Was the 2004 Election Stolen? BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

[Guest guest]

If you think we have a government elected by the people, don't miss

this......

 

 

_http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen_

 

(http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen)

 

 

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

 

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots

or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White

House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

 

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the

returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an

overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the

official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day,

lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded.

Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut

cases in

''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to

question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately

dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York

Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large

scale.''(2)

 

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that

something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6

million

American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received

them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a

state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting

firm

called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National

Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered

shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by

5,988

votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a

presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the

federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1

million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for

every

100 cast.(10)

 

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground

state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there

purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to

process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged

Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed

a

recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an

evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of

ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an

equally

impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election

officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from

monitoring the official vote count.(11)

 

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a

messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We

didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who

directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American

University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections

run by

13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

 

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their

decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and

benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become

convinced

that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert

the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election

officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical

tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in

Ohio

alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic,

were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in

2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by

118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most

astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who

registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they

were not

listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood

of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into

account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards

of

80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of

more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White

House.(15)

 

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in

2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting

in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to

vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you

had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican

outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

 

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most

experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election

as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political

polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts,

compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the

discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

 

I. The Exit Polls The first indication that something was gravely amiss on

November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and

actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they

deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error.

In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

 

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science.

Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the

most

reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict

their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving

the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are

exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the

mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost

never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both

Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so

reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of

elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by

exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step

down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the

Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the

presidency.(20)

 

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the

U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey

treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the

discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the

offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected''

numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote

count.

Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media

preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

 

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their

clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as

anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up

-- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with

them again.''

 

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the

most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running

the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research

and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered

the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the

credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll,

Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) --

approximately six

times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the

margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

 

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.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair

went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

 

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.(30) Against these numbers, the

statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31)

''Either

the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst

declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

 

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible

disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the

eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls

had

predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN

had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage

points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent.

Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in

Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

 

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of

Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all

three

of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can

say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is

impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in

the

three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to

chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

 

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling

data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political --

I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this

because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In

his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls,

Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical

analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

 

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election,

Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the

pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky,

Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November

2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that

skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

 

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading

pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is

''prepos

terous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness

of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in

general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than

Bush voters.''(37)

 

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. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and

the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the

exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38)

''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,''

observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

 

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.(39)

 

''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.''

 

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of

mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog

group,

compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the

forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those

precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that

differed

widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the

widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of

the

suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. 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.(40)

 

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable

evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are

consistent

with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if

Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41)

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.''

 

II. The Partisan Official No state was more important in the 2004 election

than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory

since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television

ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and

energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine

times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

 

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in

charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President

Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had

broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws --

setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to

the

conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he

had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in

fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during

the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of

his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired

Bush's campaign there.(46)

 

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is

well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An

outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even

in

cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage

amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He

has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and

during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds

of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued

two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking

to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in

2000.''(51)

 

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw

them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with

Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example

of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the

exercise of the right to vote.''

 

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by

Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52)

Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of

voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held

public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints

from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that

outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in

Ohio.''

The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct

and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth

Blackwell.''(54)

 

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me.

''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had

hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of

fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this

had ever happened to them before.''

 

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts

to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its

face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for

electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had

begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen

involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials

in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter

rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had

failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In

Cleveland,

which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from

the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

 

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names

undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were

duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote

-- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to

go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where

more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1

percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

 

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised

tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000

purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate,

according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly

denied

the opportunity to cast ballots.

 

III. The Strike Force In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in

the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands

of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the

state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline.

To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their

Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found

that

new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent,

compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61)

''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the

ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington

Times.(62)

 

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and

the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of

predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings

known in

electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used

such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and

Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to

abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted

minority

voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000

newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a

mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob

Bennett

-- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to

invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the

letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the

challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

 

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the

mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because

they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and

home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no

permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed,

proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

 

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken

from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts

were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would

inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that

one

Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72)

Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right

to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late

in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans

contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's

detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged

voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)

 

Continued on page 2 at:

 

_http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen_

 

(http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen)

 

Don't miss 11 hour lines to vote on page 2.

 

Don't miss Faulty Machines that switched votes on page 3.

 

Most important is Rigging the Recount on page 4.