American-style democracy revisited

Democracy Lost

In April 2006, I wrote a damning article on the state of the American democracy. For a state that purports “exporting democracy” as part of its foreign policy platform, the democratic process within the domestic United States seems rather lacking.

As part of that article, I compared the election of Bush (2000) as compared to the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005). Though the Iranian elections are hardly “fair” by Western standards, they compare in a surprisingly favourable manner to the Bush vs. Gore election. At the end of the day, the Iranian election of 2005 had a much higher participation rate, and Ahmadinejad won by a decisive majority. Bush, even ignoring the claims of procedural biases (if not outright electoral fraud) was not a “popularly elected” leader as Gore actually won more votes.

Earlier this month, Rolling Stone Magazine published a well researched political piece, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” by Robert F Kennedy Jr (son of the late “Bobby Kennedy”). Although the article has been criticised by some commentators (here, and here), there is nevertheless an essentially hitherto uninvestigated core of fact that should be ringing alarm bells.

The most pertinent part of Kennedy’s article is the section that is most grounded in fact – one that cannot be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”; exit polls.

Exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth on the decision they have just made. As such, exit polls are the most accurate of election predictors. According to Kennedy’s article (and his references), exit polls in Germany in recent elections have always been within 0.3% of the actual result. They are so accurate that they have also been used as de facto indicators of electoral fraud – used to good effect in the election in the Republic of Georgia in 2003 and the Ukrainian election in 2004.

The relevant excerpts from Kennedy’s article:

“The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren’t just off the mark – they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush...

… the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history…

For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voter – approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls – driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent…

…On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters … Kerry … had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call…

… as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities – as much as 9.5 percent – with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favoured Bush…

… In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology…

… [Steven F.] Freeman [a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specialises in research methodology] 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…

… ‘When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,’ concludes Freeman. ‘The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud – and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press…’”

The remainder of Kennedy’s article detail how this electoral fraud took place. The criticisms to Kennedy’s article all revolve around picking at side issues that I freely agree that Kennedy could be mistaken in. Nevertheless, the facts remain – there is incontrovertible proof that a widespread electoral miscount occurred in the US presidential election of 2004 with it overwhelmingly favouring Bush. This evidence was provided by the most elaborate and accurate exit poll ever devised. The “true count” would almost certainly have elected John Kerry as president.

Bush is an illegitimate president twice over. More than that, the state of the American democracy is in complete disarray. What use is the “freedom of the press” when the popular press self-censors itself to such a degree?

From: Rolling Stone Magazine