Remember the wildly inaccurate exit polls in the 2004 presidential election? In a documented and sourced piece from Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argues persuasively that the exit polls were not inaccurate:

In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered "27," in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.

Such results, according to the archive, provide "virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount." The discrepancies, the experts add, "are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent." According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, "No rigorous statistical explanation" can explain the "completely nonrandom" disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are "completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting."

Read the whole article. Considering the likely shenanigans in Florida in 2000 -- whose election mechanism also was controlled by Republicans -- I tend to be convinced. Remember, the reason the Nixon Administration is justifiably castigated is not because their people broke into Democratic headquarters, it was the overall pattern of subverting the electoral process. If it is true that the Republicans threw the election to Bush -- a conclusion that is statistically inescapable, according to this article -- then the subversion of everything this country is about is even more massive and pernicious. I fear for the electorate that fails to cry "foul" and bring the wrongdoers to justice.