But had Nader not run, and had all who voted for him tried to vote for Gore, Bush still would have become president. With computerized stripping of the voter rolls, and electronic flipping of the vote count, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris showed that a governor and secretary of state can take any reasonably close statewide vote and engineer whatever outcome they want.
Until very recently, Al Gore never publicly challenged the existence of the Electoral College, which was originally formed in part to empower slave owners. He was the fifth presidential candidate to rightfully win an election but lose the White House.
After 17 years, Gore still has not confronted publicly the issue of Jeb Bush's stripping the voter registration rolls or flipping the electronic vote count. Gore has never used his considerable public persona or immense personal wealth to open a public dialog about that election's corrupted outcome -- or to work to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Indeed, while presiding over the U.S. Senate as vice president, Gore crushed a legitimate challenge to Florida's stolen Electoral College delegation that put the GOP in the White House.
Gore has since got a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change. But his actions were the first inconvenient steps to a Trump administration now making climate chaos infinitely worse.
Four years later, John Kerry followed suit.
In Ohio 2004 -- as in Florida 2000 -- the voter rolls were stripped and the electronic vote count flipped. This time, the prime perpetrator was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, today a member of Trump's "election integrity" commission.
Working with Bush2, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, Ohio's first African-American secretary of state unleashed a veritable barrage of dirty tricks to take the Buckeye State -- and the presidency -- away from John Kerry.
In Democratic urban strongholds and college towns, precincts were riddled with chaos that was distinctly lacking in rural Republican regions. Incorrect addresses were posted on the state's official website, and polling stations were shorted on voting machines. While Blackwell spread confusion about the weight of the paper stock required for ballots, he refused to send usable ones to precincts short on voting machines. As a result, thousands of Ohioans -- many students and people of color -- simply could not vote.
Official letters were also sent to "ex-felons" threatening criminal prosecution if they dared to vote, even though ex-felons can legally vote in Ohio and many who were threatened weren't ex-felons anyway. At least 300,000 citizens were stripped from the voter rolls, nearly all in heavily Democratic urban areas. Some absentee ballots in southern Ohio were sent out missing Kerry's name.
In some Democratic strongholds, voters who pressed Kerry's name on touchscreen machines saw Bush's name light up. Some who chose Kerry saw that their choice had disappeared by the time they got to the end of the ballot.
There was much, much more, which Bob Fitrakis and I have documented in "How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election," at freepress.org.
On Election Day, Bush and Rove made one trip out of Washington, D.C. -- to check in with Blackwell. They made no public appearances and didn't bother with Ohio's GOP governor, Bob Taft.
At 12:20 on election night, despite mass chaos and huge lines (up to five hours long) in Democratic precincts, CNN showed John Kerry winning Ohio -- and thus the presidency -- by 4.2 percent of the vote. The projected margin was well over 200,000 ballots.
Somehow, a "glitch" stopped the tally. The "problem" was in a server in Chattanooga, Tenn., where the email accounts of Karl Rove and the national Republican Party also resided. They were all managed by Michael Connell, a Bush family high-tech consultant running Ohio's vote count under a no-bid contract from Blackwell. [Editor's note: Connell died in a small plane crash in Ohio in 2008, after recently being subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit alleging vote rigging in the 2004 Ohio election.]
When the flow resumed at 2 a.m., all was flipped. Bush somehow won by 2.5 percent -- a 6.7 percent shift. Scholars such as Ron Baiman deemed this change a "virtual statistical impossibility." Bush's Blackwell-approved Ohio margin was a beyond-improbable 118,000-plus votes, much of it from three southwestern counties riddled with chaos.
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