I don't mean to be another voice here criticizing Markos' post (after all, it was reading his columns in the Guardian that brought me here) but I have to side with BooMan, Georgia and the others on this one.
What I think many people are missing in their analysis, on both sides of this issue, are the contextual, cultural issues that underlie the politics. For instance, I think there is a tendency amongst many Liberals to accept the right-wing dictum that Liberals are shrill, conspiracy-theory-loving busybodies. We all know how the SCLM has been trying to distance themselves from the left for sometime now.
The fact is, many of us ask ourselves whether we might be a little naive or gullible in speculating along these lines. Furthermore, we recognize that the real issue is to effect change, not prove the righteousness of our cause (isn't that one trait we all dislike about the Repubs?). As a result, I think many of us start to question our own feelings when confronted with the possibility of blatant electoral fraud. As Markos admits...
Us liberal bloggers like to brag that we live in the "reality-based community". It's kind of hard to be reality-based when people are claiming that Kerry won with no hard evidence to the contrary. Was there fraud? Sure. There always has been. Was the GOP ready to steal the election if necessary? No doubt. But they didn't have to steal this one. This wasn't 2000. Bush rode his fucked up war to victory, whether we like it or not. History will judge us right, but until then, we're stuck with the results.
But I can't see how one can believe that "the GOP [is] ready to steal the election if necessary" and not also believe that they therefore must have attempted to do so. Did they know they would win without doing so? How? Logic suggests that one can't really believe the premise without also believing the conclusion. What does this prove? Many of us are comfortable with the notion that this election was not "above board" in every way, but are less comfortable with asserting this fact in public (where, one assumes, we might be given less credibility).
But I have this problem with logic: it's unemotional, apolitical, not open to alternative explanations, and requires no proof. And logic pretty much dictates that the election was totally f*cked up. Not stolen, necessarily. Not won on the "values" issue, neither. Not a mandate, nor a clear majority, but also not really open to a change in the results. But f*cked up nevertheless.
I, as an outsider, can't imagine how it's possible for the worst President in several generations to win a "re-election" over a reasonable (if reasonably boring) alternative candidate. This administration saw the worst foreign attack in history on US soil, the worst decline in jobs since the depression, the greatest divisions in society since perhaps the Civil War, has lied about Iraq and went against almost all of its allies to attack, had lost 1100 soldiers and 10,000 more to injury, created the biggest deficits in history 2 years after the biggest surpluses, sat by while Enron fiddled and California burned, etc., etc., etc. It is simply illogical to believe that a majority of Americans actually understood the truth and still voted for George W. Bush.
They may have pressed the "Bush" button on the screen, but even then they could not all have known what they were doing. They may have been ignorant, or naive, or bigoted. They may have been misled, or misguided, or manipulated. They may have pressed the wrong button by mistake. They may have come to the wrong poll or forgot their ID, or been threatened, or simply didn't have enough time to stay. Perhaps they were too demoralized to care, maybe they had lost hope that there could be real change, maybe they believed they could file a provisional or absentee ballot at the wrong poll. Who knows? Maybe there was even widespread, systemic fraud perpetrated.
How the election ended up the way it did is an investigation necessary in order to clean things up for 2006 and later. I don't expect Kerry to win even if Kerry wins. I'm not sure we would win in any event. None of this either supports or undercuts the fraudsters, though. What it does is confirm that the current electoral system somehow put the wrong man in office. Fighting to change that system doesn't seem loony to me.
And the only way to completely address the failures is to completely catalogue them first.