The 2004 Election was Stolen

A summary of  BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. article in Rolling Stone

The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical
and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms.

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.

Exit Polls

''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' said Lou
Harris, the father of modern political polling.

The inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote
counts 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)   ''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.

The number of people polled was 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. that Kerry 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)  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.

According to Steven F. Freeman, (who says, " I despise the
Democrats") ,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.''  
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.

''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.

According to the exit poll(in one precinct) , 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.

----------
In January 2005, Rep. John 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)  All
told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's
registration barriers did the trick. Black voters in the state --
who went overwhelmingly for Kerry -- were twenty percent more likely
than whites to be forced to cast a provisional ballot.(129) In the
end, nearly three percent of all voters in Ohio were forced to vote
provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots were
ultimately rejected.(131
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.

A "Mighty Texas Strike Force" -- an offshoot of the Republican
National Committee(85) -- was part of a (dirty tricks for the
election) team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were
deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten.

Long lines to vote

Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as
long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus,
Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of
ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours.

A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic
National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all
Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to
leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000
voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the
Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-
leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average
of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for
whites.(135)

Republican officials also created long lines by failing to
distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts.  
According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy
percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer
machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight
additional machines.(147)  ''The allocation of voting machines in
Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with
high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane
Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a
statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.(150)

The voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly
Democrats. Because of the unequal distribution of voting equipment,
the median turnout in Franklin County precincts Kerry would have
gained an additional 17,000 votes in the county.(156)

According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post,
as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone
home.(154) When closing time came at the polls, according to the
Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens
who had waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio
law, which stipulates that those in line at closing time are allowed
to remain and vote.(155)

according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections
scholar Dan Tokaji -- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes
were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If counted by hand
instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes
would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount
process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.(174)

Most of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In
Cleveland, where nearly 13,000 votes were ruined, a New York Times
analysis found that black precincts suffered more than twice the
rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-
leaning precincts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as
Bush-leaning precincts.(176) Last April, a federal court ruled that
Ohio's use of punch-card balloting violated the equal-protection
rights of the citizens who voted on them.(177)

''It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to
be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party
candidate,'' the Conyers report concludes.(179)

Rural Counties

One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the
presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot.
By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each
of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County.
In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to
keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from
the polls. (190) The county administration building was hastily
locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results
without any reporters present.

  John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen
Connally,-- a liberal black judge (running for State Supreme Court)
who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget.(193)
As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the
possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred
on election night in the locked-down facility.''

In six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other
small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled an election measure
to outlaw gay marriage by 16,132 votes.  Statewide, this measure to
outlaw gay marriage proved far more popular than Bush, besting the
president by 470,000 votes.

Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In
Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton caught an
employee of Triad -- which provided the software used to count punch-
card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties (197

Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry,
Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a
dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the
presidential ballots. (203) If that kind of remote tabulator
modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it's no
great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew
the original vote count.

The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of
our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are
accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot
box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a
government by the people.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election
_stolen/4

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