There’s a very well researched and deeply troubling article available on Rolling Stone’s website titled Was the 2004 Election Stolen? that is worth a read.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush—and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ‘’tinfoil hats,’’ while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ‘’conspiracy theories,’’ and The New York Times declared that ‘’there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.’’
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots—or received them too late to vote—after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment—roughly one for every 100 cast.
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
I admit that I dismissed some of the early claims that the election was rigged by the GOP, but this article makes it hard to come to any other conclusion. We already know that Al Gore should have been President back in 2000, but that incident pales in comparison to what it appears the GOP got away with in 2004. If there were that many people out there willing to undermine the electoral process to get their man into the White House at any cost then what hope do we have that any future elections can be considered legitimate and fair? For that matter, if the MSM is just going to ignore what seems to be obvious evidence of fraud then how will we ever hold the people who perpetrate this bullshit accountable?
Posted on 06/02/2006 at 11:43 PM 
My default position is that all politicians, Republican, Democratic, or other, are more or less corrupt, or they wouldn’t be in office. However, given the new records in sliminess set by the current Republican Administration, I find this report all too believable.