Yep, that appears to be the Repugs strategy. Stomp on the electoral process in as many places and ways as possible. It's much harder to prove fraud that way. Of course, sleeping media helps.

As an Ohio resident, I'd love to read the entire editorial but I just can't bring myself to go through the hassle of signing up for the NYT's "TimesSelect" service ... guess I'll just have be content to say IT'S ABOUT TIME some MSM attention was paid to what went on here in an2004. (And Herbert's use of the word "shocking" sounds just about right to me.)

I'm sure I'm not the only Democrat in Ohio who was gratified to read RFK Jr's well-researched and thoroughly documented article in June 1's Rolling Stone magazine but still craves the kind of attention that only the MSM can bring to the tactics that were used here to suppress the Democratic vote. Do I think the 2004 election will be magically overturned and George Bush will run screaming from the White House? No, no such luck. But I'm guessing Ohio isn't the only state with a Republican governor, attorney general and secretary of state AND a Republican-controlled house and senate. Ken Blackwell used his position as Ohio's secretary of state and chief election officer to suppress perhaps hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes. His activities are thoroughly documented in RFK Jr's Rolling Stone article and I suspect they're also at least alluded to in today's NYT editorial. (Wikipedia lists SIXTEEN election-related lawsuits in 2004 and 2005 where Blackwell was the defendant and it's only a partial list.) Unfortunately, by the time the Ohio courts resolved these suits the damage had already been done.

So I have to ask ... If it can happen here, how many other states can it happen in? The more people know about what went wrong here in Ohio the better. It won't overturn the 2004 election but maybe the whole electoral process in America, with it's partisan boards of election and gerrymandered districts, will finally get overhauled, finally be taken out of the hands and control of politicians.

There are those, even here in Salon, who seem to believe that in order to declare that the Ohio election have been stolen one must have a smoking gun, proof of some tobacco-filled-back-room deal, perhaps. (Of course the closest we came to that was the Supreme Court decision that gave Florida to Bush in 2000. Perhaps the only thing lacking there was the tobacco smoke.)

But if you accept the premise that in a democracy everyone eligible should be entitled, even encouraged, to vote, freely and without constraint, not only to determine the direction society wishes to take, but equally importantly, to confer legitimacy to the resulting government, then yes, of course the Ohio vote was stolen. The GOP strategy in Ohio relied on disinformation and on keeping certain people from the polls. And with one of their own running the election, that was not too difficult. Not only do these tactics call the the results into question, but they strip them of all legitimacy. Simply put, the GOP used their power to bias the Ohio election through non-democratic means. It is irrelevant that we do not know precisely by how much, or if it was enough to deny Kerry victory. It was a betrayal of the founding principles of our Nation. Thus was our democracy stolen.

Election fraud has *never* been proven in any American election, but we know it's happened often.

Why is it that we need to prove a stolen election? What we need is to make Americans aware of the facts that we do have. Those facts are disturbing enough.

What's important is not some golden standard of proof, what's important is restoring integrity to elections.

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And Salon is sounding more and more mainstream corporate media with it's fixation on these trivial horserace issues.

Exit polling was considered highly accurate until it indicated that George W. Bush did NOT with the 2000 election or the 2004 election. I wonder if exit polling will again be accurate once Bush is no longer running for office.

Notice this piece wasn't contributed by Farhad "Everything's just fine" Manjoo, who supposedly has made election irregularities "his story."

The 2004 election was stolen, not all at one time as in 2000, but by thousands of little "irregularities" all across the country, all of them disenfranchising Democrats. You'd think the loss of democracy, and all the crimes that have resulted from it, would be a bigger story.

How many Republicans would have to be shot in the head in order for Ohio to be free from corruption? Ohio's descended into the realm of kleptocracy -- corruption doesn't need to hide, it's the order of the day.

How about having each voter run a credit card validation as a vote? ie "buying" a $0.01 vote for either candidate -- credit card companies seem to be able to keep accurate tallies, as opposed to the Diebold e-voting machines, which appear to have been built with monkey business in mind.

The only good e-voting machine executive is a dead one. Is vote fraud not a hanging offense?

How odd, how terribly convenient, that during the 2000 an 2004 elections every exit poll that was wrong was in a state Bushit won. Every one. Every shift, every time, always in Bushit's direction. Probably just a statistical anomaly, like global warming. Bushit was never elected. We've been couped, and not in a DeVille convertible, my friends.

Now that we've twice had Bush campaign officials overseeing elections in two critical states, and voting machine manufacturers openly campaign for the GOP ticket, isn't it about time that protecting the vote became a major campaign issue for Democrats?

It's an issue that manages to be both non-partisan and partisan at the same time.

Even Karl Rove would have a hard time turning the idea of honest elections back at Dems (isn't that what they keep telling us we're fighting for in Iraq?); at the same time, it reminds us that the two most recent cases of questionable elections are case studies in Republican skullduggery.

Let the Repubs have their gay marriage and flag-burning. I'd rather own the banner of "honest elections" any day.