>Philadelphia Inquirer - November 24, 2004
>
>Final Tallies Minus Exit Polls = A Statistical Mystery!
>by John Allen Paulos
>
>Of course, what makes these discrepancies more than a technical problem in
>statistical methodology is that there is a much less likely, much more
>ominous explanation for them: massive fraud. Fraud is hard to believe for
>many reasons, one being the widespread nature, extending over different
>states and regions, of the shift to Bush. The difficulty of concealing a
>conspiracy grows very rapidly with the number of conspirators.
>
>But another disturbing possibility is that there was no co- ordinated
>conspiracy, but rather many people working independently to subvert the
>election. The election has prompted extensive allegations of fraud, some
>of which have been debunked, but many of which have not. In several cases
>non-trivial errors have been established and official tallies changed. And
>there is one more scenario that doesn't require many conspirators: the
>tabulating machines and the software they run conceivably could have been
>dragooned into malevolent service by relatively few operatives. Without
>paper trails, this would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to
>establish.
Is the first example of the use of the term "massive fraud" in a serious way in a mainstream media outlet? I have yet to see the election results questioned in a realistic way until this. Most of what I've read from the major dailies lean towards the conclusions drawn early in this article and are pretty dismissive of the idea of fraud on a scale to effect the election. Has anyone seen the election results put this way in a similar source?
John Thornton