REALITY CHECK

by Andrew Gumbel   LA City Beat    24 November 2004

Conspiracists who insist Bush ?stole? this election are only shooting themselves in the foot

Okay, deep breath, and repeat after me: George Bush won the election. George Bush won fair and square. He won in Ohio. He won in Florida. And he carried the national popular vote by a margin of well over three million. He may be a bum, a bozo, a corporate shill, a reckless bomb-thrower or any of the other things his opponents like to call him, but the brute fact is that he?s the guy a clear majority of voters picked to lead the free(-ish) world for the next four years.

It might seem eccentric to have to insist on this point more than three weeks after John Kerry?s crystal-clear concession. But I keep having conversations with otherwise reasonable, intelligent people who are unshakable in their belief that the election was stolen. Some believe the fraud will come to light as soon as journalists like myself get off our rear ends and start digging. Others believe the evidence is already available for those with eyes to see it, and seem incredulous that I refuse to join their number.

Here?s what I tell them. Yes, there are ample grounds to question whether this election was conducted according to international standards of transparency and fairness. Yes, there are questions concerning just about every aspect of the vote, from registration to absentee procedures to provisional balloting to polling-station access to the reliability of the voting machines and the accuracy of the final count.

Precisely because of those concerns, however, it is essential to work on the basis of real evidence and real numbers, not wishful thinking. And the real evidence, to date, indicates that Bush won by too wide a margin for any of the irregularities to make a difference to the outcome.

But but but, my friends and e-mail correspondents counter, how can the exit polls have got it so wrong? How come the variance in the actual results consistently favored Bush, never Kerry? What about the Florida counties with high Democratic registration which were recorded voting overwhelmingly for Bush? What about all the uncounted punchcard votes and provisional ballots in Ohio?

Unfortunately, many of these questions are based on published reports that are wild, grossly irresponsible and, in many cases, flat wrong. Take Greg Palast?s assertion, days after the election, that Kerry won Ohio and therefore the presidency, because the uncounted ballots were more than enough to overcome his 136,000-vote deficit. Palast had absolutely no basis for knowing how the uncounted votes might pan out, and his arithmetic made assumptions about the levels of hidden support for Kerry that simply did not withstand serious analysis. (Salon?s Farhad Manjoo has done a particularly good job of demolishing his numbers.)

Or take Thom Hartmann?s piece on the Common Dreams website alerting the world to the Democrat-registered Florida counties which voted for Bush. He and his source, a mathematician called Kathy Dopp, said the tabulation of these optically scanned votes was so out of line it must have fallen victim to partisan hacking, starting as early as 2002. Clearly, Hartmann and Dopp were unaware that these counties were part of the redneck Solid South which long since started switching allegiance from Democrat to Republican. And they didn?t bother to check that every one of them voted for Bush over Gore in 2000.

When I wrote to Hartmann pointing out these things, he had the good grace to amend his piece to include them. But he also wrote: ?Kathy still thinks the statistics are anomalous, and Jeff [Fisher, an unsuccessful congressional candidate in Florida] suggests that the 2000 vote was actually probably the first one hacked.? Really? An undetected hack in the single most scrutinized election in the history of the United States? And, by the way, how come most of these counties voted Republican in 1996 as well?

As for the exit poll question, it reminds me of an election in Italy in the mid-1990s when Silvio Berlusconi, then in opposition, insisted: ?The exit poll was the real result!? It sounded silly then, and it sounds equally silly now coming from disappointed Kerry supporters who cite Dick Morris ? Bill Clinton?s unloved consultant Dick Morris! ? to insist that exit polls are ?never wrong.?

Certainly, Mitofsky International, the exit poll company, has some explaining to do. But exit polls are, in fact, quite frequently wrong, especially when the race is close or turnout is unpredictable. In states where the result was clear-cut ? California, say, or Utah ? Mitofksy was much closer to the mark. The discrepancies in the key swing states, meanwhile, were almost certainly caused by inadequate sampling. The polls were conducted on a statewide rather than countywide basis, which means the pollsters had to make educated guesses about turnout, especially in more remote rural areas. As we know, the rural Bush supporters turned out in far higher numbers than anticipated, so it?s plausible to assume the pollsters, like everyone else, guessed wrong.

Some post-election analyses have risen above the general amateur-hour nonsense. Last week, a group of researchers at Berkeley published a statistical survey of three big Florida counties using touchscreen voting ? Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach ? and found that their results departed alarmingly from the norms established by the rest of the state and by a number of demographic and political variables. Bush, they said, appeared to have received 130,000-260,000 votes more than the overall pattern would have suggested ? not enough to change the result in Florida, but enough to warrant further investigation.

To know the full extent of the problems, Americans need to do something they are notoriously bad at, and that is wait patiently for all the information to come in. We are still waiting for the provisional vote count in Ohio. We may, thanks to Ralph Nader and the Greens, yet be treated to a manual recount in one or more states. Voting rights activists should also consider following the example set by the media in Florida four years ago and make open records requests to inspect ballots for themselves.

Some people appear to think none of this is necessary, that there is nothing wrong with jumping to premature conclusions. ?Anything we can do to undermine the Empire and sow a sense of illegitimacy is worth doing,? one well-known writer and political commentator e-mailed me last week. I couldn?t disagree more. If the goal is to mount an effective opposition to the Bush administration, the stolen election psychosis can only be a distraction to the main task at hand, which is finding a compelling political message to mobilize public opinion and reverse the ever-rising Republican tide.
Making wild accusations about vote fraud also risks discrediting the entire movement for electoral integrity at a time when it is needed most. Do those who still dream about a President Kerry really want to find themselves in the same position as the Bush White House over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ? forced to admit that they never really had the evidence but, gosh darn, still hoping it will turn up some day? This was an election fought, to a large extent, on the issue of reason versus belief. It would be good if those who purport to stand on the side of reason chose to exercise some of it now.