No Exit: An Interview With Steven Freeman

[struggle4progress]

Tuesday, 7 October 2008, 12:40 pm
No Exit: An Interview With Steven Freeman
By GUERNICA, a magazine of art & politics

If Barack Obama really plans to win the presidency, he had better be willing to back an independent exit poll, says Steven Freeman, professor of research methods at the University of Pennsylvania. Freeman argues that the 2004 election was stolen, and exit polls are the best way to guard against the same thing happening in 2008.

Co-author of Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman is trying to raise money for such an effort this November. He contends that current exit polling is marred by a lack of transparency in the media consortium that controls it. And it’s not a just a matter of the Republicans fixing elections for Republicans. Freeman also believes this year’s Democratic primary in New Hampshire was stolen. “There’s overwhelming evidence that Obama won it, probably by double digits,” he says, although the official returns gave it to Hillary Clinton. Because he studies the data, not the story behind them, he would have no way of knowing whether Clinton stole the primary or whether Republicans scared of facing Obama rigged it in favor of Clinton, he explains. But he is without a doubt: the numbers don’t lie.

After a varied business career and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1998, Freeman began teaching research methods. He was never interested in politics. Election Day 2004 changed that. At a small social gathering, he was looking at exit polls on a computer while friends were watching returns on TV. He’d call out a state for Kerry, and his friends would call the same state for Bush. He walked away perplexed at how exit polls, which never vary by more than two or three percent from election returns, could have been so far off.

Comparing exit polls with election returns, Freeman found a discrepancy of 7 percent nationwide and 11 percent in Ohio. The divergence “cannot be explained by chance,” he writes in his book. Although Freeman does not speculate on how Republicans stole the election, he insists that the odds are longer than 100 million to one that Republicans played fair. In order to get closer to how the fraud was perpetrated, one would have to compare exit polls and returns within each precinct, but when Freeman asked the media consortium for those data, he was stonewalled, he says ...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0810/S00088.htm

[SoCalDemGrrl]

1. Kick - Incredibly important post. Anyone know if the Obama camp has a

plan to do their own independent polling?

[TTUBatfan2008]

2. WTF, he thinks NH was stolen?

Meh.

[struggle4progress]

4. NH Republicans are dirty: remember the phone-jamming case?

GOP Official Faces Sentence in Phone-Jamming
Democratic Lines Were Blocked in 2002 as New Hampshire Elected U.S. Senator

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 17, 2006; Page A10

In October 2002, Charles McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, was mailed a Democratic flier that offered Election Day rides to the polls. The circular listed telephone numbers of party offices in five cities and towns.

"I paused and thought to myself, I might find out -- I might think of an idea of disrupting those operations," McGee later testified. A Marine Corps veteran, McGee approached the situation like a combat operation: "Eventually the idea coalesced into disrupting their phone lines . . . <it's> military common sense that if you can't communicate, you can't plan and organize."

When voting began Nov. 5, McGee's plan worked like a charm. For two crucial hours, an Idaho telecommunications firm tied up Democratic and union phone lines, bringing their get-out-the-vote plans to a halt. The effort helped John E. Sununu (R) win his Senate seat by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR20060516017


I think SEnator Clinton is smart and capable -- but the Republicans had been demonizing her for eight years and were drooling at the possibility of facing off against her in 2008

[LiberalAndProud]

3. I hope the Republicans raise hell over a election tampering when

Obama wins. I want international monitoring of our elections. The only way it will happen is that Republicans begin to believe that our elections can be tampered with.