What Happened to the Democrats Who Never Accepted Bush’s Election The 2004 vote-fraud conspiracy movement never really died. What does that mean for Trump’s true believers

Steven Freeman felt, in his bones, that something was wrong with the election. It was November 2, 2004, and the exit polls had predicted an overwhelming victory for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. But as the night rolled on, the margins grew for President George W. Bush—especially in Ohio, where the race remained uncalled as the clock ticked into the wee morning hours.

For most of the world, the uncertainty didn’t last. Kerry conceded the next day, making a cordial call to Bush, after concluding that a recount in Ohio wouldn’t change the outcome of the race. But Freeman, then a research scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers wondering, “How could this be?” He dug around for the exit poll numbers he had fleetingly seen on TV. Then he went down a rabbit hole of statistical analysis, in search of explanations for the Bush votes that seemed to have magically appeared. A week after the election, he shared a draft of his findings with colleagues, with the conclusion that “fraud was an unavoidable hypothesis.” ...

anyone hoping that Trump’s followers will quietly fold themselves back into the system, the 2004 experience suggests otherwise.

Even after Kerry conceded the race, accusations about shenanigans in Ohio emerged on several fronts. The first is what might be called garden-variety voter suppression— [even] ...voter suppression tactics reminiscent of the Jim Crow era:...

But people like Freeman, who dug into the exit poll numbers, also circulated a darker theory, centered on fraud that occurred after the vote—via those high-tech voting machines, whose results couldn’t be verified against an independent paper trail....

It was all impossible to disprove, because it was impossible to prove: If the numbers defied explanation, then any idea, however uncomfortable or wild, could theoretically be true.

The 2004 election, which saw George W Bush re-elected despite the mounting unpopularity of the Iraq war, saw an explosion of unfounded conspiracy theories that Republicans were in cahoots with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines and would never lose an election again. (The theory fell apart as soon as Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives two years later.) The history of ‘rigged’ US elections: from Bush v Gore to Trump v Clinton

And since their candidate lost, the liberal Boston Globe found:

More than 4,000 votes vanished without a trace into a computer’s overloaded memory in one North Carolina county, and about a hundred paper ballots were thrown out by mistake in another. In Texas, a county needed help from a laboratory in Canada to unlock the memory of a touch-screen machine and unearth five dozen votes.

In other places, machine undercounting or overcounting of votes was a problem. Several thousand votes were mistakenly double-counted in North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, and Washington state. Some votes in other areas were at first credited to the wrong candidates, with one Indiana county, by some quirk, misallocating several hundred votes for Democrats to Libertarians. In Florida, some machines temporarily indicated votes intended for challenger John F. Kerry were for President Bush, and vice versa.

In the month since the election, serious instances of voting machine problems or human errors in ballot counts have been documented in at least a dozen states, each involving from scores of ballots to as many as 12,000 votes, as in a North Carolina county...local officials discovered problems and corrected final counts. In some cases, the changes altered the outcomes of local races. But in North Carolina, the problems were so serious that the state may hold a rare second vote..

Since 2000, watchdog groups have intensified their monitoring and cataloging of complaints and errors. The nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation and other groups built a database of more than 30,000 ‘’election incidents” reported across the country this year. Most were routine, but nearly 900 involved significant e-voting problems, including malfunctions that shut down machines, lengthening waits at the polls. There were 42 reports of total breakdowns of machines in New Orleans and 28 in Philadelphia and ‘’15 reports of catastrophic machine failure” in Mercer County, Pa.

http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/12/01/voting_errors_tallied_nationwide?pg=full

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