Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

My main reasons for dismissing the whole ‘stolen election’ conspiracy are:
1) I have a hard time believing that the Republican Party could coordinate a national conspiracy like that and
2) that the Republican Operatives wouldn’t be boasting or bragging about it everywhere they went.

Then I realized:

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”

and that it may not be a coordinated effort on the part of the National Republican Party but the grassroot efforts of a rabid, fanatical county and state officials that were all leaning in the same direction at the same time. (The author of the article goes for the national conspiracy theory)

And the sum of the parts is greater than the whole…

Oh yes, the sources for the article

In the next election, I hope that every polling station that exceeds the margin of error in the exit polling is challenged, rather than restating the exit polls to match the polling results. We have Freedomn of the Press for a reason, and this is one of the primary reasons; to ensure fair elections.