Talk:United States presidential election, 2004

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  1. Old talk archived at Talk:United States presidential election, 2004/Archive 1 by Goobergunch 17:58, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
  2. Old talk archived at Talk:United States presidential election, 2004/Archive 2 by PhilHibbs 13:35, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  3. Old talk archived at Talk:United States presidential election, 2004/Archive 3 by DLJessup 02:50, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  4. Old talk archived at Talk:United States presidential election, 2004/Archive 4 by DLJessup 02:56, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Notice of Change

In Analysis: At least 12 million more votes were cast than in the 2000 election.-->At least "122" million more votes were cast than in the 2000 election. This reflects what the article sourced actually said, and make it clearer why it's 42% of the total population, which 12 million is far from, I assume it was just a typo.

[edit] Minnesota "faithless elector"

Hi. I'm trying to head off an edit war. I revised the Minnesota "faithless elector" section to read as follows:

One elector in Minnesota cast a ballot for president with the name of "John Ewards" (sic) written on it. The Electoral College officials certified this ballot as a vote for John Edwards for president. The remaining nine electors cast ballots for John Kerry. All ten electors in the state cast ballots for John Edwards for Vice President.
Electoral balloting in Minnesota was performed by secret ballot, and none of the electors admitted to casting the Edwards vote for President, so it may never be known who was the "faithless elector". It is not even known whether the vote for Edwards was deliberate or accidental, although there are several indications that point towards an accident:
  • Bush's margin of victory was sufficiently large that this vote could not have affected the outcome of the election, so the only plausible reason for a deliberately miscast vote would be a protest vote.
  • The fact that none of the electors have come forward makes it unlikely that this vote was a protest vote.
  • The misspelling of John Edwards' name on the ballot could indicate carelessness on the part of the "faithless elector".
  • The fact that the "faithless elector" cast both the presidential and vice presidential ballots for John Edwards can also indicate carelessness; previous "faithless electors" have always had a different president and vice president.

Keetoowah has removed all of the text after "accidental". My question for the Wikipedia citizenry: does my version violate Wikipedia guidelines? If not, is my version or Keetoowah's version better?

— DLJessup 05:28, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yours is clearly better, and Keetoowah is entirely incorrect that "assumptions are not encyclopaedic". Public perception of questionable events is clearly encyclopaedic. Indeed it's important that it gets in the article, because I am certain that if John Edwards runs for the Presidential nomination in 2008, someone will emerge from Minnesota to say "I was the one, and I did it because Edwards is the best man for the Presidency". If/when this happens it will be highly relevant that no-one came forward in 2004 and everyone assumed it to be an error. There are also tons of examples of assumptions about unclear facts in other articles: have a look at Ziad Jarrah, a featured article recently on the main page: "This may have been done in order to hide suspicious travels to Afghanistan, or it may have been to allow another person to use his identity", "The 9/11 Commission speculates that ...", "This has led to speculation that perhaps ..." and "It is possible that Jarrah had not made up his mind until right before the attacks." Dbiv 09:39, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
We do not know why the faithless elector voted as he/she did. We don't even know who that person is. Your speculations on what happened are exactly that. You don't know what happened. Now, the other examples that you have given would not be in a "normal" encyclopedia probably shouldn't be in this one, so to point to other violations of Wikipedia policy to defend your speculation is one lame argument. Also, you indicated that you are from the UK so it not a matter or being a Democrat or Republican--this is what you listed on my talk page--my response is so what? People in other countries have OPINIONS on who they wanted to win the U.S. Presidential election even though they could vote in it. I was in Austria in the last week of October and I all I heard on the BBC, CNN Intl, and Deutsche Wella was the OPINIONS of Europeans and how they thought best for Americans to vote. Also, they would come up to me in department stores and restaurants and provide me, unsolicited mind you, with their OPINION with who they believed should have won the election. To a person the people that I talked in Old Europe, as Rumsfeld says, i.e., Austria, wanted Kerry to win and believed passionately that Bush is a moron. But of course they could never explain why if Bush is a moron why he keeps getting elected to the most powerful position in the world. In New Europe, e.g., Hungary, I received just the complete and totally opposite reaction--but I digress. I have opinions on UK politics, even though I don't live there. I think that Maggie Thatcher was great PM and John Major was a loser. I think Tony Blair has been one great PM--even though he is the leader of the Labour Party. But that is just my opinion and I can't do much about it (from a voting point of view) but I can voice my opinion on it--even though I might not have much influence. The point is that even though you live in the UK you obviously have interest in the U.S. Presidential election or you would not be working on this page for Wikipedia.----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
There's a difference between "being interested in" and "having an interest in". With regards to US elections I am the former and not the latter. See my contributions to Washington gubernatorial election, 2004 and U.S. presidential election, 2004 (detail) (which I wrote most of). Yes, there are people in Europe who support candidates in US elections: I didn't dispute that, I just said I was not one of them. Dbiv 19:18, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Speculation is just that speculation. It is not fact. An encyclopedia should be filled with facts as much as possible--not your list of reasons why YOU believe the vote was a mistake. Now, if you want to follow Wikipedia policy, instead of attempting to go around Wikipedia, then you would attempt to at least try to present the material in a nonbias, neutral point of view way, which you have not done yet. You personally created a list from your own head on why you BELIEVE the elector, whom no one knows who this person is, voted as he/she did. The fact that they listed consists of your opinion is a violation of Wikipedia policy, in and of itself, because Wikipedia is attempting to pull together information from other sources, it is not designed, nor is it meant to be used for original research--no matter how poorly written.----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If you really want to try to follow the clearly defined Wikipedia policy on this issue then you need to rewrite the whole section and point out alternative reasons why the elector might actually have written the name John Edwards on purpose. And that is not all, you will need to find a third party source that has already written on this topic and you will need to specifically cite where that source says what you claim that they said. So in this situation, you will need to provide an independent third party source--and the specific place that someone like me that will cite-check you can find the written material, to back up your opinions. Also, you will need to provide a contrary viewpoint--because they are out there--on why some people think that the elector did it on purpose and he/she has just choosen to remain silent for right now.----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
For example, you state: "The fact that none of the electors have come forward makes it unlikely that this vote was a protest vote." That is purely your opinion. You don't provide a citation for your statement because it is simply your opinion. Wikipedia is suppose to deal in facts, not opinions. Now if you want to cite some recognized expert who believes this then you could state this and then you would have to cite exactly where that recognized expert said it and when and how they came to that conclusion. Then you would need to cite an opposite expert who believes just the opposite viewpoint because I know that there are experts out there that believe that the "accident" is "intentional."----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
So to sum up, your edit violates Wikipedia policy in three fundamental ways:
  • You are expressing your opinion and original research and work is verboten.
  • You are not providing cites to the opinions expressed.
  • You are not presenting the material in Neutral Point of View manner.
  • You are not providing alternative views on the actions taken by the faithless elector.----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
On a different topic, on my talk page you stated that I can't remove comments from my talk page. Well, that is not true. I did and I will again. I will not tolerate abuse and the comments that I deleted were abusive.-----Keetoowah 15:17, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)


Reading through this, and looking at the article and the removed text, it seems clear to me that Keetowah is generally wrong on this, though the excised text has one problem. When dealing with human beings, claims such as: "The fact that none of the electors have come forward makes it unlikely that this vote was a protest vote" are difficult to defend. I see nothing wrong with the rest of the material though. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 19:24, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thank you Mel Etitis for your input. However I am somewhat confused with your statement. You state that "Keetowah is generally wrong on this" but yet you did not point out HOW I am wrong. You just flat out state that I am wrong, but you don't state how I'm wrong, why I am wrong--no issue or reasoning is put forward to explain how or why I'm wrong or what I'm wrong about. It is quite the conundrum. If you could explain in what way I'm wrong, how I'm wrong and what the reasoning is behind me being wrong then may be I could respond, but until the crucial information is forthcoming about what the heck it is then I am non-responsive.----Keetoowah 20:41, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I meant that I thought that you were wrong to delete the text that you did. I don't see that what D.L. Jessup wrote was objectionable, or expressed a personal opinion in an objectionable (Wikipedian PoV) way, or contained anything that demanded but lacked a source. The natural assumption when a vote is cast is that the voter meant to cast it that way; he was pointing out that in this case, there are reasons for questioning that. He doesn't say that it wasn't the case, but leaves it to the reader to make up her own mind. The list of reasons that he gives is commonsensical (except for the second, I think, as I explained above); with the exception of the second, they're all carefully hedged round with coulds and cans. I suppose that what he's written could be described as original thought, though not as original research — but I don't think that Wikipedia demands that editors become unthinking automata, only that they not present personal opinions as fact. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:37, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thank you Mel Etitis for your response. I now have something on which to make a comment. You state: "I suppose that what he's written could be described as original thought, though not as original research." With that comment you make my point exactly. What is stated by D.L. Jessup (with team coaching by Dbiv) is the thoughts of D.L. Jessup and/or the thoughts of Dbiv. It is EDITORIALIZING--which is fine for editors to do if they are writing an editorial. But this is supposed to be a fact based article, not an editorial. How more clear can this be? D.L. Jessup and/or Dbiv did not spend time coming up with a list of speculative reasons on why the elector voted exactly the way that the elector wanted to. Why don't they add that in? They are simply making up reasons why they believe the elector voted. They cite no sources. They don't know who the elector is. They don't know anyone who knows the elector. It is all mere speculation. It is based upon just ideas that have come into their heads. Look why don't they write an article for a public policy journal of some kind, get it approved by the editor of the journal, get it published under their real names and then come back here and we can all put it in the Wikipedia article as a theory on what the elector was doing. And while they are doing that I will write my own competing article, with my own made up ideas, get that article published and we call put my crazy ideas about what some unknown person did for some unknown reason--right next to their article. At least in those two situation we would some citation to refer to justify putting in the information. Right now neither one of us can cite squat other than some rambling thoughts put together late one night while we were editing Wikipedia. Since it is mere speculation, then why is their version of fantasy and fiction any better than what crazy theories that I could come up with. Using the standard of care put forward by you, D.L. Jessup or Dbiv, I could come up with all kinds of crazy vast right-wing conspiracies for the vote, but I'm not because I know that making things up simply violates Wikipedia policy. And that is exactly what all of you are advocating: Making of stories that you like and listing them in an encyclopedia and then tell the world that you are following a strict set of editing rules, this is the standard of care that you are advocating and it does not follow Wikipedia policy.-----Keetoowah 22:28, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
While I agree with the content of the edit, I must side with Keetoowah in that while it is a sharply written argument for the side of accidental in the cause of the vote, it does not belong in an enclyopedia, as it is indeed assumptions. I think Keetowah was trying to demonstrate this form of extraneous assumption with his remark that Bush "keeps getting elected to the most powerful position in the world..." Keetowah, your logic fails however when you assume that both A) Bush is a moron, and B) Bush has been elected twice president, cannot be mutually incompatible.--kizzle 22:42, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)
As to the issue about Bush, I see your point. Clinton was a moron and he got re-elected twice. However, sometimes morons do not get re-elected, look at Jimmy Carter.-----Keetoowah 12:59, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Ah yes, the "(Insert Democrat Here) is a moron" retort. Well, at least we're on the same page that Bush is a moron. --kizzle 21:05, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Let's bring this back over to the left — no pun intended). As I said, the background assumption is that the voter voted as she meant to; there's no need to give reasons for thinking that; there is a need to give reasons for questioning that assumption. So long as those reasons aren't presented as a proof on the part of the editor that one view is correct (and here they're not), then I don't see the problem.

I should stress that I have no opinion on the substantial issue here, no axe to grind, no brief for any side of the issue; I'm approaching it purely from the viewpoint of a Wikipedia reader. From that viewpoint, while I would probably have been able to think for myself of some the reasons for not simply assuming that the voter meant to vote that way, it's useful to be told that, for example, the voter voted for John Ewards as both president & vice-president (though we should have been told whether the misspelling was the same in both cases). The points made aren't crazy conspiracy-theoretical; if they were I'd share your view. On the contrary, we're being given reasons for questioning a conspiracy theory in favour of a cock-up theory — but which is correct is left up to the reader. Pace 'Kizzle, I don't see that assumptions are offered, only a statement of certain possibilities; assumptions would take the form of statements of fact. (I fully concur with Kizzle's final point, though.)

To reiterate: if the text in question had said: "it's clear that the vote was cast in error, for these reasons" then I'd agree with you. If the text had omitted any mention of the possibility that the vote was cast in error, then I'd worry. But the text includes both possibilities, and doesn't come down on either side — so (apart from my worry about the second point, which doesn't seem to me to be commonsensical) I don't see any reason to change it. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:59, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

read Wikipedia:Spoon_Feeding ... its not so much that your edit sways one way or the other, its just that its drawing conclusions for the reader. I agree with your insight Mel, I just wish you could quote an external source... both unfortunately and fortunately wikipedia cannot contain original insight from its editors. --kizzle 23:35, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)
Well, I've (reluctantly) come to the conclusion that kizzle is correct. That being said, let me see what people think about a revised version:
One elector in Minnesota cast a ballot for president with the name of "John Ewards" (sic) written on it. The Electoral College officials certified this ballot as a vote for John Edwards for president. The remaining nine electors cast ballots for John Kerry. All ten electors in the state cast ballots for John Edwards for Vice President. (John Edwards' name was spelled correctly on all ballots for Vice President.)
Electoral balloting in Minnesota was performed by secret ballot, and none of the electors admitted to casting the Edwards vote for President, so it may never be known who was the "faithless elector". It is not even known whether the vote for Edwards was deliberate or accidental, although several of the Democratic electors and the Republican Secretary of State have expressed the belief that this was an accident.
(References: Duluth News Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio)
— DLJessup 03:17, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
nice! Mel, if you didn't entirely come up with that logic of reasoning yourself, you should at least add links to where you found out about the information that leads you to your analysis. While you're limited to drawing conclusions for readers, you can add as many descriptive statements as you wish so that it would be impossible for the reader to draw otherwise. --kizzle 05:50, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)
That looks fine to me (though I'm not convinced that the original was in fact a problem). (Incidentally, Kizzlethe original wording was nothing to do with me — I'm just butting in to the discussion.) Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:33, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If the original wasn't from you, then you should definetely link to where you found it. --kizzle 20:39, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)
? (Read this discussion from the beginning!) Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:40, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I thought that was your original contribution, but then you said the original wording was nothing to do with you, nevermind. :) --kizzle 23:23, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Johnny Edwards or John Edwards?

If you check John Edwards you might could see his legal name is Johnny Reid Edwards.Why shouldn't we change John R. Edwards to Johnny R. Edwards? (unsigned contribution by Sina)

No, because people can change their name without formality. Edwards may have been born Johnny Reid Edwards but if he now calls himself John Edwards then that is his legal name. Dbiv 22:48, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to be really anal here. People cannot change their name without formality; there are legal procedures (which vary from state to state and many of which are based in common law) which one has to go through to change one's legal name.
Are you sure? In the U.K. one has to go through a legal procedure to change one's surname, but not one's given names; is that not the case in the U.S.? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:03, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. That being said, one of my friends went through a legal process to change her middle name. I don't think it's terribly expensive in terms of time or money, especially since my friend was a penniless grad student at the time, but it does exist in this country (the U.S., in case that wasn't clear). — DLJessup 02:51, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
That being said, I believe that we should refer to Mr. Edwards as "John Edwards" for the following two reasons:
  • First of all, Sina was attempting to make a change in the Electoral Results table. Now, if you look at the Certificates of Vote from the National Archives, you will see that in all 20 states and districts that voted for the Kerry/Edwards ticket, all of them referred to John Edwards as "John Edwards". (This is especially noteworthy when you consider that these same states and districts split 14/6 in referring to John Kerry as "John F. Kerry" vs. "John Kerry" (ignoring New York's "John L. Kerry" fiasco).)
  • Secondly, "John Edwards" is the common recognized appellation for Mr. Edwards. The Wikipedia article for John Edwards is "John Edwards", not "Johnny Reid Edwards" or "John R. Edwards". If it saves redirects, it can't be that bad.
— DLJessup 23:49, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Who the hell cares so badly enough to make it Johnny Edwards? --kizzle 00:09, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)
First of all sorry for not signing the first comment,I always forget to sign here!then Nobody did not made attention to John Edwards.That says: Johnny Reid "John" Edwards.But he is knows as John Edwards everywhere.For example everyone knows John Elis Bush as Jeb Bush but is Jeb his legall name?If Johnny is his first name we should write it in table, if it is not then we better change his name in his page! help me up please!This time I did not forget to sign!--Sina 00:47, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Sina, if you look at the article John Edwards, you might note that they use his legal time once; they note it and then refer to him thereafter by his common name or his surname. Generally, in a biographical article one notes the full legal name of the person once and then moves on; the full legal name generally doesn't appear otherwise in an article. Moreover, all of the Certificates of Vote, which are the legal instruments that the Congress uses in tallying the electoral votes, note John Edward's name as simply "John Edwards". — DLJessup 02:51, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
For the record, Dbiv is right in dismissing any need for formalities:
I don't have a source to cite, but having gone thru a name change i listened carefully to the principles involved, even when i failed to note the sources.
"Legal name" as generally used with a misconception as to two aspects of the concept:
  1. The assumption that everyone has one legal name.
  2. The belief that a change of legal name usually occurs as a traceable act.
You do apparently have only one legal name if you have had your name changed by a court order, bcz you can't change it after that without another court order. Outside of that, any name that you use in dealing with your legal obligations (e.g., signing the bill in the restaurant at your hotel, authorizing the amount to appear on your overall hotel bill) has the properties usually attributed to a "legal name", unless you are using it for a fraudulent purpose. If you change the spelling or use a nickname when you apply for your driver's license or register to vote, you've got a new legal name. Edwards obviously filed his candidacy under "John", so he would be "John" in our articles whether or not we had the "commonly used names" policy.
In my own case, i started using a fanciful name for everything that didn't require showing a driver's license, and several years later started registering voters. I thought that my registrar's-helper ID should match what my neighbors knew me as, so i showed by driver's license to the registrar and asked for registrar's-helper ID with the fanciful name. Then the next time i got a driver's license, i demonstrated i could execute both of the signatures, and got my new license with the fanciful name on it. No big deal.
I've never been a immigrant, so i know less about that circumstance: apparently the migra at least discourage immigrants seeking citizenship from using other names in between. Whether this is the law, or just good advice i'm not sure, but i knew an immigrant named, say, Francois or Henry, who would serioulsy correct you if you called him "Frank" or "Hank" (respectively), which is overkill no matter what the law says (and even if the migra screw up bcz they don't get it that absolutely everyone named Aleksandr or Aleksandra is obviously also named Sasha).
--Jerzy•t 22:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Intro inclusion of link to controversies article?

Perhaps what kevin is trying to add is too verbose (I almost reverted the revert of his change but decided against that), instead, how about a short 1 sentence blurb and wiki link to the election controversies article in the introduction? zen master T 20:53, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I agree.--kizzle 23:45, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
I would favor something more like a paragraph, for the reader who wants to get a quick idea without having to click through to any other articles, but it shouldn't be in the lead section. A better course would be to include links to the daughter articles in the "Election controversy" section. JamesMLane 00:26, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
How about a 1 sentence blurb to the main election controversy article in the intro section, plus daughter article links elsewhere in the article? zen master T 02:26, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

From the vantage point of six months down the road, I don't think the link belongs in the intro. The vote counting controvery in Ohio was not a major part of the 2004 election and has been virtually ignored by MSM since December, plus there are details and links on the subject further down in the article. --Paul 15:15, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

I came here to find a link to just one summary of the Ohio controversy, and you've got nothing. That is a glaring omission. xod, 3 Feb 2006.

[edit] the world votes

Is this in the article somewhere? http://www.theworldvotes.org/index.php?nid=876&newsid=174

I don't think it belongs in the article. A poll completed by a self-selected sample of non-U.S. citizens has questionable relevance to the article, in my opinion. Funnyhat 07:37, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Election results

I just reverted a series of changes to the election results made by 138.217.89.95. There were several changes made:

  • Data from the National Archives was replaced by data from uselectionatlas.org under the explanation that this was more accurate data. This is good if the claim is true, but I'd like to see that verified first.
  • The John Edwards/John Edwards electoral vote was eliminated. That change cannot stand: the electoral votes are more important (and more certain) than the popular votes.
  • The results for the Constitution and Green Party candidates was squeezed into the "Other" category. This is a debatable change; I'd certainly like to see it debated.

In any case, I have reverted the whole series of changes until they are fully justified. — DLJessup 05:19, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have restored the data from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. It does appear to be more accurate than the National Archives data. — DLJessup 05:52, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] External links formatting

User:Steinsky just reverted my formatting of the external links. For some unknown reason, he thinks that definition term tags are more appropriate than subsection headers in grouping the external links. I disagree, for several reasons:

  • On the content side, I think that the external links are being grouped into subsections, so subsection headers ought therefore to be used. Definition term tags should be reserved for definitions and the keys in similar key-value relationships.
  • On the presentation side, while I can certainly see the appeal of smaller group titles, the defintion term tags create a verticle gap immediately underneath them that is not matched by a corresponding vertical gap above them. This is just plain ugly.
  • If Steinsky's objection is that he doesn't want the group titles appearing in the table of contents, then he ought to replace the "=== title ===" markup with "<h3> title </h3>"

A possible compromise might be to precede each unordered list marker with a colon. On the content side, this transforms the whole unordered list beneath the group label into the value in a key-value relationship with the group label. (Great Ghu, this sounds like a stretch, but think of how a dictionary will assign an ordered list of related definitions to a given term.) On the presentation side, this opens up a corresponding vertical gap above the group label that erases the ugliness objection. And it keeps the group labels out of the TOC.

In short, Steinsky's current formatting is unacceptable. I have presented three alternatives: "===" section titles, "<h3>" section titles, and ":*" unordered lists. I am reverting to the first alternative.

— DLJessup 19:04, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I like the <h3> option, the contents list is long and the subsections themselves are fairly short - no need to jump directly to the subsection. NoSeptemberT 19:47, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, that's interesting. "<h3>" no longer suppresses the TOC. I'm going to do some research and see if this is a side-effect of the MediaWiki 1.5 upgrade and, if so, if the programmers provided another method for TOC suppression that doesn't involve manually creating the TOC. — DLJessup 12:29, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

It was indeed to keep the headers out of the toc, and between the edit summary and FAC page at the time I said as much, it wasn't some "unknown reason". I didn't repeat the reason when I reverted it, because the revert of my original edit came without explanation. I don't really care though, because the whole thing is irrelevant in the long run--the references need to be turned into a "Notes & references" section using {{ref}} and {{note}}, and then the external links section can be cut down to only those appropriate to this section. Joe D (t) 14:34, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, with the "<h3>" option closed off, and with the TOC needing to be suppressed, I've gone with the last remaining option: preceding each unordered list marker with a colon. I've done this. — DLJessup 04:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Simply putting the headings on a line of their own in bold would work. Joe D (t) 18:36, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] endoresements

The table under the Newspaper endorsements section is very strange. How can Kerry have endorsements in the 2000 election? Can the original provider of this table please step up and fix it?

See the top line. The table breaks down the 2004 endorsements according to whether the paper endorsed Bush or Gore in 2000. JamesMLane 00:36, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Yep. I followed the link to the main article and finally figured it out. I really think it would be much clearer if the table in the Elections article showed straight endorsements, and the Endorsements article went into history and changes between the two elections. --Paul 00:43, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Restructuring time

I feel a little bad about opening up this topic, since I don't have time to shepherd the discussion, let alone do major work on the article, and I know it's a really tricky subject. However, I think it's time for a radical restructuring of this article. The structure still feels like a pre-election article, and it worked well last year while the story was still developing. Now it's over, and it seems like several things need to happen:

  1. A narrative of the election, weighted toward what was turned out to be significant (more on this in a bit). This probably needs to be between 30% and 50% of the full article.
  2. In general, weight article coverage by vote received.
    1. This should include three or four summary paragraphs about the Democratic primary (part of the narrative)
    2. Relegate the bulk of third party coverage to subpages.
  3. Relegate the minutia (e.g. newspaper endorsements) to subpages.

Reading this article, you'd think that David Cobb and Michael Badnarik were major forces to be reckoned with in the election, while Howard Dean was a footnote barely worth mentioning. In the name of NPOV and fairness to the candidates, it was appropriate to give the candidates still in the running equal time prior to the election. Now it's over, and we can objectively say that everyone who wasn't a Democrat or Republican was not a significant factor in this election. As much as I would like third parties to get traction, it didn't happen in 2004, so we shouldn't report it that way. -- RobLa 07:59, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

So, I did a bunch of this work way back when, and now, a bunch of it got nuked, and the article quality has suffered. This reads much more like an almanac entry than an encyclopedia article. I'll nibble at the edges of this again, but I'm hoping that someone here will either agree with me and help me fix it, or tell me why I'm wrong. -- RobLa 07:31, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minimum PV for appearance in the results table

I just had an anonymous user revert my change with the following comment: "never mind, I see we already had perfectly good data on Cobb, which DLJessup arbitrarily removed. restoring."

Now, this change was not arbitrary: every U.S. presidential election article currently displays only candidates who have achieved either an electoral vote or at least 0.10% of the total popular vote. Cobb did not meet this minimum, so his votes were combined into the "Other" column.

Nor was this choice of minimum arbitrary. The U.S. presidential election articles all report the popular vote percentage to a single decimal point. Because of the way that popular votes tend to distribute themselves among minority candidates, when you pick a minimum that is not equal to the minimum non-zero displayable value (i.e. 0.10%), you tend to get a lot of upward roundoff error. In other words, you get a lot of candidates in the 0.05% .. 0.10% range who are reported as 0.1% and so make the total percentage appear to be well over 100%.

Now, some questions:

  • Should there be a different minimum PV percentage? If so, why?
  • Should a consensus arise for a lower minimum PV %age, is anybody willing to volunteer to go through the other U.S. presidential election article and add candidates to the results table if they meet the new lower PV %age?

— DLJessup 12:20, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree that there should be a standard, and since there is an existing one, already covering scores of articles, I'm comfortable with 0.1%. Another reason for leaving things alone, is that there is a link to the detail: See also U.S. presidential election, 2004 (detail) so the data is available. --Paul 14:05, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Some arguments for including Cobb: If you subtract Cobb (119,859) from Other (219,195), Cobb is larger than Other (now 99,336). That right there means he is statistically significant.

Cobb is all over this page, because he played a historical part along with Badnarik. You can't subtract the historical significance of his role from this article. Admittedly, his significance was greater before November 1 and after November 3 than it was in the actual election. But as you cannot just remove him from this page, people currently read about him on this page and they are going to want to know how he did in the election. As every other candidate mentioned here has data in the table, readers shouldn't have to click to a details page for the one exception you want to make. (That details page, by the way, has rather different results than we see here, so it does not follow that one can simply click through to it and find the rest of the good data.) If you want to have a "minimum percentage rule", fine, but it should be subordinate to an "important participant rule", and initiation of the recount that ultimately led to a formal challenge in the joint session of Congress, calling for the results in Ohio to not be certified, is undeniably important.

But as we see, even your "minimum percentage" is questionable. Now, this change was not arbitrary: every U.S. presidential election article currently displays only candidates who have achieved either an electoral vote or at least 0.10% of the total popular vote. But that is only because you, DLJessup, recently (within the last week) went through the election articles and removed candidates under 0.10%. If you make an arbitrary decision, and then a week later change articles to conform to that decision, your changes are still arbitrary.

In doing so you have removed candidates from several articles who had been there for a long time, whom the rest of the community had no problem with including. Indeed, we should include the data we have when the reader expects it, as one does from seeing Cobb's elsewhere name on this page. Stripping the one single line of Cobb's data may make this article ever so slightly "cleaner" for you, but it robs a great deal of expected information from everyone else.

Nor was this choice of minimum arbitrary. The U.S. presidential election articles all report the popular vote percentage to a single decimal point. Looks like circular reasoning to me. Again, conforming to your own arbitrary changes one week later does not make them any less arbitrary. Your decision to limit percentages to one decimal place is entirely yours, and quite recent. Other presidential articles were out to two decimal places until you came along and "cleaned up", but I fail to see what's difficult or messy about two decimal places. In fact, it gives more data, and lends to more detailed understanding. And again, considering Cobb, if we were out to two decimal places, he would still be listed at 0.10%, because that's what his 0.098% rounds to. You say rounding is problematic? Well I added up the numbers percentages at [[1]] and they came out to 100.0%. So your argument about "making the total percentage appear to be well over 100%" is false in this case and ultimately a red herring. --66.92.70.253 20:56, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, anonymous editor, let's go through this:
First, "If you subtract Cobb (119,859) from Other (219,195), Cobb is larger than Other (now 99,336). That right there means he is statistically significant." Not exactly: it means that Cobb is statistically significant within the universe of 219,195 voters listed under Other. Cobb is far from statistically significant in the universe of all voters.
Second, I didn't remove Cobb from the page; I removed him from the results table. I had not even considered whether he belongs on this page. I must admit, the fact that he couldn't even get 0.10% of the popular vote makes me dubious, but that is quite frankly irrelevant to this discussion.
Third, when the U.S. presidential election articles were created, there was a minimum PV %age back then as well, except that that minimum was 1%, not the 0.10% I've been working with. (See Talk:U.S. presidential election.) What's happened since then is that, as people have fiddled with the various U.S. presidential election articles, some of the candidate lists have been expanded. As well, some of the articles (particularly around the early 20th Century) missed some minority candidates who probably should have been included. What I did was restore a consistent minimum PV %age, adding candidates to some elections and removing candidates from others. (This was not the only thing I was doing with the results table. I made sure that all of the results tables had explicitly sourced PV and EV data, and I believe that all of the data is now pulled from Leip's Atlas.)
Actually, the 1% minimum (which I suggested) was only meant to apply to the table on the U.S. presidential election page, not to the articles on all of the individual election pages. I personally believe that a 0.01% threshold (or lower) would be perfectly acceptable on the individual election pages. -- RobLa 07:41, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
Fourth, when the U.S. presidential election articles were created, they all had single decimal place precision. Again, some Wikipedians fiddled with some articles which led to a few (no more than two or three) having two decimal places. In particular, these articles had all been created prior to the 2004 presidential election, so we should not be surprised that it is inconsistent with the others, unless somebody makes an effort to get them consistent and make the Wikipedia more professional.
Fifth, while I stated that rounding was problematic, I did not write that it was problematic with this article. It is with some other articles — 1960 comes to mind — that there were a large number of individuals in that 0.05 – 0.10% range.
Finally, I've got a question for you: if a consensus were to develop to lower the minimum PV %age or to set some other minimum criterion, would you volunteer to help out in getting the other U.S. presidential election articles to conform to this new minimum?
— DLJessup 22:06, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

I too think it's time to update the results section. I don't have the skill to do that (I didn't want to mess with the table) but I did add the external link to the FEC's final numbers. Those numbers show Cobb with more than .10%, and should be used in any event. I hope someone else will take that on. Thanks!

— Ben Manski 3:20, 24 August 2005 (CDT)

Ben Manski:
You make two assertions:
A. The figures from the FEC show Cobb with more than 0.10% PV.
B. The figures from the FEC should be used instead of the ones from Leip's Atlas.
Assertion A is plainly false. The FEC lists Cobb's popular vote at 119,859, while it lists the total popular vote at 122,295,345. 0.10% of the popular vote is therefore 122,295.345, which is greater than Cobb's vote of 119,859.
Assertion B is a far more defensible proposition. My gut feel is that it, too, is wrong, but I haven't figured out yet whether my gut is right or wrong. I'll argue the issue if and when I resolve where I stand on it.
— DLJessup (talk) 23:37, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I understand your point, but the FEC report itself records Cobb's vote total as 0.10%. Obviously they are rounding up. But the difference of 2,400 votes is pretty minor. Seems stretching it to exclude 120,000 voters on this basis.

— Ben Manski 7:08, 24 August 2005 (CDT)

Um, the voters aren't excluded. They're in "Other".
As to your comment: "…the difference of 2,400 votes is pretty minor," the problem is that, if we lower the minimum (which is what you are asking for), then somebody else will be within some (to-them) small number of votes of that lowered minimum….
Look, I'm all for lowering the minimum if (a) a consensus develops for lowering the minimum and (b) people volunteer to help out with establishing the lowered minimum across the 46 articles about U.S. presidential elections with popular votes.
— DLJessup (talk) 00:39, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PV standards

After the back and forth between myself and Ben Manski above, I think it's time to get a broad discussion going over what the standards should be for the results tables.

Here are the questions I think need to be addressed:

  • Should there be some sort of cutoff for an individual to be displayed in the elections results tables (on the individual pages)? (This applies only to candidates who get 0 electoral votes; everyone who gets an electoral vote should be included.) If so, should it be a minimum PV %age? If so, what should that minimum %age be?
  • How many decimal places should appear in the PV %age?
  • Should we break out "write-ins" if they exceed the minimum PV %age?
  • Is there a better, more accurate source than Leip's Atlas for sourcing the PV information? (Leip's Atlas has been meticulously researched over more than a decade, so I don't necessarily expect to get an answer here.)

Here's the current standard:

  • Right now, candidates are included if and only if they receive at least one electoral vote or get above <total-popular-vote> / 1000 in the popular vote.
  • "Write-ins" are always included in the "Others" row.
  • Leip's Atlas is used as the PV source on all elections since 1824. (Prior to 1824, there isn't a useful PV to display.)

Also, it would be helpful to have some volunteers to help edit the articles to meet the standards if different standards are agreed upon.

Any help with this discussion would be appreciated.

Thanks,

— DLJessup (talk) 13:54, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I believe that all candidates down to a pretty small vote total should be included. i don't have a great sense of what a sensible minimum is, but I think a candidate that scares up even as little as 1,000 votes can be significant in the grand scheme of things. An example would be John Hospers in 1972, who received 3,674 votes. Even if he hadn't gotten an electoral vote, it still was an important milestone, since the Libertarian party would later become a more significant force in electoral politics. We have no idea which "insignificant" party will later become a force to be reckoned with in future elections. Given that Wikipedia has articles for towns with population of 1,000, it seems we can at least dedicate a one-line summary to a candidate that 1,000 people vote for. -- RobLa 17:58, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

These lists should be limited to statistically significant vote totals. 1/10th of 1% seems like a reasonable level, although I could accept rounding up to that figure (anything above .05% rounds to .1%). These "other" candidates are not just competing against those in the "Other" line, so the comparison of their vote total to that subtotal is invalid. To RobLa's point about Hospers: his vote count from the 1972 was not significant to that election; it was significant to his party and it is in the article that discusses the history of the party that it should be mentioned, not in U.S. presidential election, 1972. This article is about an election, we could write an entire book about this election, instead we limit ourselves to the relevant information for a good solid overview. Limiting how far down the list we show minor candidates is part of this limitation. If someone wants to start a trivia article People who were listed on U.S. Presidential ballots - go ahead, but lets keep this article focused on the overview of the election results that are statistically significant. I like the chart as it is, it contains the relevant information, but not a lot of unnecessary clutter. NoSeptember 08:33, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

If the entries are ordered by popular vote, how is the "clutter" really getting in your way? If you aren't interested in the candidates below a certain vote level, you can choose to stop reading at that point. Note that I don't believe that we should dedicate paragraphs of prose to minor candidates. In fact, I think this particular article needs to be trimmed back in that regard. However, as long as we're going to mention the 200,000 people or so who vote for "Other" candidates, we might as well mention who they voted for if we have that information.
For example, Cobb doesn't get a mention in the table, but has a paragraph dedicated to his run. I'd rather flip that around - put him back in the table, and nuke the paragraph of prose about his run. The threshold for getting a section in an article should be much higher, perhaps 1% or so, with the justification that people can research minor candidates by navigating through the table. -- RobLa 16:09, August 30, 2005 (UTC)

OK, it appears that it's safe to say that a consensus (3–1) exists for lowering the minimum PV to at least 0.05%, so I'll go ahead and put that on my list of things to do. Once again, any help in doing this would be highly appreciated. I do have a few comments to RobLa for reasons not to list down to the 1,000 level:

  • "You can choose to stop reading at that point." There is information (such as the Other row, the Total Row, the footnotes, and the article text after the results table) that is below the minority candidates. You can't remove it from the middle of things, so it would be clutter.
  • Let's consider the scenario you describe, in which a minority candidate gets below the PV minimum, but they are the candidate of a party that later becomes significant. I'm not sure that this would be worthy of mention, unless this candidacy was a milestone for that party; for example, if that was the party's first presidential candidate, that would be worthy of mention. The correct response in this case would be to footnote the "Other" row and state that Other includes the votes of this party's first candidate. One reason for this is that there may very well be some candidate who is utterly unimportant who gets more votes than the footnoted candidate.
  • Including somebody because they or their party might someday be important strikes me as a fools' errand, precisely because we have no idea of what the future will hold. Had Wikipedia existed in 1857, there would have been at most a on Abraham Lincoln, even though he would win the next election.
  • I agree that standards should be looser for the results table than for the article proper. And, if you read my commentary above, I am skeptical of Cobb's appearance in the prose. But I would like to deal with one issue at a time: get the results table settled, then worry about getting the article proper right.

I hope that the above is coherent — I'm not up to my best writing right now.

— DLJessup (talk) 04:45, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Campaign spending

I don't know when I'll have time to work this into a table, so I'm posting it here in case there's some idle hands looking for work. This is the FEC-reported campaign spending:

  • Kerry:
    • Collected: $298,688,602
    • Spent: $285,526,920
    • Cash: $16,222,557
    • Debt: $4,438,705
    • Date: 12/31/2004
  • Bush:
    • Collected: $367,228,801
    • Spent: $351,759,170
    • Cash: $19,291,231
    • Debt: $1,710,964
    • Date: 12/31/2004

Source: http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/srssea.shtml - Federal Election Commission database.

-- RobLa 21:36, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article restructuring really needed

This article fails to tell the story of the 2004 election. Instead, it's a loose collection of minutia, overemphasizing things that weren't conveniently moved to subpages, and practically ignoring things that were moved to subpages.

Here's the current outline, and what probably needs to be done to get this article in better shape -- RobLa 00:34, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

  • 0 Preface - condense a little. More about the cycle and issues, less about the mechanics
  • 1 Overview - Renamed "trivia" and moved to bottom of article, or perhaps subpage. This information is anything but an "overview"
  • 2 Election results - cut back on prose here. Table is fine
    • 2.1 Ballot access - keep, perhaps annotate
    • 2.2 "Faithless elector" in Minnesota - delete or move to subpage. Deserves one or two sentences tops.
    • 2.3 Electoral vote error in New York - ugh...delete or move to subpage.
    • 2.4 Presidential Results by Congressional District - keep
  • 3 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates - perhaps rename to "Party Nominations", renaming sections to the parties. May be good to keep this, but insert nominations section before this. Include brief bio in section about candidates, and include nomination process in "Party Nominations"
    • 3.1 George W. Bush/Richard B. Cheney, Republican Party - keep
    • 3.2 John F. Kerry/John R. Edwards, Democratic Party - keep
    • 3.3 Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo, independent (also Reform Party) - condense and/or move to subpage
    • 3.4 Michael Badnarik/Richard Campagna, Libertarian Party - condense and/or move to subpage
    • 3.5 Michael Peroutka/Chuck Baldwin, Constitution Party - condense and/or move to subpage
    • 3.6 David Cobb/Pat LaMarche, Green Party - condense and/or move to subpage
  • 4 Timeline - would be good to include condensed timeline here.
  • 5 Debates - since the debates were a central part of the general election phase, this is a really important section to flesh out. Perhaps rename this "general election", to encompass other events coincident.
  • 6 Newspaper endorsements - doesn't warrant its own section and table. Change table to prose, and merge elsewhere
  • 7 Electoral College changes from 2000 - condense and or move to subpage
  • 8 Vote splitting concerns - this was something that was much more interesting before the election. Cut and/or move to subpage.
  • 9 Battleground states - keep, maybe condense a little.
  • 10 New during this campaign - keep most of this.
    • 10.1 International observers - keep
    • 10.2 Electronic voting - keep
    • 10.3 Campaign law changes - keep
    • 10.4 Colorado's Amendment 36 - condense and merge elsewhere.
    • 10.5 Legal challenges - keep
  • 11 Election controversy - keep
  • 12 See also - keep
  • 13 Sources - keep
  • 14 External links - move to subpage. this is way too big to keep in main article.

[edit] Uncited references to polls

Anonymous user 24.13.102.3 has entered in two new grafs under "Campaign issues". These grafs reference "election-day polls" in support of the claim that the election wasn't really about the Iraq War. This same user had earlier made a similar modification which was much more POV than this one, which I reverted. Since I can't write directly on an anonymous user's talk page, I ask again that he provide references for the election-day polls. I don't doubt that the polls exist; I would like to have the cites for verifiability and so that the reader can get closer to the raw data if (s)he wants. (As Twain said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, and being able to see the polls is therefore important.)

— DLJessup (talk) 00:33, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Because there has been no attempt to give references for the polls, I am going to remove the graf in question.
— DLJessup (talk) 04:26, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Contribs of User 66. and Mister D, apparently unrelated to the rest of the section, have been moved to the subsection "=== The map: Virginia ===" in the new section below, #Map issues.
--Jerzy•t 04:30, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Massive link breakage: what gives?

There seems to have been a war on working links this week, mostly due to changing "presidential" to "Presidential" or vice versa. Is there a wiki project that I'm unaware of, or is someone making a rather large mistake in editing? -- RobLa 08:43, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merging Anybody but Bush

I added a merge template for Anybody but Bush because I don't think the page merits an independant Wiki article and this page seems to be the best place for it. However, I realize that this page is super-long already, and there might be a page better suited for it. -- simpatico (talk) 09:42, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that should be merged here. But most of the "Election results" sections should be merged into the existing (detail) article. Faithless electors are all very well for a political junky, but detract from reading the article. Likewise the extensive trivia. Leave it for a couple of days to see whether thre are any objections, though.
--William Allen Simpson 18:25, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I tried to find where to put it, but I can't. help! :) --Woohookitty(cat scratches) 10:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Done. Chadlupkes 20:30, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ewards

Since the person who voted from Minnesota wrote the Pres name as Ewards instead of Edwards, shouldn't the table record that name ?03:34, 1 March 2006 (UTC) sorry if this has already been talked aboutSmith03 03:36, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't appear that there's been any discussion about whether the results table should read “John Ewards” or “John Edwards”, so no worries there. As to the issue itself: While the actual (secret) ballot misspelled the name, the electors recorded the Certificate of Vote with Edwards' name spelled correctly.[2] Since that's what the electors reported to Congress, that's what we should put in the results table.
— DLJessup (talk) 04:57, 1 March 2006 (UTC)


thanks for the information Smith03 03:37, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Links

Most Important Issues & IQ Voting Correlation in the 2004 election - Mourningthevote.com

I can garuntee already that the IQ Voting Correlations are faked, no statistics exist for average IQ's state by state.

http://www.isteve.com/IQhoax.htm http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2692859 <= retraction by The Economist

--RaiderAspect 12:01, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] CBS News Doc "Forgeries"

This article states that the CBS News documents in the Killian story were "revealed to be forgeries." Although CBS News was unable to verify the documents, they've never actually been proven to be forgeries. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.169.103.223 (talk)

Sure they were. They used a font that didn't even exist at the time they were supposedly created. How much more proof of forgery do you need? A notorized confession by the perps? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.216.139.217 (talk)
I reworked this section with links to other Wikipedia articles where this is discussed ad nauseum. While there is really strong evidence that the Killian documents were forgeries, the debate was still raging at the time of the election. Since it's not Wikipedia's job to render a verdict, the reworked version doesn't, but rather merely points out that CBS felt it necessary to fire the news producer. Those seem like the most important facts to summarize what happened. Those interested in the gory details can visit the linked articles. -- RobLa 05:53, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
Also of note is that even if the documents are forged, the sentiments expressed by them were confirmed to be accurate by the Colonel's secretary at the time. Nicholastarwin (talk) 22:00, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nader's running mates

Nader had at least two other running mates besides Camejo: Karen Sanchirico in Montana and Jan D. Pierce in Alabama and New York (although in NY there was also a ballot line with Camejo). Ralph_Nader_presidential_campaign,_2004#Nader_on_the_ballot Should this info be added to this article somehow? Esquizombi 04:40, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I've added a footnote to that effect.
— DLJessup (talk) 03:28, 2 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] House/Senate synopsis and analsis in first section

I have changed this to reflect what is in (and factually supported) the Wiki articles for the 2004 house and senate elections. Namely that Republican gains in the house were due to texas redistricting and in the senate due to the unusual number of Democratic incumbents retiring (also the democrats had 4 more seats up for grabs). --FNV 14:55, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Election results, by city

Is anyone familiar with a source that lists the election results by city or by precinct (so that one could add up the precincts to obtain the results for a city)? Data for cities whose borders correspond with county boundaries (e.g. New York City or Jacksonville) are easy to find, but this is not the case with other cities. Just curious if anyone knew it off the top of his/her head, as my Google searches have not been fruitful. Thanks. Ufwuct 17:52, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Do any frequent contributors to this article or internet-savvy editors know where city election results can be found? Thanks. Ufwuct 15:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ohio Voting Machines

In the intro, the article seems to imply that most counties used electronic methods of recording votes. I worked on the 2004 recount in Ohio and know for a fact that the majority of counties used punch cards. IIRC, there were less than 6 counties that used DRE machines and approximately a dozen counties that used optical scan ballots. If I had the exact numbers, I'd change it myself...

stine 08:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Nominations

Didn't anyone notice that someone erased the entire section on the nominating process? I put it back. Jeez!

Since there were main articles on both the Democratic and Republcian nominations, and to save space, I just left the links to them there.

[edit] Analysis and trivia

This whole section is kind of long winded.. Would anyone mind if we work on rewording some of it.. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mantion (talk • contribs) 14:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC).

Please, by all means. There are huge portions of the article that need to go. See my comments above for more on the subject -- RobLa 07:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Missleading statement.

"At the same time, Bush's 2.5-percent popular vote margin over Kerry is the smallest margin of victory (in percentage terms) for an incumbent president in American history."

Although it is possibly accurate, it should be noted that

  • There has been many popular vote margins much closer then 2004
  • There has been many Incumbent presidents that LOST their election, thus a negative Popular vote margin, which is always less then a negative one.
  • The statement is mostly irrelevant, as it only looks at incumbent victories which is a minor percentage of presidential elections.

So we should modify the statement because although the elections was close in terms of popular votes, It is not the closest election. Also many incumbents loose re-elections, so being re-elected is an accomplishment in it's own right. In addition, the popular vote has no actual bearing on the election, some presidents have won elections with a negative popular vote margin. Mantion 21:40, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

If you mean that many incumbent presidents lose re-election, that is not correct. Most presidents who run for re-election succeed. The list of those who didn't is relatively (on the scale of Presidents) small.

The popular vote is clearly significant to the topic of Presidential elections, and is in the Wiki in every election in which it was ever discussed or considered remotely relevant, starting with the electoral defeat of Andrew Jackson. The fact that the press has to explain and re-educate people on the electoral system each election cycle makes the popular vote clearly relevant - not to the results, but to people's understanding and interpretation of the results.

You're also confusing the two - I don't believe any president has won RE-election with a negative popular vote margin. 151.204.147.139 (talk) 12:43, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Out of context statement

"This is the first time since George H.W. Bush in 1988 that the winning Presidential candidate of either party has won over an absolute majority, or 50% of the popular vote. However, this may have only occurred because of the lack of a strong and credible third party candidate."

If you look at [Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2004] of 197 million people eligible to vote in 2004, 125 million actually voted so it's out of context to say "that the winning candidate won an absolute majority of 50% of the popular vote" as although it's technically true, 64.38 million people is not a majority of either registered voters (142 million) or eligible voters (197 million). I would suggest either adding a caveat to this effect, or omitting the statement.Rjeong (talk) 05:55, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Electoral votes must be won

"Bush also gained electoral votes due to reapportionment after the 2000 census." No, he still had to win the states to get those electoral votes. Had Kerry won those states, would have "gained" votes due to reapportionment? The states are not automatically Republican or Democrat gains, and the states picking up new Congressional Districts due to increasing census do not automatically benefit one party or another. This statement is nonsense as it stands.

It could read "Some of the states Bush won in 2000 also gained electoral votes in 2004 due to reapportionment after the 2000 census." and be more accurate, but it is still irrelevant.


I also reworded some of the language about President Bush's domestic policies being unpopular. None are mentioned, no source is given to back up the assertation that was one of the main driving forces behind the election dynamics. I reworded it and sourced it. This article is horribly full of unsourced assertations, urban legends, so-called "common wisdom" type statements with no sourcing, especially in the supposed motivations of voters. At least source _some_ poll or scholarly writing, or a minimum a well-sourced article by a knowledgable writer, not the pundits consensus. Raphaelaarchon 09:29, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2004 Elections Stolen Confirmed By Rove Emails

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3954858769441262005

[edit] "Candidates receiving less than 1/2000 of the total popular vote."

Where can candidates coming in 8th, 9th, 10th, etc. be found? Is it even possible to find these names anywhere? Nagelfar 03:47, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

See United States presidential election, 2004 (detail)#Grand_Total Anarchist42 17:01, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. I see there isn't the same information at United States presidential election, 2000 (detail). Nagelfar 00:42, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The cartogram

Wow, that cartogram is interesting and somewhat enlightening, but so visually disruptive I almost think it should be removed. 64.221.248.17 16:42, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dean Scream, Fact or Opinion?

"What hurt Dean even more than his poor performance was a speech he gave at a post-caucus rally". Really? His post-caucus speech hurt him more than his poor performance? What is the basis for that statement? I had the distinct impression "Dean Scream" was a bunch of media spin and a weak excuse. Miqrogroove 18:13, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

While it certainly didn't help, I think the "Dean Scream" has taken on a mythical quality as the event that killed Dean's hopes. The horrible final week in Iowa more likely did Dean in; the scream just made his fall that much harder to recover from. I think a statement such as "The Dean Scream only exasperated Dean's problems coming out of Iowa, from which his campaign was unable to recover" would be a more accurate reflection of what happened. ---- OrangeKing —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.186.167.146 (talk) 29 December 2007 06:46:12

This is a bunch of a opinion from a single source and, as such, has no place in the article. For those of you not familiar with the so-called "Dean Scream", it wasn't the scream that destroyed his chances, it was Fox News looping it over and over again (for what purpose, one can only imagine) that did it. Kevin Baastalk 15:27, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Can we please nuke the potential VP candidates list?

I removed the list of potential VP candidates from this page back in March, and I see Darth Kalwejt (talk · contribs) readded it. Does anyone have a citation for this list, and a good reason why this list belong in this article instead of John Kerry presidential campaign, 2004? This seems like too much detail for this article. -- RobLa 21:51, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

My gosh, those image galleries are huge, unsourced and cumbersome. They should be made into tables, and possibly split into side articles also.Mdiamante 23:51, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Winner/Runner-Up

I have to voice my concern that this format is hurting the article. I will post this on a few notable election pages and hope that it's noticed. I have to admire the determination of whoever came up with this idea (it's apparently on every page) but ultimately, I think it should go. I think that having "winner/runner-up" displayed so prominently in the infobox overshadows the importance of the election. Some of these elections were not mere contests, but were epic events in American history where a variety of important viewpoints were symbolically represented and voted upon. Just in the last 50 years, the notable political climates of 1968 and 2004 came to a boiling point around election time. We should not be placing so much emphasis on the "winner" and the "runner-up" -- this is not a spelling bee. If we condense this into who "won" we are doing a disservice to the issues that drove these elections. SpiderMMB 23:13, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

When you say "I think it should go", do you mean "winner/runner-up" or the entire template? --Philip Stevens 05:31, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I think the entire template should go for the reasons listed above by Spider; he makes some very good points. I too think the infobox is, for one, odd. My issue with this is not so much the content, but formatting. The photos are of different sizes (see United States presidential election, 1984); some photos are b&w, some are color. Those look bad next to each other. I hope this discussion can bring about a change on all of the presidential election pages. Happyme22 06:13, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps then, reformatting of the template would be better than deletion. --Philip Stevens 07:21, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Discussions on reformatting would be fine too. When I said "should go" I meant the whole terminology of "winner/runner-up" as well as the pictures, and the whole emphasis that the infobox places on them. I have no problem with the electoral map, or even the statistics. But reformatting is definitely in order, so that the infobox does not envelope the article. SpiderMMB 19:46, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Reformatting should be done on the template's talk page. --Philip Stevens 21:44, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't think we need the "winner/runner-up" box at all. It doesn't make sense. For each election outcome, the winner is the important part. In spite of the fact they call it a "race," in a US Presidential election, only the winner counts at the end. It would be different if the runner-up had some kind of importance after the election, but this is not the case. It used to be important before the constitution changed, but now, we don't need to know the runner-up. Hires an editor 15:32, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
I disagree; if this is a reference article for the presidential election and, in a lot of cases, people are coming to this article for quick information, why make them search the article and scroll to the bottom to get the information that is conveniently and concisely displayed right there at the top? I don't think it hurts the 'story' of the election. Those who want to or choose to read more about the issues that the race itself can go right ahead. This is for reference, it's not a novel. Tommyjr (talk) 12:31, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map issues

[edit] County Map

The map that shows the vote per county is really irrelevant. a) it does not have any impact on electoral college. b) It does not show popular opinion because counties have different populations. Should it be removed?—Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.129.121.62 (talk) 17:17, 2 February 2006 (two edits in same minute)

We prominently include the map of states, which reflects the electoral college. As you may recall, after the election there was considerable discussion over the relative size of the areas that were either red or blue. You pointed out that different regions may have different populations, and that is especially true at the state level. So the map shows that state residents did not vote monolithically. In any case, I think it is a useful addition to the article. -Will Beback 22:04, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
If the map is designed to show that the states did not vote monolithic, may be a better idea would be to have a map where each state would be a shade of purple, depending on the percentage of the popular the respective candidate got. With all due respect to the Mediation Committee, I still fail to see any usefulness of that map. I might be wrong on this one, but I'd like to hear other people's opinion.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.42.32.196 (talk) 01:07, 4 February 2006
The cartogram continues in #Battleground states. I find it valuable, but it would be more so if replaced by a version where the state lines are visible, to provide hints, a little further from the coastlines, about which urban centers lie inside dark purple or blue regions.

[edit] The map: Virginia

I noticed that on the map of electoral votes that the little part of Virginia that is separated by water is colored in blue, but the rest of the state is red. Can anyone fix it? 66.30.58.20 01:16, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

    • Fixed--Mister D 22:55, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

The previous two contribs previously appeared in the apparently unrelated section "== Uncited references to polls =="
On the map, the portion of Virginia located on the Delmarva Peninsula is blue. It should be red, like the rest of the state. SamEV 12:34, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Election controversy

This is a misleading map as it should indicate incidents per capita and not scalar incidents e.g; given that CA is the most populous state (and quite large to boot) and is not unreasonable that there should be problems. --Belg4mit 19:48, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Incorrect map

The results map used in this article, Image:ElectoralCollege2004-Large.PNG, shows the electoral-vote-per-state numbers for the elections of the 1990s, not changed to reflect the 2000 census. Can this map be fixed? AJD 20:50, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Reverted page back to the last correct map version. Please get me a confirmation, though! --Knulclunk 01:22, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Looks correct to me, and matches the map at United States Electoral College! Thanks! AJD 07:29, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New section, removed for discussion

[edit] Controversial Facts of the Election

  • 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. [1] [2]
  • There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. [3] [1]
  • The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. [4] [1]
  • The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." [5]
  • Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. [6] [7]
  • Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. [8] The following two links had further credible support for this but they sites have since been removed and no reason has been found yet.
  • Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. [9] [10]
  • ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. [11] [1]
  • Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. [12] [13]
  • Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. [12] [14]
  • Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. [15] [16]
  • Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States. [17] [18]
  • Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. [18] [19] [20]
  • None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. [21] [22]
  • California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it, literally. See the movie here: [3] [23] [24]
  • 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. [5]
  • All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. [25] [26] [27]
  • The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. [28]
  • Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. [26] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33]
  • 1 in 5 Americans believe the elections were fraudulent. That's over 41 Million Americans.
  1. ^ a b c d Two voting companies & two brothers will count 80 percent of U.S. election using both scanners & touchscreens. onlinejournal.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  2. ^ Diebold. Wikipedia. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  3. ^ Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control. CommonDreams.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  4. ^ Private Company Still ‘Controls’ Election Outcome \. americanfreepress.net. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  5. ^ a b E-Voting: Is The Fix In?. CBS News. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  6. ^ Diebold's Political Machine. MotherJones.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  7. ^ Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy. onlinejournal.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  8. ^ U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Now Admits Ownership In Voting Machine Company - Senate Ethics Committee Director Resigns. Lisa Rein. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  9. ^ The Maverick on Bush's Short List - Business loves Hagel--even if the GOP doesn't always. BusinessWeek. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  10. ^ Vice president Chuck Hagel?. theindependent.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  11. ^ About ES&S. ES&S. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  12. ^ a b Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. CommonDreams.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  13. ^ TABLE: U.S. states using e-voting in Nov. 2 election. ITworld.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  14. ^ Products & Services. Diebold. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  15. ^ Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary. Wired.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  16. ^ The Presidency has been HACKED, hacker covert op in place via Diebold machines. Portland Independent Media Center. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  17. ^ Bev Harris: Embezzler Programmed Voting System. Scoop Independent News. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  18. ^ a b Company Information. BlackBoxVoting.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  19. ^ New Security Risks Found In Diebold Voting Systems by Monica Davey. Equal Justice Foundation. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  20. ^ Critical Security Issues with Diebold TSx. BlackBoxVoting.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  21. ^ Election Officials in Ohio and Florida Fail to Give Poll Access to International Election Observers. globalexchange.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  22. ^ Foreign observers banned by Blackwell. The Enquirer. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  23. ^ California Bans E-Vote Machines. Wired. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  24. ^ California official seeks criminal probe of e-voting. MSNBC. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  25. ^ Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy. Wired. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  26. ^ a b Votergate 2004? - Research Studies Uncover Potential Massive Election Fraud. Yurica Report: News Intelligence Analysis. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  27. ^ Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions. Scoop Independent News. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  28. ^ Jeb Bush's Influence in Fla. Inspires Awe, Rage. Washington Post. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  29. ^ University researchers challenge Bush win in Florida: 'Something went awry with electronic voting in Florida,' says the lead researcher. ComputerWorld. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  30. ^ Tens of Thousands of Votes Lost, Stolen, Miscounted. American Free Press. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  31. ^ Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked. CommonDreams.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  32. ^ Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies. consortiumnews.com. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.
  33. ^ National Election Data Archive. ElectionArchive.org. Retrieved on 12-20-2007.

[edit] Discussion

I have removed the following [above] section to here for a number of reasons:

  1. The controversiality dates back to before the election, yet we have gone 3 years since then without such a section; this seems to seek a reversal of 3 years of implicit consensus.
  2. The material was introduced at 8am, Eastern time, on the Friday that begins a 12-day run of vacation days, long or potentially long weekends, and ideal days to use up one's use-or-lose vacation; a rush to evaluate this new material before the 2nd week of January would inefficiently obstruct free participation of our typical complement of interested editors.
  3. Most of the citations in their respective URLs include what appear to be dates of publication, all in a period ending Feb 2005, making them presumably stale and calling for newer citations that overcome the presumption that the public has weighed them without judging for them the combination of credibility and usefulness needed to make their content encyclopedic.
  4. The list of 20 loosely related allegations of opportunities for bad acts, or of previous bad acts, if their factuality were to be assumed, would seem to achieve encyclopedic status only if the PoV is adopted that together they make up a strong case, which the mainstream press has abandoned for something like 30 months.
  5. The section's sole advocate's 33 citations will require detailed examination, as they are not a high-quality group; for example:
    1. Very few of the citations are from media widely recognized for professional scholarship or journalism; one of the few exceptions is the Washington Post, cited to establish the apparently controversial fact that "The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother."
    2. The "fact" that
      1 in 5 Americans believe the elections were fraudulent. That's over 41 Million Americans.
      is offered without any citation whatsoever, that might explain, on one hand whether the unlikely question "Do you believe the elections were fraudulent?" was asked by a responsible polling organization, or on the other, how it happens that 1/5 of 303 million falls so far short of 60.6 million.
    3. The compiler's judgment apparently allows for this sort of verification, as part of the article's text:
      • Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. [1] The following two links had further credible support for this but they sites have since been removed and no reason has been found yet.
      (Oh, and did it stop being recent three years later, or do we have to wait until it becomes 4, in February?)
    4. It ignores the likelihood (cf. CT General Statutes Sec. 9-236, paragraph c) that
      None of the international election observers [being] allowed in the polls in Ohio
      is what would typically be required by state laws.
    5. It implies the relevance of
      a chimpanzee [being] able to ... literally ... hack ... the audit logs
      without even hinting at the senses in which several words are used in the corresponding phrase, or whether the manufacturer could reasonably be thought to have intended the same senses.

My own PoV on the topic is that there is an unusually severe pattern of election abuses, under color of government office, in support of Republicans, starting at least by 2000. But even so, i don't think this editor has identified the place or manner in which WP can cover it, nor that a focus on either specific elections or (as that editor further proposed 22 minutes later) in the PoV-ly mis-titled Movement to impeach George W. Bush, is an encyclopedic place for more than a link to an article on a broader class of (mostly conservative and Republican) election abuses. As i said in my edit summary, this section is nowhere near ready for the "prime time" of the article. It should be discussed here before being added anywhere, with particular attention to where something like it might belong.
--Jerzy•t 10:12, 25 December 2007 (UTC) & Will Beback ·:· Will Beback ·:· 18:51, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I took the liberty of moving the material to the top of this section to facilitate discussion, and edited your comment to refer to it. I agree with your objections. Overall, this material appears to violate WP:SYNTH, an aspect of the WP:NOR policy. We have an article, and even a whole category, devoted to controversies. To the extent that this material is worthwhile it should be in 2004 United States presidential election controversy and irregularities or another article in Category:2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities.
-- ·:· Will Beback ·:· 18:51, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
The essentially insignificant edit you made to my signed comment was valuable, clearly friendly, and technically a forgery. I'm a stickler, certainly not for punishing technical forgeries, but for labeling them in such a way that copying one of them verbatim and in toto can never (thru loss of context) effect a misattribution. I have applied my finicky technique for achieving that via strikeout, bold, and a bolded second signature, which makes it clear the modified comment is a joint work, and does as much as i think is practical toward identifying which parts are whose. Sorry if i give offense by this; please chalk it up to my being a compulsive.
I am glad to see WP:SYNTH stated, as i find it a proper clarification of WP:OR, and would have cited it myself, had i been aware of it: i was groping toward something like it, in my point 4, but i think the principle was less clear and compelling when i justified it under the rubric of WP:NPoV.
--Jerzy•t 09:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm the one who put this section into the article, and I was wondering what needs to be done to get it put in an article. These controversies need to get to the people and thing in this government need to stop being hidden, and if places like wikipedia keep suppressing controversial political issues, then possible crimes will go unheard of. I know there might be some issues with the section, but it would be nice if we can agree on something here rather than just throwing it out and pretending it never existed. I like wikipedia a lot, I just it was more friendly to controversial issues. If there's anything I can do to help just send me a message on my talk place, or leave a message here. Thanks  :) Preservefreedom (talk) 02:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your temperate response, PF, and i applaud your commitment to exposing these issues. I have two replies that i think are fairly distinct, tho complementary.
  1. There are channels other than WP for pursuing your goal. One that occurs to me is dKosopedia, which is like a politics-focused mini-WP, but explicitly without WP:NPOV and perhaps without WP:OR, since developing memes and talking points is IIRC one of the stated goals. Blogging also offers a forum, and my impression is that sites that combine social networking with blogging provide a structure for building a bloggin reputation around common interests.
  2. You may not be able to use WP toward this task, as you have initially conceived it, but even if not, you may still be able to find uses in WP for the material i moved here, in ways that do further your goal, in another article or spread among multiple articles. You'll want to spend some time getting the feel -- from talk pages like this one and from pages in the "Wikipedia:" (or project) namespace, including the "WP:" ones cited here, and others you'll find your way to -- not so much of "what needs to be done to get it put in an article" but of what the articles are here to do, which may lead you to answers to that "how" question.
At the risk of platitudes, also do keep in mind that the things that are easiest to do get done quickly, and those that are around for, say, 3 years, without being accomplished, are hard. They don't have to be impossible, but IMO you're at the very beginning (of at least the WP part) of your work.
--Jerzy•t 09:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
To chime in here for the first time, I like to follow the criteria that the inclusion of information in an article should be judged on the basis of whether it is interesting, important, and verifiable. Most of the points above seem to meet these criteria. Then the question is where and how the information is included. As regards "where", there are articles that may be more appropriate. For instance, there are articles about controversies and irregularities surrounding the election, and one specifically about irregularities with the voting equipment. As regards "how", I think some of the wording could be improved to more "neutral" wording by removing redundancy and wording it less rhetorically. For instance, "All -- not some -- but all" could be written simply "All". the "-- not some -- but all" is redundant, and thus could be considered not neutral by way of over-emphasize. Also "Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it, literally. See the movie here:" could be written something like "___ documented a chimpanzee hacking a Diebold voting machine (video). Diebold claims that audit logs could not be hacked." Shorter, more matter of fact, and, like the original, it provides balance by giving both POV's (though this time without the conjunction "despite". Kevin Baastalk 15:49, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
I still find it fascinating that when an article is written citing only sources that prove it to be correct no one complains if it's something mainstream or that can be found in the news, but as soon as someone does the exact same thing with a topic that isn't mainstream, they are criticized for it, citing excuses like WP:SYNTH or any other way to put the article down. WP:SYNTH shouldn't even hold much weight unless in very special circumstances because the whole concept is flawed. The sources cited in that section are all verifiable. I understand that there may be a little redundancy like "All -- not some -- but all", but that's no excuse to delete an article completely, it's just a grammar issue, fix it... This is about free speech and trying to simply get facts out. I have no agenda and I have no petty republican/democrat bias, so I cant be called out for that either. Simply wighting it off as "well it doesn't belong here" isn't right because then it will just get pushed into some little "conspiracy" article where no one will read it, and people will think it's just that, conspiracy. Wikipedia has a serious problem in regards to these issues, and it needs to stop or people will either be dangerously misled or Wikipedia will lose more credibility in the world of academia as a reliable unbiased source. Wikipedia the way it is setup and the mentality of a lot of the editors cause it to always take the side of mainstream creating a huge bias in the way an article is written. Please people, we need to come to a compromise here and think about what's right. Preservefreedom (talk) 22:40, 14 January 2008 (UTC)


I would also like to comment on the biased views of the person who wrote the whole section under where this article is posted on the discussion. It isn't signed by anyone either. The section that says "this seems to seek a reversal of 3 years of implicit consensus" is not good enough to be taken into consideration because this is an opinion, and not credible. The excuse about putting this section into the article before some vacation in irrelevant because a vacation had nothing to do with the writing of the section. Until someone can prove that I compiled the information because of a vacation this statement means nothing. This person came up with the excuse that the articles used were "presumably stale" is no excuse to delete an article. That's a standard reason to improve the article, by confirming it with new sources if that is desired. If the constitution stale??? The Phrase that that person used "20 loosely related allegations of opportunities for bad acts" is an example of weasel words used to try and discredit the writer, another example of biased opinions. The Phrase "Very few of the citations are from media widely recognized for professional scholarship or journalism" is simply a way to try and attack the sources because mainstream media doesn't cover these instances, that's how it's setup. The phrase that the person criticized "1 in 5 Americans believe the elections were fraudulent"... Once again, just put a source on it if you have a problem with it, it's no excuse to delete a section. Standard procedure. Based on a number of peer reviews and professional reviews on businessmen, journalists, engineers, computer experts, the cant find any major reasons why the section should be removed from the article. Preservefreedom (talk) 06:10, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
If no one can discus why he section cant be put in the article, and with good valid reasons, or how to fix it so that it can be put in, then there's no choice but to put it back in the way it currently is. It was put in discussion to be discussed, not ignored. Preservefreedom (talk) 02:31, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
It's been 2 weeks and no one has replied or come up a reason not to have the section added to the article. The only option otherwise is to have it put back in, and we'll see how long it lasts before someone has a complaint because they don't like the subject matter, though they will call it something else. Preservefreedom (talk) 20:14, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Points of controversy

I gave the section a more appropriate title and tried to clean it up some, by merging closely related items, removing unsourced items, etc. It could use more checking and possibly cleanup, but basically I think the main content is relevant, verifiable, and well sourced. There are lots of book sources on this stuff, too; if some of the points need better sources, I'd look there. Dicklyon (talk) 01:10, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks man, I appreciate the help. It's about time someone actually did good here instead of removing it for some random reason. I'll work on finding sources for the parts that had to be removed for that reason and then maybe add them at a later date. 155.31.209.155 (talk) 06:42, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Controversial points of controversy

My first thoughts about this section is that largely they don't seem directly related to the 2004 presidential election and would be better served somewhere else... But I still figured I would improve them. Also, I don't really think the title is appropriate. Maybe these things can be worked into relevant sections within the article.

  1. The regulation/oversight comment is misleading. While no one agency has been directed to be the regulatory agency, Congress does have regulatory authority. Further, it should be noted that the EAC does have some authority and significant influence (not mentioning them would be a mistake). Lastly the GAO clearly has oversight capabilities and have launched a dozen inquiries into voting industry relating issues in the last 5 years.
  2. It wasn't "vice-president of Diebold" is was the President of Diebold Election Systems, now called Premier Election Solutions, who's president is now Dave Byrd ([4]). Can anyone confirm Bob Urosevich is still with Diebold or PES in any capacity? And it wasn't the president of ES&S it was the vice president of customer support.
  3. "Eighty percent of all votes in America" First I don't think it's quite the same thing to say the company counts the votes as the machines they sell count the votes. Second, the sources just don't add up on this one. The source provides statistical figures with no reference of any kind and cannot even breakout the 80% between the 2 companies. For such an strong (and potentially controversial) statement, a real reference is required.
  4. Cleaned up the Walden O'Dell item.
  5. Hagel: I'm using the direct source for all of this from The Hill (newspaper), rather than the 3 times removed (including being passed through the Bev Harris filter) sources offered. "Caught lying" is simply a fabrication, from the source "Hagel has not been accused of any legal or ethical violation."
  6. "Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of" This one is just silly. These two things are wholly unrelated. (apples vs. oranges)
  7. There are a bunch of "references" here that aren't referencing anything.
  8. I think it's worth noting that Diebold disputes the contracting relationship since Bev doesn't provide a direct reference. "planting back doors in his software" Conviction does not support this.
  9. Add Blackwell.
  10. Corrected language for decertification. "chimpanzee" is again silly and false.
  11. "30%..." tried to make this more NPOV and updated for date.
  12. "All the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates." This is in no way supported by the references. Rephrased and broke off Jeb to new bullet.

--Electiontechnology (talk) 19:09, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. We appreciate any help you can provide in making this section more NPOV an encyclopedic. Dicklyon (talk) 19:16, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

A book titled "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election"(2006) has extensive source material of a very high quality that can be very useful to the contributors to this article. The authors are Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.26.106.9 (talk) 15:34, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Where's the normal results table?

We seem to be absent the normal results table that we have in every other presidential election article. In particular, we don't list electoral votes for vice president. john k (talk) 22:59, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

D. Saltman - Bush won 2004 with 50.7% of the vote, the tightest re-election since Woodrow Wilson - how does that constitute an absolute majority? Please correct the discussion of the '04 election - it's embarrassing to Wikipedia to allow propagandistic information to be presented as fact. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.128.43.69 (talk) 04:13, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What are the criteria for including someone in the infobox?

John Edwards ended his campaign very early in the 2004 election. Should he be in the infobox just because he got one electoral vote? He wasn't even a candidate in November, so how could he be in the infobox? Timmeh! 15:58, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

This is a spill-over from the 2008 article, where we are trying to enforce standards. I have removed it; if someone puts it back up, I suggest removing it again. The Evil Spartan (talk) 16:01, 7 June 2008 (UTC)