Read it and weep

[mdlbear]

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? (from Rolling Stone by way of this post by ravan.)

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

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

You'd think that after what happened in Florida in 2000, people would be on the alert for something like this. Not that anything could have been done about it -- what we've seen in this country is a very quiet, very deliberate right-wing coup.

I'd like my country back, please.

Comments

[patoadam]

Even Karl Rove admitted that Kerry won the exit polls.

"Rove said he felt sick, then got mad when he started reading exit polls on Election Day as Air Force One returned from a final campaign swing. Surveys of voters just leaving polling places around the nation tilted toward Kerry early in the day and through much of the evening, causing early optimism for a Democratic recovery of the White House.

That faded through the night as exit polls were adjusted to reflect official vote tallies."

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

I was aware of all of this back when it happened. But nobody could do anything about it.

I'd like /my/ country back, please.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

And the responses keep coming in about how many sources have already debunked this. Of course, they usually claim no specifics about the sources for the 2004 election: only for the 2000 one, which is legitimately in much more doubt than this one.)

[tagryn]

Having done exit polling and seen it from the inside, its not nearly the exact science the RS article makes it out to be. But like you said, this has been countered elsewhere (like in Mother Jones) and 2000 was more questionable than '04. Election reform should be a much bigger bipartisan concern than it is, but the winners are reluctant to tinker much with a system that got them in, and the losers by definition aren't in a position to do much about it. That's true of incumbents for both parties.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Me, too. I think we might get it. All we have to do is keep putting the truth out there. If a playwright and an electrician can bring down the USSR, then surely to goodness us geeks with a free Internet can take care of some tin-horned dictator-presumptive from Texas.

Can't we?