- -12-23-04 Bush Gains Mysterious 5% From E-Touch Machines (NewsTarget.com)
- "Or, put another way, all the exit polls showed Kerry winning, and the exit polls asked people who they actually voted for. But strangely, the 'official' count appears to have been boosted in favor of Bush."
"How was it boosted?"
"Another burning question is surfacing: if this was such a record turnaround, with long lines all over the country, where did all the votes go? Because the vote totals don't show much of a difference from the 2000 election. It's as if a few million votes just vanished..." 12-04
- -Editorial: Summary of Fraud Allegations, With Data (Alternet.org - Freeman)
- "The question is whether the official count is an accurate reflection of ballots cast. In a system where campaign managers serve as election supervisors, where voting machines provide no assurance that votes are counted as cast, and where counts and "recounts" are conducted in secret, we must rely, unfortunately, on indirect evidence, such as exit polls, to ascertain the veracity of this official count as a measure of actual ballots cast." 1-05
- -Exit Polls - Accurate or Unreliable in 2004? (InTheseTimes.com)
- "Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for."
"The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine." 2-05
- 11-29-04 Jackson: Kerry Supports Full Investigation in Ohio (FreePress.org)
- "John Kerry supports a 'full investigation' into voting irregularities in Ohio, Rev. Jesse Jackson said Saturday, during a teleconference with media regarding a recount and legal challenge of the Nov. 2 vote."
" 'We want to look at the exit polls,' Jackson said, referring to at least two non-partisan Election Day polls, by Zogby and CNN, which gave Kerry 53 percent and 51 percent of the vote, respectively. 'We don’t want to be presumptuous, but these numbers in the Butler, Clarmont, Warren and Hamilton counties are suspicious.' ”
"By suspicious, Jackson is referring to the latest analysis of the Nov. 2 vote by a coalition of Ohio voting rights activists. In analyzing the still-unofficial results, the totals reveal that C. Ellen Connally, an African-American Democratic candidate from Cleveland for Ohio Chief Justice, received 257,000 more votes than Kerry. It is highly improbable that Connally’s vote totals would be so much higher than Kerry’s,' Fitrakis said."
" 'Statistically, Kerry, as the Democratic presidential candidate, should have more votes than Connally. In a presidential election, most voters have the priority of casting a vote for president and the votes for president are almost always much higher than those of candidates farther down the ticket.' " 11-04
- Academic Papers Examining the Likelihood of Fraud (dKosopedia.com)
- "Since November 2nd at least 6 academic papers have been issued doing statistical analysis and models to justify the claim that voting patterns cause "Smoke Alarms" to go on: something is afoot." 01-06
- Analysis of Exit Polls (Solarbus.org - Beckwith)
- Shows how the results from the 2004 election differed from the 2000 results and provides alternative explanations for why the exit poll results favored Bush in a statistically impossible fashion. 2-05
- Editorial: Exit Polls Wrong (FoxNews.com)
- "By the time most of the polls closed in precincts across the country Tuesday night, real numbers began to suggest that the early estimations that had been so upbeat for Sen. John Kerry were over-inflated — so much so, that FOX News Channel decided to quit using the exit poll results Tuesday evening, calling them inaccurate and unreliable."
Editor's Note: Exit polls are normally accurate within 1/2 of a percent if results are statistically adjusted to match the electorate. If "raw" data were used, rather than adjusted results, then the oversampling of women would have resulted in an incorrect "tilt" toward Kerry. Adjusted results, however, should have been quite accurate. 11-04
- Editorial: Reform Needed in Voting Security (CommonDreams.org)
- "On December 4, 2000, in time to change the outcome of the Electoral College vote, Greg Palast published an article in Salon.com, made into a BBC television documentary shortly thereafter, that laid out solid evidence of massive electoral fraud in Florida, perpetrated against the majority-Democratic-voting African American community by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. Without this fraud, Gore would have easily carried the state."
"Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it four times in the past four years."
"But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA."
"Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia."
"In three of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of elections."
"The election reversals were accomplished by funding local groups - most made up of a core of activists and college students - who worked to topple regimes that had rigged their own re-elections." 12-04
- Exit Polls - Review of Mitofsky-Edison Exit Polls for the National Election Pool (Exit-Poll.net)
- "Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average Within Precinct Error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."
Editor's Note: We find the above statement to be bizzare. Mitofsky-Edison's report data contradict their summary statement. 01-06
- National Election Poll (Exit-Poll.net)
- "ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, have created the National Election Pool to provide tabulated vote counts and exit poll surveys for the 2004 major presidential primaries and the November general election." 11-04
- Reported Vote Results Impossible (San Francisco Chronicle)
- "If the United States were a Third World country, our Nov. 2 election would not pass certification by international monitors. As former President Carter has explained on National Public Radio, we lack a central, nonpartisan election commission to guarantee fair and equal treatment of all voters nationwide, our candidates do not receive free and equal access to the media to deliver their message, voting procedures are not uniform throughout the county, and there is not a 'paper trail' available in all cases to guarantee an honest recount where called for."
"In our own recent presidential election, exit polls were conducted nationwide for the media by two of the world's most respected professional exit-polling firms: Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International." "Total samples from each state were large -- about 2,000 or more voters -- and the error of estimate was small -- plus or minus less than half of 1 percent in 99 cases out of 100."
"In state after state, Kerry saw his expected lead shrink or vanish. And when he lost Ohio -- which exit polls estimated he would win by 4.5 percent -- he 'lost' the election. According to Steven Freeman, who teaches research methods at the University of Pennsylvania, for 10 exit polls among the 11 battleground states he analyzed to be this far off as a result of random error, particularly when all discrepancies favored Bush, is essentially impossible." 9-05