Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 (US) Election Stolen?

A rare US politics based post. Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?:

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

The whole article is four pages long, appears to be authoritative and, if true, damning. Bush didn't win the popular vote in 2000, and arguably didn't win Florida either. If this is correct, he didn't win in 2004 either, massive election fraud (and we're talking more than dodgy Diebold machines) secrued an illegitimate victory.

Update:

Rebuttals here and here (via). I suspect there likely was fraud, likely on both sides, but it's moot. The US needs to refrom its voting procedures though. Big Time.

Technorati tags: US politics, Rolling Stone, Ohio, Presidential Election 2004, Bush, Kenneth Blackwell, election fraud