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Stealing the 2004 Election, Revisited

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr asserted that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, he was sowing seeds in fertile ground. Most Americans now believe that Bush lies regularly, and many suspect that the Republican Party is willing to bend or break the law to win elections. Furthermore, Kennedy made several unassailable points about electoral irregularities, especially in Ohio, that could well have changed the outcome of the election.

But the core of Kennedy's article—the basis for his certainty that George Bush stole the election from John Kerry—is the fact that many exit polls showed Kerry ahead, in Ohio and in other states that Bush finally captured. Kennedy's understanding is flawed, both of the complex issues surrounding exit polling and of the specific exit polls conducted in 2004. As a result, his credibility is suspect and his conclusion remains debatable.

Today Mark Blumenthal, an expert on political polling who writes as the Mystery Pollster, posted part 1 of his response to Kennedy's article. It's well worth reading. Before discussing the exit polls, he agrees that Ohio did not conduct a squeaky-clean election but argues that fraud has not been proven:

First, despite its weaknesses, the Kennedy article raises some important and troubling questions about real problems in Ohio in 2004. … The summary of problems deserving attention includes long lines in minority precincts, efforts of the Republican Party to selectively challenge (or "cage") new registrants and the many examples of pure incompetence by local election officials.  And then there is partisanship of Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, now his party's nominee for governor.…

Second,… I have never argued that the exit polls can be used to rule out or disprove the possibility that vote fraud may have occurred in Ohio or anywhere else during in 2004.  The question has always been whether the exit polls provide affirmative evidence that fraud did in fact occur. This involves a very basic concept of statistical inquiry:  We assume no effect until one can be proven, or more technically, we assume a "null hypothesis" until we can prove some alternative.  The same principle exists in law as the presumption of innocence.  We do not assume a crime has been committed and work backwards to try to disprove it.  We presume innocence until enough evidence has been established to prove guilt.

Everyone agrees that the 2004 exit poll results gathered by the news media consortium known National Election Pool (NEP) showed a small but statistically significant difference that favored John Kerry when compared to the official count.  But is that discrepancy evidence of fraud?  It might be, if we could rule out the possibility that other problems or potential sources of error in the exit polls that can also explain the discrepancy. What I have argued for the last year and a half is that the exit polls have many such weaknesses that have long been in evidence.

Blumenthal then discusses the exit polls in detail, first agreeing with Kennedy that the differences between exit-poll results and final tallies were ripe for examination: "The key point:  Everyone—including the exit pollsters—agrees that the average discrepancy was statistically significant." But he goes on to:

• debunk Kennedy's "distortion of the statistics," though "the overall exit poll discrepancy was widespread and statistically significant"

• describe the ways in which exit polls have not "evolved into an exact science" and are not "the most reliable" of surveys, as Kennedy claims, even though they "benefit from having ready access to actual voters who have just made their choices"

• detail what actually happened with exit polls in the countries of Georgia and Ukraine and Germany, where they were not as "exquisitely accurate" as Kennedy maintains

In short, the election of 2004 may well have been stolen, but the evidence is not ironclad. Promoting that idea on the basis of misapprehensions and distortions unfortunately creates a thicket of obstacles, making it more difficult to prove the case.

Now 2000, that's a different matter. That was a coup d'état.

Update: Kennedy replies to Farhad Manjoo at Salon.

Update 2, 6/8: Blumenthal has posted part II of his response to Kennedy's article. He describes several instances of "technically true but highly misleading statements," which taken together seriously undercut Kennedy's thesis.

Update: Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's article in Rolling Stone on the 2004 election has generated a storm of responses this week (Technorati list here). Many bloggers have uncritically accepted every one of his claims, while some have rejected them all. Extreme partisanship has clouded the discourse, and as a result the truth of what happened in November 2004 is not easy to determine.

Ohio was indeed a hotbed of sleazy tricks, and John Kerry certainly was denied some votes he deserved to get. In fact, it appears to me likely that the outcome of the election may have been determined by Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state, and other Republicans whose actions, at the least, steered close to the wind of legality. But as Mark Hertsgaard points out, Bush did win the popular vote in 2004 (whatever lies he told to do so), and it would not have been a good thing for American democracy to have yet another election like 2000, in which the anachronistic electoral college trumped a majority of voters.

Unfortunately, Kennedy's article does not make the best case for a conspiracy to steal the election. For all of his justified fury at the tactics (and the disastrous outcome), he has done the cause of electoral reform a disservice, I fear. Farhad Manjoo, who has followed this story for Salon since the election, has written a scathing critique. He examines each major claim Kennedy makes and demonstrates that it is false, inexact, or misleading. For example:

Be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "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." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June.

That report does indeed point out that many people -- 26 percent -- who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same -- a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.

Such techniques are evident throughout Kennedy's article. He presents a barrage of seemingly important, apparently damning data to show that Kerry won the race. It's only when you dig into his claims that you see what thin ice he's on.

Another example:

Claim: The exit polls showed an insurmountable Kerry lead, one that made a Bush win impossible.…

Reality: Kennedy is right that the polls in battleground states showed Kerry ahead. What he fails to say is that in many states, the exits didn't show Kerry ahead by the margin of error, meaning, statistically, that his lead wasn't secure. Way back in December of 2004, pollster Mark Blumenthal pointed out the key fact in this debate. Of the ten battleground states that the exit poll showed Kerry winning, he ultimately lost four -- states that, you could say, cost him the election. These were Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. But in none of those states was Kerry's lead outside the poll's margin of error.

The focus, of course, is on Ohio, for both Kennedy and Manjoo. And Ohio was by no means a model of democratic practice. Manjoo agrees with most who have examined the evidence that "the election there strains conventional notions of what a democracy ought to look like; very little about that race was fair, clean or competent." And many have concluded that the result could well have been affected. But Kennedy, says Manjoo, muddies the water; instead of reciting the undeniable shortfalls and calling for real electoral reform, he is "content to take us through a hit parade of the most popular, and the most dismissible, theories purporting to show that John Kerry won Ohio, theories that have been swirling about the blogosphere ever since the race was called."

Kennedy is a strong and believable spokesman for environmental issues, which he has spent a lifetime studying and litigating. It appears, unfortunately, that in making such categorical charges about the 2004 election he has moved outside his area of expertise and therefore damaged his credibility. Right-wing Republicans may now be able to use his carelessness to foil meaningful electoral reform and pave the way for more Ohios. Alas!

Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, writing in Rolling Stone, charges that the presidential election of 2004 was stolen:

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. 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. (See Ohio's Missing 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.

Conspiracy theory? Well, yes, but some conspiracy theories describe the world accurately. Given the Bush machine's propensity for lying, corruption, and self-righteous rationalizations, this one does not seem beyond the realm of possibility.

Read the whole article and see what you think.

Update: This controversy, of course, has been raging ever since November 3, 2004. The newsworthy event here is that RFK Jr has come down on the side of the conspiracy theorists, as Representative John Conyers and Mark Crispin Miller did earlier—Conyers with his congressional report "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" and Miller with his book Fooled Again.

But there are skeptics. While nearly everyone willing to look at what happened in Ohio would agree that certain partisan, unethical actions were taken—especially by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who was also cochair of the Bush-Cheney campaign—and that they may have even been enough to tilt the balance in the state (and therefore in the nation), the evidence for conspiracy is murky. Mark Hertsgaard, a respected journalist who is certainly not a Bush supporter, wrote an interesting review of the issues for Mother Jones last year. Bottom line: he thinks that Ohio did not conduct a fair election, but "it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the White House in 2000."

And if you want to get into the statistical nitty-gritty, especially to understand how the exit polls could have been so different from the final results without assuming that they were tampered with, Mark Blumenthal's your man. At his blog Mystery Pollster, he has a recent report from the conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and two long posts from last year, one summarizing the issues and describing Elizabeth Liddle's computational model for resolving them and another with exit pollster Warren Mitofsky's response. Bottom line: he sees many good reasons why the exit polls were wrong in Ohio that would not involve stealing the election.

More updates here and here.