Opinion column: The F word
By Adam Zmick   Daily Illini
Published: Friday, December 10, 2004
Media Credit: Dave Chen

It's official: There will be another election. The unofficial count showed the conservative candidate with a 3 percent lead in the popular tally, but allegations of fraud and corruption have tainted those results.

Numerous cases of voter suppression have been reported, and anomalies in regional vote counts have gone unexplained. The most damning evidence of voter fraud, however, is the difference between the vote count and the exit-poll results. The exit poll shows the election results to be statistically impossible.

Exit polls are internationally renowned for their accuracy. These surveys, given to voters as they leave the polling place, are the international standard for verifying the honesty with which elections are conducted. For instance, because the law in Germany requires a hand count, Germans know what happened on Election Night solely because of exit-poll results. In the past 20 years, those exit polls never have been wrong.

Now, before I go any further, I should probably specify which country I'm writing about here. I'm talking about Ukraine.

Don't get me wrong. Almost all the facts I just mentioned are true of our recent election in the United States as well. The only difference is that another election already is scheduled to clear up the mess in Ukraine, while most Americans still have no idea that something went wrong.

In Ukraine, government employees were ordered to turn in absentee ballots to their bosses so they could be cast in favor of Moscow-backed conservative Viktor Yanukovych. There also were reports of Ukrainian polling places being shut down after "party thugs" stormed in.

In the United States, it was reported that thousands of names were purged from voter lists in Nevada, Ohio and Florida before the election even began. Once voting started, Republican vote-challengers at polling places prevented thousands more from voting.

If they made it past the vote-challengers, most Democrats had a long wait ahead of them. This was more than a fluke. It appears that Democratic precincts were intentionally denied the voting machines they required. In Franklin County, Ohio, for example, the official records show more than one hundred voting machines collected dust in a warehouse while historically Democratic precincts received fewer machines for the general election than for the primary.

Suspicions with the Ukrainian election grew stronger because of anomalies in local vote tallies. One illustration of this occurred in the pro-Yanukovych province of Donetsk. Donetsk reported a nearly 99 percent turnout for the election but only 77 percent during the previous one.  

Our election had more than its fair share of fuzzy math. Three precincts in Perry County, Ohio, reported more total votes than registered voters. Miami County, Ohio, and Palm Beach County, Fla., added thousands of extra votes to their tallies after reporting that all the votes already were counted.

After the election, the reported election results were compared to exit-poll results compiled by Stephen Freeman, a University of Pennsylvania professor. The three most-critical swing states, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, reported results that were drastically different from the exit polls - with differences all in favor of Bush. He calculated the statistical probability of those results to be about one in 250 million.

Eighty percent of the votes cast in the United States were counted by two companies: Diebold and ES&S. Wally Odell, CEO of Diebold and Republican fund-raiser, wrote in August, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

Chuck Hagel, Republican senator and former chairman of ES&S, recently said, "It is now apparent that a concerted and forceful program of Election Day fraud and abuse was enacted, with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities."

He was referring to the election in Ukraine, but the sad truth is that he could be talking about the United States just as easily. Our election was a fraud.

Think I'm crazy? Maybe I am. But if you look at the facts and still think this election was honest, well, then you're crazy too.