the following was a short article culled from Democratic Underground from early 2005, by progressive activist "James Gatz':
If you're one of those progressive blog enthusiasts who is confident in their knowledge that George W. Bush STOLE the 2004 election, specifically through the use of pervasive voter fraud in the state of Ohio, deletion of Kerry votes, creation of Bush votes, or the replacement of the former with the latter, you may want to stop reading right now. From the many of you I've met and/or read, I realize that this belief comforts you in a way I can't appreciate, and I don't think there's any reason for me to disillusion you.
However, if you happen to be one of the many who suspects that something was amiss in 2004, but isn't sure if you buy the grand conspiracy theory, then please do follow along with me as I de-construct this myth, and why I think we (as progressives, in general) need to work diligently to overcome it before it sinks our current strong prospects and does long-term damage to the progressive movement.
The following diary is in three parts: 1. The several reasons why I do not believe the outcome of the 2004 presidential election was manipulated.2. Reasons why that progressives and many others have nevertheless developed the belief that the outcome WAS manipulated.3. Why this is potentially harmful to our cause, and ought to be guarded against.
I have many reasons to be confident in the outcome of the 2004 election, however, I think the following 5 are most compelling:
1. Reasonable overall expectations (based on history and current politics) suggested that Bush would win Ohio.2. Final polls conducted BEFORE Election Day strongly suggested that Bush would win Ohio.3. The sheer scale of Bush's Ohio victory would have required a conspiracy of such magnitude as to be improbable and beyond reasonable belief4. Why not Wisconsin? The over-complicated method of fixing the election suggested by believers.5. The overwhelming endorsement of the results (explicit or implicit) by a wide range of individuals and groups whose own interests ought to have made them highly willing to embrace any signs of fraud.
Beginning with the first point, let us remember several key facts about Ohio. It has an overwhelmingly Republican history: it has a GOP Governor, and last elected a Democratic Governor 20 years ago in 1986. It has two GOP Senators, and last elected a Democratic Senator in 1992 (and that was John Glenn, a national hero with far more cross-party appeal than John Kerry could have hoped for).It has voted for Republican Presidential candidates in 7 of the last 10 Presidential elections, and what's more, it has not given a Democratic candidate 50%+1 in ANY of the last 10 elections (Carter, and Clinton twice, each won with less than 50% of the total, helped strongly in Clinton's case by the presence of Perot on the ballot). In fact, the 2004 total of 2,741,167 official votes for Kerry was both the most ever received by a Democrat in Ohio and the highest percentage (48.71%) since Carter in 1976.
George W. Bush himself won the state just four years earlier by 165,019 votes, in an election year when he LOST the nationwide popular vote by over a half-million votes. In 2004, Bush improved his nationwide popular total (winning by 3 million plus votes nationwide), and yet lost ground in Ohio, winning by just 118,601. [All presidential numbers are from the official Ohio SoS site, at
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/]
Ohio has 18 members of the US House of Reps, and 12 of them are elected Republicans. In fact, on the very same day when John Kerry got 48.7% of the vote, Democratic candidates for the House got a collective 48.5% of the vote, meaning Kerry slightly outperformed the Democratic House candidates statewide.
There was no strong historical reason, nor was there a political balance in Ohio, which suggested that Nov. 2, 2004, was going to be a good day for John Kerry in Ohio.
Which brings me to point 2, the polls. At least, those polls conducted BEFORE the day of the election. The final polls conducted by Zogby, Strategic Vision, Survey USA, Rasmussen, American Research Group, and Opinion Dynamics all showed Bush either winning or tied going into the election. Only an Oct. 31st daily poll conducted by Gallup showed Kerry ahead in the final week. I had a good friend working in Philadelphia on the 2004 campaign, who was steadfastly monitoring all polls and conducting his own poll-of-polls to give us an early hint of what was going to happen. On the night before the election, his model projected every single state would vote exactly as it did, with one exception: he predicted Bush would win Wisconsin by .1%, when in fact it went Kerry by roughly .4%. Ohio he had Bush winning 51-48, nearly dead on. [ps, remember that note about Wisconsin]. I'll get to the famous exit polls in a later part of the diary, about the reasons why so progressives believe Kerry won.
Point three relates to the scale of Presidential elections. I think this is one of the harder points to explain to average Jane progressive, who wasn't a full-time campaign staffer (disclosure: I was. I spent 13 months of my life trying to unseat GWB, first working for Dean, then ultimately a PAC focused on voter turnout in swing states). Presidential elections are huge things, and in a state like Ohio, the single greatest defense against manipulated election results is the number of votes that would have to be forged. Florida in 2000 showed us that extremely close elections can be determined by factors other than the will of the voters, but 2004 in Ohio just wasn't that close. As I mention above, Bush won by an official 118,000 votes. If Bush won through deceit as the believers claim, then this would have to mean that literally hundreds of voting machines in dozens of polling locations around the state were tampered with, each to the tune of hundreds or thousands of votes. Such an operation would have required not only the complicity of hundreds of Republican-favoring poll workers and watchers, but also numerous Democrats empowered in counties around the state to man the polls, check the machines, etc. For none of these people to have had second thoughts and come forward, for no one in power to claim to have been approached about fixing the election and rejected the suggestion, defies probability.
Furthermore, if such a result were created, it would almost certainly be obvious in analysis of the final tally; however, aside from the highly-publicized (on the blogs, at least) anecdotes of a precinct here and a precinct there where the final tally seemed off, there isn't anything like a list of hundreds or thousands of precincts where the final tally doesn't make sense when compared to the partisan makeup of the area. Furthermore, if in fact Kerry votes had been deleted or changed to Bush, then why does the final result still show Kerry with a record-breaking number of votes for a Democrat? Are we to believe that in `reality' Kerry broke the record by an even more astounding margin? To wade into the anecdotal territory myself, why is it that (as Matt Bai notably reported on in the NYT magazine under an article titled `who lost Ohio?') ACT, MoveOn, and the Coordinated Campaign all met their vote goals in Democratic areas, and were not in the least disappointed by their turnout operations. Isn't it more likely that just as Bai suggests, the loss of Ohio is simply attributable to the fact that the Republicans turned out their folks just as well, and there are just a bit more of THEM? Doesn't it make perfect sense that in the most heated Presidential election in a lifetime, and the one where the votes in Ohio mattered more than perhaps they ever had before, the voters in Ohio simply realized it was important to get out to the polls and thus recorded their roughly 72% turnout rate statewide, with high turnout in both Republican and Democratic areas?
My fourth point asks you to step into the shoes of the hypothetical conspirator determined to forge the election results for Bush. Where would you fool with the results? In Ohio, a state Bush won last time, seemed fairly likely to win again, and which is large enough to require a massive fraud operation? Or in a state like Wisconsin, which also had enough electoral votes to flip the outcome (if Bush had lost Ohio, but won Wisconsin, he would have had 276 electorals), but less than half as many voters, had voted narrowly for Gore in 2000 (thus making it a `pickup' if Bush won it), and was too close to call in the late polls? As I mentioned above, the biggest surprise for those closely watching the election was that Kerry managed to hold on to Wisconsin. This was achieved mostly because of record-breaking turnout in the area around Madison (and, to a lesser extent, Milwaukee). Why would the hypothetical conspirator ignore such an easy target, and one where a Bush victory would have gone just as unquestioned, and instead target a larger, more monitored state (and there had to be thousands of poll watchers from various groups in Ohio, see my next point) which Bush might have won anyway? It again defies probability.
My final point against the `Bush stole Ohio' claims is that none of the groups and individuals who would have had every reason to claim fraud if they detected the signs of it did so. Not only did Kerry/Edwards quickly accept the results, but groups like ACT (which had spent over $130 to try to win swing states) and MoveOn (which had spent over $30 million, and had precinct captains across Ohio), and organizations like Election Protection and the Carter Center, which both had independent monitors in Ohio all agreed that the outcome was valid. These groups, which collectively had thousands of volunteers and staff on the ground in Ohio, each separately made the decision that there were no significant or credible reports of fraud, and none made any effort to challenge the results in the immediate aftermath of the election.
In fact, the only complaints by any reputable individuals, such as those in the Conyers Report, point most convincingly to a general pattern of disenfranchisement of minorities and other progressives, but not to voter fraud. It's one thing to acknowledge that our electoral system needs to do a better job of giving the vote and encouraging it to be used by 100% of eligible Americans, another to suggest that at the end of the day John Kerry actually received more votes than George Bush in Ohio.
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So, why do so many people who frequent the progressive blogs insist that the election WAS in fact stolen? Well, I have two main theories: first, that the string of defeats in the last few years by a group of hard-line radical rightists who most progressives find repulsive to the point of physical illness have hit us so hard that we search for suggestion that it just isn't so, and second, that it's all the exit poll's fault.
As to the first, I don't think I need to go into too much detail here. Clearly, it is far easier for a progressive (especially one living in, say New York or California, surrounded by fellow progressives) to simply deny the results of the last Presidential election than it is to accept them. Especially after the way in which Bush gained the White House in 2000 (without the popular vote, and thanks mostly to disenfranchised African-Ameicans and complicated ballots in Florida), suggestions that he stole the 2004 election as well certainly fell on ears hoping to hear them.
As for the second of these points, let me talk a moment about exit polls, and why I wish journalists would stop promoting them, especially in close races and before the official votes are tallied. Exit polls are the least scientific, and most clearly flawed political polls currently conducted. Unlike telephone polls, they are opt-in, which mean voters can choose to go up to an exit pollster at their location and tell them how they voted, or can choose to keep their vote private, which inherently skews the poll in the direction of the candidate whose voters are more EXCITED about voting for him (see: NH primary exit polls from 04, which showed Dean within 2 points of Kerry, when in fact he lost by more than 12). They are also released within hours or minutes of being conducted, without the time for careful demographic weighting that professional pollsters perform on pre-election polls. Finally, they are extrapolated from a few polling locations to estimate the whole state's vote, even though in any given election certain polling locations will slightly under-perform or out-perform the pre-election expectations for them, unlike pre-election polls which are extrapolated to a constant number, the number of registered voters in the state. The only accurate way to conduct an exit poll would be to have a poll taker at EVERY location in the state, polling a constant percentage of the voters at each one, and then to demographically weigh these results after the entire day is over. Even then, the poll would have a margin of error of probably at least 3% (very few polls ever do better than that), which would mean that it could, for example, predict Kerry with 51% when in fact he would come in with 48.7%. Sound familiar? But of course, CNN posted the raw exit poll results on their website anyway, and give birth to the conspiracy theory du jour.
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So why should you care? Well, because if you're anything like me, you want to win next time. I want to win midterm elections this year and give control of Congress to the Democrats. I want to elect a Democratic President in 2008. And I think both of these things are quite possible, if we work hard to organize progressives, to talk to swing voters, to turnout infrequents, to dispel popular myths about the parties (like the one that says Republicans are fiscally responsible, or Democrats are weak on terror), and to nominate strong, inspiring candidates. Hell, even with John Kerry as our candidate, up against the smear machine of Karl Rove in high gear, and with an incumbent `War President' wrapping himself in the flag and insisting that a vote for him was a vote for The Troops, we still managed to get within 18 electoral votes. But if you believe in the `Bush stole the election' story, why should you even try next time? After all, as Mark Miller's book points out right there on the cover, they'll "Steal the Next One Too." So why bother donating to Dems, or doing the hard work of canvassing and phonebanking. It doesn't matter anyway, since the fix is in. Why even bother addressing the widely acknowledged problems with our democracy, like the gerrymandering of districts, the campaign finance system, the disenfranchisement of former felons, the difficulty of voting itself in many inner-city areas and on college campuses, the fact that roughly one quarter of Americans aren't even registered, or any of the others, since no matter how many young people we register, no matter how many African-americans, Hispanics, women, college students, and other progressives we turn out, the machines will just count their votes for the Republicans anyway? That's what I hate about the 2004 conspiracy theory, and why I wish we progressives would move past it before it really becomes a widespread belief (and no, I don't think the theory itself is a conspiracy by Republicans to discourage Democrats, I think this one's entirely of our own doing).
Who's with me?
-An American Progressive Patriot.
