2004 Election - Let’s talk evidence
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. indulged the Left’s favorite conspiracy theory - that Bush stole the 2004 elections, notably in Ohio. While PZ Myers and many other Lefties have accepted Kennedy’s nonsense uncritically, let’s look at Kennedy’s claims and the facts (mostly from Farhad Manjoo in Salon magazine, and also Mother Jones, and OTB). When Democratic sources like Salon, Mother Jones, pollster Mark Blumenthal, blogger tristero, Poor Man’s Institute, and others point out RFK’s gross errors, I would like to see thoughtful Democrat bloggers like Mustang Bobby, Kevin Drum and Roxanne Cooper respond. Chris Bowers at MyDD comes close.
RFK Claim: “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.”
Fact: What Kennedy doesn’t say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn’t find their names listed. The Democrats’ report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a “provisional” ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same — a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy’s claim of “astounding” partisanship.
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RFK Claim: 357,000 voters, “most of them Democratic,” were either prevented from voting or had their votes go uncounted … making Kerry the likely winner.
Fact: Kennedy finds these “missing votes” in the damnedest places, detailed below:
RFK Claim: He counts 30,000 voter registrations that were deleted from voter rolls, in keeping with state law, as “mostly Kerry voters.”
Fact: It’s impossible to know if those were even real people,let alone if they were “mostly kerry voters.”
RFK Claim: 174,000 mostly Kerry voters didn’t vote because they were put off by long lines.
Fact: But the source states it was actually 129,543 voters, and that those votes would have split evenly between Kerry and Bush. And that same source — the Democratic Party’s report once again — notes conclusively: “Despite the problems on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio.” But Kennedy doesn’t tell you that.
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RFK Claim: Kennedy relies on a band of researchers, especially on Ohio’s exit poll, uncritically.
Fact: This research on election fraud has long been called into question by experts, wholly debunked, or have at least been the subject of tremendous debate among experts. Reading Kennedy’s article, you’d never guess that some of his star sources’ claims have fared quite badly when put to people in the field.
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RFK Claim: In rural counties in Ohio, more than 150,000 votes meant for Kerry were somehow switched to Bush. … “One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot.” Kennedy points to vote results for Ellen Connally, a liberal Democrat who ran for chief justice of the state Supreme Court, who ran almost 20,000 votes ahead of Kerry. To Kennedy, this indicates that a lot of the people who voted for Connally also intended to vote for Kerry, but their votes somehow didn’t show up.
Fact: “Down-ticket” candidates do indeed sometimes win more votes than presidential candidates of their own party in some places — sometimes a lot more. In 2000, Democratic state Supreme Court candidate Alice Resnick won more votes than Al Gore in dozens of counties — in 81 counties, which makes the 12 counties where Supreme Court candidate Connally outperformed Kerry in 2004 look not very suspicious at all. Resnick won 126,000 more votes than Gore in 2000;that is no evidence of Gore “stealing” Ohio that year.
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RFK Claim: GOP Secretary of State Blackwell engineered a “purge” of 300,000 voters in Ohio’s major cities.
Fact: Scrubbing the voting rolls of people who hadn’t voted in prior elections isn’t an arbitrary move. It’s Ohio law, per Ohio code, 3503.19.
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RFK Claim: Republican officials deliberately rigged voting procedures to create the long voting lines seen in Kerry strongholds, and comes up with “more than 174,000 voters” were turned away.
Fact: Long lines may have dissuaded some Ohio voters from voting. But the relevant question is how many voters didn’t get to vote due to long lines, and who is to blame? The Democratic party’s own report, enormous PDF — says “two percent of voters who went to the polls on Election Day decided to leave their polling locations due to the long lines. This resulted in approximately 129,543 lost votes.” The report adds that “these potential voters would have divided evenly between George Bush and John Kerry.” But even if Kerry got two-thirds of those ballots — a huge margin, matching what he got in Ohio’s bluest counties — he’d have won about 86,000 more votes, while Bush would have won 43,000 more. This would have reduced the final 118,000-margin in Ohio to about 75,000 — that is, Bush would still have been comfortably in the lead.
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RFK Claim: Exit polls are always reliable.
Fact: Nonsense. I will refer to the lengthy response on Salon, page 3. And Dem. pollster Blumenthal’s article here.
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RFK Claim: The exit polls showed an insurmountable Kerry lead, one that made a Bush win impossible.
Fact: Those polls showed a Kerry lead that was within the margin of error.
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RFK Claim: He repeats Frreman’s claim that the odds of the polls being as wrong as they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida at 1 in 660,000. ”As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” Freeman 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.”
Fact: But nobody argues the errors happened by chance. Everyone in the exit poll debate agrees that there was a systematic cause for the errors in the poll. Freeman, Kennedy, et al., claim that the systematic cause was fraud, while Mitofsky and many in the polling community claim the cause was a problem with the poll. So Freeman’s argument that it would take preposterous odds to produce a random sampling error is a straw-man assertion.
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RFK Claim: The exit pollsters can’t explain how their poll failed.
Fact: In January 2005, Mitofsky released a 77-page report detailing how his poll performed on Election Day. You can read the PDF here. It is not stingy about possible methodological flaws in the survey.
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RFK Claim:“Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote.”
Fact: Only 14% receved them too late.
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Note: I have pushed “fair use” probably beyond the breaking point here. If Salon asks, I’ll take down or edit this post to their satisfaction.
Those who want actual expert opinions on the 2004 elections what changes are needed should read the final report of The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting.
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