In the pages of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has argued that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. The basis of his argument is that the NEP exit poll was right and that the election returns in Ohio and other states were wrong.
This is a laughably pathetic argument, and it has been exposed as such by writers in left-wing publications like salon.com. The best evisceration of Kennedy's thesis comes in www.mysterypollster.com, the admirable blog of Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal. Scroll down for his multipart takedown.
I occasionally disagree with Blumenthal's judgments, usually as to whether a question is fairly worded—a matter on which reasonable people can and do differ. But I admire his blog for its painstaking fairness, its mastery of polling theory (much better than my own), and its willingness to take account of other views. When people ask me for a definitive reference on the 2004 exit polls and why they were wrong, I refer them to Mystery Pollster's archives, from which an assiduous reader can get a full and fair account of the research and arguments. Blumenthal deserves credit for once again doing a first-rate job on the Kennedy piece.
Incidentally, it's interesting that an article about election fraud comes from the son of the campaign manager for the successful presidential candidate in 1960. There are still some people who question the count in Illinois and some other states that year. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that even if the result in Illinois was stolen (and that was never really proved), John Kennedy still won enough electoral votes fair and square in other states to be elected. But I still think that a man named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might have been at least a little embarrassed to make brazen charges of election fraud.
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