Real Clear Politics poll aggregation showed that Bush led Kerry going into the election in Ohio, and had led nationally since the September before the election - it would have been surprising if Kerry won. Exit polling can be and has been unreliable - that's why it's only used as an indicator and not on it's own (precinct turnout is usually more indicative of who's going to win).

Really, just let it go. Kerry just lost - sometimes that's all there is to it.

Except for that whole removing thousands of democratic voters from the roles even though they were qualified to vote thing, right? I'm sure that had no possible impact on an election that hinged on a few hundred votes, right?

Actually, what you need is a political culture in your state that values integrity and good ideas over party loyalty. A great example of this is New Hampshire: Their Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, has been in office since 1976, throughout both Democratic and Republican governorships and legislatures, mostly because he's very good at his job and widely seen as valuing clean elections expressing the will of the voters.

Compare that to Ohio, where Secretary of State is often a very politicized position and where Ken Blackwell (the defendant) was doing everything he could to ensure that his party would win. These kinds of things were widely reported in newspapers:
- Rejecting voter registrations from heavily Democratic areas because they were on the wrong paper stock.
- Rejecting voter registrations from liberal political groups because they had, in order to comply with applicable laws, submitted all the registration forms they got, including ones from Mickey Mouse and the like.
- Refusing to do anything at all about churches explicitly endorsing Republican candidates (if a religious body endorses a candidate, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status).
- Putting fewer voting machines in precincts likely to vote Democrat than in precincts likely to vote Republican, so that Democratic voters had to wait for hours to vote while Republican voters took about 15-30 minutes.

.
You don't need e-voting to blow elections - just corrupt officials and complicit courts.

Voting intimidation is eliminated when you vote in your own home and you don't have to deal with crowded poll places. I don't understand why more states don't do this.

And now for the tangent, more and more we are seeing the evil republican label. Similarly, it is the socialist, Marxist liberals. Both labels are hyperbole. The two parties aren't all that different really, they agree on most things. The thing that kills me is people don't realize that to make it to congress, you must be at least millionaire. You want to know why the Bush tax cuts haven't expired? Why the democrats haven't beaten the republicans over the head with it? They don't want to see their own taxes go up, just like the republicans. They just have to talk a good game to continue to be elected.

It is only when their supporters really get pissed off that they do something, because they like their cushy job and free, government run health care.

As for claims of vote hacking, neither side really wants an investigation. Think about it, right now the US is seen is fat, lazy and stupid. Do you really want to add slow to that mix? While it would make a lot of us feel good, from the outside, if a former president is put in jail, what does it look like?

Probably something like, we're stupid, fat, lazy, slow and cannot properly investigate a crime. The last thing anyone on either side wants to do is suggest that our law enforcement is somehow inadequate, it would just invite others to exploit that. It is the same security theater as TSA, just on a different stage.

Not to comment at all on the rest of it (I've got a paper to write!) but, I thought it was strange people jumped on that number and conflated it to mean that our government is supporting 80 million freeloaders (not saying you specifically, but if you look at the rabid articles about it on the internet, that's the impression I get)

a) There's no comparison made to other countries, so that's just an arbitrary measurement in arbitrary units (If I told you the higgs boson was 114 GeV, and didn't give you any sense of scale, would you think that was big or small?)

b) When you look at the breakdown, 55 million of those checks come from only social security. Are we now arguing that people who collect SS are freeloaders?

c) Of the remaining 35 million checks, 10 million checks comes from tax refunds (they obviously cluster around april 15th, but when you amortize it, it's 10 million/month)

d) We're down to 25 million checks then, and pay for veterans benefits (4.1 mil), retirements (2.6 mil), and contractors (1.4 mil) out of that leaving us with ~16.9 million or so checks.

The breakdown I found has more categories, but I picked off all the things that would be pretty non-contentious (I didn't include medicare or medicade, which seems to be a lot of people's big target these things). It's not like our government is a freewheeling money-printing machine like people keep making it out to be

Give me a third party with the size and principles..

Maybe someone should give you a pony too.

It's particularly disappointing that you want the size given to you. It sounds like you're saying you refuse to vote for real candidates (assuming someone else does the job of giving them to you), unless a bunch of other people vote for them first (of course, by then, it's too late and the candidate has lost, because you refused to vote along side them, since that candidate's victory had not already been assured).

Your attitude is why we can't escape the Democrats and Republicans. You are the problem that you're complaining about.

Imagine the world where Thomas Jefferson wrote:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, we can only hope that someone gives those people what they want. King George is bad, and we humbly request him to appoint a new king. (We don't care who; that's not our problem.) If he refuses to do so, we will continue to recognize his authority but we'll be slightly irked.