No part of this book struck home for me more than the contrast of two elections that took place in November 2004. In both elections exit polls showed one candidate with a strong majority of the popular votes, yet the official tallies show the other candidate winning. The exact same individual oversaw both exit polls. Yet in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, there was an international outcry of fraud and election theft fueled by the outrage between the official tallies and their variance with the exit polls, an outrage in which the White House joined. As a result Eduard Shevardnadze was forced by international opposition out of office. In the other election, however, instead of the exit polls calling into question the official results, the exit polls themselves were declared in error.
Exit polls are astonishingly accurate. Internationally they are used as a gauge of how fair and valid an election is. Except in the United States. For some reason, the idea that an election in the United States could be stolen is unthinkable, and I will confess that while I heard many stating that the 2004 election was fraudulent, without knowing the facts I wrote the claims off as conspiracy theories. But facts are stubborn critters and while you might be able to suppress them for a while, they will eventually rear their heads. And in the 2004 election both exit polls and a number of other statistics suggest that there was a substantial shifting of votes from John Kerry to George Bush.
That the GOP has tried to subvert the Democratic process is beyond question. The attempt to scrub voter roles in Florida and elsewhere is not only well documented, those harmed by such actions have won court actions alleging civil rights violations. Undeterred by the law and the Justice Departments, the states just went ahead and scrubbed the voter roles again. The book also mentions the blatant attempts to suppress voter registration by African-Americans and other minorities as well as numerous other tactics of Republicans to keep groups who are likely to vote Democrat from voting. History has shown repeatedly that large voter turn outs as well as maximum voter inclusion strongly favors Democrats. Republicans have long responded by attempting to keep people off voter roles or hindering people from voting. But this book is not in the end about these voters. What Freeman and Bleifuss want to account for is the significant and statistically improbable (so improbable to be a near impossibility) gap between the exit polls (which are substantiated by other polls and statistics) and the official vote totals that Kerry and Bush received in 2004. Although it is now definitively known that the 2000 election was won by Al Gore (it is simply a fact that the judge in charge of the recount in Florida was going to authorize a state wide recount of all the undervotes, which would have provided Gore with a very comfortable victory--the recount did not go forward because the federal judiciary in the form of the Supreme Court intervened in a purely state matter, in what is incontestably one of the worst violations of judicial authority in American history), it now appears that in fact Kerry both earned a higher total in both popular and electoral votes than Gore did or should have won in 2000. In other words, we now know that Gore unquestionably should have won the 2000 election, and there is substantial evidence that Kerry even more decisively defeated Bush in 2004.
Republicans will call anyone impugning the outcome of the 2004 election a sore loser, but numbers are numbers. Anyone who remembers the election of 2004 will remember television analysts before the polls closed talking about how glum the White House was, how sullen and unhappy those gathering for the GOP election party were, how elated Democrats were. Why? The exit polls were showing a very strong victory by Kerry. To be specific, the exit polls showed Kerry winning between 282 and 364 electoral votes and between 5 million and 7 million popular votes. Later the exit poll results were "adjusted" to reflect the official tallies, but the raw data showed a strong Kerry victory, especially in the key battleground states of Ohio, Nevada, and New Mexico by numbers well outside the margin of error, as well as probable victories in Florida, Iowa, and Colorado, though there inside the margin of error. In addition, Bush victories in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri were well within the margin of error. Suspiciously, virtually every state exit poll showed Kerry doing significantly better in almost every state than he actually did. Only in a couple of states did Bush do worse than exit polls predict, and those were Republican strongholds where Kerry did only one or two tenths of a percentage point better, not only within the error of margin but statistically insignificant. All told, the exit polls indicated that Kerry nationwide should have done 6.5% better in the popular vote than he was credited with. Again, the question of why this divergence between the popular vote and the exit polls would be significant in former Soviet Georgia but not the US has to be raised.
One of the great absurdities of the 2004 election was the silly theory of the uncooperative Bush responder. Bush voters, so the theory postulates (and it is pure postulation, since there is utterly no evidence for this--in fact, there is some evidence that Bush voters actually were more likely to respond to exit pollsters), were reluctant to answer pollsters' questions. Nevermind that there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence for such a presumption; it because near orthodoxy in the days following the election. It is uncanny how such a baseless belief gained such strength. What is more amazing is that almost everyone agreed--without seeing the raw exit poll data--that the exit polls and not the final vote total must be suspect. There really are no grounds for this conclusion exception a profound reluctance to consider the possibility that Bush's people stole millions of votes. Yet the evidence points in that direction more easily than in the direction of the theory of the reluctant Bush voter.
So if votes were stolen, how were they? This is a harder question to answer. We know that there was vast voter suppression on the part of the GOP, but actual theft of votes is more in the way of speculation. The data definitely suggests THAT votes were stolen but does not describe HOW it was stolen. The book describes many ways that the votes could have been stolen, though one of the main culprits could be the electronic voting machines that became so much more widespread in the 2004 election. I would love to go into just a few of the many problems with using electronic voting machines, which have an amazingly spotty record so far. Anecdotally a very large number of people asserted problems with the machines switching votes to Bush as they looked at the screen, but the problems are greater than that. Electronic votes without a paper trail cannot be checked later for accuracy. And because the manufacturers refuse to reveal to anyone--not even government officials--the details of either their software or the hardware, there is no way to have confidence in them. One votes on an electronic machine in blind faith that it is accurate. Yet it is well known that without proper evaluation and inspection of the software and hardware, the machines could easily shift large numbers of votes from Kerry to Bush. Most likely this is what happened in the 2004 election. Again, there is no concrete evidence that this happened, but the proven unreliability of the machines and the resistance of the manufacturers to have their machines inspected makes the machines the likely suspect. THAT the votes were stolen is proven by the exit polls, while HOW they were stolen remains an unanswered question.
I have only one doubt about whether the election of 2004 was stolen and that lies with the fact that to pull this off requires a conspiracy of silence with a very large number of people. Or perhaps not. If the software engineer at Diebold, for instance, wrote some holes in the software that would enable a switch of votes or the creation of votes (there were several districts where more votes were cast than there were voters), this would not involve many people. One person could write the code, and then several tech support people could update the software once the full ballot was known. In fact, many of the machines did receive software patches immediately before the election. But I at this point find it harder to believe that every exit poll in every battleground state could be up to ten points off than that a software geek got George Bush elected president.
We should be very worried. Though polls show Democrats with a substantial lead over Republicans going into the 2006 election and Bush enormously unpopular in the polls, and although lame duck presidents almost always see their party lose a significant number of congressional representatives in the final off year election, we might not see that this time. Is it possible that the Republican Party has perfected the art of stealing elections? We know that many within the GOP have a Manichean mindset where the only good individuals are card-carrying members of the Republican Party and Democrats liberals who are assigned to the outer darkness. Many on the Right possess a view of the world whereby they could see it as a moral or religious duty to disenfranchise those secular liberals. But if my fears hold true and Democrats once again fail to do as well as polls indicate that they should, I think we should all become very, very suspicious.
I can live with the idea of a conservative in the White House. I won't like it, but I can accept the will of the people.
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