Update: I’m now seeing articles questioning RFK Jr’s methodology, so I’m not sure I can endorse his arguments. Time will tell – everything comes out in the wash.
Up-update: On the other hand, I’m still inclined to believe the bulk of the Rolling Stone story.
At least we can’t fault him for lack of consistency – consistently using dirty tricks and fraud to “win” the White House. I was suspicious back then, and am convinced now: John Kerry was the real winner of the 2004 presidential election, just as Al Gore was the winner in 2000. This astonishing article should move earth and heaven.
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 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 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. 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….
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. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000. “Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,” a Fox News analyst declared, “or George Bush loses.”
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.
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.”
“Read the whole thing,” if you’ve got the strength to do so. You simply will not believe your eyes. The examples of fraud are spelled out explicitly, with names and footnotes. In earlier times, I would have dismissed such stories as conspiratorial nonsense. Not so in the Age of Bush, where fraud, corruption, dirty tricks and bold-faced lies are simply standard procedure. So before the inevitable acucations of paranoia and delusional thinking come flying in, read the piece and gather your arguments.
1
By bob
Do you realize you have taken a paranoid article from Rolling Stone–world famous for its sharp and insightful investigative journalism–and posted it on your website as proven fact? The statistics tossed about in this article are hardly explicit, for instance “357,00 people…were prevented from casting their ballots.” While this may have been true and many were prevented from voting, did it ever occur to you that perhaps this was due to legal restrictions clearly outlined in the state’s constitution or legislation? It is not illegal to prevent a person from voting if that person is prevented by law from voting.
It’s blind, reactionary blows at the Republican Party that are leading to an increasingly dumber-sounding Democratic Party identity in America. Chill out man, Bush won the frickin’ election, that’s what elections are for.
June 2, 2006 @ 12:06 am | Comment
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By Ivan
“It is not illegal to prevent a person from voting if that person is prevented by law from voting.”
Wow! That’s exactly what Communist China’s government says, too!
Evidently, Richard, you’re attracting some real mental giants here.
June 2, 2006 @ 12:19 am | Comment
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By OtherLisa
I have always been of the mind that Gore won in 2000 – clearly – and that the Supreme Court decision was a real blow to democracy. I hadn’t really formed an opinion on 2004. I tended to think there was some malfeasance but was not convinced that it was enough to swing an election in Bush’s favor.
The RS article is a pretty convincing argument for another Republican steal.
What’s interesting is that it focuses, not on hi-tech Diebold type cheating, but on more conventional, low-tech thievery.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to be said and counter-arguments to be made, but I would suggest reading the article.
June 2, 2006 @ 12:24 am | Comment
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By richard
Hi Bob, nice to meet you. Knowing all we know today about how things are carried out in Ohio (are you up on the Bob Ney scandal, and his guilty plea?), I find this perfectly believable. Rolling Stone has broken stories before and is no liberal rag. William Greider and Kevin Phillips and many, many other political analysts have written articles for RS.
Lisa, yes, I would like to hear the counter-arguments, as well. But expect this story to be basically ignored – we are so numb to Bush shenanigans, that no one flinches at word of more yet more crimes and misdemeanors.
June 2, 2006 @ 1:50 am | Comment
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By richard
By the way, this isn’t all new information. Raw Story reported on some of it last year:
Remember, their people just got jail sentences for jamming the Democratic Party office’s phones on election night in New Hampshire. These people will do anything to win – anything but tell the truth. And the stories of dirty tricks in Florida in 2000 are legendary. No, this is now their modus operandi.
June 2, 2006 @ 2:03 am | Comment
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By Ivan
Once is an accident.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
And thousands and thousands of times is the Republican Party.
June 2, 2006 @ 2:27 am | Comment
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By chris
so, is this grounds to impeach? or still not as heinous as a blow job. america baffles me.
June 2, 2006 @ 2:21 pm | Comment
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By OtherLisa
impeachment is impossible until or unless Democrats control at least one house of Congress.
We’ll see after the fall elections.
June 2, 2006 @ 4:45 pm | Comment
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By Bobb999
It’s chilling to contemplate that the ’04 election may have been literally stolen by Repubs.
On election night the Dems were celebrating an apparent Kerry victory based on exit polls, only to have their victory snatched away by the supposed official “vote count”. Michael Moore said the Dems did not fight hard enough to assert their victory in the 2000 election. If there was credible evidence of fraud on election day in ’04, the Dems should have insisted on immediate, serious investigation, instead of rolling over and surrendering, as they did (perhaps so they would look “statesmanlike”, not petty?!)
…My cynical mind can’t help but see irony in RFK Jr. being the author of a piece exposing vote rigging in a presidential election – especially when credible investigative journalists always maintained that JFK’s 1960 presidential win was aided by his ex-bootlegger father, Joseph Kennedy’s recruiting of the Gambino crime family to successfully help fix the Illinois vote for son Jack! Some theorize that JFK’s lack of gratitude for mafia favours – made all too obvious by A.G. Bobby’s concerted crackdown against the mafia-
may have led to his assassination (if it wasn’t Castro).
Vote rigging is nothing new in American politics. It’s a tradition. In some southern states particularly, it was often the norm. Texas and Louisiana were 2 notorious examples.
Americans need to wake up to the fact that “the greatest democracy in the world” is, and has always been a pseudo- ,or quasi-democracy at best, with inequality and corruption so ingrained in a whole host of ways, that America may be about as unsalvagable as Iraq now appears to be!
And some have dared to try to export it as a morally superior system, a beacon for the whole world to follow. I wish they were kidding.
June 2, 2006 @ 7:56 pm | Comment
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By The Admiral
@Bob – Go stand in the corner and let the adults talk, okay? Good boy.
Richard, thank you again for being so diligent in trying to keep the Asian Expat community abreast of what’s happening in the US.
It is not so much shocking as it is frightening that there are people in this day and age manipulating elections. I though that “we” would have learned our lesson after 2000, but no, 2004 appears to be even worse.
You know, I’ve never thought about it before, but the US could do a lot worse than Bobby, Jr. as President.
You make the call: Bush or Bobby?
June 2, 2006 @ 9:00 pm | Comment
11
By Filthy Stinking No.9
Richard, you’re officially joined the ranks of the loony-left. A full card carrying ranting moonbat. Do you SERIOUSLY belief this? Well, if your intention was to reduce my respect for your views on American politics to beneath the level that I’m even prepared to bother listening to them, then you’ve succeeded.
Isn’t it ironic? The last few times I’ve read stories you’ve posted like this, I keep hearing certain comments (posted by yourself) about certain mainland Chinese being apparently rational people, until the topic of Taiwan is raised, at which point they lose all sense of reality, and start raving. Now you know how I’ve come to feel reading this website.
I’ll continue visiting when I have time, to read the China postings … but in future I’ll just skip down the column every time I see a non-China related story. Don’t worry about posting a response to this message anyone, at least not in this thread. I meant what I said. I won’t be back to read it.
June 4, 2006 @ 11:13 pm | Comment
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By richard
Hi FSN9, how are you? Actually, I’ve been reading recent articles that question the methodology of RFK Jr’s piece, and if his reasoning was flawed I’ll be the first to condemn it. But fixing/stealing elections is something Bush and his freinds are good at – do you have any knowledge about the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire? The one for which Bush’s friends are going to jail? Seriously, FSN9 – aren’t you aware that the courts have found the GOP guilty of trying to fix elections? Aren’t you aware that there was lots of monkey business performed in the 2000 Florida recount, and that thousands were illegally deprived of their right to vote because of “felony lists” that were later proven seriously flawed? Anyway, we’ll all miss you.
Anyway, as usual, you come on here condeming my liberalism and never engaging in
June 4, 2006 @ 11:46 pm | Comment
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By OtherLisa
The problem is, there are enough irregularities and first-hand accounts of problems with the voting in Ohio (and elsewhere), and that, combined with what happened in 2000, has seriously undermined peoples’ faith in the integrity of our electoral system. This almost overrides the question of whether Kerry actually won the election or not. Almost.
The mere fact that so many people believe that their vote didn’t count, or doubt that it did is bad enough on its own to warrant a thorough investigation and measures to ensure the integrity of the vote.
June 5, 2006 @ 12:58 am | Comment