The 2004 election, that is. Captain's Quarters reports on an article by Bobby Kennedy Jr, in the Rolling Stone, in which this credit to his clan argues that Bush didn't really win in 2004. His evidence? Quoting him in CQ:
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
So Kennedy would have us overturn an actual election because the results didn't agree with the exit polls! He is right, of course, that exit polling is one factor used to discredit fraudulent elections. But in all such cases the discrepancy was very large, and it only served to confirm a mass of other evidence. No reasonable person would claim that exit polls alone are more reliable than real elections. This especially so considering the sorry history of exiting polling in the U.S. over the last several elections. The notion that exit polls are never wrong is ludicrous.
Fighting wars that are long over is never a sign of a healthy psychology. Ask my relatives in the South. Ask Republicans after Clinton was re-elected. Ask Bobby Kennedy, if he can hear you under his tin foil hat.
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