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Saturday, June 3, 2006 12:00 AM

Was the 2004 election stolen? No.

In Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argues that new evidence proves that Bush stole the election. But the evidence he cites isn't new and his argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions.

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  • Friday, June 2, 2006 10:40 PM

    Manjoo's Arbitrary Straw Man

    For me, the most telling piece of desperation here is this passage:

    "As for Freeman's 660,000 to 1 statistic, it is irrelevant. ... The statistic measures the probability that the errors in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida occurred due to chance or random error, and according to Freeman, that probability is very low. 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."

    You take the most important fact in this debate, the point of commensuration between two feuding groups, and simply declare that your explanation is right. In your mind, because Mitofsky claims the "systematic" error was in the polling (which is contentious, even though you claim an anonymous "many in the polling community" agree with him), the possibility the systematic error was fraud is therefore null and void. What?

    How does a competing claim based on the same evidence make one side "a straw-man assertion"? If in fact fraud was committed, then Freeman's statistic is hugely important. And Kennedy and others have submitted a grocery list of fraudulent activity.

    Freeman's statistic is essential, because it shows whatever happened in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida was DELIBERATE and not due to chance. Your assertion that the deliberate mistake was in the polling does not mean you are right and Freeman's number is irrelevant. It means Freeman's number points to _something_, and other evidence will determine what that something is.

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