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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.
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Thursday 01 June 2006
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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,"(1) and The New York Times declared that "there is
no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale."(2)
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(3) never received their ballots - or received them too
late to vote(4) - after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas
registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was
discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning
machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) 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.(10)
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.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly
by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the
Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had
13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."
…snip…
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