Mainstream American media were complicit in dismissing charges that the 2004 presidential election had been stolen by George W. Bush.
Yet I believe the question has not been addressed with scholarly thoroughness, and should be.
There are many confirmed reports of Republican efforts to suppress the minority vote. The Ohio recount was marked by many incidences of Republican officials not allowing investigators access to voting data that they needed to make their determinations. There were, furthermore, many instances of what were, allegedly, technical glitches, Bush receiving more votes in a particular county than the county had voters, for example, and a most curious aspect of those “glitches” was that they were all in Bush’s favor.
A scholarly investigation of the matter could, for example, begin a section of its investigation with this question: What is the statistical probability that out of 1,000 vote-count errors attributable to technical malfunctions of voting machines, every last one of them would be in favor of one and the same candidate?
American children are routinely instructed as to the virtue of honesty. George Washington confessed to cutting down the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walked a long distance to return incorrect change to a storekeeper.
In more ways than one, George W. Bush is not a Washington or a Lincoln. Before his NSA secret spying program was reported on in the New York Times, George W. Bush regularly reassured Americans that no surveillance was being done without the required warrants.
The whole question of what form anti-terror spying should take and whether Bush’s spying program is legal is separate from the fact that he lied about not conducting surveillance without warrants.
Deception is a modus operandi for Bush and his entourage. To dismiss as fringe kookiness the theory that the 2004 election could in point of fact have been stolen is not a move that will lead to an understanding of the truth of the matter.