Electronic voting machines manufactured by Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) lost over six thousand three hundred votes in the 2002 general elections in Alabama. Sometime after the polls had closed and well after elections workers had gone home, the optical scan machines used to tally the vote in the gubernatorial race lost the votes which were all cast for Don Siegelman, the Democratic candidate for governor. The total of the lost votes was almost twice the margin by which Republican Bob Riley was ultimately declared the winner. Riley won by about three thousand two hundred votes. Siegelman demanded a recount, but Alabama has no provision by which an automatic recount is done when elections are decided by close margins. Instead, recounts in Alabama must be funded by a voter-approved bond. Siegelman was denied his recount and Bob Riley became Alabama’s governor.

Months after ES&S’s electronic voting machines flipped the Alabama election for the Republican Bob Riley, a spokesman for the company admitted that “something happened” with his company’s machinery, but that he did not have “enough intelligence” to say exactly what it was.

Bob Riley is still governor of Alabama.

Don Siegelman is currently in prison for racketeering, but just because he is a fraud and criminally greedy, it doesn’t mean he didn’t win the 2002 election. Of course, some people think Siegelman was torpedoed by Turd Blossom Rove. Most of the time when people think Turd Blossom has been up to no good, he has been up to no good. So, there’s a good chance that Don Siegelman isn’t even as guilty as the law thinks he is.

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