The 2004 Election Theft

The Rolling Stone article on the 2004 election theft can be found here. I had previously read about most of this stuff, but seeing all the evidence set out in one article really kind of gave me the creeps and made me wonder if we'll ever have a fair national election in this country again. Kenneth Blackwell, who was the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee in 2004 as well as Ohio's secretary of state, should be thrown in prison and never released.

Here's some excerpts from the article regarding the exit polling from 2004 (via Brad Blog):

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states – including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida – and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.
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Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day.
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What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent – a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.

“When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,” concludes Freeman. “The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud – and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.”
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The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered “27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.
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According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, “No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the “completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are “completely consistent with election fraud – specifically vote shifting.”

It is a long article, and the above-quoted excerpts barely scratch the surface. Read the whole thing -- it's worth it.

And if you missed Keith Olbermann tearing Bill O'Lielly apart yesterday, check it out here. It is great.