A Call To Investigate The 2004 Election
This must be done. Not because people have an inability to ‘get over it’ or ‘move on’ with life, but because where the heck are we ‘moving on’ to? Or is this something that is indeed ‘over’, if we don’t fully come to accounts with why these statistical improbabilities took place, and why the results of these past elections were so egregiously skewered.
We’ve all heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.
But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush’s 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.
Read the complete report, along with Zachary Goldfarb’s report for The Washington Post on how people have shown that an entire election could be thrown by a single person.
USA Today also does an expose here on the vulnerabilities of e-voting machines.