- Originally published in the New York Times on October 22, 2004 [more]
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly,
Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted
fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the
outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry
lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush
lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this
week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls
in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break
against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about
probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with
job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger
zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead
heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the
challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300
electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a
very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored
that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a
very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own
very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public
impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of
its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls
show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines "likely
voters": the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered
voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out
(using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample
of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both
minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters
in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls
suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all
the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported
recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown
to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black
voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck
thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting
machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor,
black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems
during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied
voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the
replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush
recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would
greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail
for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters
to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white
Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state
officials who urged him to "pull the plug" on a new felon list - which
was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public
- just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much
of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable
and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates
that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor
and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But
we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the
possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on
Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters.
And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of
skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular
support.