Leading bloggers turn timid after election

Tom Tomorrow:

The "stolen election" argument was a loser in 2000 when the election pretty clearly was stolen. Without a smoking gun, preferably with Karl Rove's fingerprints on it, I just don't think it's going anywhere this year.

Are you kidding me? There’s so much smoke around this election that it’s obvious democracy has been torched, and you sit on your hands?

Atrios:

If people want this issue to be taken seriously they need to stop thinking that any of the information floating around right now - and yes, I've seen it all multiple times - provides proof of any such thing.

As Mark Crispin Miller says, “our touch-screen electronic voting machines have no paper trail and are manufactured by companies owned by Bush Republicans,” but you can’t take it seriously yet?

By the way, I've yet to see proof that Bush won, but that hasn't stopped the media from crowning him.

Eighty percent of the vote is counted by Republican companies, but let’s wait for something we can nail them with before we say anything. It would be funny if it wasn’t so absurd.

And Bartcop too is taking a “wait and see” attitude.

If nothing is done about the vote machines, any talk about strategies for 2006 and 2008 is just that, talk, just like all the talk leading up to this election that ignored the fundamental issue of vote integrity. That is the ONLY issue that matters right now regarding this election. That is the fight, and it's now, not later.

Rigorous Intuition asks:

Do you know what's happening in the Ukraine, America? Tens of thousands are in the streets of Kiev, protesting alleged election fraud:

[yes, it is just alleged, but they aren’t sitting worrying about how smart they appear on the net]

Vote results from Ukraine's Central Election Commission showed Yushchenko trailing Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in last Sunday's race, but final results have not been announced and Yushchenko's supporters want a re-count. Yushchenko backers claim he won 300,000 more votes than Yanukovych. Some exit polls also put Yushchenko in the lead.

In the Ukraine, when election results conflict with exit polls, it's grounds for belief a fraud was perpetuated. While in the United States, when results reverse exit polls only in battleground states, even outside the margin of error, and only in favour of Bush, it's the fault of bloggers for disseminating "erroneous" data which "confused" voters.

One more. Super Stevens, who comments on blogs but does not play a lefty blogger on TV, or the Internet:

Folks, the exit polls were correct. You have been conditioned to accept a polling margin of error of 4%. What you don't know or understand is that "exit polling" is much different and it has a margin of error of 0.1% to .3%. I’m not kidding.

The main difference is that with exit polling you are asking someone who has already voted - how they just voted. With the other type of polling, you have to estimate/guess at how many members/what percentage of each party will show up to vote. This can and will throw off the polling results. For example, the fox pollsters would question 38 republicans for every 30 democrats. They assumed that more republicans would actually vote. This is the major factor that accounts for the +/- 4% margin of error. One other factor that was mentioned would be that pollsters weren’t calling cell phones.

Both of these variance factors are eliminated in exit polls.

So you see there is huge difference between polls taken in anticipation of the vote versus polls taken by the actual voters immediately after they voted.

[Disclaimer: I sure as hell didn't do anything about the vote machines, other than posting articles on it periodically on my blog. I'm as guilty as anyone for not getting off my ass more, but c'mon, now is no time to worry about whether you sound "shrill."]