Thursday, August 16, 2007

We The People Counted The Votes In The Sunshine!

Dede Farrell reviews the results of our manual exit poll vote verification project. Voters who supported ALL the candidates participated in this poll, not just the supporters of Ron Paul as some have claimed.

This was posted earlier:

Dede Farrell, one of our Vote In Sunshine Coalition team members poses by the "hand count" total of our exit poll conducted yesterday at the Iowa Straw Poll. 897 individuals signed affadavits and/or a vote verification card which looks like this:



Vote In Sunshine coalition volunteers were all dressed in VoteInSunshine.com t-shirts - some of which were plastered with buttons and stickers from all of the campaigns. We were received very positively by the vast majority of individuals attending the straw poll as well as many of the volunteers working for the various campaigns. There was a bit of concern from some individuals who had read the press or listened to the WHO interview with Bob Schulz and Jim Condit about the lawsuit, but when we described what our main goal was - ie. achieving fair and accurate voting processes in America by returning to the use of and counting/saving/storing of paper ballots -
most of these individuals came around in a positive way to support our effort with words of encouragement. Here's a picture of one of the t-shirts were wore in the sweltering 90-95+ degree heat yesterday:



Here's the listing - as it appeared on our real - ie. hand written - yellow paper list of our manual exit poll paper vote count from yesterday:

Ron Paul 332
Tom Tancredo 150
Mikw Huckabee 187
Fred Thompson 8
Tommy Thompson 39
Mitt Romney 90
Duncan Hunter 12
Hillary Clinton 1
John McCain 5
Sam Brownback 62
John Cox 4
Dennis Kucinich 1
Rudy Giuliani 6
Total 897

Clicking Votes 15,000

Editor's Note:
"Clicking Votes" refers to our manual effort to observe throughout the day the number of individuals exiting from the three voting stations in the Hilton Coliseum, Sheman and Stephen centers/halls. Vote In Sunshine volunteers possessed hand counters - ie. "clickers" as we called them - and clicked the counter once for every individual exiting. According to the today's Des Moines Register - page 1 - 14,302 individuals voted in yesterday's straw poll which was just 698 votes shy of our manual estimate. The 897 votes we counted/verified amounted to exactly 6 % of the total votes cast in the Iowa Straw Poll

5 comments:

Stephen said...

Clearly, those who were most upset about the results, knew about the lawsuit, and were eager to "prove" fraud participated in the exit poll.

The fact that some of the questioners were wearing candidate stickers introduces bias into the survey, and should never have been allowed.

The little spiel you folks gave people may or may not have skewed results. Again, those concerned about a "fair and accurate" poll result were likely those who didn't believe it WAS fair or accurate in the first place. And of course, no one was talking about such a thing except the Ron Paul people, who were bitter about the results. So again, that was a "giveaway" for people participating as to the origin of the survey.

Were only IOWA RESIDENTS allowed to participate in this survey? If not, then why not, since ONLY Iowa residents could vote. Obviously, hundreds of Ron Paul people from other states attended, but couldn't vote. If they voted in this survey, it skewed the result.

Tom Tancredo's excellent showing in this survey - and the fact that the results bear NO resemblance to the actual straw poll - should be a giveaway that there were severe problems here with YOUR survey.

Vote In Sunshine said...

Our exit poll closed at 6 pm the time the polls closed so your claim that individuals "upset about the results....and were eager to 'prove' fraud participated" simply doesn't add up.

Having said that, please note that we have made no claims that our exit poll was in any way scientific. We had fun but were not stupid. I am curious where you derived this presumption.

As for "Ron Paul People" being "bitter" about the results, for those who are aware of vote fraud and how it's destroying our country , this bitterness has nothing to do with the "unofficial results" which claimed that Ron Paul received 9.1% of the vote. The questions to ask are: 1)Where are the paper ballots? 2) When are they going to count the paper ballots? 3) Why are they keeping the the paper ballots from We the People? 4) What are they trying to hide?

You comments are baseless for the real story about the Ames Iowa Straw Poll has yet to be determined/flushed out.

You might want to read the following for more details about what's really going on...

http://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org/UPDATE/Update2007-08-15.htm

Finally, you wrote:

>>Were only IOWA RESIDENTS allowed to participate in this survey? If not, then why not, since ONLY Iowa residents could vote. Obviously, hundreds of Ron Paul people from other states attended, but couldn't vote. If they voted in this survey, it skewed the result.>>

If you were in Ames you would know that they inked the right thumb of anyone who voted. Our exit poll focused on only individuals who had the inked thumb who were walking out of the polls. So, as with your comments above that presumed we were claiming our exit poll was scientific, you wrote about another non-issue here.

We were expecting and hoping for at least 100-200 volunteers in Ames. If we got 200 we could have easily quadrupled our results and confirmed 4000+ vote verifications and/or exit poll affidavits. For a rag-tag team of only 10-20 to pull off what we did is incredible.

We raised public awareness and consciousness about one of THE most important issues facing America at one of THE most publicized political events in America. We did a great job and I hope you can see through your presumptions to help support this very worthy cause.

Thanks for sharing.

Vote In Sunshine said...

Stephen:

You wrote:

>>The fact that some of the questioners were wearing candidate stickers introduces bias into the survey, and should never have been allowed.>>

We were there to support all the voters behind all of the candidates. None of the Vote In Sunshine exit pollers wore stickers from any of the campaigns. The only ones who wore campaign stickers were volunteers who passed out our flyers or were doing video documentation work around the Iowa State Campus.

Your point is appreciated.

Stephen said...

I'm delighted to learn that there was no claim of scientific accuracy for this poll. Thanks for that clarification. I'm glad it was all in "fun." Too bad some people are latching onto it, then, as "proof" that there was a vast anti-Paul conspiracy. Since unscientific data can prove no such thing.

As for going to another Website to get the "truth," I am suspcicious of people who have the "real truth" about voter fraud, or for that matter, about UFOs and the Kennedy Assassination. Usually, they do not have any special knowledge, just suppositions and "facts" that don't hold water or have far more plausible explanations.

It could be, for example, that Ron Paul's virulent anti-war rhetoric, and perhaps his scary followers talking about "revolution" and how "illegitimate" the government is (among many other nutty conspiracy theories) scared conservative Iowa voters and he really did get 9%, a figure I find amazingly high, personally.

Unknown said...

I was one of the organizers of the "verified" exit poll. I haven't been back to this site since the straw poll but since we'll be covering the Iowa caucus decided to check back and was shocked by Stephen's lies, distortion, and obvious hated toward one of the candidates, Ron Paul. First of all many American don't trust the computer voting software esp. after seeing the HBO's documentory "Hacking Democracy" that aired last fall PROVING vote fraud. Second, all of us conducting the exit poll, were completely unbias in this poll, not favoring on candidate over the other. We wore "Vote in Sunshine" t-shirts with NO stickers. The response from the Iowan voters was friendly. All the candidate's supporters seemed happy to participate in the "verified" exit poll and willing to sign their name for the candidate they voted for.We wished we had more volunteers, but even so, we were able to get 6% of the total votes cast. All the "verification" cards had been placed in clear boxes and at 6pm. counted in full public view in the sunshine. www.LibertyBroadcastNetwork.org