Outside Story

Illustration By: Jeffrey Bouchard

A lack of media interest has fueled Election Day conspiracy theories.

by David S. Barry

The complaints about Ohio began pouring in on Election Day, beginning with the widely televised images of Democratic voters waiting 12 hours to cast their ballot in precincts that failed to provide enough voting machines. There was also the electronic voting machine in one Ohio town that gave Bush 4,258 votes in a precinct with fewer than 700 registered voters.

Then came the weird, sinister report that the Warren County election headquarters were locked down—and off-limits to the media—after the polls closed because of a terrorist warning from the FBI. (Later, it turned out that there had been no threat.) And, finally, who can forget the exit polls that had pointed to a clear John Kerry win Election Eve—projections which everyone said were never wrong?

As far back as February, Democrats were sending e-mails amongst themselves, warning of potential problems with electronic voting systems that leave no paper trails. The day before the election, those warnings took on the form of reports on Internet blog sites, and when the results were so far off from the exit polls a day later, people started crying foul. But with blogs and e-mail running the coverage, the dialogue could only get so loud.

Calls for an investigation and action mounted, even though these irregularities were merely a blip on the mainstream media's radar.

One week after the election, a widely circulated paper by University of Pennsylvania statistics professor Steven Freeman put the odds at 250 million to 1 against exit-poll error going so heavily for Bush in 11 battleground states. Shortly thereafter, a statistical analysis from the University at California at Berkeley posited it as a near impossibility.

Fueled by these apparent signs of wrongdoing, a group of Democratic congressmen led by Michigan Rep. John Conyers soon asked the General Accounting Office to investigate widespread charges and allegations of electoral irregularities. A day later, the GAO announced an investigation was underway as reported irregularities ranged from 30,000 to 51,000 votes. On the same day, Nov. 24, activist Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org announced she had video footage of electoral fraud in Volusia County, Fla. The media, she said, rejected her information, an assertion that's become common in this growing recount movement.

The groundswell hit a fever pitch six days later when Jesse Jackson denounced the Ohio election as a fraud, citing harassment, intimidation and deliberate undersupply of voting machines in areas with high Democratic registration.

By that point, the stage was set for belief in a Republican Election Day conspiracy, and the lack of serious coverage of the allegations in the press—aside from opinion pieces—fueled it. Those thoughts have yet to dissipate more than a month after Kerry conceded the election. John Allen Paulos, a Temple University mathematics professor, published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that called the exit-poll discrepancy a haunting issue that demanded a full public accounting. Paulos was especially unhappy with what he sees as the "snide, dismissive way'" the press has dealt with complaints of irregularities. He says most mainstream television commentators present the attitude that the complaints are only coming from kooks and conspiracy theorists.

"The only reporter in the mainstream press who has been addressing it is Keith Olbermann on MSNBC," Paulos said in a phone interview. "Olbermann has really looked at the issues, and he's almost the only one."

On his MSNBC blog Dec. 2, Olbermann wrote that he had been drawn to question the vote in Ohio by the strange report of the Warren County election-night "lockdown," in which the media was barred during hours that the votes were tallied, something that other reporters should have questioned.

To that end, Maureen Farrell of BullFlash.com cited a Sacramento Bee story that noted all three major networks decided that tales of alleged fraud and electronic-voting snafus were not worthy of investigation because "nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome."

"If the networks don't want to look under the hood, that's fine. But to deem a story dead in the water and dismiss others' attempts to cover it up?" Farrell said. "Well, there's one reason people suspect there's something rotten in the state of Denmark—which is why they've been turning to the Internet in droves."

If there was a sinister purpose that night in an area of Ohio responsible for 120,000 votes, it would have been carried out in the precinct headquarters. A Democratic poll watcher and Kerry campaign attorney, however, made his way through the lockdown to stand his watch in the after hours and reported what he observed. In a phone interview with City Paper, attorney Jeff Ruppert of Franklin, Ohio, said that he saw absolutely nothing devious occur.

"I was inside the entire time the votes were being brought in, sorted and counted," said Ruppert, an official Democratic challenger witness to the vote count. "I had free access to go anywhere—to monitor the ballots coming in from each of the cars, accompany the precinct captains with the ballots up the elevators and watch until the ballots were processed and put away for storage. I got to see all of it."

Ruppert noted that, as in most Ohio voting districts, Warren County election officials were evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats—even though registration is overwhelmingly Republican. As a registered Democrat, Ruppert said, "I'm as partisan as they get. If I had seen anything wrong I would have screamed bloody murder."

Does that mean Ruppert sees no possibility of electoral fraud in Ohio? No. Even if the validity of the election complaints are questionable, the groundswell—and the media's nonreaction—is a story itself. Even as the mainstream media turns a blind eye, or offers page 18 treatments, most observers agree that computerized vote tallying is vulnerable to electronic hacking. As Paulos says, "I don't like thinking that the electoral system was crooked but mathematically, there are 11,000 precincts in Ohio. If a program shifted half a dozen votes—that's all, just six—in each precinct, it would be enough to account for Bush's win there."

Ruppert, who says he doesn't believe the election was stolen, agrees that evidence or proof of electronically hacking the vote is beyond either the reach of an election observer like himself or even the looming recount. A recount of the votes would not show any trace of tampering with the computer program. If electronic strings were being pulled, Ruppert said, "we wouldn't be able to see it."

"I think the Republicans just out-campaigned and got out more votes than the Democrats," he says.

Still, an official recount of the Ohio vote is expected this month, based on a motion filed by the Libertarian and the Green parties, joined by the Kerry campaign at the last minute. No one expects the recount to threaten Bush's Ohio victory margin, which stood at 119,000 after provisional ballots were counted. Freeman and Paulos, though, see statistical puzzles in the Bush victory margins in Florida and Ohio that have yet to be explained. Both would like to see an in-depth study by a major media organization.

"It's a debate that ought to be joined and ought to be reported," says Freeman.

Paulos compares the 2004 election to Florida in 2000. "Florida in 2000 at least had the virtue of being very public. What happened this time, if something did happen, it's clearly hidden," he says. "I think it's highly unlikely that the election was stolen, but the possibility that it was stolen should have a zero probability. Unfortunately, it doesn't."

Neither Paulos nor Freeman wants to think the election was electronically cooked by the Republicans but both say the data opens the door to that interpretation.

"There are two available hypotheses," Freeman says. "Either the exit polls were really systematically skewed—and there is no evidence of that—or the vote count was off. I haven't produced any evidence of that, but a lot of people have. And the people who are in a position to say the exit polls were right—the people with the information—are not speaking."