Yo! Is Ohio Big?
Of course, it may be that life isn't fair because it's fixed. This is the article wrtten by Robert F. Kennedy Jr for Rolling Stone which makes a solid case for arguing that the 2004 US Presidential Election was stolen by the Bushites. Again, thanks to The Konformist.
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., Rollingstone.com, Jun 01, 2006
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about
it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents,
sources, charts and commentary.
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 ''preposterous.''(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)
--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory --
Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11,
2004.
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election
Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.
3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,''
June 2005, page 11.
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside
U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration
Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former
workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job
was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis,
MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico
State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2
James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,''
Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of
the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots &
Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States
Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited
throughout the story.
12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights
Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June
22, 2005. Page 5
15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998
and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The
Hill, November 4, 2004.
19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New
York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,''
Associated Press, December 11, 2004.
Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive
Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December
4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential
Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official
Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.
23) Mitofsky International
24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the
Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004
Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of
the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.''
FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey
Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll
Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005.
Page 3.
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00
p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data
Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count
Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.
41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most
Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.
43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,''
Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''
45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus
Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger
(Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.
47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates
Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.
49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-
Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About
Delivering Ohio to Bush.''
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of
Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al.
v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of
the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers,
Jr.), January 5, 2005.
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton
counties.
56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of
Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade,
January 9, 2005.
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing
States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural
Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.
63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The
Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR,
All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.
66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George
Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason
for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October
27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of
State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and
Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County
Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.
74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,''
The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
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., Rollingstone.com, Jun 01, 2006
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about
it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents,
sources, charts and commentary.
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 ''preposterous.''(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)
--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory --
Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11,
2004.
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election
Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.
3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,''
June 2005, page 11.
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside
U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration
Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former
workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job
was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis,
MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico
State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2
James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,''
Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of
the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots &
Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States
Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited
throughout the story.
12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election
Results for the U.S. President.
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights
Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June
22, 2005. Page 5
15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998
and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The
Hill, November 4, 2004.
19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New
York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,''
Associated Press, December 11, 2004.
Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive
Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December
4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential
Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official
Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.
23) Mitofsky International
24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the
Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004
Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of
the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.''
FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey
Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll
Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005.
Page 3.
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00
p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by
Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National
Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data
Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count
Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.
41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most
Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.
43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,''
Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''
45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus
Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger
(Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.
47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates
Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.
49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-
Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About
Delivering Ohio to Bush.''
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of
Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al.
v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of
the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers,
Jr.), January 5, 2005.
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton
counties.
56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of
Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade,
January 9, 2005.
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing
States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural
Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.
63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The
Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR,
All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.
66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George
Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge
Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason
for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October
27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of
State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and
Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County
Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell,
Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.
74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,''
The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
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