By PHK
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” in Rolling Stone Magazine took me back – not to the Stones’ heyday – but to the presidential election results of 2000 and 2004 that catapulted George W. Bush into the presidency and the US into what is becoming an eight year nightmare of bad decisions and misadventures.
I spent election night 2000 on the 93rd floor of what was once the World Trade Center, Tower 2 as New Mexico’s State Manager for then Voter News Service (VNS). I was not involved in exit polls; my job was simply to oversee the relaying of election results from hundreds of precinct and county reporters I had recruited who were fanned out across the state waiting for the polls to close: these VNS reporters even included a group of high school honors students. My reporters then phoned in the results to central VNS phone banks as soon as the local and county election officials publicly released the results. For the precinct reporters it meant a single phone call shortly after 7 pm. For the county reporters it often meant a very long night calling in frequent updates.
New Mexico was a battleground state which made it interesting. Had the election gone differently our five electoral votes might even have made the difference. The New Mexico outcome hung in the balance that night and well beyond because of ineptness in the most important county clerk’s office and a misreading of the final tally by another. The Republican county clerk in question lost her job and her elections supervisor was fired as a consequence. The best report of what went wrong in New Mexico Elections 2000 was published as a front page feature by the Wall Street Journal on December 15, 2000. But I and my reporters were off the hot-seat once the situation in Florida began to turn into the fiasco it became because VNS exit polls and pollsters predictions there did not jibe with the vote tallies being reported by VNS reporters from the precincts and county clerks' offices and from the latter by AP.
Even so, it was a long, suspense-filled night that rapidly became the gray sky of morning – not because of the reporters I had recruited – they did their jobs – but because of a few county clerks’ offices and the razor-edge presidential election results that were being reported. The chief problem in New Mexico Elections 2000 was ineptness at the county clerk level, not complicity to commit electoral fraud, although we know now that a Diebold company representative with ulterior motives or instructions and/or a county clerk or elections supervisor who wants to manipulate the electronic paperless voting machines can do so prior to the elections.* However, I never heard charges of deliberate malfeasance in “The Land of Enchantment” for Elections 2000 but there have been concerns expressed about the fairness of the presidential count here Elections 2004.
I watched elections 2004 at home. VNS had been disbanded after elections 2002 because of a colossal failure due to bad decisions made by Ted Savaglio, VNS’ inept new and last head. As I followed the 2004 elections and their aftermath covered only by AP, it seemed as if every accusation of electoral malfeasance was answered with a plausible response to the contrary. The exit polling model was wrong yet again – for instance. And as Kennedy now describes it, the consortia of media who funded VNS and now support the AP-run elections coverage blamed the new pollsters’ models for the discrepancies.
Election fraud or suspicious coincidence? Where does the truth lie?
But who really was right? Were the highly regarded pollsters Mitofsky and Edison that inept? Or could the answer lie elsewhere? Namely, could there have been selected, targeted election fraud perpetrated by the Bush election campaign – first evidenced in Florida in 2000 then elements transplanted, adapted and implemented in Ohio and other battleground states in 2004 that stole the election from John Kerry?
There are at least two previous reports that suggest widespread electoral fraud on the part of at least one high level member of the Bush campaign. “Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One, Too” is by NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller and the other is by Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Conyers commissioned his report on the Ohio situation from House Judiciary Committee staff and it was released to no fanfare or apparent MSM interest in January 2005. There is an executive summary on “Truthout” and it is damming. Meanwhile Miller’s and Conyer’s findings were even questioned by liberal investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard in an interview by Amy Goodwin on “Democracy Now” November 2005 and apparently in his earlier article on the subject for Mother Jones.
Countering skeptics with stats
What Kennedy’s article does is counter some of Hertsgaard’s skepticism about the veracity of anecdotal incidents of electoral fraud with finely honed statistical data and analysis by University of Pennsylvania Visiting Scholar Steven F. Freeman. The raw data was released by the pollsters Edison and Mitofsky in January 2005. Freeman’s book entitled “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count” which is due out later this month, lays out, according to Kennedy, “a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.”
Freeman’s analysis describes not only Republican malfeasance in Ohio led by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State and also Co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Campaign in Ohio who is currently running for Governor, but also discrepancies between actual vote tallies and exit polling results that favored George W. Bush in ten of 11 battleground states above the statistical margins of error. This includes New Mexico, but it also showed larger than should be expected deviations that tilted towards W in the three critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio as well as Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire.
Freeman’s data further debunks the response that Mitofsky/Edison used to explain their “mistake” in the aftermath, e.g. that the Kerry voters were more likely to talk to the exit pollers than Bush voters.
As we approach yet another electoral period, I’m delighted that Robert F. Kennedy’s son has come forward to raise crucial questions regarding the conduct of the 2004 elections. Why his article appeared in Rolling Stone rather than front and center on the New York Times or WaPo’s op-ed page, however, is beyond me.
Why should it matter?
Maybe Freeman’s analysis wouldn’t matter if George W. Bush’s presidency hadn’t turned into such a disaster. Maybe it also wouldn’t matter if the Bush administration hadn’t chosen to focus on its high profile promotion of honest elections and democratization abroad through its insistence upon a multitude of elections in Iraq and support for the colored revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and elsewhere where exit polls were used to invalidate fraud at the ballot box thereby throwing out entrenched regimes in power too long. Too bad that didn’t happen here, too.
If statistical evidence continues to mount that this administration did indeed “steal the 2004 elections” then there needs to be a hue and cry throughout this country led by the MSM and outraged Democrats who are not afraid to turn over every stone as carefully as Freeman has – not hide under one as they are doing up to now. And it should start immediately. If not, then there is a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Fourth Estate as well as the “loyal” opposition that does not speak well for the future of this country.
The first place to begin is with Kennedy’s Rolling Stone article, Conyer’s January 2005 study and all of the reports by Freeman and his team on the University of Pennsylvania website - even before the book hits the stands. And now, before we see a replay next November – as NYU political scientist Miller warned.
Note: A check of The New York Times archives do not mention Freeman, his forthcoming book, or his reports on this subject available on the University of Pennsylvania website. WaPo David Broder was asked about Kennedy’s article June 2 in a "live discussion" by someone from New Hampshire: his response was “I have not read the article, but I intend to do so” and WaPo David Froomkin simply quoted an excerpt from the Kennedy article on page four of a five page blog. But that's at least more than I can report for the New York Times.