Disputes, questions linger 3 weeks after Election Day

BY LARRY EICHEL

Knight Ridder Newspapers   22 November 2004

PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - It has been three weeks since the election, but a few people still see some loose ends in need of cleaning up.

In Ohio on Monday, the presidential candidates of the Green and Libertarian parties, who plan to seek a statewide recount, asked a federal judge to order the state to speed up its initial vote tabulation.

The suit's goal is to provide enough time for the recount to be held before Ohio's 20 Electoral College votes are cast on Dec. 13. Ohio was the decisive state in the election.

And in Philadelphia, Steven Freeman, a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, was finishing up a second version of his much-discussed paper entitled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy."

The first draft, widely circulated on the Internet, created a stir among Americans worried about the variance between President Bush's 3.3 million popular-vote margin and exit poll numbers that had him trailing.

In Ohio, the two presidential candidates, Libertarian Michael Badnarik and David Cobb of the Green Party, have already raised the $113,600 the state requires before conducting a recount. The unofficial tally has Bush ahead of Democrat John F. Kerry by 136,000 votes, more than 2 percent of the total votes cast.

No recount can occur, however, until a first, official count is complete. The Ohio secretary of state's office, citing state law and practical considerations, has said a recount might not be able to start until Dec. 11, only two days before electors meet.

The secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, was a co-chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio.

"I know a recount will change the results," Cobb said Monday in a conference call with reporters. "I don't know whether it will change the results sufficiently to determine who wins Ohio's (20) electoral votes."

Last week, the Ohio Democratic Party sued the state in federal court over the standards for counting Ohio's 155,000 provisional ballots, the ballots that initially delayed Kerry's concession. The Democrats' attorney said at the time that the party had no expectation of overturning the outcome of the election.

Among the issues raised in the new lawsuit, filed Monday in Toledo, is the accuracy of the electronic voting machines that have no paper trail. Such machines were used in seven Ohio counties. But as Cobb acknowledged, there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount of votes cast on them.

In his exit-poll paper, Freeman, a lecturer and visiting scholar at Penn's Center for Organizational Dynamics, found that the gap between the poll results on Election Night and the vote count itself was beyond any easy explanation. "That the President did not legitimately win the election is still a very premature conclusion," he wrote in the revised version, "but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis."

Since the original paper was posted (initially without his permission) 10 days ago, Freeman said, he has received roughly 1,500 e-mails and 100 phone calls, mainly from voters thanking him for raising the issue.

"The reaction has been overwhelming," said Freeman, whose field is business management. "I started looking at the situation just for my own curiosity. I'd seen the exit poll numbers on Election Day, and thought Kerry had won. The subsequent articles trying to explain what had happened made no sense to me."

Any number of pollsters, political scientists and professionals in both the Democratic and Republican parties have said they see no reason to suspect there is anything significantly amiss with the vote count, regardless of what the exit polls said.

The consortium of news organizations sponsoring the polls has commissioned an investigation to learn why the results ended up skewed toward Kerry.

While the investigation is not complete, Warren Mitofsky, whose company designed and help conduct the poll, has suggested more Republicans than Democrats refused to be polled, skewing the numbers. Such refusals, the theory goes, might stem from distrust some Republicans feel toward the so-called "mainstream media," whose logos the pollsters wore on Election Day. Exit polls have overstated the Democratic vote in other recent elections as well.

Freeman, who said the theory has "some plausibility," expects to post the revised version of his paper Tuesday on his Web site, www.appliedresearch.us/sf/.