Moving on to the 2004 Presidential Election – Exit Polls and Vote Counting Accuracy
Exit polls for years have consistently (in thousands of vote races) been very accurate – often coming within fractions of one percentage point of predicting the outcome of elections. However, when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections conducted on electronic voting machines, the polls have been off by more than ten percentage points – an unprecedented margin of error.
The most trusted exit polling was done by the Edison/Mitofsky Election System. Their exit polls for the overall 2004 presidential election were off by 5.5% – their largest discrepancy ever. They had Kerry winning by 3%. However, it was “officially” record that Bush won the election by 2.5%. In precincts that used hand counted paper ballots the exit polls were, as usual, LESS THAN ONE percentage point off. However, in precincts that used some form of electronic voting system the exit polls were, ON AVERAGE, OVER TEN percentage points off.
With regard to the 2004 presidential election, Republican pollster Dick Morris discussed the “virtually inconceivable” errors of the exit polls in the pivotal battleground states of Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada and Colorado, summing up the occurrences by saying:
“Exit polls are almost never wrong… So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries…. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible!”
Once again in Florida, especially in Democratic leaning counties, a University of Cal Berkley study uncovered an “inexplicable 130,000- 260,000 additional votes for President Bush.” Again, numerous irregularites were seen through swing states and an overwhelming percentage of them went in Bush’s favor.
It wasn’t just these battleground states though. In Oklahoma a conservative newspaper reported that Kerry was winning 57 of 77 counties with 70% of the vote in. However, Kerry ended up losing all 77 counties, every one of them. In the closing moments of the election, Kerry magically lost over 35,000 votes and Bush gained 394,000 votes. These counties claimed that the machines began counting minus votes for Kerry. In Pennsylvania, many voters testified that machines were set to “default to Bush.” As I said before, the list goes on and on.
To be clear, election manipulation is not just on the presidential level. There are many instances and clear examples of congressional and state election manipulation as well.
If these two presidential elections were purposely stolen using electronic voting machines, we must then try to figure out who could have pulled this off. Let’s now take a look at the history of the voting machine industry.