i just saw rfk jr. on tv defending his "stolen election" theory.

and it was very disappointing. i think it was stolen, but if this pathetic whiner is the best we can get to present the case to the media then there is little hope. his voice has an offensive "i need to cry" quality that makes the listener want to puke. why doesn't he take some speech lessons?

his demeanor looks weak and decrepit.

communication is important, but knowing how to do it is more important that the facts at your disposal.

poor jfk jr. failed the test. nobody will be convinced by his whining.....

sorry but that's that way it was.

-inedal in stockholm

I think we're looking at the wrong question here. The question is not "Was the 2004 election stolen?". The question is "Was there a conspiracy to steal the 2004 election that resulted in vote manipulation, fraudulent voting, or voter disenfranchisement?"! Our country's election history is not so clean that either pary is above suspicion. Indeed, people from either party probably justify themselves by saying either "They all do it" or "They did it us, it's only fair we do it to them". It was known in advance that this was going to be a close race, the temptation would have been strong for unscrupulous people to try to find a way to change the results in states where a narrow victory was predicted for the other side. It doesn't matter whether the PREDICTIONS were accurate, only whether the attempt to manipulate the results took place. If it indeed did, the details must be uncovered, and the perpetrators prosecuted to the full extent of the law, whether or not it changed the actual results of the election. Then steps must be taken to prevent those particular methods from ever working again. This is a never-ending battle, this is one of the places where we pay the price of freedom.

I have been involved in the issue of election integrity for over thirty years. In the 1980s, I was invited to speak with Ohio's county election supervisors at their annual meeting hosted by then Secretary of State Sherrod Brown. Now I have written a book about "The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence" published in January 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan. It is available through amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

My book starts with 1776 and ends in July 2005. Thus, it covers the 2004 election nationally, including the Washington State governor's race, the alleged attempt to tear up non-Republican voter registrations by a private company in Nevada, as well as the Ohio situation. Much of the claims of fraud in Ohio were written after my book was completed, and I had a word limitation, so I didn't expend many words on that issue. However, an important point in my book is partisanship at the highest levels, exhibited most recently by Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 and J. Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2004. I report on the House of Representatives hearing on Ohio held as the Electoral votes were being counted, under the requirements of the Electoral Count Act. No House Democrat who spoke, including Marcy Kaptur, Stephanie Tubbs Jones and John Conyers, claimed that Kerry really won. These representatives note misfeasance and Blackwell's partisanship, which were serious. I quote Kaptur on this point on page 212. The so-called Conyers report similarly fails to claim that Kerry won.

I received some information about the Ohio election from the people at The Election Science Institute, consisting of Steven Hertzberg aided by Eva Waskell, who were in Ohio during the election. They expressed no belief that the election was stolen. What I have read from writings by Mark Crispin Miller and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the case is not made at all.

One concern that I have remains to be resolved. It concerns the purging of voters from the Ohio list of registered voters. It has been stated that this purging was accomplished under Ohio law allowing for the elimination of voters who have failed to vote in two successive elections. However, this law cannot be in force for federal elections. It was superseded in 1992 by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which states that no voter can be purged from a list of voters for federal elections solely for reason of failure to vote. In order to purge a particular voter from such a list, it has to be positively shown that the voter is no longer eligible, by virtue of having moved, died, or by having been determined by a state court to no longer be eligible because of felony conviction or mental incompetency. Was Ohio's purge carried out using the requirements of the NVRA? I don't know, and I suggest that some of you who are so positive one way or another find out. We have a big problem with voter registration lists because of the NVRA. Its requirements are very difficult to implement. Many states have large numbers of ineligible voters still registered because of failures to implement adequate data systems. Some states divide their rolls into "active" and "inactive" voters. Many citizens move, and keeping up with them is a real job. With millions of voters in Ohio, legitimate changes could be in the nature of hundeds of thousands per year.

In his June 7, 2006 reply to Kennedy’s rebuttal of his earlier critique Farhad Manjoo citing Mark Blumenthal, claims that:

a) The exit poll margins of error for Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio were between 5% to 7%. This is preposterous. Rather than relying on Mark Blumenthal (an unreliable source for quantitative analysis), I urge Manjoo to download the National Election Pool a “Methods Statement” for the Edison Mitofsky (EM) exit polls (produced on Nov. 2 2006) at:

http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/MethodsStatementNationalFinal.pdf

The second page of this statement sets 95% confidence intervals for these polls (for a “characteristic” i. e. Presidential candidate preference for which there is a close to even split) squarely at 3% for sample sizes of 951-2350 – the range of reported sample sizes for these states. However, as Blumenthal knows, the reported sample sizes (also in the methods statements) are about half of what they really are (see Mitofsky correspondence in Baiman June 5 Free Press AAPOR report). For these true doubled sample sizes of 2351-5250, NEP’s own estimated confidence interval falls to 2% - which matches my own (and I believe Freeman’s) estimates with a 30% cluster adjustment factor. As I have stated in my earlier response to Manjoo, this puts Ohio well outside the margin of sampling error with odds of less than 1,900 that Kerry’s reported result is true given the exit poll result. This is not “slight” evidence but rather highly statistically significant, especially one considered with the inexplicable pro-Bush exit poll discrepancies in the two other key battle ground states of Florida and Pennsylvania. As Freeman and I have stated, the odds that these “sampling errors” (in the same direction and of these magnitudes) would occur for these three states simultaneously in less than one in 182,000,000 (i.e virtually impossible - this number is based on doubled sample sizes). Moreover, when one looks at precinct level exit poll data , and not just aggregate state polls, the evidence in even more striking and inexplicable. A fact that Manjoo has not addressed at all.

The question that has to be asked is why are Manjoo (and Blumenthal) trying to dismiss the statistical significance of the exit poll discrepancies when even Mitofsky (in his January report) concedes that they were the largest on record and highly statistically significant?

b) Manjoo’s efforts to dismiss what he calls the “purported rural vote shift” is even more outlandish. As Kennedy points out he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a popular incumbent who earned more votes statewide than Gore in 2000 and a former Republican judge from Cincinnati who got a “favored son” boost in that region; and an unknown, under funded, very liberal judge from Cleveland, who got 24% less votes than Kerry statewide, inexplicably getting more votes that Kerry in 12 of the most conservative counties (judging by their Bush vote shares) in Ohio!

Moreover, these same 12 counties just happen to be among the only 14 (out of 88 counties) where Bush’s vote is larger than Moyer’s (the incumbent conservative judge) by more than 43%. Moreover, the amount of “excess Bush” vote (more than Bush’s state average of 21% more than Moyer) just happens to roughly match both by county and for entire state the “lost Kerry” vote (what Kerry would have gotten if he had received his state average of 32% more votes than Connally in these counties) without any overall substitution from Moyer to Connally (Moyer’s vote is larger than the state average and Connally’s is smaller than the state average in all but one of these 12 counties).

Farhad, do you understand how absolutely remarkable such a series of “coincidences” is?!!

I challenge you or anyone else to provide a plausible non-vote shifting explanation for these patterns.

Note that the Bush to Moyer ratio is independent of the Kerry to Connally ratio when there is no substitution between Moyer and Connally. It is simply impossible to understand why, out of all the 88 counties, 9 out of 14 cases where Bush does extraordinarily well relative to Moyer, just happen to be in the same counties where Connally does extraordinarily well relative to Kerry?!!!! And it is even more impossible to understand why the relative magnitudes of these impossible undercounts for Kerry and over counts for Bush should so closely match!!!!

I would take this evidence to a trial. Clearly a crime was committed in Ohio. There is simply no other explanation for these patterns other than vote shifting. The only thing we don’t know is who did it and how. And exactly this kind of information is necessary to get serious electoral reform - that you claim to support.