Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count

by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss

Book Overview

On the afternoon of election day 2004, the world was abuzz with the news: exit polls indicated that John Kerry would decisively win the election and become the next president of the United States. That proved not to be the case.
According to the official count--the number of votes tallied, not necessarily the number of votes cast--George W. Bush beat Kerry by a margin of three million votes. The exit polls, however, had predicted a margin of victory...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583226877
• ISBN13: 9781583226872
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Here's the evidence that it was

How can a democratic country allow voting machines that cannot be verified? How can it let interested parties run elections? How can the media stand by while people are not allowed to vote? The answer is that a democratic country can't do this and remain democratic. This book provides a huge amount of statistical evidence that the official results do not match what actually hapenned in the 2004 election. It's very convincing, and hopefully will demonstrate to many people that we will lose our democracy if we don't demand fair elections.

Where's your evidence? Here!

This is the one. If you've had a hunch that the 2004 election was stolen, but have been stymied in arguing the case by too much conjecture, too little hard evidence, and vulnerability to people who think you're a paranoid, tin-foil hat, conspiracy theorist, this book is going to make your life easier. Not a lot easier, though, because 1) people want to believe that America is innately good; and 2) the the cheating is so widespread that it boggles the mind and will. But Freeman and Bleifuss provide the essential facts and key questions for attacking the problem step-by-step. The book is very clearly organized with sections about voter disenfranchisement (especially African-American), corruptible voting machines, legal and illegal suppression of votes, the particular cases of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, and biased polls. Freeman's specialty is polling. He wisely begins with November 2, 2004, reminding us of all those afternoon and early evening exit polls that showed Kerry winning the election. The sudden and dramatic turnaround late at night, all-too-reminiscent of the previous presidential election, made many of us wonder what kind of dirty tricks were being played. Freeman provides photo evidence of tampering with the polls after the "official" election results were submitted. He keeps coming back to the exit polls and their essential trustworthiness as a bellwether of foul play. Reminding us of the velvet revolution in Ukraine that occurred just weeks before our own election, he repeatedly probes reasons why Americans didn't use similar evidence to examine fraud at home. It was easy for him to convince me that the NEP consortium that created the exit polls produced a state-of-the-art sample that was the fruit of years of experience and expertise. It's hard to believe they didn't lead to harder questions. The contrast between exit polls and actual election procedures might lead one to trust the former more than our actual democracy, but everyone can agree that such a step would be foolish indeed, especially because some of the NEP data is proprietary and secret. It's also clear that the final poll results were "tweaked" in order to fit the "official" data. This should be a criminal offense in a democracy, but it seems to have passed as business as usual. Luckily enough raw data was revealed and enough inconsistencies emerged to lead thoughtful people like Freeman to examine the data more closely. And ultimately the polls are only a check against corruption of the process. If they lead to questions, the vote should be checked, which leads to the whole issue of paper trails and verifiability. If Freeman's book creates a sense of outrage, it also leads to conviction that we must have a transparent voting system with checks and balances. It's very clear that lack of accountability leads to illegality. To be a government of laws, we must have men and women who enforce the law. While I wish Freeman had looked more critically at the reasons f

Steal our votes and you've stolen democracy

No part of this book struck home for me more than the contrast of two elections that took place in November 2004. In both elections exit polls showed one candidate with a strong majority of the popular votes, yet the official tallies show the other candidate winning. The exact same individual oversaw both exit polls. Yet in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, there was an international outcry of fraud and election theft fueled by the outrage between the official tallies and their variance with the exit polls, an outrage in which the White House joined. As a result Eduard Shevardnadze was forced by international opposition out of office. In the other election, however, instead of the exit polls calling into question the official results, the exit polls themselves were declared in error. Exit polls are astonishingly accurate. Internationally they are used as a gauge of how fair and valid an election is. Except in the United States. For some reason, the idea that an election in the United States could be stolen is unthinkable, and I will confess that while I heard many stating that the 2004 election was fraudulent, without knowing the facts I wrote the claims off as conspiracy theories. But facts are stubborn critters and while you might be able to suppress them for a while, they will eventually rear their heads. And in the 2004 election both exit polls and a number of other statistics suggest that there was a substantial shifting of votes from John Kerry to George Bush. That the GOP has tried to subvert the Democratic process is beyond question. The attempt to scrub voter roles in Florida and elsewhere is not only well documented, those harmed by such actions have won court actions alleging civil rights violations. Undeterred by the law and the Justice Departments, the states just went ahead and scrubbed the voter roles again. The book also mentions the blatant attempts to suppress voter registration by African-Americans and other minorities as well as numerous other tactics of Republicans to keep groups who are likely to vote Democrat from voting. History has shown repeatedly that large voter turn outs as well as maximum voter inclusion strongly favors Democrats. Republicans have long responded by attempting to keep people off voter roles or hindering people from voting. But this book is not in the end about these voters. What Freeman and Bleifuss want to account for is the significant and statistically improbable (so improbable to be a near impossibility) gap between the exit polls (which are substantiated by other polls and statistics) and the official vote totals that Kerry and Bush received in 2004. Although it is now definitively known that the 2000 election was won by Al Gore (it is simply a fact that the judge in charge of the recount in Florida was going to authorize a state wide recount of all the undervotes, which would have provided Gore with a very comfortable victory--the recount did not go forward because the f

Accessible, Thought-Provoking & Intelligent

Now why would anyone have a problem with using computers as vote processors, when computers will simply do what they're told, can do what they're told even if told to do it years in advance, and will do it without regard to any laws, morals or ethics? Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss do a great job of explaining the consequences of this e-voting debacle. Nobody's yet found a computer accountable enough to trust with counting votes, nor one that fears going to jail. THe computers just seem to follow whatever anyone tells them. If you seek a very accessible guide to the 2004 election, starting with election night and proceeding through all the major issues, I can't make a higher recommendation than this book or Mark Crispin Miller's book. This is the most important issue in our democracy right now, and these authors do it a good service. Full Disclosure: A study I co-authored on touch screen voting is discussed on pages 75-79 and I was pleased with its accuracy, the first such time I've had the pleasure of reporting accuracy from journalists or authors.

A Must Read: Riveting & Carefully Researched

Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania and veteran journalist Joel Bleifuss have produced a riveting and carefully-researched page turner examining whether the 2004 presidential election could have been stolen. Whatever your political affiliation, this volume is worthy of your attention. It will clearly be the subject of significant controversy, discussion and debate. To start with the obvious question: is this the work of conspiracy theorists or wing-nuts? Emphatically not (although it must be admitted that the authors have no love for the Bush-Cheney re-election effort, nor for election officials in Ohio and Florida). The authors patiently examine recent and historic patterns of voting irregularities; painstakingly detail the lack of data security and auditable paper trails surrounding the use of direct-recording electronic (DRE or automatic touch) voting machines; and provide a thorough review of the statistical and other evidence concerning the question of whether the 2004 presidential exit polls were valid, or whether the votes might not have been counted as cast. In sum, this book is serious, clearly written and well-researched. And yes, despite the presence of footnotes and appendices, it is clear, plain-spoken and hard-hitting, even for those of us who are neither computer professionals, political scientists or statisticians. Some of what you'll learn if you buy a copy: --How the fair performance of a Las Vegas voting machine is assured, and how that compares to the monitoring of your automatic touch voting machine. --What can be more easily verified: your grocery store purchase and your bank machine withdrawal or your vote on an automatic touch voting machine. --What computer professionals think of automatic touch voting and why. --Why the most widely-accepted explanations for why the U.S. exit polls supposedly failed in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections may have significant statistical and logical shortcomings. The integrity of the U.S. election process is the linchpin of American democracy. At minimum, Freeman and Bleifuss demonstrate that the system may be wobblier than you might have thought. Republicans, Democrats, Independents and all others owe it to themselves to read and debate this important book. Whether you agree with the authors' conclusions or not, you'll want to form your own opinions about a fascinating book that will inevitably be the subject of considerable interest and controversy.