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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
I'm not on Karl Rove's payroll -- and there's still no evidence that George W. Bush stole Election 2004.
Nov 12, 2004 | Salon received dozens of letters in response to my article debunking the idea that Republicans stole the election, and many readers were interested in only one thing: How much did Karl Rove pay me to print such garbage? According to these people, I clearly hadn't examined the overwhelming evidence that Bush won through dirty tricks. From the exit polls pointing to a Kerry win, to the tales of voting machines switching selections for Kerry into votes for Bush, to the odd results in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and those weird stats in Florida's rural counties -- there's just so much evidence that something fishy went on last Tuesday, these people said, that the only way I could argue that everything was OK was if I was being paid by Turd blossom himself.
So let me say first that, alas, I'm expecting no checks from the Bush-Cheney team. I've been writing about the flaws in our electoral system for at least two years now, and I'm not naive about the possibility of fraud; elections have been stolen in the past, and it isn't crazy to suspect that some people may have thought about stealing this one. It's also important for activists to keep searching for clues. When I spoke to him on Monday, David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who's spearheaded much of the opposition to paperless electronic voting machines during the past two years, told me that it's the activists -- the computer scientists, voting-rights groups and amateur investigators who've uncovered some of the most egregious flaws in our voting system during the past couple years -- who should be congratulated for the general success of this election. Since 2000, these people have passionately challenged the machinations of partisan election officials and shady voting companies; thanks to their efforts, today, few citizens blindly trust the system, and that's good for democracy.
But if passion is important, so is reason and logic. And unfortunately many of the folks responding to my piece seemed more passionate than reasonable, refusing to believe the most sensible explanations for suspicious occurrences.
Take the case of the apparently odd voting patterns in the Florida counties that use optical-scan voting machines. As I wrote in my piece, there's nothing strange about the fact that the op-scan counties have many people who are registered as Democrats who seemed to have voted for Republicans -- it's not odd because this has been happening for years. But don't take my word for it: Walter Mebane, a political scientist at Cornell, proves this here; Josh Levin, of Slate, shows the same thing here; Kim Zetter at Wired News does it here; and Yevgeny Vilensky, a writer at the (conservative) Yale Free Press, offers probably the most thorough examination of the subject here.
Vilensky examined 28 of these rural counties that proponents of the Kerry-actually-won theory say are Democratic. Twenty-six of them went for Bush this year and two went for Kerry; but Vilensky shows in this chart (PDF) that in 2000, the same pattern occurred -- two counties (Gadsden and Jefferson) chose Al Gore, while the other 26 chose Bush. In 1996, the result was more mixed, but Bob Dole -- even though he lost Florida to Bill Clinton -- still did pretty well in these apparently Democratic counties, winning 12 of them, and coming within two percent of winning another five. Considering these voting trends, the 2004 result in these counties is simply not surprising. Even if there are many citizens that are registered as Democrats in these locales, they're not considered Democratic strongholds.
But why, many readers wondered, do these Bush-voting Democrats only seem to live in the counties where optical scan machines are used? Why does the voting pattern seem to be tied, in other words, to the voting machinery? "That's an accident of the fact that many of the counties are small," Walter Mebane told me. In a small county, it's easier (i.e., cheaper) to upgrade voting technology, so many of these counties switched to optical scan systems in the 1990s, when that was considered the best voting technology. Florida's bigger counties, meanwhile, were slower to adopt new voting technology; many did so only after the 2000 fiasco, when touch-screen systems were in vogue.
For many readers, the most compelling bit of evidence pointing to a Kerry win was his success in the exit polls. Several people pointed out this bizarre essay by Dick Morris, in which the political consultant argues that pollsters deliberately skewed the exit polls in Kerry's favor in an effort to "chill the Bush turnout." It's difficult to understand why anyone would put so much stock in a far-fetched conspiracy theory banking on the idea that the exit polls were rigged.
Several readers, though, noted Morris's assertion that exit polls are hardly ever wrong. "To screw up one exit poll is unheard of," Morris wrote. "To miss six of them [in each of the battleground states] is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here." If Dick Morris says exit polls are never wrong, readers asked, how could they all have been wrong in pointing to a Kerry win? It's a good question, but as I wrote, right now we have no answer. The most important reason for this -- and this is a key point that many readers seemed to miss -- is that nobody knows what the exit polls actually showed. The exit polls that are currently on news sites like CNN have been re-weighted to match the final results -- a standard practice. This means that they no longer show a Kerry victory.
