Charting Electoral Fraud:
Turnout Distribution Analysis as a Tool for Election Assessment
Summary:
An above-average voter turnout in a given precinct is often a
signal of electoral fraud. Local oligarchs have a
selfish interest in delivering the maximum number of votes for the winning
candidate or party in electoral districts they control. Vote-buying,
intimidation, and ballot box stuffing raise reported voter turnout as well as the number of votes for the winning candidate, but
only in the precincts in which they occur.
Most precincts are honest, even in a fraudulent election. It is
worth the trouble to compile the turnout and vote count from every
precinct into a single spreadsheet. By aggregating precinct-level election results by voter turnout,
one can generate a graph of how far voter behavior diverges from the bell-curve
distribution of an honest election.
This graph gives policy-makers a useful tool for judging whether a
given election was free and fair.
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here for the rest of the paper.
In late April 2004 I was one of 82 former U.S.
Foreign Service officers who signed a letter to President Bush protesting
his endorsement of Israeli settlement of the West Bank.
The unexpected result of my signature was to find myself invited to
join eight fellow signers, three of them former U.S. ambassadors, in a
visit to Ramallah, the de facto West Bank capital, at the expense of the
Palestinian American Congress. This
was too interesting an invitation to pass up.
Palestinian hospitality is proverbial, and their desperate search
for U.S. sympathy turned them into generous hosts indeed.
Crossing Jordan River
We crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan on July 16, 2004 and
returned on July 23. This was
my first visit to the Holy Land since my maiden Foreign Service posting,
to U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv in 1983-1985.
The
King Hussein/Allenby Bridge from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is the
West Bank's airport. ...
For continuation as a
Word document (6900 words) click
here...
For
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs coverage of the trip click
here...
(Op-Ed for
Danish newspaper, September 2005)
Frank Grevil is fighting to stay out of prison on a
charge of leaking Danish state secrets.
His crime was to reveal an intelligence assessment that made clear
that the Prime Minister of Denmark was not telling the truth to the Danish
people about the war into which he was leading them.
Since 2004, leaks of classified information, particularly the
Downing Street memos in the UK, have made clear the brutally inadequate
political basis for the Iraq War. As
a diplomat in Athens in February 2003, I had no access to the equivalent
U.S. "smoking gun." If
I had, it would have been my duty as an American patriot to leak it to the
press. Americans learned the
truth about their national interests in Iraq far too late -- no U.S.
official risked prison by putting loyalty to the American people above
loyalty to career.
America prides itself on open government, but it also hoards more
secrets than anyone else. As a
U.S. diplomat for twenty years, I had access to good secrets and bad
secrets. The CIA will go
berserk, and properly so, to protect the men and women brave enough to
share their native countries' shameful secrets with an often benevolent
superpower. This is the proper
meaning of secret intelligence.
Policy secrets are not real secrets.
When Henry Kissinger launched America's "secret bombing"
in Cambodia in 1969, the Cambodians knew exactly who was bombing them.
When Fogh Rasmussen took Denmark to war, millions of people knew
perfectly well that Iraq did not pose a threat to the security of Denmark
or its allies. Most documents are stamped "secret" simply for
the convenience of politicians and bureaucrats.
A governmentt that relies on secrets is a government that serves
other interests than those of the people who elected it.
It will be a sad distinction for Danish justice if Denmark is the only
country in America's Iraq coalition to imprison one of its officials for
putting his country ahead of his career. The Danish people, whose sons and
daughters are bravely attempting the impossible in Iraq, should take a
lesson from the CIA's loyalty to its own sources of "secrets."
They should repay Frank Grevil's higher loyalty with their own.
April 2004
Colin Powell was a fine
Secretary of State, poised to be the finest in half a century. He was
outward looking, loyal to his troops, respected by his colleagues, an
effective representative of the United States.
When I resigned from the State Department over Iraq last February,
my sense was that Powell should not follow.
He was a vital asset for U.S. foreign policy, the only
counterweight to the disastrous impact of a President, Vice President, and
Secretary of Defense ignorant of the global responsibilities of a
superpower.
I had few illusions about the impact of my resignation.
It is unlikely that even Secretary Powell's resignation could have
prevented the Iraq war. In any
case, his reservations – correct as far as they went -- were outweighed
by loyalty to his President and faith in the assurances of Director of
Central Intelligence Tenet that Iraq was a threat.
Powell presented his best case for legitimate war under a UN
mantle. He failed not out of
disloyalty or incompetence but because his foreign interlocutors knew
better. Still, he persuaded
some allies to stand with us, to the administration’s benefit and their
own detriment.
But now it is time for Powell to resign.
Last week's visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon was the confirmation that U.S. foreign policy has been suspended
until Election Day. The
customary pandering to special interests will give way to more honorable
policy only after November 2. For electoral pandering, Secretary Powell's
character is of dubious utility. He
can mark time, at best. And in
any case the Secretary can no longer perform his role of damage control
for the administration. In today's Washington, which like Falluja prizes
tribal loyalty above duty to country, there is no room for a Secretary who
has shared his misgivings so vividly with the President's hagiographer.
Resignation would buy Secretary Powell the best protection from his
detractors, the right to speak freely in service of the American people.
Only Powell has the stature to confirm why this administration’s
experiments in unilateralism were doomed to fail. Only Powell can explain
to the people of Iraq why America is inept but not evil, and why our
occupying forces deserve cooperation.
Only Powell can reassure a frightened world that the American
people have not really abandoned either international law or common
humanity in a panicked pursuit of security at any price.
Resignation does not come cheap. Powell
is tough, disciplined, financially secure, a hero to millions regardless
of what he does. But dissent
cuts us off from the peer group on whose good opinion we are conditioned
to depend. Depression is
likely, and only a very melancholy sense of vindication.
This is not an administration that learns from history.
But America does. Colin
Powell has little time left to write himself a better place in history
books than the footnote his misplaced loyalty would earn him in the
biographies of the President he tried to serve.
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February 2004
The sin for which Donald Rumsfeld will rot in hell is
that he betrayed the only purposes that might have made the Iraq war a
just war for the U.S. War is
an extension of politics. The
war in Iraq made sense only if it upheld the political goals of America as
a whole, the goals articulated by the President of the United States with
the advice and consent of the Congress.
Our stated goal in invading was to make America and the world safe
from a large and growing threat. This,
everyone agreed, did not mean simply erasing Saddam Hussein's
unpredictable leadership of Iraq from the President's post-9/11 terrorist
threat matrix. This meant
reorganizing Iraq as a viable state that neither offered war against its
neighbors nor exported terrorists or their arsenals.
It also meant assuaging the vivid anger and fear our invasion
inspired in America's vital allies, by demonstrate a rapid, convincing net
increase in collective happiness of the Iraqi people at our own expense.
If we deterred other foes by proving the formidable competence of a
revolutionized U.S. military, that was a minor collateral benefit.
The task Rumsfeld grasped required the military to be a loyal
servant of politics, putting America's interests ahead of its own military
convenience.
Our ability to destroy Saddam's army at minimal loss
to ourselves was never in question after the Gulf War in 1991.
The minimize size and most efficient conformation of the force
needed to dismantle this bedraggled and betrayed army was an interesting
intellectual challenge, but was irrelevant to the purposes of this war.
The legitimate question was what combination of military force and
effective civil administration would allow the most rapid, painless, and
inexpensive restoration of a defanged Iraq to its people. General Shinseki
was the expert who, predictably, kept his eye on the ball and got it
right. Two hundred thousand
troops blanketing the country to impose immediate order, and billions of
dollars to implement an immediate, massive reconstruction of decaying
infrastructure, might have done the job.
Less than that would certainly fail at the purposes for which the
war was fought. It did fail.
Secretary Rumsfeld rewrote his assignment, however,
insisting that his responsibility was to win a military victory.
His force structure and operational planning were designed to
capture Baghdad at minimum cost to his budget and with no sacrifice to his
vision of a high-tech, low-manpower military. The
reasons were simple enough: an
accurate, public accounting of the costs in lives and treasure to achieve
the promised benefits might have deterred even a more bloodthirsty
president than George W. Bush. And in this way Rumfeld won a battle but
America lost a war.
It may be that no power on earth, no matter how wise
and virtuous, could have kept Iraq from collapsing into chaos tempered by
tribal theocracy. Rumsfeld
owed it to America and his own conscience to try.
His contemptuous dismissal of the looting of a whole Iraqi
civilization suggests a profound disregard for the values that brought
America its global preeminence.
July 2003
Dear Editors:
National Security Advisor Rice’s contention,
reported in the Post on July 14, that the British could not share
corroborating information on Iraqi nuclear acquisitions, is an insult to
the intelligence of the Post and the public, not to mention to sixty years
of loyal U.S.-UK intelligence sharing.
This is a life or death political issue for Prime Minister Blair.
It is inconceivable that usable information on Iraq’s nuclear
program would have been withheld.
The American people should assume, until given credible evidence to
the contrary, that our British friends recognized that release of this
additional “intelligence” would be as embarrassing as that of the
fraudulent Niger yellowcake documents.
The CIA and its British counterparts will not willingly reveal that
they accidentally flimflammed one another – each thinking the other had
solid information – in a conscientious but failed effort to help
President Bush and PM Blair manipulate world opinion.
Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld and Dr.
Rice had themselves first manipulated the President, using self-serving
defector reports and other raw intelligence rejected as worthless by the
professional analysts. They
relied on a “realistic” but ignorant faith that Saddam Hussein’s
devotion to his nuclear and other WMD programs would be as deep as their
own.
Unless we redeem our brutally sacrificed international credibility through
a courageous self-examination of what we knew and when we knew it, our
experimental doctrine of unilateral preemption will be morally
indistinguishable from naked aggression.
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October 1999
Editors:
The fifty-one senators who voted against the CTBT
have dealt the security of our country a more vicious blow than they are
morally or intellectually equipped to realize. By virtue of its democratic
institutions and noble intentions, the U.S. is tolerated internationally
in behavior that tests the limits of international legality.
This evil vote, betraying
our friends while allying ourselves with the pariah nations of the world,
forfeits that precious legitimacy. Discrediting our highest democratic
institution as a force for sanity, we also discredit
America's leadership in the world.
A previous Senate, blinded by ideology and hatred of a sitting
president, opened the door to WWII; this one, by legitimizing the nuclear
programs of our foes, guarantees new global disasters, against which we
will find ourselves friendless and, expensive ABM fantasies
notwithstanding, helpless.
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