Here in sunny California, today is the primary election, in which most people will be voting for candidates for their parties -- if they're registered with a party -- and ballot initiatives. A few lucky people will get to decide on real offices, like the mayor of Oakland. I was one of those lucky people.

How fitting that, a week ago, Rolling Stone published a feature story penned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" regarding the degree to which the Bush administration stole the 2004 election.

I have written in this space before that Bush did not steal the 2000 election; that was the by-product of poor litigation and jurisprudence all around. The 2004 election, however, was stolen by the Bush administration. In 2000, it was an issue of ambiguous ballot-counts: by some calculations, Gore would have won another recount. By other calculations, Bush would still have won. (Don't try and tell me that according to this one particular esoteric thing you read from some Democratic apologist, Gore definitely would have won; that's a pile of baloney. The truth is that we'll never know definitively.)

2004 was a different story, however, especially in Ohio, the tie-breaking state. Kennedy and some co-authors report that massive voter fraud occurred in Ohio, and the worst part of it that the fraud was perpetrated by Secretary of State (and Bush re-election committee co-chairman) J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, a fervent Republican, did everything in his power (and some things outside of his power) to disenfranchise voters who might vote Democrat. The number of disenfranchised voters (and I use the word "disenfranchise" in its literal and correct meaning -- "denied the right to vote") was more than the margin separating Bush and Gore in Ohio.

Some fun facts from the story:

• "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots."
• "According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots."
• "According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials, and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards. Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent."

Additionally, the article details attempts by GOP operatives to discourage people from voting, illegal decrees from Secretary of State Blackwell that were designed to make it extremely difficult to register to vote or get a provisional or absentee ballot (including the enforcement of an archaic law requiring that voting applications not printed on eighty-pound card stock be rejected). GOP illegality ran the gamut from discouraging voters from coming to the polls by intimidation or creating long lines all the way to altering or destroying voter registration information.

Want to be more outraged? While Ohio state courts have, time and again, ruled these actions illegal, the point that Kennedy makes is that it is too little, too late: the election is over, and people are in office. Because Blackwell is in charge of state elections, there have been no investigations into this blatant corruption. Angry voters, aware of Blackwell's complicity in the theft of the 2004 election in Ohio, succeeded in getting an amendment to the state constitution placed on last November's ballot that would require future elections to be administered by an independent commission rather than the Secretary of State.

The amendment failed, however, and Blackwell is still in charge of elections; indeed, he intends to run for governor when Bob Taft's term expires in November. We've seen how he games the system when other people are running for office; how corrupt will this year's elections be when Blackwell himself is on the chopping block? Blackwell is even more conservative than current governor Taft, by the way. Taft did not endorse 2004's constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage because it could be construed to outlaw heterosexual common-law marriages, as well. Blackwell championed the whole thing and even boasts on his website that he "championed the passage of Issue 1, the Ohio Marriage Amendment in 2004."

Bob Taft began the project of destroying Ohio, and now Kenneth Blackwell would like to finish the job.