Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Rumor Quash #1

Forget the definition of "close." If the election was "stolen" in the out-of-town precincts, the results from those precincts would be skewed more heavily in Nagin's favor. They weren't. In fact, Nagin beat Landrieu worse in "local" precinct returns (i.e., votes actually cast in N.O. on Election Day) than he did in the out-of-town returns. They split the 24,000 or so "out of town" ballots almost right down the middle. Nagin actually won the election in N.O., which is interesting because he seemed to do more out-of-town campaigning (among displaced voters in Houston in particular) than Landrieu did. Thus, the notion that the election was stolen by rigging out-of-town returns just doesn't seem to square with the actual returns.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was the anonymous poster who posted the note titled "Voting Fraud Rumor #3 " in your blogg...

I was not referring to the election where Nagin beat Landreu in 2006...

In that election, clearly, Nagin was supported by white conservatives who came in from Metairie and the North Shore to vote AGAINST Mitch.
I was at the major polling place in Lakeview for that election, and I saw many many of my old Lakeview nighbors at the polling place that day.. In town for the first time since Katrina only for one reason.. To defeat the democrat Mitch...

My post was refering to the more recent elections.. where President Obama won Orleans Parish... and where William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson roundly defeated Mr. Chao in Orleans Parish only votes cast..

In BOTH of those recent elections, the numbers of "VOTERS" far exceed the numbers of actual people living in the worst effected areas of New Orleans. Namely, the 9th ward.

Someone is rigging our local elections... and I am worried that whomever that is.. will stick us with the next mayor.

Please.. let the federal government watch over our next Mayoral election to make sure that the people who actually have to live with our new leadership actually LIVE in Orleans Parish!

Anonymous said...

Look again at the actual returns...

Think about the time..
It was 2006... right after Katrina...
How many people were actually living in Lakeview???? The Lakeview returns will show that they overwhelmingly elected Nagin over the liberal democrat Mitch.

Without that vote, the white vote from the North Shore and Metairie, would Nagin have won?
I honestly don't know.. I have not crunched the numbers...

Anonymous said...

Hey, you sure like to throw around that "liberal democrat" label. Sounds like you have an agenda to prove. I don't think it's outrageous to think Orleans parish voted for Obama. It just proves our intelligence is higher than the surrounding ditto-head tea-bagger parishes.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, many of us wonder how long people can vote in New Orleans elections if they no longer have a home here. As far as I know, no one has gotten a firm answer on when the residency question.

Anonymous said...

Since when can Metairie and people on the Northshore vote on a Orleans Parish ticket?

Anonymous said...

People in Metairie and Northshore can influence people in New Orleans. When a person of reasonable intelligence speaks, sometimes, people listen.

Not all New Orleanians are easily foolded by political BS.

Anonymous said...

I would highly recommend all of the smack talking of liberal and conservatives be put on hold for a second while everyone stops to contemplate the obvious...both parties f-d their constituents.

So before anyone starts ranting about Bush or Obama or Frank or Clinton or Cheney...do you see a pattern. If they keep you upset at each other, than you are less likely to deal with the root cause of the problem which is the people holding office.

So stuff it down, way down deep and regardless of how well you think "your" guy/gal did, vote em out. Send a message to all of them, that we don't care, we want new people in office and we want transparency and we want efficiency. Stop the recall crap, stay informed but next time just push a different button and get your neighbor to do the same.

Jason Brad Berry said...

- I would highly recommend all of the smack talking of liberal and conservatives be put on hold for a second while everyone stops to contemplate the obvious...both parties f-d their constituents.

Amen and Ashe'. well spoken sir. the only other caveat I would add to that comment is to apply the same logic to the racial debate...let's put it aside as well and realize regardless of race or partisanship...we're still getting fucked.

Anonymous said...

Since when can Metairie and people on the Northshore vote on a Orleans Parish ticket?

People in Metairie and the North Shore can and do vote in Orleans parish elections. Especially since Katrina.. they maintain their voter registrations at their flooded addresses..

and look.. I was talking about 2006 Mayors election... Things may have improved by now..

Also.. This thread was NOT about politics of who won who lost..
It was and is about who decided the election.

In 2006... displaced New Orleanians came home to vote.. and many had no intention of returning to New Orleans. THEY helped give us 4 more years of Nagoon.

My posts at the top of this reply list was pointing out the in the Obama and Chao election.. there seem to be way too many people voting in certain parts of the city vs. the actual population of the city.
I was NOT pushing any agenda for or against any candidate.
Mr. Chao LOST in Orleans parish.. but who were the voters? Did they LIVE in Orleans Parish?

My only point here is that there is massive voter irregularities in all of these elections.. This needs to be corrected before our next mayoral election so that those of US who live in Orleans parish get to decide for ourselves who our next mayor is.
And I don't care if it's Rush Limbaugh or Louis Farkan.. just so long as the votes cast are from people who actually LIVE in the city.

Jason Brad Berry said...

- My only point here is that there is massive voter irregularities in all of these elections.. This needs to be corrected before our next mayoral election so that those of US who live in Orleans parish get to decide for ourselves who our next mayor is.
And I don't care if it's Rush Limbaugh or Louis Farkan.. just so long as the votes cast are from people who actually LIVE in the city.

and that is a great point. We need to get some answers to that. i will work on that.

Anonymous said...

Good points. I there is shady biz going on in the electoral count, air that BS out!

Anonymous said...

Is the question in the vote count or the voter count? Didn't Orleans just have a purge? Surely, after almost four years there's been some clean-out of the rolls. Right?

While I can't say Mitch would have been any better a mayor, I'm sure he couldn't have been any worse. Kind of hearkens back to the defenses of EWE and the Kingfish: sure they were crooks but at least they took care of the people.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

I put a little love for ya up over to my jernt, darlin'.

http://anntichristscoulter.blogspot.com/2009/04/okay-you-might-wanna-go-back-through.html

And don't nobody be talkin' smack about Edwin. When he said that he wouldn't take a dime in pay until the budget was balanced, he wasn't fucking around.

Granted, he had his own forms of income, but does anybody honestly believe that he's EVER been desperate enough to result to bribes from Eddie Jordan's little henchmen? Pfft.

Jason Brad Berry said...

Gracias, ASC

Anonymous said...

Well, I might as well chime in here. Everyone really should calm down, because if you want a reform minded, ethical Democrat, Republican (or Other) to run or represent this City, then that isn't happening until we resolve the voting issues.

As an aside, I met someone named Susan Bernecker who ran in JP against Giambelluca a long time ago who claimed that she and Richard Angelico did a live investigative report on WDSU from a warehouse guarded by Harry Lee's guys and showed how machines could be and had been easily manipulated to change returns there and fix an election. That was in JP. To my surprise there is actually a wiki page of some kind on her:
http://viswiki.com/en/Susan_Bernecker

In Orleans, I will just throw a few observations out. (1) I do remember news reports about the local registrar for Orleans, Sandra Wilson (a PhD by the way) taking the lists of purged voters after Katrina and supposedly faxing and mailing forms to the residents back to where they were outside NO to ensure that they would not be purged. Supposedly from a list of like 8000-9000 or so maybe a couple hundred may have finally been actually purged. I think this happened again on 2008, though maybe differently, there was a list of inactive voters published and basically someone could call in and just give a new address, which I found kind of a remarkable way of doing things.

http://www.nola.com/archives/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-29/1212644819114130.xml&coll=1

(2) I don't knbow if everyone agrees with this, but my observation has been (as someone who has voted both for and against her) that Mary Landrieu in her first two elections for Senator was losing very late, only to see a needed number of returns come in very late in the evening in her favor from the 9th Ward. The Landrieu team did not seem surprised. (3) The same goes for Bill Jefferson, though when he was losing to Cao, he did get a sudden rush of extremely late votes from the last 5% of precincts, that greatly narrowed his deficit. It seemed to me in the interviews that his team being interviewed on tv knew they would be close but would not have quite enough to pull it out, as though they knew exactly what numbers would be coming through. - I realize there is nothing nefarious necessarily about those last two items, it's just a pattern I've seen in Orleans elections. Indeed something similar happened in the Nagin/Mitch Landrieu election. If I had the wherewithal it would be great to run a study to compare elections affecting NO at the ~95% return stage vs. how they ended across the board and over a long period of time. It certainly seems to me that some precincts from the Ninth and occasionally Central City are held to the very end only to generate heavily titled results to one particular candidate.

Finally, talk to anyone who has worked as a poll worker in NO and they will tell you some of the practices that go on in some precincts, very sketchy enforcement of the rules or lack thereof.