Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count

By Steven F. Freeman, Joel Bleifuss and John Conyers, Jr.

On the afternoon of election day 2004, the world was abuzz with the news: exit polls indicated that John Kerry would decisively win the election and become the next president of the United States. That proved not to be the case.
According to the official count—the number of votes tallied, not necessarily the number of votes cast—George W. Bush beat Kerry by a margin of three million votes. The exit polls, however, had predicted a margin of victory for Kerry of five million votes. Occurrences of vote manipulation, vote suppression, and outright election fraud were alleged at the local level in many precincts throughout Ohio and other "battleground" states.
Where the controversy of the 2000 presidential election had come about as the result of an extremely close race, in 2004 the irregularities were widespread and appeared to follow a clear pattern. Why then did the Democrats concede the election early the next morning? Why has there been no investigation by any major news organization? What does it say about our democracy when the slot machine industry is more strictly regulated than our electronic voting machines?
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? analyzes the available data, and attempts to answer the question of whether America's sitting president was inaugurated after winning, or losing the 2004 presidential race.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609801014

Reviews for Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

[jensenmk82 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book deserves to be widely read. Using the “anchor-and-adjust” method with the 2000 election (when DRE voting was not widespread) as anchor, the authors find a near-miraculous appearance of two million new Bush voters in 2004. With CNN’s adjustment of its figures between Nov. 2 and Nov. 3, “[w]e could hardly have a surer sign of a corrupted count.” Freeman and Bleifuss find “a discrepancy on the order of 10 million votes.” Even the most optimistic turnout views do not allow a 2004 Bush victory without Bush winning “significant numbers of Gore 2000 voters.” But do you believe there were large numbers of such voters in 2004? A DNC report never seriously considered the possibility of fraud. The authors estimate that John Kerry really won by 5%, “a swing of 8 to 10 million votes from the official count” (p. 174). “In short, every calculation of how America voted indicates that, rather than giving Bush a 3-million-vote plurality, American voters gave Kerry a plurality of at least 5 to 7 million votes” (p.175).Print and broadcast media have downplayed, ridiculed, or ignored these issues, because, they say, a vast conspiracy would be needed—but the authors argue that this is not so. The New York Times played a leading role in squelching the story. Yet John Allen Paulos, the 2003 winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science award for the promotion of the public understanding of science, published an Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsing Freeman’s analysis and expressing surprise at the lack of academic interest. Columns on the subject were killed by the Chicago Tribune’s syndication service, Tribune Media Services. Compellingly written and analytically cogent, this book is written by an expert in survey design (including polling) and an investigative journalist.