Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen Too?

[Time for change]

40. Palast brings up some excellent points

I believe the main issues he brings up are mostly important for our future rather than for the 2004 election per se. Nearly 250 thousand uncounted votes is unacceptable in a democracy, especially when most of those uncounted votes are distributed among our most vulnerable citizens. It should provide a lesson for us for the future, to use methods that produce accurate results.

What effect those ballots would have had on the 2004 election is another question. Florida had a comparable number of spoiled ballots (undervotes and overvotes) in 2000, approximately 175 thousand. 64,248 were undervotes. Of these, approximately half of them had no marks on them at all, so could not have been counted for either candidate. Another few thousand contained votes for third party candidates, were found to be overvotes rather than undervotes when they were examined, or contained marks in places that were not adjacent to candidates' names. That left approximately 27 thousand that were counted for Bush or Gore in the Miami Herald's investigation. From that count, Gore came up with a net advantage of 1,314 votes over Bush -- plenty enough to make up his deficit of 537 votes in Florida (though the Herald spun its own results differently, to de-emphasize that point), but nowhere near enough to overcome a deficit of the nature of 119 thousand votes, which was the case for Kerry in Ohio in 2004.

There were also about 110 thousand overvotes in Florida in 2004. A statistical analysis of who those votes were meant for indicated that Gore probably would have had a net advantage over Bush of about 50 thousand votes. This calculation is made by assuming (reasonably) that the vast majority of overvotes that contained one vote for Gore or Bush and one vote for a third party candidate were actually meant for the major party candidate. However, courts have not allowed that kind of analysis to be used to allocate votes. The only definitive evidence of voter intent which probably would have been used to allocate votes (had the Gore team requested it in 2004) was a write in for the candidate on the ballot. Had that analysis been performed in Florida in 2000, Gore would have picked up an additional 873 net votes -- again, plenty enough to carry Florida, but way short of what Kerry needed in Ohio in 2004.

The provisional ballots are another story. Palast notes 155 thousand provisional ballots in Ohio in 2004 that were not counted. He is no doubt correct that the good majority of these would have probably been for Kerry. But keep in mind that it is not at all clear how many of those provisional ballots would have been found to be legal had the case been taken to court. The ballots are called "provisional" because it was not clear at the time they voted whether the voter was eligible to vote.

Let's say Kerry pushed the matter and demanded that it be settled in court. Suppose he picked up 3 thousand additional votes from a count of the spoiled ballots (which the Florida experience in 2000 would approximately predict), thereby reducing his deficit to 116 thousand. In that case, even if all 155 thousand provisional ballots had been counted, he would have had to have won that count by an overwhelming margin to win -- approximately 136 thousand to 19 thousand. With Blackwell overseeing the process, I think it's highly unlikely that there would be a ruling to allow nearly all of the 155 thousand provisional ballots to be counted. So I think that all these factors went through Kerry's mind, and he realized that it would be such an uphill battle that he had almost no chance of winning. And that's why he conceded.

I do believe strongly that Kerry was cheated out of Ohio in 2004, and I'll make that point more concretely in other chapters, especially chapter 5, which discusses the voter purging. But I do not believe that insisting upon a count of the spoiled ballots and provisional ballots would have succeeded in goving the election to Kerry. As for the voter purging, that could theoretically have been used to give the election to Kerry. But there was not clear evidence of that available at the time.

As for New Mexico, I do believe that Kerry was cheated out of New Mexico too. But New Mexico's electoral votes would not have been enough for Kerry to win the election.