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Who won?
doom writes "I think they call them "exit polls" because people
bolt for the exits when you mention them, but I'm still
fascinated by the subject myself, and this book is one of the
reasons why. In Was the 2004 Presidential Election
Stolen?, the central focus is, of course, on the infamous
exit-poll discrepancies of the 2004 US Presidential election;
but the authors also put it into context: they discuss the
2000 election, the irregularities in Ohio in 2004, the electronic
voting machines issues, and the media's strange reluctance to
report on any of these problems. Further, in the chapter "How
did America really vote?", they compare the indications of the
raw exit-poll data to other available polling data. Throughout,
Freeman and Bleifuss do an excellent job of presenting arguments
based on statistical analysis in a clear, concise way." Read the rest of doom's review
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
author
Steve Freeman & Joel Bleifuss
pages
265
publisher
Seven Stories Press
rating
9
reviewer
doom
ISBN
1583226877
summary
Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count
The heart of the book in my opinion, is Chapter 5, "The inauguration eve exit-poll report": The Edison and Mitofsky firms that conducted the NEP exit polls later released a report trying to explain how they could have gotten it so far wrong. Freeman and Bleifuss, of course, take issue with the presumption that the discrepancies must be "errors", and argue in a different direction. This section makes an exciting read (in a nerdy sort of way) it's an impressive piece of statistical judo: Freeman and Bleifuss take on Edison/Mitofsky with their own data, and totally shred their conclusions. The authors show: That the exit-poll discrepancies had a statistically significant correlation with the use of electronic voting machines, with races in battleground states, and in almost all cases favored the Republicans. The "Reluctant Bush Respondant" theory looks extremely unlikely: response rates actually look slightly better in Bush strongholds than in Kerry strongholds; and while media skepticism remains strong among conservatives, it has been on the rise among Democrats, and yet the data shows no shift in relative avoidance of pollsters. They also deal with the various other excuses that were floated shortly after the election: The discrepancies can't be shrugged off with an "exit polls are not reliable" — theory shows that they should be better than any other survey data, and history shows that they always have been pretty reliable. There was no upswing of support for Bush throughout election day — that impression was entirely an artifact of the media "correcting" the exit-poll figures to match the official results. One of the book's authors, Steven Freeman, was one of the first to examine the exit-poll discrepancies, and as a professor at University of Pennsylvania with a background in survey design, he was well equipped to begin delving into the peculiarities he had noticed.
Overall, this is an excellent book for people interested in evaluating the data; with lots of graphs that make it easy to do informal estimates of the strength of their conclusions (just eye-balling the scatter, the correlations they point to look real, albeit a little loose, as you might expect). There's also an appendix with a very clear exposition of the the concept of statistical significance, and how it applies to this polling data. There are of course, limits to what one can conclude just from the exit-poll discrepancies: "We reiterate that this does not prove the official vote count was fraudulent. What it does say is that the discrepancy between the official count and the exit polls can't be just a statistical fluke, but commands some kind of systematic explanation: Either the exit poll was deeply flawed or else the vote count was corrupted. "
This is a remarkably restrained book: unlike many authors addressing this controversial subject, Freeman and Bleifuss have resisted the temptation to rant or speculate or even to editorialize very much. Freeman claims that he is not a political person (and adds "I despise the Democrats"); possibly this has helped him to maintain his neutrality and focus on the facts of the case.
Personally, I found this book to be something of a revelation: in the confusion immediately after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legitimate at least had some wiggle room. There was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found significant problems, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe? The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they got it wrong: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never covered that development, and I missed it myself...
On the subject of electronic voting machines, They include a chapter discussing electronic voting in general which covers ground that is by now familiar with most readers here: the strange case of Wally O'Dell and Diebold; and also the lesser known problems with ES&S. Have you heard this one? "In 1992, Hagel, then an investment banker and president of the holding company McCarthy & Co., became chairman of American Information Systems, which was to become ES&S in 1999. [...] In the 1996 elections, Hagel launched his political career with two stunning upsets. He won a primary victory in Nebraska [...] despite the fact that he was not well known. Then, in the general election, Hagel was elected to the Senate in what Business Week described as 'an unexpected 1996 landslide victory over Ben Nelson, Nebraska's popular Democratic governor.'"
My experience is that a lot of people need to hear this point: "The voting machine company Datamark, which became American Information Systems and is now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today, Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is CEO of Diebold Election Systems."
It's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system: even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be? A paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? But only a start. As the author's point out: "We devoted a chapter to the ills of electronic voting, but a critical lesson of the 2004 election is that not only DREs, but all kinds of voting machine systems are suspect. Edison/Mitofsky data showed that while hand counted ballots accurately reflected exit-poll survey results, counts from all the major categories of voting machines did not."
In one short passage, the authors list a few "grounds for hope", but following up on these points is not encouraging: The Diebold-injunction law suit in California brought by VoterAction has since been denied and one attempt at a paper trail amendment, HR 550 has stalled out.
If you're looking for an answer to the question posed by the book's title, the authors conclude: "So how did America really vote? Every independent measure points to a Kerry victory of about 5 percentage points in the popular vote nationwide, a swing of 8 to 10 million votes from the official count."
Of the many and various potentially depressing books out there about the state of the United States, I recommend this one highly: it addresses a critical set of issues that everything else depends on.
You can purchase Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The heart of the book in my opinion, is Chapter 5, "The inauguration eve exit-poll report": The Edison and Mitofsky firms that conducted the NEP exit polls later released a report trying to explain how they could have gotten it so far wrong. Freeman and Bleifuss, of course, take issue with the presumption that the discrepancies must be "errors", and argue in a different direction. This section makes an exciting read (in a nerdy sort of way) it's an impressive piece of statistical judo: Freeman and Bleifuss take on Edison/Mitofsky with their own data, and totally shred their conclusions. The authors show: That the exit-poll discrepancies had a statistically significant correlation with the use of electronic voting machines, with races in battleground states, and in almost all cases favored the Republicans. The "Reluctant Bush Respondant" theory looks extremely unlikely: response rates actually look slightly better in Bush strongholds than in Kerry strongholds; and while media skepticism remains strong among conservatives, it has been on the rise among Democrats, and yet the data shows no shift in relative avoidance of pollsters. They also deal with the various other excuses that were floated shortly after the election: The discrepancies can't be shrugged off with an "exit polls are not reliable" — theory shows that they should be better than any other survey data, and history shows that they always have been pretty reliable. There was no upswing of support for Bush throughout election day — that impression was entirely an artifact of the media "correcting" the exit-poll figures to match the official results. One of the book's authors, Steven Freeman, was one of the first to examine the exit-poll discrepancies, and as a professor at University of Pennsylvania with a background in survey design, he was well equipped to begin delving into the peculiarities he had noticed.
Overall, this is an excellent book for people interested in evaluating the data; with lots of graphs that make it easy to do informal estimates of the strength of their conclusions (just eye-balling the scatter, the correlations they point to look real, albeit a little loose, as you might expect). There's also an appendix with a very clear exposition of the the concept of statistical significance, and how it applies to this polling data. There are of course, limits to what one can conclude just from the exit-poll discrepancies: "We reiterate that this does not prove the official vote count was fraudulent. What it does say is that the discrepancy between the official count and the exit polls can't be just a statistical fluke, but commands some kind of systematic explanation: Either the exit poll was deeply flawed or else the vote count was corrupted. "
This is a remarkably restrained book: unlike many authors addressing this controversial subject, Freeman and Bleifuss have resisted the temptation to rant or speculate or even to editorialize very much. Freeman claims that he is not a political person (and adds "I despise the Democrats"); possibly this has helped him to maintain his neutrality and focus on the facts of the case.
Personally, I found this book to be something of a revelation: in the confusion immediately after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legitimate at least had some wiggle room. There was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found significant problems, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe? The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they got it wrong: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never covered that development, and I missed it myself...
On the subject of electronic voting machines, They include a chapter discussing electronic voting in general which covers ground that is by now familiar with most readers here: the strange case of Wally O'Dell and Diebold; and also the lesser known problems with ES&S. Have you heard this one? "In 1992, Hagel, then an investment banker and president of the holding company McCarthy & Co., became chairman of American Information Systems, which was to become ES&S in 1999. [...] In the 1996 elections, Hagel launched his political career with two stunning upsets. He won a primary victory in Nebraska [...] despite the fact that he was not well known. Then, in the general election, Hagel was elected to the Senate in what Business Week described as 'an unexpected 1996 landslide victory over Ben Nelson, Nebraska's popular Democratic governor.'"
My experience is that a lot of people need to hear this point: "The voting machine company Datamark, which became American Information Systems and is now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today, Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is CEO of Diebold Election Systems."
It's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system: even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be? A paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? But only a start. As the author's point out: "We devoted a chapter to the ills of electronic voting, but a critical lesson of the 2004 election is that not only DREs, but all kinds of voting machine systems are suspect. Edison/Mitofsky data showed that while hand counted ballots accurately reflected exit-poll survey results, counts from all the major categories of voting machines did not."
In one short passage, the authors list a few "grounds for hope", but following up on these points is not encouraging: The Diebold-injunction law suit in California brought by VoterAction has since been denied and one attempt at a paper trail amendment, HR 550 has stalled out.
If you're looking for an answer to the question posed by the book's title, the authors conclude: "So how did America really vote? Every independent measure points to a Kerry victory of about 5 percentage points in the popular vote nationwide, a swing of 8 to 10 million votes from the official count."
Of the many and various potentially depressing books out there about the state of the United States, I recommend this one highly: it addresses a critical set of issues that everything else depends on.
You can purchase Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
'Freeman claims that he is not a political person (and adds "I despise the Democrats")'
So hating one of the major political parties involved in that election makes him neutral?
It was all part of the evil Karl Rove trifecta of evil. First we stole the election, then we steered hurricane Katrina right into New Orleans (with the patented Karl Rove Neocon Magic Weather Machine), and to complete the hat trick we blew up the levies to flood the black parts of town. It was a great success, just like the time we went back in time with Microsoft Word 1972 edition to make a fool out of Dan Rather.
He won the second time because they felt he was protecting them from danger and wanted to give him a chance to win the war.
Some people voted for him for that reason, agreed. The issue is whether enough people actually voted for him, for whatever reason, to have fairly elected him for this second term. A thoughtful and complete analysis of whether that happened is most welcome, I think. The fact that you're tired of thinking about it ("get over it") isn't really relevant, and I suspect that your own evident bias is a strong influence on your willingness to hear about it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I'm not saying they cheated in '04, but the '06 results don't disprove it. They can only cheat so much without getting caught. With the huge backlash in '06, it would have been much more difficult to pull off.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't know of very many people who say that GWB "engineered" anything, much less large scale election fraud. You do realize that the people in this administration number more than 1, right? You do realize that the people who would stand to gain from this kind of fraud aren't limited to people named George.
Actually, Gore won the popular vote in 2000. In addition, in case you missed it, Clinton had had 66%+ approval rating when he left office. Most political analysts now say that Gore's reluctance to embrace Clinton, coupled with how incredibly boring the man is, cost him the election. (Or, rather, made it as close as it was.) Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.
Except that the book we're commenting on here offers evidence that this was not what happened, and in fact it was fraud that won Bush his second term. If you would like to dispute the data, then sobeit, but making pronouncements like that doesn't make them true.
Who, exactly, are you talking to? The authors of this book never claimed to be Democrats. Furthermore, if what they're saying is true, the very foundations of our Democracy are at risk. One would think people would be a little more concerned over it.
Historically, exit polls have been amazingly accurate. Only in the last two elections have there been a wide disparity between the exit polling numbers and the official vote count. Secondly, in the last election data, why is there a wide disparity between exit polling data and the official vote count primarily in areas that used touch-screen voting with no paper trail, but yet be dead-on in areas with paper ballots?
We don't do that to avoid the potential for two things: Mob Rule, in which people decide not to bother to go make their voice heard when it appears [to them] that it would be unheard anyway, or they jump on the bandwagon to go join the winning team, and to avoid premature calling of the vote leading to same. Interestingly, this last actually occurred during the 2000 election as one of Bush's relatives felt free to prematurely call the vote, which is credited with stopping a lot of democrats from bothering to vote.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A single person in the right place could have compromised all electronic voting machines from a given company. Just something to think about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ronald Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify" about the Soviet Union's disarmament. That applies here, too.
US elections should not be open to question. We should be able to audit to confirm elections, and vigorously pursue anyone who attempts to illegally influence elections.
Let's fix the system so that we can TRUST the process. That begins by being able to audit the results.
In California, we had the option to fill out a largish sheet of paper, filled on both sides with the elections and propositions. This single piece of paper contained the same information as the Electronic Voting machines. We filled in bubbles, could check our work, and then submitted them into a Diebold scanning machine.
I cringed when I saw the maker, but realized that my paper ballot was there for counting at the precinct, district or randomly selected audit. Anyone who tried to cheat, would have to change or steal my ballot.
Electronic screen voting should be reserved for special needs people, and should PRINT out the same ballot that the rest of us fill in.
That would be less expensive, faster, less prone to abuse, and absolutely verifiable.
What's wrong with that?
One thing to keep in mind is that correlation != causation. The use of electronic voting machines is highly suspect, but it's not a smoking gun. It could be as simple as the voting machines were problematic for the democratic population segment. Another possibility is that the areas deploying the machines did so because they were more Republican leaning to begin with. (Remember, electronic voting was a push from Bush after the 2000 "hanging chad" scandals.)
So more evidence is still needed to determine if the election was actually stolen. Certainly, this does add credence to the possibility.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering where I stand on this:
1. I am republican. Truth be told, I've become disgusted with both parties. Yet I'm too conservative to go libratarian.
2. I think the government should mandate that Diebold is no longer allowed to sell voting machines to the government as they are "unsuitable" to tally votes according to legal requirements.
3. If the vote was stolen, it should be exposed. As should all the dirty laundry of politicians. Sadly, too much will remain hidden.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
what shall we replace it with? the exit polls?
The point of the electoral college is similar to the point of the senate. They are both there to ensure the STATES have a voice in government. This is the United STATES of America, but people have come to believe it is the Federal Republic of America. If you believe that you personally were disenfranchised by the last 2 elections because you didn't vote for Bush (I didn't vote for Bush the last 3 times, btw) then maybe it is not so much a sign that the elecoral college is at fault, it is that the central government has grown way too powerful and has swept the individual states into irrelevancy. The best government is at the local level, where you are better aware of your governing needs than some beltway insider 1000 miles away. Next best is state government, only 100 miles away.
I do agree voting machines need a papertrail, though I am vehemently opposed to the idea of giving the voter a receipt--anything that a voter can carry out to indicate how he voted will inevitably lead to coercive voting. If the local political machine can make sure you voted "correctly," (or else!) that is no better than non-audited electronic boxes manufactured by supporters of that political machine.
More music, fewer hits
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
"Bush won because many voters, myself included, thought Bush was responsible for cleaning up his own mess..."
Let me get this straight: You let a monkey run about throwing crap at everyone. Then, you have the opportunity to put the monkey back in his cage, but instead you let him back out so that he can clean up all the crap he threw? How's that logic working so far?
The nice thing about Bush winning reelection in 2004, is we can all now be assured that he deserves the Worst President Ever label.
It's just too bad it's going to take 30 years to fix the mess he's created.
While generally in "free" countries, letting other know how you vote is not much of an issue, its an important safeguard when a country goes down that slippery road to being a non-free country.
The basic problem, is that with a public vote, especally when dealing with non-mainstream parties, voters can be intimidated, harrassed or or otherwise stigmatised. This may make them choose to vote for (a/the) mainstreem party, or otherwise cause their vote to come with hidden costs (thus the election is no longer fair).
To give a short and semi-plausable example, suppose the police department where to lookup in the voter records for all the people who voted for the marijuana party, and decided to monitor them more closely on the assumption that most of the people who vote for that party are stoners and thus lawbreakers. An employer looking up those same records, might suddenly start asking you to take a "random" drug test, with consiquences if you refuse.
Or cast your mind back 50 years: are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party.
In communist russia, there was an optional anonymous vote. Anyone voting for the communist party would publically declare their vote, but if you where not voting for them you would be far more likely to use the secret ballot, so choosing a secret ballot would it itself make you suspect.
The current secret ballot system has taken a long time to get to its current form, but its fairly robust and comes with the safeguards to help protect a free society.
The USA and UK have recently been stripping away our civil liberties, but look back in history and ask why we demanded (and fought wars for) these civil liberties in the first place, we may be told that we don't need them in our modern world, but the question is not "why" we need them but "when" we would need them.
Historically, exit polls have been amazingly accurate. Only in the last two elections have there been a wide disparity between the exit polling numbers and the official vote count.
Historically, elections haven't been as close as the last to elections. It is far easier to correctly predict an election using polling data when the difference in vote totals exceeds the margin of error. Most of the readers of this site weren't born the last time we had an election as close as 2000 and 2004.
Secondly, in the last election data, why is there a wide disparity between exit polling data and the official vote count primarily in areas that used touch-screen voting with no paper trail, but yet be dead-on in areas with paper ballots?
Probably because people clam up and act like morons when presented with a new electronic device for the first time. Massive conspiracy that nobody leaked, coincidental series of smaller conspiracies that also weren't leaked, or people being stupid when presented with a computer... Which seems more likely to you?
A simple, safe, completely OSS voting system can be made with only say tens or hundreds of hours of work. The key is to make it completely secure by only requiring trust in the ballot box, which is not electronic -- everything else is directly observable by the poll workers, observers, or voter. This lets you leverage any technology out there.
Voting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with apache, tomcat, whatever
2. Install ballot web app
3. Setup CUPS printer
4. Setup firefox for kiosk mode, home page is voting app
Ballots print like this, one measure per line:
PRESIDENT: AL GORE
SENATE: JAMES WEBB
STEM-CELL: YES
During the election, voters take their printout and drop it into the ballot box. After the election these are counted individually at each polling place using a counting machine.
Counting machine:
1. Setup linux distro
2. Install ballot counter program
3. Run ballots through OCR software
4. Update counters (in realtime as scanned)
For the counting program, all it needs to do is keep a count of unique lines on the ballots as returned by the OCR. It should include a simple display showing the most frequent lines and their count (sorted by count) along with the last vote scanned. This way it doesn't need to know anything about the election in order to count it.
For the voting machine you can add fancy CSS styles, javascript to prevent accidental undervoting, screen readers, on-screen keyboard, etc. To polish the system you will want to have some specific printer hardware so the votes print on something smaller than a sheet per vote.
we have to first ask about the 2000 election.
bush never won legally. in Volusia County, FL one precinct tallied -16000 votes for Gore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error
that's right, negative votes. which logically and legally is impossible. but technically possible.
since they say bush won by 500 votes, this proves that bush never won the presidency legally.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"Until someone steps forward and says "I did X & Y at the direction of Mr Z,""
Here you go:
Clint Curtis testified before congress that
"At the behest of Rep. Tom Feeney, in September 2000, he was asked to write a program for a touchscreen voting machine that would make it possible to change the results of an election undetectably. This technology, Curtis explained , could also be used in any electronic tabulation machine or scanner. Curtis assumed initially that this effort was aimed at detecting Democratic fraud, but later learned that it was intended to benefit the Republican Party.
West Palm Beach was named as an intended target, but used punched card ballots in the 2000 elections. Indeed, West Palm Beach was famous for the "hanging chad" recounts of that election."
Here's a video of his testimony.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Exit polls within the US have had a shady history at best. The meme that it's only been the last two Presidential elections where discrepancies have appeared is a myth created by conspiracy nuts or people just looking to sell a few more papers. About the only thing at all consistent is the level of inaccuracy. For example Clinton's overestimation in 1992 exit polls was almost exactly the same as Kerry's in '04 but Clinton won so no one really cared that the raw polling data was off by almost 3%. There have also been significant problems with 1990, 1994 and 1998 numbers with regards to Senate and Gubernatorial races but once again, no one really cared at the time so those numbers, which were off 58% of the time (in both directions), were basically thrown down the memory hole.
Historically US exit polling results are all over the map and have only been getting worse. It also doesn't help that poor training leads to improper sampling or that laws in certain areas restrict pollers access to voters.
Outside of the US exit polls are much more accurate but that can be easily explained by differences in polling techniques and voter mentality.
A good source for a little less bias polling info is Pollster.com as opposed to a book co-written by an editor of an progressive magazine run by an admitted socialist.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Republicans are often called harsh names for positions they hold dear. Among these are racist, xenophobe, fascist, fundie, hate monger, etc. This is irrisponsible, and never happened in the media 20 years ago, but it happens today.
And, of course, the fact that over the last 30 years the Republicans have completely rejected their historical platform in favor of fascism and hate mongering couldn't have anything to do with that, now could it?
Sorry, but instituting a fascist police state and promoting hate based legislation reaps its own rewards.
Anybody who votes Republican should be ashamed of themselves and would be if they had any sense of decency at all.
If what you hold dear is explicitly rejected by the constitution, then you don't get it. Too fucking bad. Move to a country that shares your values, like Saudi Arabia or something.
Oh, no, you're right, it's the evil media always attacking the poor innocent Republicans.
Idiot.
A lot of people become very atatched to the philosophy they've built. They get sentimental about it, then they start to forget to update it regularly, then they forget why it needs to be updated regularly, then they forget that their map isn't actually reality, then they start making their experiences fit their map instead of the other way around. And there's your other side.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Because Fox spreads misinformation, therefore Fox fans tend to be misinformed. People who are happy to be misinformed tend to be idiots. That's why.
This isn't just a general impression. Studies have shown that the more you watch Fox, the more likely you are to be misinformed on key political issues. See this PDF document.
it IS fair that Fox News is out there to balance the overwhelming liberal bias in the overall media.Well, it depends where you put the centre ground. If you classify all sane people as being on the "liberal" left, and all the genocidal maniacs as being on the "conservative" right, then perhaps most non-Fox media is "liberal". But I don't think that's a fair place to put the dividing line.
I'd say that all networks with a systemic bias in favour of the establishment (see the Propaganda Model) must be classified as right-wing or at least centrist. This puts Fox at the extreme right, with other networks in the centre-right and centre, and alternative news sources such as Democracy Now at the left.
Further, I'm a Christian and I cannot vote for people that support the killing of innocent babies (abortion). Correction: you're against killing American babies, even when they are not babies but primitive unborn fetuses. You have no problem voting for people who kill large numbers of babies, teens, men, women and elderly, just as long as they are towel-heads. I also hold a Master's Degree (MBA), so if you think that conservatives are uneducated, think again!You can find examples of people who have passed through the education system, and yet still believe in gods, angels, fairies, aliens, homoeopathy, astrology, moon-landing conspiracies, feng shui, tarot cards, Iraqi WMDs, virgin birth, Fox impartiality, and cigarettes making you look cool. However, this doesn't stop the fact that such beliefs have a strong scientific correlation with having shit for brains (specific example given above).