Book review: Was the 2004 presidential election stolen?

Book review: Was the 2004 presidential election stolen?

By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss. Seven Stories Press, 265 pp, $22.50, softcover.

Immediately after George W. Bush won the 2004 U.S. election, tales of vote fraud began circulating over the Internet.

Much attention focused on touch-screen electronic-voting machines, which don't require paper ballots, making it impossible to physically verify results.

Approximately 29 percent of U.S. voters used these machines in 2004. Another 35 percent used optical- scan systems (like the one used in Vancouver municipal elections), which require paper ballots.

Shortly after the election, University of Pennsylvania organizational-dynamics professor Steven J. Freeman told the Georgia Straight that Bush's final-day tallies were significantly higher than exit-poll results in 10 of the 11 battleground states.

Freeman, who teaches research methods and survey design (including polling) to graduate students, claimed there was a 250,000,000:1 chance of the discrepancies in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania occurring simultaneously.

The supposed media watchdogs quickly rejected claims that Bush could have stolen the 2004 election, often ridiculing the “conspiracy theorists”.

Despite this, Freeman soldiered on, trying to figure out how Bush could have won by three million votes after exit polls of 114,559 respondents at 1,480 precincts indicated a seven-million-vote victory for Democratic challenger John Kerry.

To Freeman, there were two explanations: either the ordinarily reliable exit polls were biased or there was a biased count of the votes.

Exit pollsters Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski claimed that they surveyed too many Kerry voters, skewing the results. This was the “reluctant Bush respondent theory”.

In Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman and coauthor Joel Bleifuss meticulously examine every possible explanation and arrive at a different conclusion.

Bush voters were actually overrepresented in exit polls.

Polling discrepancies were three times higher in precincts in which votes were counted by machines. And the media didn't care.

By treating the exit-poll discrepancy as a mystery worth solving, the authors create a riveting experience for readers.

It should be required reading for political reporters, particularly on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections this November.

Comments