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Tid Bit: Politics, US Elections, Florida, November 2004

"Election night, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report."

- Thom Hartmann: Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show.

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Thoughts

Other tid bits about the 2004 Florida elections:

1. 72-percent of Floridians approved a ballot to raise the minium wage, a solid democratic victory, compared to democratic presidential candidate Kerry received just 48%.

- Possible Explanation? People in the red states seem to be voting for president based on "cultural values" and fear, both of which are correlated stronlgly with the messages from the electronic and other media in which they're immersed.

2. The new controversial touch screen voting machines appeared to provide results that were consistent with proportions of registered voters. However, for optical scanning machines, Bush received significantly higher percentages of votes relative to the ratio of voter registrations by party affiliation.

- If the imbalanced ratios were due to shortcomings in Democratic voter turn-out, then you would expect a similar thing to occur in at least some of the counties with new voting machines, that is, you'd expect it on both types of machines. The issue isn't how the machines function, rather it is that hightened attention was focused on the fair operation of the new touch screen machines, and less vigilence was afforded how the other machines operated and votes were handled.