Have exit polls outed Bush?

Unexplained discrepancies between exit polls, which were pointing to a clear Kerry win, and the outcome in the recent US presidential election, have called into question the use of electronic voting with suggestions that Bush supporters hacked into computers in voting booths and, if proven true, could mean that electoral fraud, which gave Bush Jr his first presidency, was repeated on a grand and frightening scale to produce "hail the thief part 2".

There is no dispute that in the recent US presidential election there were wide discrepancies between exit polls and the results which election officials and the media announced.

However, nearly all the mainstream attention, questioning and blame has been on the exit polls. How did the previously reliable exit polls get it so wrong? This question will undoubtedly be the subject of much handwringing particularly by those unwilling or incapable of contemplating the other explanation—that it may have been a case of fraud and not error.

Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a disturbing answer. Looking at the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, he concludes that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one.

"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."

In his widely circulated paper The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy Dr Freeman (he can be contacted via sfreeman@sas.upenn.edu) concludes that:

"Systematic fraud or mis-tabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election’s unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies and the public to investigate."

However, evidence is emerging which may explain why tried and trusted exit polls proved so resoundingly wrong. Exit polls are polls taken of people who have just cast their vote which is why they traditionally have been found to be extremely reliable. To date there has been a high correlation between how people said they voted and the voting result.

Exit polls have been so reliable that they have been used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.

Dick Morris, Clinton's infamous political consultant during his first campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, in an article for The Hill, a publication for political junkies in Washington, DC, said:

"Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

"So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried.

The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by ten points."

However, while the exit polls were showing Kerry as the clear winner, a few hours later, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in, the Bush camp was claiming victory. This apparent failure of the exit polls, which were way off the mark and saw reputable news services get it seriously wrong, has been baffling reporters since election day.

In his article for The Hill, Morris concluded that: "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Some conservatives have claimed that it was the exit polls which were rigged to create a winning climate for Kerry and discourage Republican supporters in the western states from voting. It seems a strange tactic and one which, if it was believed, has backfired badly.

But, some diligent analysis of computer voting patterns suggest that the rigging may have been elsewhere other than in the exit polls.

A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. The professor noted that although voting for the minimum wage increase and Kerry's vote were never going to correspond perfectly, he did not expect that the gap—of 1.5 million votes—to be that large.

Although this could be all a coincidence the unexplained puzzle is why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems, produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Net denizen Kathy Dopp has researched and compiled official information (available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm) which has highlighted some startling correlations, as can be seen from the accompanying column charts.

Thom Hartmann, in an article published on Saturday, 6 November, 2004, by www.commondreams.org Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked tells of George W Bush's reaction when he was told that the exit polls were clearly showing that Kerry was winning in a landslide.

"Bush took the news stoically," according to the Associated Press radio report.

So far the only national "mainstream" media to touch on the story about the discrepancies in the exit polls has been Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, 5 November, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seemed to favour Bush.

Concern with these irregularities have already seen calls for an inquiry [See box Call for voting inquiry.]

Power grab

It is accepted that political parties and their politicians strive to attain the power of government. The tussle has been reduced to a modern-day bread and circus routine but to date in Western democracies there has been a belief that voting is above-board even if the electioneering is tawdry.

The cloud of electoral fraud surrounding George W Bush's first presidency seems to be even darker over his second "victory". In a more blatant repeat of the first Bush election, his camp announced Bush as the victor before voting was finalised and not long after exit polls were pointing to a Kerry win. The pundits must have been puzzled at this extraordinary display of confidence. It would be safe to assume that such a bold, if not arrogant, announcement must have been based on sound data. Doubt is a terrible curse.

This time round the Bush push for power was more than usual. Remaining president was a matter of survival. The skeletons in the proverbial cupboard could not be exposed. These are many and they are connected to the Bush Administration's role in the 11 September investigations, the lies to wage war in Iraq, the subordination of the UN's charter, the corrupt state of

Corporate America and its stranglehold on government and the global economy, the inability of the most powerful and wealthiest nation on earth to feed, clothe and care for millions of its people, the shameful role in wreaking havoc around the world and the taint of electoral fraud.

Of all the wrongs, one which cannot be tolerated, is tampering with the integrity of elections. The consequences of this are too devastating to contemplate which is why honest and democratic Americans should do everything possible to clear up any uncertainties over the recent presidential elections.

Man of the times

We are undoubtedly living in difficult times. We live in a world that is disoriented: from fears, at times exaggerated, from delays in dealing with environmental and social justice recovery and, above all, disoriented by technological change and an uncontrolled economy. One of the many consequences is the weakening of healthy and humane traditions that have contributed to the progress of civil society.

In a few words we are in full competition mode where the winner always wins. In the current climate it is hard to think that the loser, or the person who represents the loser, wins. Hence Bush's victory, for the second time, was not fanciful. Bush had the money for the political advertising, he had the support of corporate America, he had convinced Americans that the economy was going well, popular fear from September 11 was still alive, the opposition did not markedly distinguish itself and it was not insignificant that Osama Bin Laden appeared, punctual, with his "threatening" message.

The recipe favoured Bush even if about 20 million more Americans voted than in the past.

All this shows that it is more likely that the political system is managed by the powerful—and will be so until the majority of people (remember that about half of Americans do not vote) takes charge of democracy.

But, the Bush camp had shown it could not just leave victory to chance the first time round. It strategically rigged voting in 2000 and got away with it. If computer voting fraud, which is much easier to carry out and much more difficult to prove, was carried out this time round, the consequences may be as momentous as the fall of the Berlin Wall and of communism.

Call for voting inquiry

Three US congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday, 5 November, requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in the 2 November presidential elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

The congressmen claimed that there had been numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio, that voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw that their votes were instead recorded as votes for George W Bush. In Florida there were also reports that when voters attempted to select John Kerry on the screen Bush appeared. In their letter the congressmen, John Conyers Jr, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler, all Democrats, said:

"The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004."

Stand by the fraud fighters

Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org) has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence—red flags, exit polls—but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.

Grass roots stirrings

Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them has paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. . . . A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results . . . posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

[Susan Truitt (susan.truitt@lexisnexis.com) www.caseohio.org]