Last month I wrote a column about conspiracy theorists, such as Teresa Heinz Kerry, who believe the 2004 election was rigged. But even TomPaine.com, a liberal web site, says there is no evidence in support of such theories. Russ Baker writes:

Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. They weren’t. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings— but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush.

I looked especially closely at the theory that fraud is the only way to explain the large gap between the early exit polls, which showed Kerry doing very well, and the final result giving Ohio’s key electoral votes to Bush. According to this theory, there was no way the actual tally could vary so greatly from the exit polls. The proponents of this view essentially accuse the legendary exit pollster Warren Mitofsky, and a media consortium, the National Election Pool (NEP), of some kind of complicity— or at least willful denial. I found no evidence whatever of either.

For casting doubt on the conspiracy theory, TomPaine.com and I received virtual barrels of e-mail, most from angry anti-Bush activists who could not believe that their hard work had been for naught…..

Privately, I heard from many Democratic officials, election reform advocates and analysts from inside Ohio and elsewhere, who believed my reporting to be accurate, and who were more than a little perturbed by the frenzy, which they found a counterproductive distraction from the serious ongoing effort to reform election practices. Since the debate refuses to die, this seems a good time to trumpet the arrival of not just one, but two, new technical analyses that cast further doubt on the theory regarding exit poll fraud….

(Hat tip: Ankle Biting Pundits.)

And believe it or not, over at DailyKos, a remarkable outbreak of rationality can be seen here, where a poster reports on some heavy-duty statistical analysis of exit polls by Kos contributor Elizabeth Liddle, who debunks academic conspiracists who believe the official vote count was corrupted. Very interesting stuff that you won’t read about in the MSM—mostly because we are so mathematically challenged. If you are a super-geek (I’m married to someone who used to perform regression analyses for a living), you will appreciate Liddle’s meticulous work and insights. See Mickey Kaus for the layman’s interpretation and Mystery Pollster for extended statistical explanations (with graphs! and Monte Carlo simulations!).