The Florida Memorandum
Open Letter to the Editors
From: Doc Cuddy, Editor, Magellan's Log Re: Possible Voting Fraud in Florida
A couple of points first: We here at Magellan's Log are not conspiracy theorists, finding adequate explanations for the various American messes in garden-variety greed, incompetence, and thoughtlessness. The occasional, bumbling Oliver North is the exception that proves the rule. Second point: Even if we were given to conspiracy-driven theories of history, we don't have the staff and other investigative resources necessary to find support for such theories. That said, I find myself more and more puzzled-- and intrigued-- as I go over the basic known facts involving the Presidential vote in Florida. To list them is to find yourself compounding improbability with improbability: 1. The founder and operator of the Voter News Service, which conducts the exit polls and provides data from those polls to subscribers, has covered some 3,000 elections. He reports that they have been wrong only five times in their calls. The odds against another mistake are thus 600 to 1. 2. The critical state for the entire election turned out to be the one whose governor is the brother of the Republican candidate. The odds here are obviously 50 to 1. 3. That state is also of a size sufficient that its number of electors could cover a fairly wide spread in the national vote tally. Let's say there are ten states large enough to have such a decisive effect. Odds: 10 to 1. The odds then against what happened are 600 x 50 x 10 = 30,000 to 1. 4. Now, we factor in the timing of the predicted Florida
outcome: I don't have the exact time of each of the events, but Tuesday evening unfolded
roughly as follows. Now let's suppose we were writing a political potboiler/thriller about a presidential election. We have the bad guys set up a situation roughly like that in 1, 2, and 3 above. And the bad guys also set up some kind of mechanism to shift the balance of votes if the national tally is running against them. But they don't make the process automatic. They rather set up a trip wire. What would that be? The exit polls, of course. If the exit poll from Florida comes in early and it's in the Republican's favor, then no action is required. But action would be required in the two other possible cases. If by, say, 9 p.m., VNS had NOT called the state for the Republican candidate, then the mechanism goes into action. Or if the VNS comes in early and says the state is going Democratic, then clearly the mechanism goes into action. What might the mechanism be? No idea. As I said, we're not conspiracists around here. Nor do we write political potboilers. Add to this the odd possibility that the Republican candidate, known to be not real fast on his verbal feet, just might have come close to letting something slip. In the phone calls between the two candidates, the Republican informed the Democrat that his brother had assured him that Florida would wind up in the Republican column. Somebody with deep pockets and smart reporters really ought to look into it. END
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