A Call to Investigate the 2004 Election
by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss
We've all heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of
celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for
Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat
down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be
the next president.
But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance
to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed
significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored
President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48
percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But
the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.
In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of
the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary of State
Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he used the power of
his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas.
Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented,
first in January 2005 by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and in
June 2005 by the Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of
DNC Chairman Howard Dean: ``More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported
problems with their voting experience."
Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate under
the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with new, unproven
technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans voted on direct
recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which
are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud. According to a September
2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained
flaws that ``could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or
modify data and programs that are critical to . . . the integrity of the
voting process."
A reasonable person could thus argue that a well-conducted exit poll
that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would
have to believe the results of such an election. Without an audit or a
recount to verify the official count, those of us who suspect that the
presidential election was stolen do so based on the information now
available.
In the days after the election, the media largely ignored this exit
poll discrepancy. When it was mentioned, it was only to report that the exit
polls -- based on a confidential, 25-question written survey of 114,559
voters in 1,480 precincts -- were flawed. The discrepancy, however, was real
and beyond the statistical margin of error. On that, there is widespread
agreement. What is still being debated is only the reasons for the
discrepancy.
In January 2005, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, the two men who
conducted the 2004 exit poll, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, released their
promised explanation. Their report began: ``The inaccuracies in the
exit-poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling
locations at which the exit polls were conducted." In other words, the
precincts they sampled were representative of the nation, so the discrepancy
was not the result of choosing unrepresentative precincts.
The data they released allows researchers to correlate voter
characteristics (race, age, sex, etc.) with voting preferences -- but it was
not the data that identified specific exit poll results with specific
precincts. That data remains the property of the media consortium (ABC, NBC,
CBS, Fox, CNN, and the AP) that commissioned the polls. No one has provided
a coherent account of how polling error could explain the discrepancy. We
have only the pollsters' blithe assertion that Kerry voters must have
disproportionately participated in the polls. Yet the available state-level
data contradicts the pollsters' explanation, also termed the ``reluctant
Bush respondent" theory. The data does show that key variables -- racial
makeup of a state, partisan control of governorships, whether a state is a
swing state, and reports of Election Day complaints -- all correlate with
the magnitude of the poll discrepancy.
The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts --
the only ones where comparable data does exist -- the difference between the
exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts
where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone. If
we had access to the withheld precinct-level data, we would be able to
investigate whether the size of the exit poll discrepancy correlates with
the voting technology used.
For these reasons and more, it is imperative that our newspapers of
record as well as our governmental oversight bodies now investigate the
question people continue to ask: Was the 2004 election stolen?
Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman are authors of the book ``Was the
2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"
© 2006 Globe Newspaper Company
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