In its official postmortem report issued two months
after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in
its methodology — so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the
electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply
disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) — displaying
a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in
Kerry’s favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation’s
leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's "reluctant responder"
hypothesis is "preposterous."(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official
report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: "It is difficult to
pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more
likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters."(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman
and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the
theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day.
In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that
fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey - compared to
only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) "The data presented
to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it," observes
Freeman, "but actually contradicts it."
What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit
polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In
precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the
exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast,
in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit
polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern
that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in
Bush country.(39)
"When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data
that supports the supposition of election fraud," concludes Freeman. "The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where
there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater
proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where
there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are
strong indicators of fraud — and yet this supposition has been utterly
ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party."
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of
mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan
watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified
vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by
Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts - nearly half of
those polled - they discovered results that differed widely from the
official tally. Once again - against all odds - the widespread
discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of
the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered "27," in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According
to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the
vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only
thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are
just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide "virtually
irrefutable evidence of vote miscount." The discrepancies, the experts
add, "are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won
Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately
reflected voter intent."(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice
president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola
University in Chicago, "No rigorous statistical explanation" can
explain the "completely nonrandom" disparities that almost uniformly
benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are "completely consistent
with election fraud - specifically vote shifting."
The MSM is especially bad at covering stories that are math intensive and deal with probability issues (polls vs results, changes in voting patterns, etc), or with arcania like hacking, encryption, and computer security. RFK clearly emphasizes the *visible* vote manipulation.
What troubles me is that the electronic voting machines and tablulators are, according to computer experts, laughably hackable. All I have to do is run a virus check on my computer, or look at my "junk" e-mail box to know that if a system is vulnerable, someone will take advantage of that weakness. So I have to assume that the likelihood these systems have already been hacked is high.
What we have here is means, motive, and prior history on the part of the Republican party. And until recently, a "What me worry?" MSM. Let's hope that RFK Jr's article opens up this can of worms and shakes it all over the national table.