Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

BookPage

With a foreword by U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

exit polls, election fraud, and the official count

By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss

“Freeman and Bleifuss document the final proof of the most monumental theft in American history.”

—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Read more about Steven Freeman here [1] and Joel Bleifuss here [2]

This book available through Election Defense Alliance.

Click Here to Place Order. [3]

"This book discusses a contentious, but not a partisan issue. People differ strongly about whom they want in the White House, but almost everybody wants whoever is there to be seen as having been rightfully elected . . . Only those who simply and reflexively assert the explanation with
which they're most comfortable will dismiss this careful and judicious book as the work of conspiracy theorists."

—John Allen Paulos
author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

"Freeman and Bleifuss shape the raw data into an image of all that the Founders warned us against."

—U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.
from the Foreword, "Praise for Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"

“After Steven Freeman first pointed to the statistical improbability of the discrepancy between 2004 Election Day exit polls, which forecast a Kerry victory, and the officially reported results, opinion leaders accepted with relief the mea culpa offered months later by exit pollsters Joe Lenski and Warren
Mitofsky. The careful analyses presented in this book demonstrate that the pollsters’ explanation is utterly unsatisfactory.
Indeed, the additional evidence that Freeman and Bleifuss develop is even more disquieting than the original discrepancy. Their book deserves to stimulate follow-up investigations into the threat to our democracy posed by insecure electronic voting machines, and into the possibility that their vulnerability was exploited in 2004 with fateful results. As a citizen, I very much hope that the answer is ‘no,’ but it is time for mainstream scholars, journalists, and public officials to stop avoiding the question.”

—Jack H. Nagel
Steven Goldstone Endowed Term Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

"Freeman and Bleifuss are true patriots. They understand that our country cannot survive as a viable democracy if our election processes are corrupted. They responsibly and insightfully investigate evidence suggesting that the 2004 presidential
election may have been stolen, using as a focal research question: either the exit polls were unusually way off or the votes were not accurately counted. Concerned Americans should not ignore this intelligent book."

—Kenneth Warren,
Professor of Political Science, St. Louis University, President of The Warren Poll

“In the aftermath of the 2004 election, I was convinced that the exit polls had got it wrong, that George Bush had won the popular and electoral vote, and that arguments to the contrary were little more than a combination of sour grapes and conspiracy theory. After reading this book, I’m no longer so sure. When asked ‘was the 2004 election stolen?’ the only honest answer I can now give is ‘I don’t know.’ That is a sad commentary on the state of elections, election polling, the news media and academic research in the United States and it needs to be remedied.”

—Michael X. Delli Carpini,
Dean, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

‘Freeman and Bleifuss have made a critically important contribution to the debate over election accuracy and integrity in the United States. Their book offers the most thorough account to date of the large and
growing body of evidence indicating that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. They cover the evidence of voter suppression, bias in election policy and administration, disparities between exit polls and election returns, and much more. While making these and
other complex subjects accessible to non-experts, Freeman and Bleifuss also discuss larger questions about the role of elections, election administration, and media oversight in modern representative government. They demonstrate that American democracy itself is in jeopardy.

-- Lance deHaven-Smith
Professory of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University

“This is the book I have been waiting for. Freeman and Bleifuss are reasonable, balanced, and insistant--addressing the questions about the 2004 elections that won't go away. They specifically target the exit polls and explore how these
exit polls (the gold standard of polling) could have been so far off from the official count in so many states. Readers will have the opportunity to step outside a comfortable conventional wisdom, not into a world of conspiracies but into the territory of careful searching,
combining the best features of science and true investigative journalism."

—Karen Parker Lears, Associate Editor Raritan Review

“If you seek a very accessible guide to the 2004 election, starting with election night and proceeding through all the major issues, I can't make a higher recommendation than this book…”

—Paul R. Lehto, votersunite.org

Twenty months after the 2004 presidential election, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? is the first sustained investigation of what really happened on the first Tuesday of November 2004. Scrutinizing the widest spectrum of facts and theories that have emerged to explain the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official count, authors Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss tell the story of our electoral democracy at this moment in its history without fear or favor.

The story they have to tell is a damning one—one that has profound implications for the 2006 and 2008 elections, indeed for the future of American democracy:

• Was there something wrong with the way that exit polls are conducted in the United States or does the problem lie with a lack of security at the ballot box? In their book, Freeman and Bleifuss plumb both the history of exit polling and the state of the art today. The Election Day 2004 exit polls showed Kerry winning nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. So why did the exit polls differ so substantially from the official count? In elections in Germany and the United Kingdom, exit polls accurately predict the outcome of national elections. And in the Ukraine that same month, an exit poll discrepancy was used to overturn the official results.

• Did the implementation of electronic voting systems pave the way for election fraud in 2004? Freeman and Bleifuss examine the vulnerability of new ballot technologies. In 2004, 64 percent of voters cast ballots on
either electronic voting systems or optical-scan voting systems. A September 2005 study by the General Accountability Office found that such systems had security problems that “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are
critical to the accuracy and the integrity of the voting process.”

• Why were the exit polls so wrong? The pollsters who conducted the exit polls, Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky, produced a 77-page report that attempts to explain why the exit poll discrepancy occurred. Freeman and Bleifuss
examine that report in detail and demonstrate that the pollsters’ analysis does not stand up under scrutiny. “Lenski and Mitofsky found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy as
practiced in the 2004 presidential election,” they write.

• Freeman and Bleifuss also analyze the Conyers Report and Democratic National Committee report, as well as earlier reports such as those on African American vote suppression conducted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights—all of which cast doubt on the integrity of the 2004 presidential election. The authors pay particular attention to Ohio, the critical battleground state. In Ohio, an extraordinary variety of electoral malfeasance is documented, including various forms of vote suppression, ballot “spoilage,”and institutionalized disenfranchisement—all of which amounted to more than enough to swing the election. So why weren’t the investigative arms of our government and the press more in evidence? Freeman and Bleifuss explore the reasons.

Freeman and Bleifuss present their case with scientific precision in clear and easy to understand language. Advance readers like the distinguished mathematician John Allen Paulos are already calling Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? a “careful and judicious book” in recognition of the effort of the authors to rise above partisan politics.

STEVEN F. FREEMAN's
analyses, together with a study by the University of California, Berkeley's sociology and demography departments, are recognized to have been the first serious attempts to examine the validity of the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.
Freeman holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management. He is on the faculty of 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 his research.

JOEL BLEIFUSS
is editor of In These Times. An investigative reporter and columnist, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Utne Reader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dissent, among many others.

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count

by Steven F. Freeman & Joel Bleifuss

Foreword by U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.

Publication Date: June 30th, 2006

284 pages | Paperback | $17.95

www.sevenstories.com

To Interview the authors, please contact Ruth Weiner or Crystal Yakacki

(ruth@sevenstories.com [4], crystal@sevenstories.com [5], 212.226.8760).