As The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone exposé on 2004’s questionable Presidential Election is set to hit the stands tomorrow (Friday). The online version is promised for today and we will, of course, link up as soon as it’s publicly available.
We’re reviewing the final version of the article as published in RS right now and will have more on it later today, of course. In the meantime, Rolling Stone has issued their own press release with a few more details (posted in full below).
According to the release, the article will contend that “Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters — the overwhelming majority of them Democratic — from casting ballots or having their votes counted” on Election Night. Says Rolling Stone…
Myriad Election Night “irregularities” in the Buckeye State, along with a nearly-impossible late-night shift from Kerry to Bush in a full 10 out of 11 Exit Polls in battleground states are covered as well. Again, from RS’s press release:
The complete text of the Press Release for the article follows…
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I’m not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided.”
— Howard Dean
“Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.”
— Lou Harris, father of modern political polling
In the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates a GOP voting scandal in the 2004 presidential election that virtually guaranteed another four years in the White House for George W. Bush. Surveying reports by federal officials, election scholars, and voter advocates, Kennedy finds that in Ohio alone, a critical battleground state, Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters — the overwhelming majority of them Democratic — from casting ballots or having their votes counted. In a race decided by only 118,607 votes, he concludes, these votes could have been enough to put Senator John Kerry in the White House. In his article Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, Kennedy also uncovers evidence of outright fraud that may have shifted more than 80,000 rural votes from Kerry to Bush. The primary culprit behind the widespread barriers to voting was Ken Blackwell — now the GOP candidate for governor of Ohio — who used his powers as secretary of state to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, create long lines in Democratic precincts, and oversee a rigged recount. Says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, “The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections, not throw them. The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.”
Kennedy investigates numerous election night irregularities including the monumental discrepancies between exit polls and actual voter count. As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, the polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states. But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities ? as much as 9.5 percent ? with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. “As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” he says, “it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Rolling Stone spent four months investigating the 2004 election in Ohio, interviewed dozens of election officials, pollsters, candidates, voter advocates, and political scientists, and reviewed reports by federal officials, statisticians, voter advocates and journalists. Kennedy’s article, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? appears in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, on sale nationwide, Friday, June 2.
UPDATE: EXTENDED EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE, INCLUDING NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTING A STOLEN ELECTION NOW AVAILABLE HERE…
Beautiful.
I’ve been SO FUCKING SICK of hearing people -many of them "Dems"- suggesting this is a dead issue, that we need to move on, blah blah BLAH.
I won’t move on and just ‘let it go’.
These filthy, cheating motherfuckers blatantly rigged the ’04 election and will continue to rig elections until SOMEONE STOPS THEM.
Let’s hope RFK Jr. not only gets some goddamn airtime on our State-Censored "TV news", but really pisses off the lying bastards of the GOP. The more attention he can get, the better!
This all sounds good, but much of it is already…in Rumsfeld speak, known, knowns. I’m interseted to see the evidence regarding the outright fraud he says he has. We need evidence…period.
Awesome!! Not sure if I can wait til July 2! Hey, maybe we’ll get something on the Fitz of July as well 🙂
Super, you don’t read much, huh?
Supersoling,
Right. I’m really tired of reading "could have" and "may have". I’m convinced, but if a crime was committed I want to hear that there is evidence PROVING a crime was committed.
Welcome back, by the way. 🙂
Joan,
Thank you. Nice to be here.
Reggie…huh?
Reggie,
I’ve read ALOT about this on Bradblog & elsewhere but I confess to not having read every word so I certainly could have missed something: do you feel there is enough hard evidence to actually win this in a court beyond a doubt? I remember alot of caveats.
Maybe Brad is the one to answer that.
Please let this article ruin Blackwell’s chance at being governor. The corruption under Taft has been rampant – we cannot endure any more!
How did Blackwell own stock in Diebold and not know?
Reggie,
can you point me to anything in this press release that constitutes new proof? I didn’t see it. All I’m saying is that I hope there is more when the full article comes out. You have to agree that unless there is some actual proof that can be used in court, like Joan says above, that this will be much of the same, only with more exposure, which is great, but not enough. I want to see the evidence that will take this MF’r down.
Just about wore out my f5 button, Brad.
I hope this is the tipping point. And I hope you get credit, too.
There are f#cking books out there on election fraud in Ohio. Plus Rep Conyers, BBV etc.
Wake up America!!!
For Supersoling: I think the important story here isn’t any new evidence the Kennedy article might produce, it’s that the OLD (to us) evidence will be presented to millions of people for the first time.
How many? Not 50 million, but maybe 5-10 million, if we factor in Rolling Stone’s circulation and the various blogs that will excerpt the article. The number could go a lot higher than 10 million if the corporate media pick the story up.
Many of us (and Brad, especially) have worked so hard for 19 months to prove this case that we know it by heart. Remember that others who don’t use the Internet and/or don’t pay attention to political issues (too busy, too jaded, etc.) are not acquainted with the evidence at all. They might get their news from CNN or their local paper, and will have missed everything.
It’s huge. If RFK, Jr. has a smoking gun in there we don’t know about, that’s just a bonus.
Super,
Dont ever go against the herd here. Even if you are a democrat you will be thrown aside and attacked. Just blindly accept everything they say and youll fit in here.
Oh yeah, and Bush caused 9/11.
RLM
Of course you are absolutely right. It’s easy to forget sometimes that the internet is a much smaller vacuum than it appears sometimes to those of us who know all of this stuff already. I’m just getting ready for the blizzard of spin and attacks that will come inevitably. That’s why the proof is so important to me. When the spin starts, I want to know that the evidence will be there to absolutely refute the attacks that will come.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Ricky
I have met the herd, and they are me…or something like that.
And oh…I’m no democrat.
What no one seems to be talking about is the possibility that Kerry was complicit in his own defeat. What else would explain his running such a horrible campaign, his unwillingness to respond to the swiftboating, and his willingness — eagerness — to concede defeat? If it is possible — likely — that Bush & Co stole the election, is it not also possible that Kerry was part of an even larger and more sinister plot?
Hey Miss P — good news! You only have to wait until tomorrow, JUNE 2! Grab a copy for me!
Joan – Steven Freeman says "As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible," he says, "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."
This is not only Steve’s opinion is mathematical fact. His methods have been reviewed and NO ONE has refuted them in a scientific manner.
I think it is fair to say that any fair court would find beyond a reasonable doubt that if you flipped a coin 660,000 times before it came up heads then there is something wrong with the coin or the how it was flipped.
There are other studies that come to the same conclusion! To anyone who has read and understands these studies it’s a mathematical certainty until some one comes along with a scientific study that shows it to be an incorrect conclusion.
No one has and I don’t think anyone will!
We will never hear or see the direct proof of vote tampering until after Bush and Blackwell are through with their political careers. All we can pray for is a death bed confession or a garbage man discovery before then.
All of the urban myths will show up soon.
The minority fascist right, represented by Ricky, still think the polls favor the republican dictatorship, and he has expressed his eagerness for the November elections.
He, like the rest of the corrupt ones inside a self inducted trance, does not know that he is in the contemptable minority, and that America has rejected the republican dictatorship.
This blog represents more of the middle now than it did before people woke up and smelled the stench of preznit blush .
Ricky and the other trolls want to be respected for telling lies and for spreading the manure. Sorry, our political noses still function, and we know stench when we smell it.
Other myths that will show up do not realize that the purpose of this is not to win a court battle. The Judicial branch does not have any jurisdiction whatsoever to overturn the ’04 election.
The only chance of that happening was the challenge presented in congress following the election. Some stood up and said the election was not as the official tally had said.
But the rubber stamp republican congress would not hear any objection (remember DeLay’s comments?) and the fraudy election was accepted.
There is no power on earth that can change that. All that can be done now is to rub the republican dictatorship’s noses in their own stench.
The upcoming discussion has some hope of focusing on the crap electronic machines that make the upcoming election also a target of fraud.
And I suspect with all the discontent with the republican dictatorship being expressed nation wide, that these hooligans are more desperate than ever.
But if the news gets out, they will be watched closer than ever.
And that is what must be done.
looking forward to the article
For Joan: The exit poll/tabulated vote discrepancies are impossible mathematically, as Prof. Freeman points out. But it’s worse than that. It’s equally impossible that almost every report of a flipped vote favored the same candidate…Bush. And that exit poll/tabulated vote figures for Senate races, and in non-battleground states for president, all fell within the margin for error. Only the presidential numbers in battleground states were way off kilter.
Look at it this way: If we viewed the same data from another country’s election, without any bias for either candidate, what would we conclude? That somebody was flipping votes or otherwise manipulating the vote totals in crucial precincts. No other plausible conclusion would avail.
It’s only when we bring partisan baggage to the question that someone cries, "Sore loser!" or
"Conspiracy theorist!" Such a person, of course, is content with the results, and might even think they’re legitimate. Yet, if a Republican troll in the United States were to look dispassionately at the Ukraine election, he’d probably say, "Sure, it was rigged." But the same troll, looking at the 2004 election, will respond, "Get a life, loser!" to any and all claims of fraud.
Except, that is, in the Washington governor’s race.
#15, of course kerry was complicit in his own defeat, but i don’t think it was through election fraud, as you seem to suggest.
IMHO he fell into the Gore trap of allowing entrenched and out-of-touch losers, a.k.a. Dem consultants, to do their usual mucked-up focus-group-think campaigning.
i think there are a more than a few reasons no one is implicating kerry ‘in his own defeat’ at this point, the biggest one being that no one cares. because if kerry cooperated in his own defeat, then he is an even bigger idiot than Dubya, assuming such a thing is even possible!
One of the urban myths is that those who did the exit polls, which predicted a Kerry win, considered whether or not the official tally was wrong.
That is pure myth:
"Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation" (link here, bold added).
Mitofsky considered the discrepancy to be because republicans were more shy than democrats, and therefore did not talk to the exit pollsters.
Mitofsky never even considered the possibility of election fraud.
That is why it should be investigated. It never has. Why investigate? Because:
"Exit polling is a well-developed science, informed by half a century of experience and continually improving methodology" (ibid, bold added).
We need to explain why the science that has been used in elections around the world for 5 or so decades, and continually improved, and always reliable, predicted a Kerry win.
But Ohio where the head of the republican election scenario was also the secretary of state, governing elections and recounts, was a disaster contrary to science, and clothed with conflict of interest.
I found the "shy Republican" theory interesting, because I had already heard it a day or so BEFORE the ’04 election. My sister, the rabid Republican, said it.
"Exit polls?" she said, "I don’t wanna tell them who I voted for! That’s between me and God! I’m too busy to tell some pollster my business!"
I’m sure that was the Republican talking point of the day or week. They were setting up their excuse!
Basturds!
shw
Yeah, really. Kerry and Bush are the same. Bone Thugs and Harmony dude.
The election was rigged no matter what once Kerry got the nomination. Even if Kerry had won, there would be no deviation from the Master Plan. Kerry was put in there just in case voters REALLY rejected Bush overwhelmingly. But they didn’t, so it was easy to keep Bush in office.
I saw the Freeman speech when it aired on CSPAN & I knew about virtually all the "glitches" favoring bush & about the exit polls rarely being so wrong before.
I guess I know about most of it, and like I said, I’m convinced.
What I didn’t know is that "The Judicial branch does not have any jurisdiction whatsoever to overturn the ’04 election." (if Dredd is right & he probably is)
So even if, by some extremely unlikely turn of events, the msm runs with this & we begin to see it splashed across the front pages & tv screens as it should have been five years ago (or two, if you want to put aside 2000) and it becomes unavoidably clear that massive fraud was perpetrated…that massive fraud is not prosecutable? Ever?
Or is it not prosecutable unless & until an impeachment & conviction takes place? Because I understood that the president & vice-president, if impeached/convicted, would then be legally vulnerable to indictment & prosecution.
I realize I’m implying here that election fraud is provably connectable to the white house & that that’s another issue, but hypothetically….?
Brad Friedman…
…You are the BOMB Baby!
Joan #26
Election fraud is prosecutable, and several republicans have already been convicted for illegal and felonious activitiy in the ’04 and ’00 elections (link here, here, and here).
What I was in reference to was changing the election results. In other words when the Ohio electors were challenged in the House by the Democrats, and the republican dictatorship overruled the objection by majority vote, that was the end of the challenge to the election of preznit blush .
Anyone caught doing fraud during that election can and should be criminally prosecuted for that fraud, even tho we can’t challenge the election results in court any longer, in terms of changing who is president.
The major point, then, is that the rubber stamp republican congress intentionally and knowingly covered up the fraud, and put in place the likes of preznit blush , a person they now try to distance themselves from (link here).
This republican dictatorship is so phony and incompetent it seems like we are dreaming.
Excuse me, Dredd, but this is/was the United States of America, and if there is no remedy for a wrong, we make one, especially if the ones keeping us from it are the culpable parties.
Just because something has never been done before, and there is no provision for it on the books, does NOT provision cannot be made, and remedy effected. The only way "rule of law" is worth anything is if this is true. I’m really tired of people boxed-in by what already is. There never was a goddam coup d’etat here before. We damn well CAN vacate whatever "law" sanctioned it.
Agent99 #29
The only avenue expressed ad nauseum is articles of impeachment.
Which according to law, must be drafted by the House of Representatives.
Where each and every committee, including the committee that has jurisdiction over impeachment, is chaired by a republican.
And where the majority vote on that committee, and each and every other committee, is republican.
Same in the Senate where the actual trial would take place.
It is clear to me that it is fanciful to imagine such a thing taking place.
The hope then, if focused reasonably, is to vote the republican dictatorship out in November.
Good luck on your "goddam coup d’etat".
My comments apply to the realm of what we can do, not to the realm of what we have done. I know all about the problem with the legislative branch, and, assuming we aren’t all in concentration camps come November, the chairmanships, etc. ought to be different. Impeachment is not enough, and we should not leave it at that, or we are not much better off. Maybe a conference of governors, or even better, a convention of all the state legislatures, to decide how to redress this and keep it from happening again. Whatever. Outside the box, because inside this box a serious threat to our, and the world’s, safety has been found. It must be stamped out. We can do it in a civilized fashion or an uncivilized one, but it must be done.
Massive election fraud = coup d’etat… and it has not been bloodless either. We cannot refuse to recognize it, stick to Robert’s Rules and hope for the best in the future. It has to be faced and it has to be dealt with and it has to be prevented from happening again, or THIS ISN’T OUR COUNTRY. It’s theirs. Period.
Courage must accompany clarity or it’s gone.
I think these bastards are bent retaining power and are capeable of doing whatever it takes to keep there reins. especially since if the dems get power there will be seriouse investigations , if you think the last electionwas a fraud as i do . man look out for this one . the last one had too do with the war and beacoup largent in gov. contracs . this one still has those plus inditements at stake. i never thaught i could seriously say this but i do believe our democracy has been stole . the american peopple might sometimes be slow. but as a whole there not stupid . nobody and i mean nobody could have screwd up as manny things as this guy did , and got lagiteamitly realected. :
These things in the Whitehouse are not human. If genetic testing were done on them, I’d bet that they would have a different genetic makeup than real people do. I do not believe it is possible for a a living creature with a heart or soul to knowingly wreak such havoc on this country. Certainly they are not spiritual beings or they would be in fear that they will surely rot in hell. I’d like to believe that tey will!!!!