It may not be what you think it is. Let me give you some hints.

It’s not the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual reported vote counts, discrepancies that overwhelming favored George Bush. Nor the fact that Ken Blackwell used his office as Ohio’s Secretary of State to further the partisan interests of his other job as Co-Chairperson of the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign in Ohio. And it isn’t the documented evidence of the GOP’s coordinated efforts to suppress the vote in traditionally Democrats precincts.

It wasn’t the many legal and illegal roadblocks that Republicans employed to limit voter registration efforts that targeted minority and student populations. Nor was it the lack of sufficient voting machines allotted to Democratic districts, while GOP districts enjoyed and overabundance of same. Nor was it the outright denial of voting rights to thousands of people, either through the wrongful purging of their names from registration rolls, or the refusal to issue them provisional ballots.

Not the pattern of abuses by GOP operatives to intimidate Democratic voters. Not the record of election day shenanigans by various officials which permitted or enabled thousands of votes to be lost, spoiled or simply not counted, again primarily in Democratic precincts. Not the probability of ballot stuffing and other vote rigging in Republican districts that inflated the vote count for George Bush while also reducing the number of votes cast for John Kerry.

No, the single most significant matter to be addressed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s article in Rolling Stone, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” is summed up by this excerpt of the report referring to an interview with MsNBC News Anchor, Keith Olbermann:

The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. “I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers,” he said. “And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night — and then everything flipped.” Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. “I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters,” he said. “The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes — and no one covered it. Shouldn’t someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?”

Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. “You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble,” he said. “You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our electoral system.”

Continued below the fold (also cross-posted at Daily Kos and My Left Wing).
“You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our electoral system.”

Indeed, that is the message we have had consistently drummed into our stunned, outraged, unbelieving hearts and minds, not only by the traditional media who failed miserably in their duty, but also by our Democratic leadership, our Democratic political consultants, and even by leaders of the progressive “netroots,” among them Armando and Markos Moulitsas, who have impugned the motives, and often the sanity, of anyone who suggested that the 2004 presidential election was fraudulent, and that John Kerry should have won.

In essence, the GOP talking points which flooded the airwaves right after the election secured Bush’s victory because those in positions of authority on the left (official or otherwise), with a few pointed exceptions, were either too afraid or too unwilling to investigate the numerous reports about election irregularities that, in almost every case, favored Bush at the expense of Kerry. No one in a position of authority on the left was willing to stick their neck out, and make the case that a tremendous crime had been committed against our Republic in order to ensure George Bush’s re-election. And without that “squeeky wheel” making itself heard over the din of the great right wing wurlitzer, our lazy, corporate controlled media never had a reason to engage the story.

Instead those of us who tried to keep this story alive in the public’s consciousness were told to “get over it,” to “move on” and to realize that there simply were “more of them than there are of us right now.” These admonishments were meted out despite the numerous evidence suggesting something was seriously wrong with the 2004 election, beginning with the exit polls, but hardly ending there, as all the documentation and other sources listed in the footnotes to Kennedy’s article makes clear.

In short, the truth was out there, as those who had the courage to look discovered. Unfortunately, their efforts have been singularly ridiculed, mocked or ignored by far to many in the media, in the Democratic Party and often within the the progressive netroots. They’ve been labeled obsessive, neurotic and “tin foil hat” conspiracy theorists. Their motives have been questioned, and their credibility denigrated.

Yet, it seems they have been right all along. The 2004 election was stolen, and the proof has been hiding in plain sight. Why did know one take notice? Because too many were simply unwilling to pursue a story which pointed out just how rotten our political system, how undemocratic our democracy, and how endangered our Republic, have become.

I sincerely hope that Kennedy’s article will reignite the debate over the outcome of the 2004 election. Why do I wish for that? Why do I want to rehash old controversies and open old wounds? Why can’t I let it go and just dedicate myself to working for electoral reform and get out the vote efforts this Fall?

Because there can be no election reform unless people understand why reform is needed. And, even more important, because we must safeguard, to the extent we still can, the elections this Fall from the same sorts of machinations, illegality and corruption that has befouled our last three elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004. We, as a people, and a movement, have to be prepared to combat what we know will be coming our way, courtesy of Karl Rove and Co. Deliberately ignoring the extent of the injury which has been done to us and our country over the course of the past three elections makes no sense, unless we wish a repeat of the same outcome, once more.





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