I was reading some of the letters, and I came across this passage in an otherwise very well written letter by Xanthro:

"The type of Republican election fraud that occurs is of the nature of attempting to reduce turnout of Democratic voters. Jamming phone lines, placing signs challenging ability to vote, having police cars patrol near polling places, giving false information on where and when to vote, purging voter rolls, etc. Rarely are these types of activities actually enough to sway even a very close election, and the 2004 election was not one of those rare cases."

In fact, the 2004 election was quite close. A sitting president challenged by a candidate relatively new to the national scene is always going to be a tough race, and Bush had a lot of support going in to the race from the mainstream media.

The specifics of the election aside, Xanthro and others who are not familar with the uses of voter disenfranchisement, should study the politics of the South. For over one hundred years, Blacks had the vote, but there were no African-americans in politics after Reconstruction. Nor were there politicians sympathetic to the interests of Blacks. This is testament to the effectiveness of systematic voter disenfranchisement. Poll taxes, literacy tests and the rest ensured that only a select few would select the so called representative governments of places like Charleston. If suspect Whites went to the polls there were ways to make sure that their votes did not tally, by temporarily jamming a lever. Regardless of which party an election worker was affiliated with, his or her loyalty lay with the dominant class, in this case the White wealthy elite.

After the Voting Rights Act became law and began to be enforced, southern politicians began to resort to more underhanded tactics to supress minority, labor and poor voters. However, now that the federal Attorney General and the Secretary of State of many states are no longer willing to enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, it is possible for Republicans to return to full blown voter disenfranchisement of a scale not seen since the days when it was legally sanctioned. With the press turning its face the other way, there is absolutely nothing to stop the party in power from making sure that the numbers add up the way that some one would like them to, not the way that chance or the voters would have them.

It is naive in the extreme to assume that with the Secretary of State decreeing systematic voter disenfranchisement and with the federal government refusing to intervene that any minor precint level worker would buck the system and protest. In fact, a few did. The only people who reported their stories were the independent internet press. Everyone else went along with the dog and pony show that was the Ohio 2004 election.

I think what Xanthro meant to write was "rarely are these type of activities perpetrated against the types of citizens whom the press feels are worth reporting about, and therefore no one bothers to keep track of the number of votes which are lost." We know that in Florida enough votes were lost to turn the election day count around, because Database Technologies kept records. We may never know in Ohio, but the pattern which the use of the same tactics in other races has produced suggests that they may have been much more effective than some Pollyanna types choose to believe.

I agree with most of the points in this article. There's one point that has been missed by everyone, and to me it's the real reason Bush won Ohio and Florida. Around 1 in the afternoon of election day, Rush Limbaugh started going nuts aput how Bush was losing. He then began spewing, hour after hour, about how people in Ohio and Florida, especially Ohio, needed to get to the polls. This drumbeat continued with Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, all afternoon into the evening. They were specifically yelling about Ohio.

I noticed this in my state (Maryland) too. I was working the precinct for Kerry and I noticed that around 1 in the afternoon there was a big rush of people wearing Bush buttons and with Bush bumper stickers. That's why I tuned in to Limbaugh to see what was going on.

In my opinion, Karl Rove was feeding the actual raw exit polls to Limbaugh, Hannity and Liddy. I thought there was some agreement that exit polls weren't to be spouted off on the air until the polls close. Either that agreement needs to be enforced or there needs to be equity, we need to make sure that we have equality on the air to get our voters out.

I like RFK "Jr" best when he's writing for the Atlantic about the innocence of his dear convicted-of-murder cousin. Can't believe he went slumming in Rolling Stone with this schlock . . . Shouldn't he be keeping another river?

When the question of fraud in the 2000 and 2004 elections comes up, people inevitably talk about whether the Republicans stole votes from the Democrats, and the myriad ways in which they did or did not do so. What irks me about this debate is that the issue of systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans and other minorities is only discussed as evidence for the "larger issue" of lost Democratic votes. But shouldn't disenfranchisement of blacks

in itself

be headline news? (again?) The historic precedent for such behavior starts from the minute African Americans were granted the vote, into the Civil Rights era, when it was the Democrats preventing blacks from voting. With the Voting Rights Act up for renewal, we can't afford to gloss over the important fact that a historically oppressed minority is still being denied the right to vote. I just heard Brian Lehrer's radio show where he hosted both Kennedy and Manjoo, and Manjoo's explanation for his article was that he wants the country to focus on the larger issue of election reform, and not get hung up on whether Kerry really won, thus antagonizing Republicans from the cause (although this is not at all clear from the article). Perhaps highlighting race, rather than political affiliation, would make this less of a partisan issue, or at least a more embarrassing one in the eyes of the world. It might mobilize this group of voters to keep fighting for their long-trampled-upon rights, before they abstain from voting altogether out of rightful disgust at the state of our country.