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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWas the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?
I'm currently working with a publisher, Biting Duck Press, to publish a book (title as yet undetermined) on the corruption in our election system. We hope that it will help to make Americans more vigilant and concerned about the way our elections are run. Ive drafted most of the book. I am currently intending to post large portions of it on DU, in the hope of stimulating discussion and obtaining useful feedback. I have previously posted a draft Chapter 1 of the book, concerning the stealing of the 2000 Presidential election in three parts. This post begins Chapter 2.
WAS THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION STOLEN TOO?
It was well known in the days prior to the 2004 Presidential election that a Bush victory was highly unlikely without Bush carrying both Ohio and Florida. As Election Day unfolded, spirits in the Kerry camp were running high, as it became evident that Ohios 20 electoral votes would determine the victor, and Kerry had a comfortable lead in the Ohio exit poll. Even CNNs right wing hack, Robert Novak, acknowledged that it would be an uphill climb for Bush.
But as the results came in from Ohio, optimism in the Kerry camp began to fade, and by late evening their remaining hope was narrowed down to strongly Democratic Cuyahoga County, and especially Cleveland, where reports of large pre-election increases in new voter registration and exceptionally high voter turnout had circulated. But this remaining hope soon faded, as it became clear that the (official) voter turnout from Cleveland was in fact miserably low, and by noon the next day John Kerry conceded the election, which he officially lost by about 119 thousand votes.
In this chapter I will not discuss all of the evidence for a stolen 2004 election, as I will reserve most of that for later chapters that deal with election fraud by type of fraud. In this chapter I will discuss: 1) the record breaking discrepancy between the many exit polls that were performed as voters left the polls and the official vote count; 2) the widespread silence regarding that discrepancy by our national news media, and; 3) the corrupted vote recounts that were performed when citizens concerned about the integrity of the election challenged the results.
The Discrepancy Between the Exit Polls and the Official Vote Count (The Red Shift)
The exit polling on Election Day 2004 was performed by Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research, under contract to six major news media organizations. Warren Mitofsky, who led the project, had been performing exit polls for 35 years and was recognized as the leading expert on exit polling.
For ease of discussion I will refer to the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official vote count as a red shift, the term that is commonly used to describe it. Red refers to the fact that the TV networks colored states red that had voted for George Bush. The term red shift refers to the fact that the exit polls predicted a Kerry win nationally and in most states, but when the official results were tallied, the vote count was found to be shifted nationally and in the vast majority of states towards Bush.
An analysis by Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman examined the red shift. The final exit polls, posted at 12:23 a.m. on Wednesday morning, November 3, predicted Kerry with 50.8% of the national vote and Bush with 48.2% of the national vote a difference of 2.6%. In marked contrast, the machines that were responsible for the official vote count registered a national vote of 50.9% for Bush and 48.1% for Kerry, a 2.8% Bush victory. The difference between the exit poll results and the official vote count the red shift was thus 5.4%. The statistical odds against such a large discrepancy occurring by chance were astronomical, approximating one in a million.
Steven Freeman, in his book, Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, reports an analysis of the red shift in the 11 states recognized as battleground states (or swing states) just prior to Election Day. His results showed red shifts in ten of those states, no blue shifts (shifts towards Kerry from the exit poll to the official vote count), and one state (Wisconsin) where there was no shift at all. These are the results:
State
Exit poll result
.
.
Official vote count
.. Red shift
NH
Kerry by 10.8% ........ Kerry by 1.3% ....... 9.5%
OH
Kerry by 4.2% ......... Bush by 2.5% ........ 6.7%
PA
Kerry by 8.7% .......... Kerry by 2.2%
.. 6.5%
MN
Kerry by 9.0% ......... Kerry by 3.5%
.. 5.5%
FL
.
Bush by 0.1% .......... Bush by 5.0%
.. 4.9%
NV
..
Kerry by 1.3% .......... Bush by 2.6%
.. 3.9%
NM
..
Kerry by 2.6% ......... Bush by 1.1%
3.7%
CO
..
Bush by 1.8% .......... Bush by 5.2%
3.4%
IA
Kerry by 1.3%
Bush by 0.9%
. 2.2%
MI
.. Kerry by 5.0%
Kerry by 3.4%
.. 1.6%
WI
.. Kerry by 0.4%
.
. Kerry by 0.4%
.. 0.0%
Thus, if the official vote count had approximated the exit poll findings, Kerry would have won not only the national popular vote, but four additional states, including Ohio, Nevada, Iowa, and New Mexico (and maybe Florida). Ohio was the only one of those states (other than Florida) whose electoral votes would have swung the election to Kerry. Thus the vast majority of focus by those concerned about a stolen election was on Ohio.
Reasons for discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts
When exit polls differ substantially from official election results, there can be only three reasons (or combination thereof):
1. Random error, or chance
2. Biased exit polls
3. Impaired election integrity
Lets consider these possibilities one at a time:
1. The role of random error (or chance)
The first step in the assessment of any statistical discrepancy is to assess the role of chance in producing the discrepancy. This can be accomplished easily with statistical tests. As noted above, the likelihood of the discrepancy between the national exit polls and the official national results occurring by chance was calculated statistically by Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman as being close to one in a million. US Count Votes (USCV) estimated that the likelihood of the discrepancy between the combined state exit polls and the official state results occurring by chance was about one in ten million.
2. The potential role of exit poll bias
It is unfortunate that the knee jerk response of the national news media was to assume that the only legitimate explanation for the red shift was that there was something wrong with the exit polls, rather than consider that there may have been a problem with the election itself. Mitofsky himself conducted a quick analysis and produced a report that supported the news media assumptions. Paramount among the conclusions of the report were two statements: Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment AND Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. The first of these statements implies that a problem with the election was not the reason for the red shift. The second statement implies that exit poll bias was the reason for the red shift. Unfortunately, both of these statements were stated as conclusions rather than as hypotheses, even though there was almost nothing in the report to back them up. I will discuss both of these hypotheses separately in a moment, but first lets consider two basic types of exit poll bias.
Exit poll bias can be broken down into two components: Biased sampling of precincts AND bias within precincts referred to as within precinct error (WPE). The former can be easily tested, and the latter cannot be easily tested (and many question whether or not it can be accurately tested at all). Mitofsky tested bias due to sampling of precincts and concluded that this bias actually favored Bush. Therefore, the hypothesis that the exit poll bias (in favor of Kerry) might explain the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results becomes less likely, since all of this bias must be concentrated within precincts (WPE), and this bias must account for not only the discrepancy between the poll results and the official election results, but also it must cancel out the bias in the opposite direction due to sampling of precincts, which works in Bushs favor.
So with that in mind, lets consider the Mitofsky statement that Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. What was this statement based on? The report states:
This is the sum of the reports evidence for the absence of election fraud.
But both touch screen and optical scan machines count the votes by computer. And so do all other methods of vote tabulation except for the hand counting of paper ballots. Deep in the report, but not in the executive summary, is the average WPE data by type of voting equipment:
Type of voting ....WPE i.e. within precinct error
Paper ballot: . -2.2
Mechanical: . -10.6
Touch screen: -7.1
Punch cards: . -6.6
Optical scan: ..-6.1
Note that the magnitude of the negative WPE (i.e. within precinct error, with the negative sign meaning that the official vote favored Bush compared to the exit poll results) is considerably less in precincts where paper ballots were used, compared to any other method. How does the finding of a much smaller WPE (i.e. less negative) for precincts with paper ballots than for precincts using machines to count the vote support the conclusion that Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment?
Next lets consider the statement in Mitofskys report that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. This is commonly known as the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis. If the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis was valid, where would you expect the lowest voter response rates to be? One would think that the lowest voter response rates would be most likely to occur in precincts that leaned heavily to Bush since the hypothesis postulates that the reason for the biased polls (producing the red shift) is reluctance of Bush voters to participate in these polls. However, when USCV analyzed the data presented in the Mitofsky report, they found exactly the opposite: Precincts with the highest percentage of Bush voters had the highest, not the lowest response rate. This must certainly strongly count against the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis. Yet that hypothesis was put forward in the Mitofsky report and thus in the national news media as the primary explanation for the difference between the exit poll results and the official vote count (i.e. the red shift).
But dont yet give up hope on the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis. It can be (and was) revised to say that, although Bush voters in general were more reluctant to participate in the polls than Kerry voters, this did not apply to precincts where there were a very high percentage of Bush voters, because in those precincts the Bush voters would perhaps feel more comfortable participating in a poll.
This revised hypothesis can also be tested. If the hypothesis applied only to precincts without a heavy preponderance of Bush voters, then one would expect that those precincts would be where the highest WPE would be found. But in fact, by Mitofskys own data, precisely the opposite is the case: The average WPE is highest, not lowest, in precincts where there were a very high percent of Bush voters (80% or more). This too must count as further strong evidence against the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis.
So where did Mitofsky come up with the idea of the reluctant Bush voter? This is it:
Distance restrictions imposed upon our interviewers by election officials
Weather conditions which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations
Multiple precincts voting in the same location as the precinct in our sample
Interviewer characteristics such as age
Polling locations with a large number of total voters where a smaller proportion of voters were asked to fill out questionnaires (i.e. participate in the poll)
So how do all these factors that contributed to a high discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results (i.e. red shift) support the contention that Bush voters were less likely to participate in the exit polls than Kerry voters? Mitofsky doesnt explain this in his report. As I noted above, the only analyses that looked directly at the reluctant Bush voter hypothesis provided strong evidence against it. Nor does the Mitofsky report contain any quantitative assessment of the extent to which he believes that the above factors caused exit poll bias.
3. The potential role of election fraud
What about the role of election fraud. Mitofsky barely discusses that possibility except to say that their data doesnt support that possibility, and to offer as evidence for that statement the fact that he found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment. The fact that there was a great difference between precincts using paper ballots and those using machines to count their vote is not mentioned in their report at all, except that it appears in the table that I reproduced above.
Direct evidence of various kinds of election fraud will be discussed in subsequent chapters. In this chapter I will simply mention a couple lines of evidence that were immediately apparent from looking at available data.
If the 2004 Presidential election was fraudulent, one would expect more fraud to have occurred in those states where there was a reasonable chance of switching their electoral votes from Kerry to Bush (i.e., the swing or battleground states). Of the 11 main swing states (OH, FL, PA, WI, MN, NM, IA, NV, NH, MI, CO), according to Mitofsky, in five of them there was a discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results that were outside of the margin of error (Im defining outside of the margin of error as less than a 5% probability of occurring by chance). These five swing states included Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. Of the remaining 39 states, only 8 were outside of the margin of error (In all 13 states that were outside of the margin of error, the exit polls favored Kerry, compared to the official election results). I believe that this finding supports the suggestion of election fraud.
Secondly, Mitofsky acknowledges in his executive summary that the exit poll error was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which he has data (going back to 1988). It seems to me that concurrence in time of the record-breaking discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote (red shift) with a greater ability than ever to use secret software codes to fix elections is not a coincidence. Rather, that concurrence suggests election fraud as a primary explanation for the discrepancy.
4. Summary of immediately apparent reasons for the great red shift of 2004
In summary, based on information and data that was readily available following the 2004 election, the following can be said about the reasons for the red shift (exit polls that suggested that Kerry won the presidency, in the face of an official victory for Bush).
Random error (chance) is easily ruled out through routine statistical tests as an explanation for the red shift.
Exit poll bias cannot be completely ruled out. However, the following can be said against the likelihood that exit poll bias accounts for the discrepancies between the official election results and the exit polls:
An analysis of potential bias from the choosing of precincts to participate in the exit polls shows no red shift at all. In fact, it shows a slight blue shift.
Although the Mitofsky report proposes that Bush voters were less likely than Kerry voters to participate in the exit polling, it provides no direct evidence for that. Other groups, which have tested that hypothesis directly, have found that the data provides evidence against that hypothesis rather than in favor of it.
The following can be said in favor of election fraud as an explanation for the red shift.
According to Mitofskys own report, the red shift was outside of the margin of error in 5 of the 11 crucial swing states (OH, FL, PA, NH, MN) and in only 8 of the other 39 states. That is consistent with the likelihood that if election fraud were committed in the 2004 presidential election it would be most likely to be committed in states where it really mattered the swing states.
The concurrence of by far the largest exit poll discrepancy (2004) demonstrated in any year since Edison-Mitofsky began conducting exit polls with the greatest use of machine voting suggests that voting machines played a role in producing the red shift (i.e. that the official election results did not fully measure the intent of the voters.)
The fact that precincts that used paper ballots (rather than methods in which the votes were counted by machines) demonstrated by far the smallest red shifts lends further support to the idea that voting machines played a role in producing the red shift.
There is much more evidence than this, but much of that will be covered in later chapters.
The next post in this series will consider the widespread silence of our corporate owned news media on this issue, and asks why, since the United States government officially condones the use of exit polls to identify election fraud in other countries, was there such deafening silence in this country when the winner of the official vote was predicted by the exit polls to be the loser.
Iggy
(1,418 posts)was stolen in 2004.
the problem is the democratic party is not doing enough to stop these ripoffs in key states. I have my
own theory as to why that is- but that's another topic.
bigwillq
(72,790 posts)Rhiannon12866
(207,016 posts)http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php
villager
(26,001 posts)...can be taught, along with why the rabidly anti-democratic, anti-American Republican party eventually had to be outlawed.
Rosco T.
(6,496 posts).. any sane person can see that with the facts.
nobodyspecial
(2,286 posts)That's why we need to win by wide margins and why they are working so hard to keep people from voting. The close it is, the easier it is to steal.
DJ13
(23,671 posts)WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)crazylikafox
(2,763 posts)Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)barbtries
(28,825 posts)gwbush was never elected president.
ailsagirl
(22,913 posts)applegrove
(118,972 posts)that he did not have (and rove would know about the shy elephant factor), lighting a fire under conservative voters and making democratic ones - who mostly vote at the end of the day - more relaxed about voting.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/125143741
The GOP always foment discussion about exit polls stealing elections so that democrats who believe your theory will not get along with democrats who do not. It is a way of making us less strong. Don't fall for it. They stole the election in 2004 but not the way you say. It was by releasing exit polls early in the day. Why the MSM no longer publishes exit polls earlier in the day. Cause they got burned by what I say happened.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)corporate owned media were happy to see them. They were captured on screen shots by Jonathan Simon and Steven Freeman and consequently made public, to the great dismay of the Republican Party.
There was deafening silence on the subject by the corporate media, and they lambasted anyone who implied that the exit poll discrepancy could be indicative of election fraud as kooky "conspiracy theorists".
CountAllVotes
(20,884 posts)Or some say so.
Frankly, I believe that 2004 was stolen as well as 2000 was.
And ... the beat goes on.
I hope these bastards rot in effin' hell yes I do!!!
FarLeftFist
(6,161 posts)lindysalsagal
(20,806 posts)There were vote-counting computers in Cuyahoga county in Ohio that were deemed "broken" and some republican Diebold tech wiped the memory. I remember watching the local news stories on it. Some precincts had 400% of the registered voters voting for Bush. Huge obvious democratic areas going for Bush. And absolutely none that were supposed to go Bush that went Kerry.
It was rigged, no doubt at all.
Watch out this time: It's not the Bush crime family, but they're pissed off enough to try it again.
Doremus
(7,261 posts)There were several posters here in the days and weeks after the '04 election that collected and analyzed Ohio precinct results in minute detail. My memory is a sieve or I'd give you some names to search for .... maybe others with better recall will come along and help.
Good luck with your book. I hope it's a best seller.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)I've touched base with some of those people and was involved in some of that analysis.
fascisthunter
(29,381 posts)well played but it doesn't last. The majority of Americans do reject right wing ideology and probably always will, because most have empathy.
Blue_In_AK
(46,436 posts)ailsagirl
(22,913 posts)Bushco needed another term to finish destroying the country-- apparently four years wasn't enough
That and the data you cite-- most impressive!!
tabatha
(18,795 posts)A Republican operative, who diverted the results to a different server before going to state servers, was later killed in an airplane "accident".
Check Bradblog.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)along with the testimony of Clint Curtis and the "suicide" of Raymond Lemme.
Eddie Haskell
(1,628 posts)Michael Connell,45, of Akron died Friday when his plane crashed near a vacant house in Uniontown while attempting to land at nearby Akron-Canton Airport.
But the fatal accident is also raising questions about Connell and his work for key political figures and lobbyists, which has targeted him in investigations over missing White House e-mails and a lawsuit alleging electronic voting fraud.
Following Last Friday's fatal accident, CBS Affiliate WOIO reported that Connell, who had recently been subpoenaed to testify in relation to a lawsuit alleging vote rigging in the 2004 Ohio election, was warned at least twice about flying his plane because his plane might be sabotaged.
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)Why are you spreading a false flag story? Are you part of the cover-up?
zeemike
(18,998 posts)But few in the party are wiling to even mention it much less do something about it...They know what would happen if they did....some one would find kiddie porn on their computer and it would become a week long story in the media if the ridicule about being a CTer did not shut them up.
We have got to stop being so manipulated.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)I remember being thrilled that a prominent Democrat did so.
But look where he is now, so I have no doubt you are correct.
The only way to stop being so manipulated, is to not leave it to one lone Democrat here and there to speak the the truth, but to have numbers so big talking about it, relentlessly, pushing for investigations and most importantly demanding paper ballots and an end to the outrageous idea that it is okay to have the counting of the country's votes in the hands of Republican owned corporations with proprietary software that no one is allowed to look at, even when there are clear indications of something wrong. It's as if we are living in Wonderland.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)And the barriers to doing that is by confusing the issues and the right wing control of the media...who tell us things that don't matter or are complete lies...they want to focus on anything but fair elections.
I would love to see a protest in front of the county election officials office demanding that they junk the machines and have paper ballots counted precinct by precinct and in the open with any observer allowed to watch...and the results posted for all to see....in other words open elections.
But that does not happen because we are fragmented by single issues and have no leadership with a goal that matches free elections...that really should unify us all.
Divide and conquer is the tactic that is used and it works.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)count our votes using proprietary (i.e. secret) and unverifiable software. I think that Democrats have been afraid to speak out on a wide variety of issues because they know they will be lambasted by the corporate media. It's a very sad situations, and the solutions are very difficult or require a lot of courage.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)with so many people doing so that no one of them can be singled out. And they should get the people to back them up.
Take some lessons from the enemy. They will not back off something once they get their teeth in it, no matter how wrong they are.
But Democrats, even when they have an issue that they know the people will back them on, simply give up the fight before it even starts.
That is what happened after the 2000 and 2004 elections. They all went silent. It was so disappointing.
progressivebydesign
(19,458 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)And he apparently did deliver Ohio for Bush.
Blackwell also played a major role in his dual capacity of Ohio Secretary of State and Chairman of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio. But he wasn't stupid enough to promise publicly to deliver Ohio for Bush.
Zoeisright
(8,339 posts)Botany
(70,677 posts)park Kerry votes in a 3rd party's vote total and when the other vote
comes in you can do a little magic in Chattanooga, TN thanx to smartech
and Michael Connell.
BTW Kerry was cruising to a victory in 2004 and Karen Hughes went and told W he
lost and W just laughed. I was in the belly of the beast and saw and heard things that
still wake me up in the middle of the night. Ohio was way f***ing dirty.
slipslidingaway
(21,210 posts)the Christmas video from the WH where Rove joked about the color of the ornaments and how they went to Ohio several times always struck me as weird, as if he was just taunting people with a bit of the truth.
Ellipsis
(9,124 posts)The tech matching the recount numbers...by writing the orinal tally on the wall?
And I just posted this a few days ago in Videos.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)Time for change
(13,718 posts)progress2k12nbynd
(221 posts)that it was stolen from now on. I can hardly remember a single important national election in the last 15 years or so that the losing party didn't accuse the winner of all kinds of "dirty tricks." This kind of post-election drama used to be reserved for the so-called "Third World."
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)I wonder why he would not mention that very important fact?
Time for change
(13,718 posts)To not give him the benefit of the doubt, its whole purpose was to try to get the exit poll discrepancy out of the news by saying that the exit polls were flawed/biased. Whatever he had to say to make that point was said. The possibility of election fraud could not be considered. Mitofsky worked for the news media corporations, and it was obvious that they wanted the whole controversy to just go away.
MrTwister
(76 posts)burrowowl
(17,657 posts)knitter4democracy
(14,350 posts)They also talked of people being scrubbed from the lists, people who'd voted in that polling place for decades--all of whom were Dems. They were convinced the fix was in, as am I.
The election was stolen. Period.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)the 2004 election in Ohio. This will be covered in a later chapter.
May I talk to you about your personal experiences regarding this?
Thank you.
knitter4democracy
(14,350 posts)I can tell you which yarn shop they used to hang out in and which guild they're members of.
Coyotl
(15,262 posts)votes become Bush votes.
Rhiannon12866
(207,016 posts)http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php
Time for change
(13,718 posts)I believe the main issues he brings up are mostly important for our future rather than for the 2004 election per se. Nearly 250 thousand uncounted votes is unacceptable in a democracy, especially when most of those uncounted votes are distributed among our most vulnerable citizens. It should provide a lesson for us for the future, to use methods that produce accurate results.
What effect those ballots would have had on the 2004 election is another question. Florida had a comparable number of spoiled ballots (undervotes and overvotes) in 2000, approximately 175 thousand. 64,248 were undervotes. Of these, approximately half of them had no marks on them at all, so could not have been counted for either candidate. Another few thousand contained votes for third party candidates, were found to be overvotes rather than undervotes when they were examined, or contained marks in places that were not adjacent to candidates' names. That left approximately 27 thousand that were counted for Bush or Gore in the Miami Herald's investigation. From that count, Gore came up with a net advantage of 1,314 votes over Bush -- plenty enough to make up his deficit of 537 votes in Florida (though the Herald spun its own results differently, to de-emphasize that point), but nowhere near enough to overcome a deficit of the nature of 119 thousand votes, which was the case for Kerry in Ohio in 2004.
There were also about 110 thousand overvotes in Florida in 2004. A statistical analysis of who those votes were meant for indicated that Gore probably would have had a net advantage over Bush of about 50 thousand votes. This calculation is made by assuming (reasonably) that the vast majority of overvotes that contained one vote for Gore or Bush and one vote for a third party candidate were actually meant for the major party candidate. However, courts have not allowed that kind of analysis to be used to allocate votes. The only definitive evidence of voter intent which probably would have been used to allocate votes (had the Gore team requested it in 2004) was a write in for the candidate on the ballot. Had that analysis been performed in Florida in 2000, Gore would have picked up an additional 873 net votes -- again, plenty enough to carry Florida, but way short of what Kerry needed in Ohio in 2004.
The provisional ballots are another story. Palast notes 155 thousand provisional ballots in Ohio in 2004 that were not counted. He is no doubt correct that the good majority of these would have probably been for Kerry. But keep in mind that it is not at all clear how many of those provisional ballots would have been found to be legal had the case been taken to court. The ballots are called "provisional" because it was not clear at the time they voted whether the voter was eligible to vote.
Let's say Kerry pushed the matter and demanded that it be settled in court. Suppose he picked up 3 thousand additional votes from a count of the spoiled ballots (which the Florida experience in 2000 would approximately predict), thereby reducing his deficit to 116 thousand. In that case, even if all 155 thousand provisional ballots had been counted, he would have had to have won that count by an overwhelming margin to win -- approximately 136 thousand to 19 thousand. With Blackwell overseeing the process, I think it's highly unlikely that there would be a ruling to allow nearly all of the 155 thousand provisional ballots to be counted. So I think that all these factors went through Kerry's mind, and he realized that it would be such an uphill battle that he had almost no chance of winning. And that's why he conceded.
I do believe strongly that Kerry was cheated out of Ohio in 2004, and I'll make that point more concretely in other chapters, especially chapter 5, which discusses the voter purging. But I do not believe that insisting upon a count of the spoiled ballots and provisional ballots would have succeeded in goving the election to Kerry. As for the voter purging, that could theoretically have been used to give the election to Kerry. But there was not clear evidence of that available at the time.
As for New Mexico, I do believe that Kerry was cheated out of New Mexico too. But New Mexico's electoral votes would not have been enough for Kerry to win the election.
Sancho
(9,072 posts)and called it out to the election officials. At any rate, we had impossible results in Florida in other ways...like Bush winning in precincts where other races and referendums went completely Democratic. Also, the undervotes analyzed in some Florida districts made no sense; like large numbers of undervotes for specific races and large differences between DRE's, early voting, and mail in ballots.
There's no question that the DRE's and tabulators are being hacked. I don't know why we can't get some action to fix this, but it's very frustrating.
CleanLucre
(284 posts)MrSlayer
(22,143 posts)Too late to do anything about it now.
Time for change
(13,718 posts)which could be useful in reforming our election system.
MrSlayer
(22,143 posts)You're right about that.
polichick
(37,152 posts)...with the rest of it if our elections are stolen.
My questions: Where is the Democratic party in all this? Why lie down without a huge fight, with in fact barely a whimper? Why has nothing been done to keep 2000 and 2004 from happening again?
K&R
Time for change
(13,718 posts)My best guess is that it is related to the fact that the Democratic Party has become somewhat paralyzed by fear that if they move too far left on certain issues they will become targets of right wing interests that have tons of money to spend. Related to that is that they will become targets of the corporate media. In the case of election fraud, they will be called nutty "conspiracy theorists".
polichick
(37,152 posts)...is a big reason I'm no longer a Democrat after decades of work for the party.
Without verifiable voting, we're just spinning our wheels.
(Of course I still vote for Dems, as the lesser by far of evils.)
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)Just search my name and Ohio or my name and election. Should be 20-30 articles out there.
PM me if you need any more
Time for change
(13,718 posts)joycejnr
(326 posts)...and like so many other revelations that can result in the reactive rage of the public, the story of the 2004 Election is doomed to wait for years for inclusion in our history books.
As so many have noted, history is written by the victors. If your book makes it into print, it will take an honored place on my mantle right next to my copy of Vince Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America, the best narrative of America's 2000 judicial coup de etat.
Thank you and best wishes!
Time for change
(13,718 posts)I would be honored to have my book next to Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America
Overseas
(12,121 posts)There were lots of old fashioned Republican techniques of voter intimidation and misdirection and less polling places in Democratic districts, less machines there too, even as the electronic shenanigans were going on.
All kinds of distracting techniques and the big old Swift Boat smearing to give the pundits some clear reasons the vote totals flipped from War Hero to Beer (and Torture) Guy in the middle of the night.
And really ridiculous discussions about the fallibility of exit polling by the pundits later because the exit polling agreed with the early returns that flipped later.
And thanks for refreshing my memory about the red shift. That has been quite a distinctive pattern.
And those of us who watched 48 to 51 Kerry and then saw it flip after midnight were told that it just had to be lousy exit polling.
And this year we will have Swift Boating on steroids with all the billionaires playing politics and we can all blame the power of post Citizens' United ads if there is a squeaker flip.
And it will be true that all those private millions pouring onto the airwaves in swing states will indeed have an effect, but what a pity that not enough of our legislators stood up for verifiable auditable paper trails for electronic voting, so just in case enough people say Screw Big Money We're Sticking With Obama, we may not know that.
diane in sf
(3,920 posts)DefenseLawyer
(11,101 posts)The reporters at the time were saying "well this is odd, but the President wants to make a statement". All the Bushies were sitting around on a big hideous sectional couch. It was very creepy. Bush looked into the camera and said something to the effect of "I just want everyone to know that I think we're going to win". Immediately after that the reporters started saying "We're hearing that there may be problems with the exit polls in Ohio". The whole episode made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Marzupialis
(398 posts)Or does he accept it as a genuine loss?