I have meant, for some time now, to put up a post on the possibility that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Thanks to comments by rabbit, and a few emails from friends of mine, I have been spurred to do so. Because it's such a large topic I will likely devote a few more posts to the subject.
At this point many of you have probably heard that the election results coming from Ohio were highly suspicious. The suspicious nature of the election results are well covered in a
Congressional Report commisioned by a Congressional Commitee headed by
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan. I would highly reccomend that you read this report. You can also purchase a copy from many online retailers if you have a hard time reading PDFs. In general, the report outlines three time periods in which possible fraud and misconduct may have occured: 1) possible pre-election manipulation including improper allocation of voting equipment to minority areas, targeting minorities for legal challenges to their voting rights and misinformation campaigns, as well as denying access to provisional ballots; 2) manipulation on the day of the election including voter intimidation, registration irregularities due misconduct by election officials, machine irregularities (indicating possible voting machine manipulation) and spoiled ballots; 3) manipulation after the election to hide possible fraud including poor handling of the recount process (in many precints the recount was never even performed), delaying of the legal process asking for a recount and handling of voting machines after to the election possibly to erase evidence of tally manipulation. It is very interesting reading.
Now, there are explanations for many of these irregularities. For some
"debunking" of pieces of the Conyers report see Mark Hertsgaard's article in
Mother Jones. It is also worth the read. The main problem that he points out is that many of the examples given in the Conyers report for possible outright fraud are not well substantiated. However, he does note that many of the charges about the semi-legal manipulations by Ohio Secretary of State
Kenneth Blackwell (who was also the cochair of the Bush campaign in Ohio), including voter roll purges, improper allocation of voting machines and improper denials of voter registration, are fully substantiated and may have had a large effect on the outcome of the election.
While the Conyer's report outlines the many avenues by which fraud may have been conduted in Ohio, in its narrowness of focus it misses a central point: election manipulation likely occured in
every battleground state. In an excellent
analysis of exit polls Steven Freeman, at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that the odds that exit poll results were as wrong as they were in Ohio, Florida
and Pennsylvania are 662,000-to-one. Interestingly, eight other battle ground states all had skews similar to Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. Namely,
all the polls predicted Kerry to get more votes than the final tally says he did.
Why were the exit polls so wrong? The only answer that has been given by
Mitofsky International (the firm that conducted the polls) is that Republicans were less likely to acquiesce to being polled. What? This doesn't make any sense, and yet it is bandied about in the news media as if it's
common sense. Hertsgaard, in his Mother Jones, article even makes a quip along these lines dismissing the exit poll numbers. Will someone please tell me why Republicans in
eleven states decided, without consulting each other, to sytematically boycott exit pollsters? Is it that conservatives are private people who are part of the of the "silent majority," and liberals are a bunch of loudmouths ready to spout off the moment they are asked a question? Or is it rather some posthoc, patchwork, explanation for what is a
real anomaly?
So what does this all mean? First, it is still unclear whether Bush stole the 2004 election in a technical sense, meaning through outright fraud. However, there are real and unexplained anomalies in the discrepancies between exit polls and election results, indicating that widespread vote-rigging may have occured. Also, it is abundantly clear that his operatives systematically manipulated the electoral process, through questionably legal but certainly unethical means, to maximize his chances of winning. This in itself is problematic, and the lengths to which the evelope was pushed suggests to me that if Bush operatives could get away with more clearly fraudulent activities, they would. If we add up the whole picture: Bush operatives willing to bend election law to the point of breaking it, Bush spying on and labeling dissenting US citizens as threats to US security (
see Quakers), Bush's appointment of Supreme Court Justices friendly to Presidential power, and his general use of heavy bullying to silence critics all point to the fact that Bush and his handlers do not actually
like Democracy. While I still believe that we are a long way from a Totalitarian state, the erosion of Democracy that we have witnessed during this administration's tenure is disquieting to say the least.
