Author: Sean Carroll

I like to think I am a gracious loser, not a whiny sour-grapes conspiracy theorist. Which is why I’m hesitant to suggest that malicious tampering with the vote counts somehow contributed to Bush’s win last Tuesday. But, at the very least, there is a significant pattern of irregularity going on, which should be cleared up if only for the sake of future elections.

We already know that one Ohio county gave Bush 3,800 extra votes, a mistake which has now been corrected. And there have been claims of systematic bias, some rather hysterical. But Brian Leiter points to a study that is provocative to say the least. The study compared the declared makeup of each Florida county in terms of registered Democrats and Republicans to the final votes. The results are startling — a sizeable number of overwhelmingly Democratic counties, mostly smaller ones, where Bush came away with a big victory. Franklin county, 77% Democrat, went for Bush 3,472 to 2,400. Hamilton county, 79% Democrat, went for Bush 2,786 to 2,252. Holmes county, 73% Democrat, went for Bush 6,410 to 1,810. Lafayette county, 83% Democrat, went for Bush 2,460 to 845. Liberty county, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 88% to 8%, went for Bush 1,927 to 1,070. And on and on.

Interestingly, all of the counties with these wild discrepancies between results and registrations have something in common — they used optically-scanned ballots whose results were fed into a central PC. In counties where the much-maligned touch-screen voting method was used, the results conformed nicely to what the registrations would have you believe. I suppose the good news is that a recount should be straightforward in such counties — although we all know how hard it is to get a recount done in this country.

The dramatic conclusion from this would be that there is a simple reason why the exit polls, which were indicating a substantial Kerry victory, deviated so dramatically from the final results — they were right, the results weren’t. (As Dick Morris says, “exit polls are almost never wrong.”) But the minimum conclusion is that a grown-up civilized nation like the United States should be able to figure out how to count votes quickly, accurately, and verifiably. I would think that even the Republicans should be in favor making every effort to figure out what really happened, if only to shut up the sore losers once and for all.

Update: Blogging of the President has a list of links to other stories about possible tampering, including a very good piece by Keith Olbermann on how a story like this crosses from the blogosphere into the mainstream media. As I mention in the comments, I hope that there really wasn’t any tampering going on; but there’s every reason to investigate it as thoroughly as possible.

Update again: People who are more sophisticated than me (see, if I were sophisticated, it would be “than I”) have pointed out that it’s not really the results in small counties that are most problematic, as those can perhaps be explained by accidents of history creating misleading party registrations. But there is a discrepancy between the optically-scanned results and the touch-screen results even when you control for size of county. See also interesting commentary at Rhosgobel and Pharyngula.

Update yet again: Brian Leiter now points to an online discussion that seems to make sense, and gives good reasons not to take the study referenced above seriously as evidence of tampering. There are still some disturbing stories floating around, especially about Ohio, but nothing that seems to me to be extremely strong evidence of wrongdoing (much less “proof,” as Atrios emphasizes). Worth re-checking everything as carefully as possible, of course, if only to give the appearance that the truth is what matters.

Ha, I bet you think the title is some clever metaphor for some contemporary political situation about which I will now snarkily comment. Nope, it’s just the straightforward truth. Philosophy, Etc. links to a report from the University of Florida about researchers who have grown a brain of rat cells in a vat. Aforementioned brain, feeling all cooped up, then took a fighter jet for a spin.

To be clear, the “brain” is a collection of 25,000 neurons extracted from the brain of an actual rat, and cultured in a Petri dish. The neurons are placed separately in the dish, at which point they stretch out to each other and grow connections. Thomas DeMarse, the scientist leading the study, obviously has a sense of humor, so the first thing he did was to hook up the newly-formed brain to an F22 fighter simulator. The brain interacted with the simulator through electrodes, both giving and receiving information.

Just think of that poor rat brain, tricked into thinking it’s a fighter pilot when it’s really stuck in a dish in a laboratory. Philosophers love this stuff. (What will Daniel Dennett think? Or Descartes, for that matter?) The scientific justification is that there are certain tasks that organic brains are much better at than computers — pattern recognition being a simple example. Someday the autopilot on your plane might be constructed from neurons rather than integrated circuits. Let’s just hope they don’t rise up and take over the world!

The people who rule the internet over at Fark.com have pointed to a press release about our arrow of time paper. The comments, to be honest, are not very helpful.

I don’t want to talk about the damn election forever and ever, so let’s just get some links out of our system.

• At Alas, a Blog, ampersand says what I said below, but with considerably more brevity:
  

  The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

  Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

• Over at Daily Kos, a quote worth remembering from Barack Obama’s convention speech:
  

  In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

  Like kos says, “He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me.”

• Daniel Drezner is right: Thomas Frank’s speaking fees just went through the roof.
  
• At Crooked Timber, Daniel poses a fascinating math problem:
  

  If you flip a coin four times and it comes up heads, heads, tails, tails, then does it make even the slightest bit of sense at all to spend the next month thinking about what major structural changes need to be made to the coin if it is ever to come up heads again?

• Majikthise collects more responses. Couldn’t agree more: I’m so proud to have all these folks on my side.

A fairly substantial Republican win across the board (here in Illinois excepted). Kerry shouldn’t mount quixotic legal challenges in Ohio. It’s a completely different situation from Florida four years ago; not only is Bush’s lead more substantial, but he also won a decisive victory in the national popular vote. The country doesn’t want to see a long fight in the courts, and the Democrats are just going to look bad by dragging it out to the legal limit. Face it, Bush won.

It’s an emotionally draining defeat for liberals, who are going to find it hard to accept that the President will come out of this actually more powerful than when he went in, with a mandate from the popular vote and better majorities in Congress. Look for an extremely aggressive agenda from the Republicans — cutting taxes, reshaping the judiciary at all levels, privatizing Social Security, drilling in Alaska and elsewhere. Not to mention continuing to feed the epidemic of anti-American sentiment worldwide. There will be little that Democrats can do to stop them.

Looks like a values-based defeat. By most surveys, a majority of Americans agreed with Kerry more than Bush on the actual issues; they mostly didn’t approve (by now) of the war in Iraq; and they consistently voted against their economic self-interest. But the Bush supporters just thought he was a better human being, and therefore a better leader; not only is he more resolute and sure of his convictions, but on the key issues of God/guns/gays the Democrats have no hope of ever attracting these voters. It’s sobering to think that the last non-Southern Democrat to win the White House was Kennedy in 1960.

How can we fix it? There isn’t any easy way. A Democrat may very well have an good chance of winning in 2008, just because voters get sick of the ruling party fairly quickly. But the longer-term diagnosis isn’t great. Ultimately we will have to fight values with values. I honestly think we have to figure out a way to convince more rural, heartland Americans to think like good secular liberals — i.e., to come to celebrate (or at least accept) differences in race, sexual preference, religious belief, and so on. (I said it wouldn’t be easy.)

In other words, we have to recharge the liberal-humanist agenda, both in putting forward new ideas and in making the good old ideas more attractive. How do you convince a rancher in Montana that it’s okay to be non-Christian, non-white, non-straight? More abstractly: how do you convince them that there is value in nuance and ambiguity, in seeing the world in shades of grey? I suspect that deep down there is an economic/class-based undercurrent even to the values issues; people don’t like to think that elitist snobs on the coasts are pushing beliefs down their throats. So somehow we have to repackage liberal ideals, which are really just contemporary versions of the same philosophies on which the country was founded, so that they are compelling to folks in the red states. Don’t ask me how, but I think that has to be the long-term goal.

Frustrated progressives will grumble about moving to Canada. Not me; I’m going to stay home and fight.

Congratulations to my good buddy Barack Obama, who squeaked by Alan Keyes with only about 80% of the vote, it seems.

Since I don’t want to be a downer, I’ll stick with that news, and not point you to the horrible news here or here.

By Muriel Rukeyser.

This has nothing
to do with
propagating

The species
is continued
as so many are
(among the smaller creatures)
by fission

(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)

The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing

But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:

The paramecium
lies down beside
another paramecium

Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged

for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other

This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.

What, you were expecting something about the election? Don’t forget to vote.

As the Green Bay Packers have essentially guaranteed a Kerry victory, we may not have George W. Bush to kick around for much longer. So as a final parting shot, let’s just dwell on this quote from Donald Rumsfeld (speaking in a rare moment of honesty) that I found in an article by Jason Epstein in the New York Review:

people don’t want to go to war…. But, after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

Oh no, wait a minute. That wasn’t Rumsfeld at all — it was Hermann Goering, speaking at the Nuremberg trials. So this wasn’t really a damaging quote, it was just a cheap-shot comparison with the Nazis! Sorry about that.

I don’t want to linger too long in the already-disturbed hornet’s nest of competition, gender, and physics, but I do want to point to some thoughtful articles by Maire that are worth reading: here, here, and here. We’re basically on the same wavelength, but she has the patience to get into some of the details.

Whenever anyone is quick to leap from a fact of our current social arrangements (underrepresentation of group X in occupation Y) to a conclusion about biological inevitability (X’s just don’t have what it takes to succeed in Y), I can’t help but think of the SPHA’s — the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. The SPHA’s were a dominant basketball team back in the 1930’s. Indeed, at the time a significant percentage of the best basketball players were Jewish. Are we surprised to learn that it was common for people to attribute this success to the intrinsic superiority of Hebrews when it came to the skills of basketball? From Jon Entine, quoted by Michael Shermer:

“The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,” wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, “is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”

Jews were also thought to possess the genetic advantage of being short, enabling them to dart past the gangly Gentiles for easy buckets. Of course, these days we are enlightened enough to realize that it is actually blacks who are genetically predisposed to have game, not those sneaky Hebrews. Progress marches on.

Maybe I just haven’t noticed, but has anyone pointed out the most obvious possibility? The Bin Laden tape is the October Surprise. Think about it: a good October Surprise will make people rally around the incumbent, without having any obvious fingerprints of political maneuvering all over it. And we don’t know where Al-Jazeera got the tape from. Karl Rove is as likely a source as any.