Grand Theft Election

Although Robert Kennedy spends some time looking back at 2000, this article focuses mainly on 2004 and Ohio. And it's a real horror show, demonstrating the many, many ways in which the GOP successfully kept their opponents from voting in 2004-- and turned a Kerry victory into a second Bush presidency. The article is painstakingly researched, with hundreds of citations. It's also a must-read.

Choosing just one paragraph to post here is difficult, because almost every one brings up a way in which the system was manipulated or the law was broken to repress the vote.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls. Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.'' Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty. Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.