This Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been getting a ton of play. It was cited in Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times today, just for example. Over the last few weeks I've seen references to it all over, but I've been avoiding reading it because I still find the subject of the 2004 election much too depressing to think about -- but at last I have finally broken down and read it.

The central thesis, which is meticulously researched and footnoted, is that John Kerry very likely would have won Ohio if America had a marginally functional electoral system. The problem -- whether or not you accept that particular claim as true -- is that the electoral system in this country is fundamentally broken and will remain so as long as its unreliability benefits those in power. I have no idea what we can do about that.

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)