Voteless History

Rolling Stone Says Ohio Cheated in 2004

By Carl Chapik ⋅ January 2, 2008 ⋅ Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

In June of 2006, Rolling Stone published an article that claimed that the Ohio election of 2004 was stolen. It was written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and claimed that 350,000 voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the election. Exit polls indicated that the election was going to go to Kerry, a consulting firm called Sproul and Associates was caught shredding Democratic voter applications, in New Mexico, where the election was decided by fewer than six thousand votes, machines failed to properly register a presidential vote in more than twenty thousand cases, and roughly one in every hundred ballots cast nationwide was spoiled by faulty election equipment.

“The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.” Said Kennedy.

Read More:
The Rolling Stone Article by Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Summary of Ohio’s 2004 Election
Washington Post Reports on Ohio Electoral Disaster
New York Times Covers 2004 Ohio Elections