My Election 2004 Bad Dream

Posted on Tue, Apr. 26, 2005
My Election 2004 bad dream

By JOSH MITTELDORF

ON A RECENT flight to Nashville, I sat next to a man who asked what I was writing. Preparing a talk, I told him, for a conference of people sharing evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Without missing a beat, he asked. "Isn't that next door to the convention on UFO sightings?"

I wasn't surprised. We've been painted as conspiracy theorists and worse by Democrats and Republicans alike, and even the liberal arm of the press has steered clear of this issue. But when I arrived at Jefferson Street Baptist Church in Nashville, my doubts about the election were reinforced by a group of sober professionals, none who seemed overtly loony.

I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who spent months with colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and "consecutive number registers" from Brakey's Tucson home precinct.

They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct and found: 12 innocent and unsuspecting voters who had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. Twenty-two "undervotes" where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush.

Josh Mitteldorf teaches math and statistics at Temple University.

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More:
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/11489971.htm