[Peace-discuss] Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by Robert Kennedy

[Lisa Chason]

In Rolling Stone 

 

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? 


Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots
or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White
House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. 


The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. For more, see
exclusive <http://rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875>  documents, sources,
charts and commentary. 

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the
returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an
overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight,
the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next
day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded.
Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut
cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions,
did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post
immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1)
and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or
errors on a large scale.''(2) 

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that
something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6
million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or
received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut
down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A
consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the
Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground
states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New
Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines
mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than
20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged
with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were
spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10) 

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground
state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there
purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to
process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and
illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A
precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly
high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city
Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In
Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist
threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11) 

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a
messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials.
''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor,
who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American
University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000
elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and
municipalities.'' 

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their
decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and
benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become
convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign
to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican
election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and
unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data
reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming
majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not
have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the
results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's
<http://rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875>  Missing Votes) In what may be
the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio
citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to
discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to
stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And
that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright
fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted
instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough
to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15) 

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in
2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting
in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to
vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio,
you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican
outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.'' 

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most
experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election
as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political
polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual
precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can
tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.'' 

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004,
was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote
counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to
an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but
four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16) 

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science.
Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be
the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to
predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask
voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The
results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have
never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit
polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has
worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such
surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the
relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote
tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard
Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the
Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud
that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20) 

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the
U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey
treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the
discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the
offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with
''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the
official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results,
the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21) 

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their
clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served
as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed
up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with
them again.'' 

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the
most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running
the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered
the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the
credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll,
Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) --
approximately six times larger than those normally used in national
polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus
one percent.(27) 

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were
briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an
insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to
Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister
Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect
Kerry.(29) 

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed
Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding
leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes
nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in
supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these
numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in
450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,''
a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32) 

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible
disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the
eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls
had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls,
CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage
points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5
percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in
Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33) 

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of
Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all
three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as
we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is
impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in
the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been
due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale
<http://rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875>  of the Exit Polls) 

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling
data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political
-- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into
this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so
wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a
statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling. 

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election,
Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the
pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to
Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters
on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented
aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent
nationwide.(35) 

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading
pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is
''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the
hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the
reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in
the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37) 

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a
team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead
wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined
to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman
and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed
the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry
strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to
substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.'' 

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and
the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where
Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off
by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry
dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within
three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election
officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39) 

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that
supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The
discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were
Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of
African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most
Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet
this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the
Democratic Party.'' 

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of
mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan
watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote
count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In
twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they
discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again
-- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively
in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the
disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct
Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those
surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven
percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only
thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just
shy of one in 3 billion.(40) 

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable
evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are
consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral
votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter
intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a
public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous
statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom''
disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he
adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote
shifting.'' 

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has
been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's,
and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers
and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones.
Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the
campaign -- more than to any other state.(42) 

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in
charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President
Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell
had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws
-- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter
registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's
re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for
his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral
system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he
witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the
Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46) 

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is
well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An
outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion
even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the
anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in
rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic
liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official
powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in
Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a
federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result
in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51) 

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw
them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt
with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an
example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate
the exercise of the right to vote.'' 

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by
Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary
Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the
widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the
committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked
into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers
issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter
irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes,
were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it
involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54) 

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me.
''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had
hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level
of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like
this had ever happened to them before.'' 

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts
to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its
face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard''
for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the
voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the
avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell
permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct
a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more
than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two
national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry,
nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and
2004.(56) 

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names
undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more
were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right
to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided
not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C,
where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was
only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state. 

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised
tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the
300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate,
according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly
denied the opportunity to cast ballots. 

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the
biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers
and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing
to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on
the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican
counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new
registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent,
compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61)
''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the
ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington
Times.(62) 

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and
the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of
predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal
mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties,
after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black
voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court
orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004,
the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered
letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five
counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio
Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of
elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of
35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came
back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from
Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67) 

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the
mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because
they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and
home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no
permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed,
proved the new registrations were fraudulent. 

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken
from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo
courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that
would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a
process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an
''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up
and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only
sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very
addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the
atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were
dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims
of fraud.(74) 

URL:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
<http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stole
n%20>  

Rollingstone.com

--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry
Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html 

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The
New York Times, November 14, 2004.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC
404482
<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994D
C404482&n> &n 
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results 

3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special
Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html 

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June
2005, page 11.
http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005
_ 
v1.0_usletter.pdf 

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,''
International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004. 

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail
Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.
http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm 

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers:
Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back
cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004. 

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for
the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf 

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State
Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2.
http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/ 
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf 

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps
Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election
Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the
American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,''
September 2005, pg. 10.
http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf 

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the
story. 

12) See ''Ohio?s Missing Votes.'' 

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results
for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf 

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at
Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5
http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/full
report.pdf 

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.'' 

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison
Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool
(NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf 

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and
2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman. 

18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November
4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx 

19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times,
October 17, 2004. 

20) Matt Kelley, "U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine," Associated
Press, December 11, 2004.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html 

Daniel Williams, "Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in
Runoff, Set New Election," The Washington Post, December 4, 2004. 

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election
Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," Seven Stories
Press, July 2006, Page 102. 

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool
(NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf 

23) Mitofsky International Web site.
http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm 

24) Tim Golden, "Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners," The New
York Times, August 10, 1994. 

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool
(NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59. 

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004
Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the
Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data." FreePress.org,
December 29, 2004, P. 9
http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf 

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman. 

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134 

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The
New York Times, November 5, 2004. 

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134 

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S.
Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.
http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsk
y.pdf 

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST,
November 2, 2004. 

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102 

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool
(NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4. 

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120. 

36) Interview with John Zogby 

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool
(NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4. 

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128. 

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130. 

40) "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show
Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount," U.S. Count Votes, National
Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf 

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16. 

42) The Washington Post, "Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited
States," November 2, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html 

43) John McCarthy, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," Associated
Press Online, November 30, 2004. 

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer
http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates
<http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates&fn=main-h
.htm&cp=PORC> &fn=main-h.htm&cp=PORC 

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch,
November 30, 2004. 

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland,
Florida), November 18, 2000. 

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/ 

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,''
Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.
http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B
1-02.html 

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex
Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004. 

50) Raw Story, "Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering
Ohio to Bush."
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php 

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio
Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth
Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf 

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the
House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January
5, 2005. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf 

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8. 

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4. 

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties. 

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate. 

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2
Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334
<http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334
&SearchID> &SearchID 
=73195662517954 

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips. 

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections 

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6. 

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The
New York Times, September 26, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=125402400
0
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=12540240
00&en=> &en= 
cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt 

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,'' The
Washington Times, October 28, 2004.
http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm 

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post,
October 29, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html 

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things
Considered, October 28, 2004. 

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio,
Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no.
C-1-04-735, Page 2.
http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell
102704ord.pdf 

66) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in
a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004. 

67) Daniel Tokaji, "Early Returns on Election Reform," George Washington Law
Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235 

68) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in
a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004. 

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for
Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004. 

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19 

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to
All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1
(Oct. 26, 2004). 

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,''
Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/ 
NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS 

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio,
Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no.
C-1-04-735, Page 4.
http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell10
2704ord.pdf 

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News
Messenger, October 26, 2004. 

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM



 

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