Three-year 19-month old news about electoral irregularities usually makes my head nod the way it used to in class on occasion--pen doing a random walk down the page--but Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone is too comprehensive to ignore (sources: Ultrabrown and Portside). Including the 200+ footnotes, the piece comes in at over 14,000 words worth of detailed arguments and illustrations of alleged Republican efforts in the last Presidential election--particularly in Ohio--to throw the election to Bush. It is deep, it is dark, and it is above all worth reading.

Kennedy begins by drawing your attention to the discrepancy between the exit polls that predicted a Kerry victory and the certified election results in Ohio and other states that gave the government back to Bush. He then premises the rest of the piece on the notion that it's the election results that were wrong, using a variety of means ranging from the mundane and the clever to establish and bolster his point:

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181)...

If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183) ''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''

Kennedy alleges that Republican tactics in Ohio and elsewhere included: overt fraud like swapping Kerry votes for Bush or other candidates' votes; limiting transparency to the outcome on Election Day--including one example in which a false terrorist threat was declared; preventing a fair and thorough recount; and most of all myriad maneuvers including intimidation and disenfranchisement to prevent people's votes from getting counted at all if they would have been likely to vote for Kerry.

However, the disturbing thing about Kennedy's piece is that the individual allegations are generally not shocking--if anything, the article reads as an illustration of the banality of electoral corruption. It's the cumulative effect that's distressing.
The strength--and resulting creepiness--of the article is that he builds it from the ground up, describing in detail how one goes about Republicans allegedly went about rigging a Presidential election in the United States in the early 21st century. Particular because Kenendy includes numerous citations from non-partisans or people actually antagonistic towards Democrats, the piece is at minimum worthy of serious further investigation by Important People.

Based on recent history, I'm not, however, holding my breath. If Kennedy (and many others) are right about even half of what they say, a lot of powerful people would be in some truly deep $hit. It's almost absurd to think they wouldn't spend their political capital preventing these things from coming to light in a way that penetrates the popular concsiouness.

I hope I'm wrong about both the extent of their power and their willingness to use it for inglorious ends.

Update: Over at Rhinocrisy, comments in a similar post lead to a counterpoint in Salon --also recommended by commenter Amanda here.  Rhinocrisy's discussion also suggests another critique at a blog to the RFK argument. I leave it to you to decide who's right :)