Book Review: "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count
by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss

Reviewed by David L. Griscom, Ph.D.

The French Revolution took place just two years after the signing of the American Constitution, yet France has since had three more kings, three emperors, and five republics ...while America has remained an unbroken republic for 220 years! Or has it?

Back on November 3rd 2004, many Americans sensed that something dreadful had just happened to our democracy, although most quickly blotted the thought out of their minds. Nevertheless, according to a May 2006 OpEdNews/Zogby People’s Poll http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2006/051106Kall.shtml, 39% of Americans now believe that the 2004 Election was stolen – no thanks to Fox News, or even the so-called “liberal media.” Less than two weeks after the Election, both the Washington Post and the New York Times pre-judged perfectly valid lines of inquiry as already having been debunked by “experts.”

In real scientific research, competing hypotheses can sometimes joust for years before a widely accepted winner emerges. Indeed, science owes its success to the use of mathematics to make testable predictions that logically flow from each hypothesis. In this way, incorrect hypotheses are eventually falsified. Statistics is the branch of mathematics that underpins quantum mechanics, the paradigm that now enables us to understand physical reality from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the first few minutes of “the big bang.” Steven Freeman and others have applied statistical methods to the discrepancies between the 2004 exit polls (which showed a Kerry lead of 2.6% nationally) and the official ballot tallies (which had Bush winning nationally by 2.8%) – a net discrepancy 5.4%.

For the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio (net discrepancies, each in Bush’s favor, of 4.9, 6.5, and 6.7%, respectively) Freeman calculated that there is only one chance in about 660,000 that these three discrepancies resulted from three independent fluke accidents. In other words, the odds are 660,000-to-one that these votes had been MISCOUNTED. Because in 2004 64% of Americans voted on optical-scan or touch-screen voting machines fitted with internal memory cards having well-demonstrated “backdoors” vulnerable to hacking, AND the central tabulators of these votes were operated by private companies like Diebold using proprietary software, massive clandestine manipulation of the official vote count was not merely feasible, it could have been pulled off by a relatively small number of conspirators.

In their superbly researched book, “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?” (262 footnotes), Freeman and Joel Bleifuss explain in layman’s terms the science and statistical analysis of exit polling and summarize much of the evidence for election fraud that has been unearthed since November 2004. Lucidly written and replete with easy-to-understand graphs, this book answers its own title question with a resounding YES! It is essential reading for all Americans who want their electoral system restored to a state of reliability and transparency that they can once again trust. Freeman and Bleifuss point out that this could be easily achieved with 100% hand-marked paper ballots, hand counted in public. And they note that this is exactly what is done in Germany – where the exit polls differ from the official counts by an average of just 0.26%!

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David L. Griscom is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, retired from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC (1967-2001). He was also Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (1997), visiting professor of research at Universités de Paris-6, Lyon-1, and Saint-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (2000-2003), and Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Arizona (2004-2005).