at least 57 Democrats-three shy of a filibuster-proof majority. And, there are still three hotly contested US Senate races that are too close to call; Georgia, Minnesota and Alaska. Just when we thought we were out of the national spotlight...

I've always said if Democracy was a religion, voting would be the sacrament. I'm wondering if someone stole the body and blood of this election. I'm wondering if the wine isn't poisoned. Take a few whiffs. Breathe deeply. See if you don't come to the same conclusion. Where are the votes? Something stinks at the Alaska Division of Elections.

The huge disparity between opinion polls and results, which matched perfectly everywhere else in the US, is very distinctive.

[Pekka]

Yes. Obviously voter fraud, intimidation adn whatnot. THe evil Belzebub made a deal with Obama, who is a direct descendent from the Bohemian Grove. It all makes sense now, let's just replace the right with the left. I knew it, it did make sense then, it makes sense now.

Alex Jones will be all over this in a second. Now he will be the nut against the left. NWO, booyaa! I can already hear the sound of the Amero, where's Charlie Sheen and other fine scholars when you really need them?!

[RGBVideo]

The polls displayed different results from the actual results. Clearly, we should start suspecting the validity of the actual results.

Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, et aliae represent the new tide of Internet journalism, a path pioneered by FOX news in TV. Why live under the annoying cloud of reality when you can manufacture your own to suit your personal prejudices?

[RGBVideo]

I felt like Obama would get a landslide victory based on election polls given to me by my favourite media sources; therefore if he didn't get it of course the fault should be in the election process, which of course is filled by fraud by the evil Republicans.

Truthiness™

[Thue]

VJ: the suspicious part is the house and senate votes, not the presidential election. The polls numbers in the article for the house and senate runs are confirmed by multiple independent polling agencies.

[Krill]

1. **** Happens
   
2. Demand a recount that won't happen because someone burned teh ballots.

[Thue]

From a presumably nonpartisan source http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/582698.html

Did a huge chunk of Alaska voters really stay home for what was likely the most exciting election in a generation?

That's what turnout numbers are suggesting, though absentee ballots are still arriving in the mail and, if coming from overseas, have until Nov. 19 to straggle in.

The reported turnout has prompted commentary in the progressive blogosphere questioning the validity of the results. And Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore, who usually works with Democrats, said Friday that "something smells fishy," though he said it was premature to suggest that the conduct of the election itself was suspect.

With 81,000 uncounted absentee and questioned ballots, some of which will be disqualified, the total vote cast so far is 305,281 -- 8,311 fewer than the last presidential election of 2004, which saw the largest turnout in Alaska history. That was the election where Alaska's selection of George Bush for a second term was a foregone conclusion, though there was an unusually hot Senate race between Sen. Lisa Murkowski and former Gov. Tony Knowles.

Four years later, the lead-in for the 2008 election was extraordinary:

• Unheard of participation in the Democratic caucuses and strong Republican interest in theirs as well.

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• A huge registration drive by Democrats and supporters of Barack Obama that enrolled thousands of first-time voters.

• Obama's historic candidacy.

• Gov. Sarah Palin's unprecedented bid for vice president as an Alaskan and a woman.

• A race in which Republican Ted Stevens, a 40-year Senate veteran, was facing voters as a recent convicted felon against Anchorage's popular mayor, Mark Begich, a Democrat.

• A Congressional race in which Republican Don Young, in office almost as long as Stevens, was seeking re-election after a year in which he spent more than $1 million in legal fees defending against an FBI investigation of corruption involving the oil-field services company Veco Corp. Young's opponent, Democrat Ethan Berkowitz, had been filmed on the state House floor in 2006 demanding an end to Veco's corrupt practices weeks before the FBI investigation became known. The news clip played over and over as legislators and then Stevens were indicted and convicted, boosting Berkowitz's status.

"Everyone had a reason to vote," said Shannyn Moore, whose blog on one of the most popular liberal Web sites in the country, the Huffington Post, suggested the Alaska election was "stolen."

"Then people were what, listening to the news and couldn't pull away from their TVs to go vote at the last minute?"

Even conservatives appeared to be short counted, Moore said. The latest tally showed that the McCain-Palin ticket had almost 55,000 fewer votes than Bush-Cheney in 2004, she said.

Moore's blog, posted Thursday, has already been reposted or commented upon around the Internet. But even Democratic Party officials are saying she's jumping the gun.

"Nobody is charging 'shady,' " said Bethany Lesser, spokeswoman for the Alaska Democratic Party. But she said she's also confused about why more Republicans didn't support Palin, let alone Democrats coming out for Obama, Begich and Berkowitz.

"When I look at that vote, where are the people who are her people?" Lesser said.

While Democrats were charged up by Obama's candidacy and volunteered to help in Alaska, some of that effort was redirected after Palin's nomination, when it became obvious that Alaska would vote strongly Republican for president. Lesser said that Obama volunteers in Alaska spent time telephoning voters in swing states like North Carolina and Ohio rather than spend all their time getting out the vote in Alaska.

One volunteer, Jane Burri, said she was asked to address postcards to swing state voters in between registering Alaskans to vote while she attended an Obama rally in Anchorage in October.

"I remember I wrote, 'It's a really cold day in Alaska but we're sitting out there, writing to you, because we need your help,' " Burri said. She wrote that Alaska, with only three electoral votes, didn't amount to much, "but your vote counts."

Moore, the Anchorage pollster, had predicted a victory for Begich and Berkowitz, as did David Dittman, who usually polls for Republicans.

Moore said he's seen anecdotal evidence of both strong support for Democrats, and also low turnout at the polls, so he's waiting for the final count before reaching any conclusions.

Still, with the increase in registration and population since 2004, the total vote this year should have been around 330,000 to 340,000 had it been just an ordinary election, Moore said

"Given that interest in this election could not, under any circumstances, have ever been greater this year than it was in other years, it's almost inconceivable to imagine that the number of votes cast would drop" from 2004, he said. "It smells to me like you had a really, really, really weird turnout where all the Palin mothers and all the Ted Stevens supporters came flooding en masse out of the woodwork to make a point, and the Dems somehow sat on their hands and enjoyed the presidential news as it filtered up from the Lower 48 through the day."

Dittman says that seems to have been what happened, though it probably wasn't Democratic Party members who stayed home -- rather independents who may have been leaning that way because of the corruption charges against Young and Stevens.

Polls published just before the election that suggested strong victories for Begich and Berkowitz, plus cold weather and warnings of long lines at polling places, might have suppressed turnout, Dittman said.

"They didn't see any reasons to endure," he said.

McHugh Pierre, a spokesman for the Republican Party, said Republicans also had reason to not show up.

"A lot of people were torn: How do I morally vote for someone who is guilty of seven felonies?" he said, referring to Stevens' conviction a week before the election. "They don't show up to vote."

Director Gail Fenumiai of the Alaska Division of Elections said someone sent her Moore's blog, but she hadn't had a chance to read it -- she's too busy organizing the effort to count the absentee ballots and the review panels that will look at the questioned ballots. She urged patience before making a judgment on the election process.

"People just need to wait until the last ballot is counted," Fenumiai said.

[RGBVideo]

Originally posted by Thue
VJ: the suspicious part is the house and senate votes, not the presidential election. The polls numbers in the article for the house and senate runs are confirmed by multiple independent polling agencies.

That was NOT my point at all.

My primary point was that nobody should be blaming the results if the polls are pointing to a different direction; that is a very disturbing precedent because it's an empirically realized fact that people are afraid to admit to pollsters that they support a certain politician/party if (s)he's been smeared to death by the media.

My secondary point is that Huffington Post does not have any evidence of a voter fraud, despite this being extremely easy to notice if the voters vote by paper (leaving a "paper trail") and the vote counters are composed of all parties receiving votes and form a consensus about the amount of votes received for each party.

My first tertiary point is that Huffington Post is cherry-picking polls by quoting a single poll by "Hays Research group" which has a sample of 400 voters and thus has a ±4.9 margin of error (with 5% probability of having a MoE higher than that, just in case someone doesn't know the definition of the phrase "margin of error").

My second tertiary point is that considering all other points, everyone who gives any credit to that article by Huffington Post has made up his mind about voter fraud beforehand, and is thus only reinforcing his own hidden prejudices; or in other words, educating himself with truthiness.

[Thue]

I still think the numbers are suspicious in themselves, especially the low turnout. You don't have to be a partisan to think that.

And I am actually not that partisan - I would be just as interested if the suspicion was that the democrats had pilfered the polls. It seems to me that many USians (especially republicans) become blind to incriminating facts if they goes against their party; IMO I am relatively unbiased in that regard.

Yes, I know that the Huffington Post is biased, but the numbers still speak for themselves (and I did actually verify a few of them before posting the original article). And yes, I agree that you can disregard the cherry-picked presidential poll. I posted the Huffington Post article because it was juicy .

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Well, leaving aside tinfoil hats and all that, and not even considering discrepancy with the polls, there is a simple question here:

How is it that overall voter turn out for this election topped 2004, but in a state where the governor was on the presidential ticket and there was both a high-profile senate race and a high-profile congressional race, turnout in Alaska was down something like 30-35% compared to 2004? (FWIW, turnout in Arizona was about the same as 2004, and turnout in Delaware slightly higher; and as far as I can tell, only one similarly big, empty, deep-red Western state -- SD -- saw turnout fall, and that was only by 2-3 points).

That may not point to mischief, but is is a glaring sociological/demographic/historical anomaly, and requires an explanation. "Fraud," whatever you think of the people yelling it, is a pretty compelling explanation. But there may be other compelling explanations.

Anybody? Anybody?

edit: xpost with Thue, who makes the same point just above.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well I do think that part of it is that Obama won so early in the evening, depressing turnout in Alaska. 2004 was very, very close.

[Tuberski]

According to Weather Underground:

In 2004, it was snowing in Anchorage with 20 mph wind gusts.

In 2008, no snow, no wind to keep the voters away.

ACK!

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Well I do think that part of it is that Obama won so early in the evening, depressing turnout in Alaska. 2004 was very, very close.

I agree that this is a factor, but I still find it strange that people didn't get off their asses to either:

a) Vote for the hometown girl
b) Vote for the black guy
c) Vote against the black guy
d) Vote for the avuncular Senator who's done so much for Alaska and who is now being targeted by those DC types
e) Vote against the convicted felon Senator

There is something weird here. Could just be strange or it could be actual malfeasance. There is enough wrong with this to think that somebody should be taking a good hard look at things. For instance, where was the turnout down the most?

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Tuberski
In 2008, no snow, no wind to keep the voters away.

Do you mean the lack of snow and wind is why people didn't vote? We are talking about Alaskans here...

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by Darius871


Do you mean the lack of snow and wind is why people didn't vote? We are talking about Alaskans here...

No, I'm saying weather isn't a factor.

It was worse in 2004, and there was greater turnout.

ACK!