Fraud

UPDATE 2: Click here for some more info on the article. For the record, I have never stated that Kerry won Ohio, and I'm going to just tune out anyone who even tries to make that claim at this point, even if they do cite actual instances of fraud (which we know did occur to some extent). The facts are a lot clearer than I realized. Any swing due to illegal activity would have been way too small to have made a difference.

Put the tinfoil hats away. This is no longer crazy talk.

UPDATE: The Editors are dismissive of the report, citing an old Tom Paine article. I think they're missing the big picture here. I left the following comment:

From the Tom Paine article:

In this case, what most likely happened was that more Bush supporters failed to complete exit poll surveys than Kerry backers. The reason for that can be as trivial as a sampler skipping someone who looks unfriendly or voters not liking the race or demeanor of the sampler.

From the RS article:

Industry peers didn’t buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation’s leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky’s ‘’reluctant responder'’ hypothesis is ‘’preposterous.'’(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ‘’It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.'’(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey — compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ‘’The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'’ observes Freeman, ‘’but actually contradicts it.'’

From the Tom Paine article:

To have a conspiracy of this magnitude, you’d need more than a bunch of individual mishaps—you need a plan and coordination. And you’d need a large number of collaborators willing to commit felonious and treasonous behavior of the highest order.

We already know there was a plan and coordination. This isn’t even a secret any more. The GOP specifically targeted Ohio as the state they needed to win, and the Rolling Stone article detailed the instances where a plan was carried out, in order to disenfranchise voters, limit voting access, and to manually change votes on individual ballots.

The only controversy here is trying to guess exactly how many votes Kerry lost in Ohio in 2004 as a result of all of this. It’s probably impossible to concretely say that Kerry would have won, but it’s irresponsible not to take the evidence of the article seriously. This was the case of a political party commanding a large number of people to break laws in order to swing an election.