THE FLAMING GUN: Here are some highlights from "a comprehensive analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky report" on the strange discrepancies between the exit polls and the reported results of the 2004 Presidential vote. In other words, this is the best evidence we have of the election being stolen, at least until Bush's impeachment hearings in 2007. (Yes, I can dream.)

The report states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by chance ("sampling error"), and that a systematic bias is implicated. ...

The exit polls were based on more than 70,000 confidential questionnaires completed by randomly selected voters as they exited the polling place. The overall margin of error should have been under 1 percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than 5 percent—a statistical impossibility. ...

Finally, they report that the source of error is, in fact, within-precinct error (WPE), the difference between official precinct tallies and the exit poll samples from those same precincts. On average, across the country, the President did 6.5 percent better in the official vote count, relative to Kerry, than the exit polls projected. ...

Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.

... the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. ...

In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0—the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3). ....

Read the whole summary at "A Corrupted Election". (Thanks to scratch & sniff.)