Moron Bobby Kennedy Jr.Still griping
about the 2004 election.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)First things first. The idiots questioning the election always focus in on the Exit Polls. But even the Exit Pollsters admit they were flawed. Second, why is it that none of these electoral geniuses ever mentions that the Exit Polls were the outliers? Almost every poll taken before the election showed Bush leading by 1-5 percentage points nationally; he won by about 2.5 percentage points.
Ditto with Ohio, which comes in for the lions' share of the attention here, for obvious reasons. Three of the last five polls Gerry Daly used had Bush ahead, one had Kerry ahead, and the last one had it dead even. The one that Kerry led was from Zogby, who had two later polls that showed Bush leading by 1 and by 5. In the end, Bush won Ohio by about 2 percentage points.
There is the usual crappola about how perfect exit polling has become (cough, Florida 2000, cough!) And then there's this little bit of paranoia (shades of the 9-11 "Truth" movement):
But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)There's the usual claim that some of the 2004 CTers aren't even Democrats:
Puzzled by the discrepancies, [Stephen F.] Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.Let me guess, he hates the Democrats because they don't stand up to Bushitler?
Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.Now, you can guess the punchline, right? Are election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo likely to be Republicans? It's absurd on its face, and I suspect the reasons those elections officials purged their rolls was precisely to prevent electoral fraud.
And get this conclusion:
If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged [Ohio] voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.And if all of them had voted for Kerry he still would have lost Ohio by over 80,000 votes.
This is Sore Loserman all over again. Get over it, Democrats!
Update:
Dan Riehl notes that NPR (!) debunked this effort a few days ago.
Confederate Yankee makes a good case that this article is really a smear job on Ken Blackwell, the black, Republican, Ohio gubernatorial candidate who was in charge of the Ohio elections process in 2004.
Update II: See also
Mr Ugly American's post on this around which Moonbats are already circling.
