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Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count

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Now why would anyone have a problem with using computers as vote processors, when computers will simply do what they're told, can do what they're told even if told to do it years in advance, and will do it without regard to any laws, morals or ethics?

Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss do a great job of explaining the consequences of this e-voting debacle. Nobody's yet found a computer accountable enough to trust with counting votes, nor one that fears going to jail. THe computers just seem to follow whatever anyone tells them.

If you seek a very accessible guide to the 2004 election, starting with election night and proceeding through all the major issues, I can't make a higher recommendation than this book or Mark Crispin Miller's book. This is the most important issue in our democracy right now, and these authors do it a good service.

Full Disclosure: A study I co-authored on touch screen voting is discussed on pages 75-79 and I was pleased with its accuracy, the first such time I've had the pleasure of reporting accuracy from journalists or authors.

Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania and veteran journalist Joel Bleifuss have produced a riveting and carefully-researched page turner examining whether the 2004 presidential election could have been stolen. Whatever your political affiliation, this volume is worthy of your attention. It will clearly be the subject of significant controversy, discussion and debate.

To start with the obvious question: is this the work of conspiracy theorists or wing-nuts? Emphatically not (although it must be admitted that the authors have no love for the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, nor for election officials in Ohio and Florida). The authors patiently examine recent and historic patterns of voting irregularities; painstakingly detail the lack of data security and auditable paper trails surrounding the use of direct-recording electronic (DRE or automatic touch) voting machines; and provide a thorough review of the statistical and other evidence concerning the question of whether the 2004 presidential exit polls were valid, or whether the votes might not have been counted as cast.

In sum, this book is serious, clearly written and well-researched. And yes, despite the presence of footnotes and appendices, it is clear, plain-spoken and hard-hitting, even for those of us who are neither computer professionals, political scientists or statisticians.

Some of what you'll learn if you buy a copy:
--How the fair performance of a Las Vegas voting machine is assured, and how that compares to the monitoring of your automatic touch voting machine.
--What can be more easily verified: your grocery store purchase and your bank machine withdrawal or your vote on an automatic touch voting machine.
--What computer professionals think of automatic touch voting and why.
--Why the most widely-accepted explanations for why the U.S. exit polls supposedly failed in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections may have significant statistical and logical shortcomings.

The integrity of the U.S. election process is the linchpin of American democracy. At minimum, Freeman and Bleifuss demonstrate that the system may be wobblier than you might have thought.

Republicans, Democrats, Independents and all others owe it to themselves to read and debate this important book. Whether you agree with the authors' conclusions or not, you'll want to form your own opinions about a fascinating book that will inevitably be the subject of considerable interest and controversy.

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. But what angers and upsets me is that in both 2000 and 2004, the will of the people was subverted. This book should be read by every American of either party who cares about the preservation of the democratic process.

How can a democratic country allow voting machines that cannot be verified? How can it let interested parties run elections? How can the media stand by while people are not allowed to vote? The answer is that a democratic country can't do this and remain democratic.

This book provides a huge amount of statistical evidence that the official results do not match what actually hapenned in the 2004 election. It's very convincing, and hopefully will demonstrate to many people that we will lose our democracy if we don't demand fair elections.

This is the one. If you've had a hunch that the 2004 election was stolen, but have been stymied in arguing the case by too much conjecture, too little hard evidence, and vulnerability to people who think you're a paranoid, tin-foil hat, conspiracy theorist, this book is going to make your life easier. Not a lot easier, though, because 1) people want to believe that America is innately good; and 2) the the cheating is so widespread that it boggles the mind and will. But Freeman and Bleifuss provide the essential facts and key questions for attacking the problem step-by-step. The book is very clearly organized with sections about voter disenfranchisement (especially African-American), corruptible voting machines, legal and illegal suppression of votes, the particular cases of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, and biased polls.

Freeman's specialty is polling. He wisely begins with November 2, 2004, reminding us of all those afternoon and early evening exit polls that showed Kerry winning the election. The sudden and dramatic turnaround late at night, all-too-reminiscent of the previous presidential election, made many of us wonder what kind of dirty tricks were being played. Freeman provides photo evidence of tampering with the polls after the "official" election results were submitted. He keeps coming back to the exit polls and their essential trustworthiness as a bellwether of foul play. Reminding us of the velvet revolution in Ukraine that occurred just weeks before our own election, he repeatedly probes reasons why Americans didn't use similar evidence to examine fraud at home. It was easy for him to convince me that the NEP consortium that created the exit polls produced a state-of-the-art sample that was the fruit of years of experience and expertise. It's hard to believe they didn't lead to harder questions. The contrast between exit polls and actual election procedures might lead one to trust the former more than our actual democracy, but everyone can agree that such a step would be foolish indeed, especially because some of the NEP data is proprietary and secret. It's also clear that the final poll results were "tweaked" in order to fit the "official" data. This should be a criminal offense in a democracy, but it seems to have passed as business as usual. Luckily enough raw data was revealed and enough inconsistencies emerged to lead thoughtful people like Freeman to examine the data more closely.

And ultimately the polls are only a check against corruption of the process. If they lead to questions, the vote should be checked, which leads to the whole issue of paper trails and verifiability. If Freeman's book creates a sense of outrage, it also leads to conviction that we must have a transparent voting system with checks and balances. It's very clear that lack of accountability leads to illegality. To be a government of laws, we must have men and women who enforce the law. While I wish Freeman had looked more critically at the reasons for feeble Democratic response to outright theft and the culpability of the media in corruption of our democracy, he provides enough grist for the reader to grind the mill. Finally, we're all implicated because we've known what's going on and haven't plopped ourselves down in the square or the streets like the Ukranians, Mexicans, and others who have had their votes stolen by the powers that be. Activists are taking the next steps in voter protections groups around the country, and momentum is building toward a national consensus. Freeman's book is essential reading for those who want to know how the election was stolen and are eager to talk reasonably with people who know something was wrong but don't want to upset the apple-cart. Questions have been floating around for six years now (I'm thinking of the 2000 election as well) - Freeman and Bleifuss provide answers without demanding true belief. This is a great book to leave behind at your cousin's or friend's house - just dipping into it will wash away illusion.

This is a phenomenal book in every way. It was also very difficult to read--not because it is written badly (it's not), but because the book makes it abundantly clear that the 2004 election was stolen--and our democracy failed us, badly. Why didn't this book get a lot of attention from the press? Why was it not reviewed in the New York Times? Why are so few people aware of this book and its first-rate scholarship?

Every American who takes the integrity of elections for granted must read this book because its evidence is so strong and its conclusions are so shocking. The first author is an MIT-trained expert in statistical analysis in social sciences, and the book is chock full of hard evidence, not conspiracy theories. Here is a terse summary of the evidence.

1. Systematic Discrepancies Between Exit Poles and Ballot Counts

Discrepancies between poll exit interviews and official vote counts are far beyond the limits of statistical probability in many places.
* Exit poles closely tracked vote counts in precincts that used paper ballots in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
* Exit poles diverged by 6-7% from certified vote counts on electronic voting machines.
* The discrepancies increased in proportion to how important a state or precinct vote was in determining the electoral vote and whether the voting in that polity was administered and tallied by Republicans.
* In 2000, 2002 and 2004, virtually all large discrepancies favor Republicans, which coincidence has odds of occurrence of one in millions.

For the past 40 years, poll exit interviews have proven highly reliable checks on integrity of elections. Exit polling methods have been refined to account for numerous secondary distortions in accuracy, such as different response rates to exit poles by various demographic and political groups.

The cumulative effects of these divergences were to give Bush-Cheney both elections in spite of the strong evidence from exit poles that they did not win in either 2000 or 2004.

2. Vote Suppression

Election officials have practiced voter suppression for specific demographic groups and precincts. For example, in Florida
* Criteria for accepting voter registrations, allowing slightly defective ballots, voter identification requirements at the polls, acceptance of absentee ballots, and other factors affecting the vote count differ by precinct, and tend toward looser standards in Republican precincts.
* African Americans tend to vote Democratic, while Cuban-Hispanics tend to vote Republican. Voting machines and problem resolution systems tend to be inadequate in African American areas and adequate in Cuban-Hispanic areas. Lists intended to exclude former felons from voter roles (done in no other country in the world) contained race information and were assembled with very rough name matching, but virtually excluded Hispanic names.

The methods of voter suppression used in several states are too numerous to recount here.

3. Insecure Voting Machines

DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines are exceptionally prone to error or fraud yet by 2004 they recorded about about 1/3 of votes and their share is growing. Computer experts unanimously condemn as DRE machines as unreliable, easy targets for fraud, and lacking in a paper trail for verification.

DRE voting machines are virtually unregulated black boxes, compared to slot machines in Nevada. For example,
* The state of Nevada has access to all gambling software. It is illegal for casinos to use software that is not on file. Software for electronic voting machines is a trade secret.
* Board inspectors show up unannounced at casinos to compare computer chips to those on file. No checks of voting machines are required, and even if an election official wants to, he or she would not have a chip to compare to the one in the machine.
* Slot machine manufacturers are subject to background checks that last 6 months or more, and any uncovered criminal record is investigated. Citizens have no way of knowing, for example, if e-voting programmers or industry executives have been convicted of fraud. In fact, at least one key technical executive in a voting machine company has a previous conviction for fraud.
* Slot machines are certified by a public agency that maintains and arms length relationship with manufacturers. Public questions are invited. Voting machines are certified by for-profit companies chosen and paid by the manufacturers. No public information is available on how the testing is done.
* If a gambler believes he or she has been cheated, the casino is required to contact the Gaming Control Board, which has investigators on call around the clock. Investigators can open machines to inspect their internal mechanisms and their records of recent gambling outcomes. If a voter believes a machine has manipulated his/her vote, in most cases the only recourse is to call the Board of Elections to lodge a complain that may or may not be investigated.

In 2005 a commission headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker called for an auditable paper trail for all votes. In Florida, and to some extent nationally, Republicans oppose expenditures to provide paper trails for elections. Democrats support such measures.

4. Defects in Electoral Procedures

In 2004, President Jimmy Carter's foundation, which specializes in monitoring elections in other countries, stated that "Some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida," the most significant of which are: (1) a non-partisan electoral commission or official, (2) uniformity in voting procedures.

5. Intervention by the Supreme Court in 2000

In the 2000 presidential election, had the US Supreme Court allowed the Florida recount to go ahead as ordered by Judge Allen, Gore would have clearly won.
* In 2000, Florida Judge Terry Allen, overseer of the 2004 Florida vote, ruled for a recount and that the clear intent of every vote should be counted when it could be ascertained as per the standard set by the Florida State Supreme Court. Republicans petitioned the US Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount ordered by Judge Allen and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court ordered the recount stopped.
* So called "overvotes" (ballots having improper marks outside the check boxes) that were rejected by voting machines were later examined by researchers and classified. When the rejected overvotes with clear intent were counted, Gore received 68,200 votes and Bush received 23,802; therefore, Gore won Florida by over 40,000 votes which would have overturned the certified 537 vote advantage given to Bush by the Republican administered voting process. Even if only the category of rejected "overvotes" had been included in the certified vote where a candidate's name was written in and the ballot was properly marked for the same candidate, Gore would have won.

6. Fear of Raising such an Explosive Issue

The media, exit polling companies, and the Democratic Party focus on anecdotal evidence of fraud. They deemphasize the most competent professional analyses, which establish that fraud was extremely likely in many elections, including two presidential elections, from 2000 to 2004. Systemic fraud in presidential elections is so explosive that mainstream institutions avoid seriously raising the issue.

The book explains many other types of fraud that contributed a few (ten or hundred) thousand votes each that were more than enough to account for the Bush margin of victory in the popular vote and the electoral college.

7. Conclusion

The book is full of statistical tests of the probability of the outcomes in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections. The authors conclude that systemic fraud must be present in American elections during this period. In the 2006 midterm elections, the gains by Democrats were significantly less than the gains indicated by exit polls. The problem has not gone away.
Actual and potential electoral fraud could be greatly reduced by some basic reforms - such as insisting on nonpartisan electoral commissions, paper trails for all votes, and effective poll exit surveys). Obviously Americans must address these issues before any others in the electoral system.

Politicians need public backing and outcry to fix the growing systematic fraud occurring in U.S. elections.

I counted votes in Ohio for the Green party during the recount in 2004. I know for certain that votes were stolen and I know how it was done. This book describes how the votes were stolen in myriad ways across the state by miscounting and by not counting certain votes at all. In my county they had what is called a "rolling ballot" where the names at different precincts were in a different order on the ballot. It was incumbent upon the programmer to change the program for counting each deck of cards for each precinct. All he had to do was fail to change the program and a Kerry vote became a Bush vote. I watched it happen during the recount. Only in favor of the Republicans, of course. This was only one incident in an otherwise scrupulously honest County in southern Ohio. The book lists many more outrageous incidences such as the notorious Clermont County FBI lockdown. It reads like a spy novel. Every voter should read it.

This book uses the science of statistics to destroy any notion that the 2004 election was accurately and honestly recorded. Every excuse for the exit polls is refuted. It may take a Ph.D in statistics to write this book but the facts are so clear, anyone with a grasp of arithmetic and open to reality can understand the book and appreciate its warning to us.

Look at the other reviews. See which ones are reasoned and supported by details. See which ones are fact free dismissals.

You know, George Bush lost the popular vote in 2000. We had 20 million new voters in 2004: 55-60% of whom voted for John Kerry. So we're left with MILLIONS of Gore/Nader voters from 2000 voting for George Bush in 2004.

Does that sound at all plausible? Of course not. It never happened. This election was stolen. It probably ended up pretty much like the one Obama won this week over John McCain.

I'd like to point out in this review that the #1 reason fraud-doubters blow off the exit polls from this election is because such polls have been "trending" Democratic for years. That is to say they've been pulling away from the final tally all that time; and that these final tallies have been increasingly skewed to the Republicans. So they're a worthless tool for sniffing out election fraud, and millions of formerly rational Americans must have gotten kicked in the head between 2000 and 2004.

Of course, that argument is based on the assumption that THOSE TALLIES HAVE NOT ALSO BEEN RIGGED. Rome wasn't built in a day my friends. If you're going to steal a national election you have to work up to that, and previous exit polls may have been picking up on that budding network of psychopathology.

Dr. Freeman... If you're reading this you might want to look over that trend. ESPECIALLY when Karl Rove's involved. It's the next logical step.