This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 3, 2008 - Q: Who was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win both the Electoral College and a majority of the popular vote?
A: Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but lost the Electoral College to George W. Bush. Bill Clinton, the only Democrat to actually win the White House in that 32-year period, won consecutive three-man elections with popular pluralities of 43 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
If anybody's left to write history -- indeed, if future generations can read -- somebody may want to put an asterisk beside the above records because the case can be made that John Kerry has a claim to both.
In 2004, six major news organizations contracted with Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to conduct a nationwide exit poll for the November election.
Pollsters consider exit polling to be the gold standard of accuracy. Unlike pre-election polls that ask respondents to predict future behavior ("Will you vote? If so, for whom?"), exit polls ask people who have already voted to report what they've just done. Although some voters prefer to keep their preferences confidential, most people go to the polls to make their voices heard and are thus more than willing to participate.
In fact, exit polls are considered so reliable that they're used by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations to gauge the fairness of elections in developing countries. The Edison/Mitofsky poll selected a sample six times larger than that normally used for a national poll, reducing the projected margin of error to +/-1 percent.
As voting drew to a close, the exit polls had Kerry winning both Ohio and Florida -- either of which would have given him the White House--and ahead by some 1.5 million popular votes nationally. Things looked good for the morose Massachuset. Then the gremlins came to life.
As reported in Rolling Stone (2006), the polls in Nevada showed Kerry winning by 7.5 percent. The eventual certified tally gave the state to Bush by 2.6 percent. Kerry won the exits in New Mexico by 7 percent but lost the state by 0.8 percent. Florida was projected by the exit polls to go for Kerry by 2.6 percent, but he ultimately lost there by 5 percent. These discrepancies of 10.1 percent, 7.8 percent and 7.6 percent were recorded against a margin of error of 1 percent. Never before or after, here or elsewhere, has anything like this happened.
An obvious explanation for the variance is that the poll was defective. That bucket would hold more water had not the discrepancies trended so strongly in favor of the GOP.
Steven Freeman, a research methodology specialist at the University of Pennsylvania notes that in precincts where Bush took 80 percent+ of the vote, the incumbent ran an average of 10 percent ahead of the polls' projections. In precincts that Kerry took by 80 percent+, the polls were accurate to an average of 0.3 percent. Additionally, the certified tallies indicate that moe than 10,000 people in Nevada and more than 20,000 in New Mexico went to the polls to vote in a presidential election and didn't bother to vote for president.
Nowhere were irregularities more irregular than in the critical battleground of Ohio, which made the 2000 Florida vote look like a civics lesson. Exit polls there predicted an 8.8 percent Kerry victory. He lost by 2.1 percent. Referencing this debacle, nationally recognized pollster Lou Harris said, "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen."
Widespread complaints of illegal efforts to suppress African-American turnout notwithstanding, the officially certified tallies of those who managed to vote are sufficient to make the case.
A predominately Republican precinct in Miami County, Ohio, reported an astounding 98 percent turnout. In an inner-city precinct of Cleveland, only 7 percent of registered voters had their ballots counted. In one celebrated instance (precinct #27 in the Edison/Mitofsky audit), exit polls showed Kerry with 67 percent of the vote; the certified tally there eventually credited him with 38 percent. Statisticians place the odds on that discrepancy occurring because of random chance at just under 1 in 3 billion. Further, in precincts where voters used the traditional paper ballot, the exit polls were accurate. In those that used the new electronic voting machines, the polls were off by several times the margin of error.
Summarizing the election in general, Professor Freeman remarks, "When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that support the supposition of election fraud. 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 ..."
Q: Who was in charge of the vote count in Ohio that ultimately gave Bush a second lease on the White House?
A: Kenneth Blackwell, then-Ohio Secretary of State and co-chair of Bush's re-election committee in that state.
Given the deafening silence of the mainstream media regarding this topic, we turn to one of the most prominent political figures of the last century for clarification: "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
It probably says something about the current state of our political culture that it is best explained by the likes of Joseph Stailn.
Further details and references on this subject can be found in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rolling Stone, June 2006.