these are a few of the many folks that have doubts:
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics at Temple University, has doubts.
So does Brian Joiner, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin.
The same goes for Frank Stenger, Ph.D. (University of Utah); Richard G. Sheehan, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame); Paul F. Velleman, Ph.D. (Cornell University); Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D. (Case Western Reserve University); and Campbell B. Read, Ph.D. (Southern Methodist University).
And the same goes for countless professors of statistics and mathematics the nation over.
The Interim Report of the Social Science Research Council's Commission on Election and Voting
http://election04.ssrc.org/research/InterimReport122204.pdf states that "... incomplete data and insufficient transparency of the election administration process do not allow for a conclusive statement regarding the accuracy or fairness of specific results..."
http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1More than 27,000 anecdotal reports of irregularities in the 2004 election were submitted to the independent "Election Incident Reporting System". An alleged pattern of discrepancies between exit poll results and final tallies in several key states is still regarded with suspicion by many observers.
"Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report," U.S. Count Votes, Dr. Josh Mitteldorf, et. al., 1/29/05)
"Mitofsky/Edison say in their Executive Summary (p. 3), 'Exit polls do not support allegations of fraud...' -- but they do not consider the hypothesis of election fraud";
"The report proposes to explain the Within Precinct Error
with the following statement (p. 31): 'While we cannot measure the completion rate by Democratic and Republican voters, hypothetical completion rates of 56% among Kerry voters and 50% among Bush voters overall would account for the entire Within Precinct Error that we observed in 2004.'.... no data in the report supports the hypothesis that Kerry voters were more likely than Bush voters to cooperate with pollsters, and the data suggests that the opposite may have been true....in precincts with higher numbers of Bush voters, response rates were slightly higher than in precincts with higher number of Kerry voters";
"Seven of fifty states have 't' values less than –2.7, meaning that each of them had less than a 1% probability of having the reported difference between exit polls and election results occurring by chance. The binomial probability that 7 of 50 should be so skewed is less than one in 10,000,000";
"The analysis of the potential correlation of exit poll errors with voting machine type is incomplete and inadequate, and their report ignores the alternative hypothesis that the official election results could have been corrupted"; and
"we suggest that the investigation extend to the official vote count tallies."