Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

Twenty months after the 2004 presidential election, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? is the first sustained investigation of what really happened on the first Tuesday of November 2004. Scrutinizing the widest spectrum of facts and theories that have emerged to explain the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official count, authors Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss tell the story of our electoral democracy at this moment in its history without fear or favor. The story they have to tell is a damning one—one that has profound implications for the 2006 and 2008 elections, indeed for the future of American democracy:

• Was there something wrong with the way that exit polls are conducted in the United States or does the problem lie with a lack of security at the ballot box? In their book, Freeman and Bleifuss plumb both the history of exit polling and the state of the art today. The Election Day 2004 exit polls showed Kerry winning nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. So why did the exit polls differ so substantially from the official count? In elections in Germany and the United Kingdom, exit polls accurately predict the outcome of national elections. And in the Ukraine that same month, an exit poll discrepancy was used to overturn the official results.

• Did the implementation of electronic voting systems pave the way for election fraud in 2004? Freeman and Bleifuss examine the vulnerability of new ballot technologies. In 2004, 64 percent of voters cast ballots on either electronic voting systems or optical-scan voting systems. A September 2005 study by the General Accountability Office found that such systems had security problems that “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to the accuracy and the integrity of the voting process.”

• Why were the exit polls so wrong? The pollsters who conducted the exit polls, Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky, produced a 77-page report that attempts to explain why the exit poll discrepancy occurred. Freeman and Bleifuss examine that report in detail and demonstrate that the pollsters’ analysis does not stand up under scrutiny. “Lenski and Mitofsky found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy as practiced in the 2004 presidential election,” they write.

• Freeman and Bleifuss also analyze the Conyers Report and Democratic National Committee report, as well as earlier reports such as those on African American vote suppression conducted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—all of which cast doubt on the integrity of the 2004 presidential election. The authors pay particular attention to Ohio, the critical battleground state. In Ohio, an extraordinary variety of electoral malfeasance is documented, including various forms of vote suppression, ballot “spoilage,” and institutionalized disenfranchisement—all of which amounted to more than enough to swing the election. So why weren’t the investigative arms of our government and the press more in evidence? Freeman and Bleifuss explore the reasons.

Freeman and Bleifuss present their case with scientific precision in clear and easy to understand language. Advance readers like the distinguished mathematician John Allen Paulos are already calling Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? a “careful and judicious book” in recognition of the effort of the authors to rise above partisan politics.

STEVEN F. FREEMAN's analyses, together with a study by the University of California, Berkeley's sociology and demography departments, are recognized to have been the first serious attempts to examine the validity of the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. Freeman holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management. He is on the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, where in addition to his regular courses, he teaches workshops research methods and survey design (a domain that includes polling.) He has received four national awards for his research.

JOEL BLEIFUSS is editor of In These Times. An investigative reporter and columnist, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Utne Reader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dissent, among many others.

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count
by Steven F. Freeman & Joel Bleifuss
Foreword by U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.
Publication Date: June 30th , 2006
284 pages | Paperback | $17.95
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