http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=12-03-04&storyID=20222Election 2004: Another Look At the Disputed Vote Count By BOB BURNETT
Special to the Planet, NEWS ANALYSIS (12-03-04)
Four weeks after the presidential election, there continues to be a controversy about the difference between the exit poll projections and the actual results. Almost daily, conspiracy theories surface on Internet blogs, only to be refuted a few hours later.
To gain perspective on why many Democrats persist in the belief that the election was stolen let’s remember what happened on Nov. 2. In addition to exit polls reporting that Kerry was going to win, there were widespread reports of voting irregularities. I heard some of these in Colorado, where I was getting out the vote. Periodically the Boulder Democratic headquarters would receive calls that voters were being harassed or told the wrong place to vote.
A national database (
https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation) captured 24,842 of these voting irregularities. Mahoning County, Ohio, reported more than 1,000 voting incidents; for example, “Caller’s father voted on touchscreen machine for Kerry-Edwards, when he went to check his vote, the vote had recorded Bush-Cheney; he had to try three times to get the vote to Kerry-Edwards.” Similar incidents were reported in Miami-Dade County in Florida, “Voter voted for Kerry; when she reviewed the
ballot it showed that she voted for Bush.”
These documented irregularities don’t fully account for a Bush plurality of 3.3 million votes; but the fact that many of us saw or heard about election nastiness does explain why Democrats have a bad feeling about the election, why we want to believe that the Republican cheated their way to victory. To dispel these concerns and accept the results, Democrats require a coherent explanation for what happened—why Kerry didn’t prevail as we hoped.
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The title statement is right after this excerpt. Comments please.