Was '04 election stolen? prof asks

Professor Steven Freeman speaks at the Penn Bookstore about numbers from the 2004 presidential election that he says don't add up.

As the official story runs, President Bush was re-elected in 2004. But one professor has his doubts. In a speech at the Penn Bookstore last night, professor Steven Freeman said that exit polls predicted a victory for Democratic candidate John Kerry. He added that the electoral process might be to blame for the discrepancy. "Exit polls aren't like phone surveys - they should be like measuring precipitation after rain has already fallen," said Freeman, a visiting professor at the Center for Organizational Dynamics. "You're asking people who they voted for after they've left the booth." Intrigued by the inaccuracy of the exit polls and what he said was a lack of media coverage following the election, Freeman started researching the available data in an attempt to answer the question that became the title of his recently-published book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Nationwide, there was a 7-percent disparity between the exit polls and the final ballot count, but in three key battleground states - Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida --- the disparity was even higher, Freeman said. "If the votes had turned out the way the exit polls were being reported, Kerry wouldn't have lost by 3 million votes," he said. "He would've won by 6 million." Freeman, who admitted he is "not a political person," explained that his biggest concern with current elections is electronic voting. "We push a button and expect that button to take the vote correctly, but any programmer can change millions [of] votes with one programing code," he said. "And we have a system where three companies control 80 percent of voting machines in the country, two of which have enormous connections with leaders of the Republican party." Freeman said some people wonder why he is trying to raise awareness about this issue two years after the election and tell him to "move on." "But if, by all these indications, the election was stolen, . it's like Chief Justice [John] Roberts said: 'If we don't have the right to vote, we have nothing at all,'" he said. Economics graduate student Dionissi Aliprantis said he was in agreement with Freeman. "I think the important thing is there should at least be some dialogue," Aliprantis said. "'Just get over it' isn't acceptable in a democratic society."

Comments (6)

For those of you who are interested in hearing more from Professor Freeman, please join us at the White Dog Cafe (3420 Sansom Street) for a Breakfast Talk Tuesday morning, October 3rd. For more information, please visit www.whitedog.com/10032006.html

BUSH WON SO SHUT THE HELL UP. (and boycott White Dog)...

For those of you interested in discussing left-leaning conspiracy theories completely lacking in science, logic, common sense, or even a minimum level of academic legitimacy, please join us at the White Dog Cafe (3420 Sansom Street) for a Breakfast Talk Tuesday morning, October 3rd.

While we may have appreciated the analysis having been done immediately, I don't think it's time to "move on" at all if there is a problem to be pointed out. I'm glad Steven Freeman is going ahead and publishing a book on this. I've heard reports of other people doing the same analysis and coming up with the same result. I want to be sure my vote is counted this year and for the presidential election in 2008. I have served on jury duty, I pay taxes, and I waited in line for 2 hours in 2004 for to vote in Philadelphia. It upsets me that maybe that vote was not counted.

Please. This is pathetic. A disparity such as this could be explained by 100 factors, each having nothing to do with the accuracy of the vote tallying. Most probable: Democrats, especially in that particular election, were probably much more willing to speak with exit pollsters. There is nothing scientific about exit polls, as this professor has clearly ignored. If there were, we could just elect our president using a bunch of people with clip boards.

Let me get this straight - First Bush stole the 2000 election, now he stole the 2004 election? Is it me, or is their an almost pathological denial among liberals that Bush actually won those two elections? The liberals refuse to believe that he was elected legitimately so they keep coming up with wilder and wilder conspiracy theories to explain how Gore (or Kerry) actually won and Bush �?stole�? the victory. One thing you find about conspiracy theorists is that you can�?t reason logically with them because to them �?the lack of any evidence what so ever is just more evidence of the scope of the conspiracy�?. Now back to the discrepancy in the exit poles. The loud T.V. pundits notwithstanding, conservatives are far more private and far less likely to speak with pollsters than liberals. As stated by the previous poster, especially in this election where the incumbent was so vehemently hated by the liberals that they couldn�?t wait to tell people they voted against �?W�?. Exit poles are neither scientific nor do they follow proper statistical procedures. Pennsylvania for instance (which by the way went to Kerry), is a primarily rural state with two large liberal urban areas (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Were the pollsters spread throughout the state evenly or were they primarily in Pennsylvania�?s two best known cities? That, along with conservatives�? unwillingness to tell how they voted, could explain why the final tally was different than the exit poles. GEORGE W. BUSH IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! HE WAS ELECTED LEGITIMATELY BOTH TIMES! GET OVER IT!!!!

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