Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count
by By Conyers., John, Jr. (FRW), Bleifuss, Joel, and Freeman, Steven F.
Category: Political Science , General

On the afternoon of Election Day 2004, the world was abuzz with the news: Exit polls indicated that John Kerry would win the election and become the next president of the United States. That proved not to be the case.According to the official count—that is the number of votes tallied, not necessarily the number of votes cast—George W. Bush beat Kerry by a margin of three million votes. The exit polls however had predicted a margin of victory for Kerry of five million votes. In every “battleground” state across the nation the final tally swung clearly beyond the exit poll’s margin of error to favor the president.How can one explain this eight-million-vote discrepancy between the Election Day exit polls and the official count? Either the exit poll data was wrong or the official count was wrong.Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? analyzes the exit poll data and looks at documented examples of conventional vote suppression and outright vote fraud. It investigates the possibility that enough election fraud occurred to determine the outcome of the presidential race. And it asks the question why neither the government, nor the Democratic Party, nor any major media organization did their own investigation.Steve Freeman has a PhD in organization studies from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Organizational Dynamics, where he teaches research methods and survey design (a domain that includes polling). He has received four national awards for best research paper of the year—on four different topics in three different fields.Joel Bleifuss, a journalist of 23 years, is the editor of In These Times. In his 18 years there, he has had more articles cited as one of the Top Censored Stories of the Year by Project Censored than any other journalist.