Stolen Election!

Or: My Mama sure loved his Daddy.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. cracks open the 2004 Presidential election in a Rolling Stone article. The results? A good laugh.

The most prominent point in his argument concerns those exit polls. Proven comically wrong election after election, they are comically put forward here as proof positive that Bush stole the necessary votes:

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

Good Lord, where does one start?

1. The notion that respondents were more likely to respond "in Bush strongholds" doesn't necessarily identify Bush voters. Say a "Bush stronghold" is a sixty percent pro-Bush district. This means forty percent of all voters are pro-Kerry. And fifty-six percent of all voters rushed to the exit pollsters to identify their votes. Now: how eager would Kerry voters in, say, Durham, North Carolina, be eager to identify themselves as separate from the rubes? Think about it.

2. What was made clear from the early exit polling (the numbers that appeared first on Wonkette, then elsewhere) the woman/man respondents wre roughly 60/40, thus skewing all the results toward Kerry. No mention of this by Kennedy.

Beyond that--heck, a few hundred thousand here or there--George W. Bush won the popular vote. Isn't that everything to the Democrats?