Right now at the top of the recommended diaries is a diary reporting the fact that Obama's campaign has put together a team of 5,000 lawyers to monitor the polls for election fraud on November 4th.
Rolling Stone back on June 1, 2006 released an in depth article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. which demonstrated pretty conclusively to anyone caring to look at the facts that there is overwhelming evidence that through a combination voter suppression tactics the GOP managed to affect the outcome of the 2004 election just enough to insure the re-election of George W. Bush.
The proprietor and editors of this site have repeatedly denounced any attempts to focus in depth on the massive electoral fraud that occurred as wild-eyed conspiracy theory, not worthy of this site. As Kos noted again just the other day, repeating this assertion, the real work was to build a stronger Democratic party and defeat the Republicans.
These is of course no arguing that point, and it is obvious this is not your father's Democratic party this year. Thank $DEITY!
But if the apparatus of voter registration and counting votes is unreliable, and capable of being manipulated to produce fraudulent results anyway, so what? You still lose. You still have no idea whether the results of an election are valid or a complete fraud.
And what then does one say then to Obama's emphasis on preventing a replay of the stolen election of 2004 by deploying an army of 5,000 layers?
Does that make the Obama campaign a bunch of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists?
We have seen for weeks now the frantic efforts of the Republicans to again engage in the same sort of voter suppression tactics that that target the disenfranchisement of groups that tend to vote overwhelmingly democratic.
And of course there remains the basic fact that has been clear to many from the beginning of the effort to move to electronic voting machines: it is a bad, bad idea, that will lead to fraud in the voting both, with no way to every know by a recount using human eyes how any vote was count.
I hope in the coming Obama administration one of the earliest pieces of legislation will target putting an end once and all both to the pre-election voter suppression tactics, but also put an end to the monster of electronic voting, which is a threat to our electoral system of unparalleled magnitude.
Even doing early/absentee voting here in Indiana, although they offer machines for voting, they still offer the paper cards on which you pencil in your votes in ovals. They are scanned for efficiency, but they can also be reviewed by human beings in case a recount or audit is necessary.
I count myself fortunate to be able to choose to cast my vote in a fashion that assures me there will be a high probability it can be read and audited if necessary.
That is after all the fundamental heart of our representative Democracy, isn't it?
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
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.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 200412 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes13. (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots14. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House15.
Read the article. Then tell me again that the 2004 election being stolen is just wing nut hysteria.