A consulting firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states was discovered shredding Democratic voter registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines failed to properly register a vote on nearly 20,000 ballots, which may have altered the poll result. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with election reform, up to one million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment.

This combination of incompetence and malpractice was particularly acute in the crucial swing state of Ohio, which decided the US presidency in 2004.

US congressman John Conyers, the Chair of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, investigated the Ohio poll. You can read his shocking report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, here.

Conyers cites "massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies… In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behaviour, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio." Unbelievable but true: the man in charge of the Ohio election was also the leader of the Ohio Republican election campaign. 

Allegations of electoral malpractice are echoed by Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University. His analysis of the Ohio election was published in Harper’s Magazine in August 2005.

Robert F Kennedy Jr's investigation of the key Ohio election found that "at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 - more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes…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…upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."

The huge discrepancies between the 2004 exit polls and the official Ohio vote is strong evidence of ballot stuffing and vote discarding. According to the National Election Data Archive, the discrepancies were stacked almost entirely in Bush's favour. The wildest discrepancy came from a precinct where, according to the exit poll, Kerry should have received 67 per cent of the vote but the official tally gave him only 38 per cent. The statistical odds against such a wide variance are just under one in three billion.

Ron Baiman, vice president of the Archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago concludes that the Ohio poll result is ''completely consistent with election fraud - specifically vote shifting.''

Voter purging was widespread in 2004. Election officials in the major Ohio cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo expunged the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.  Moreover, almost 3 per cent of Ohio voters were forced to vote provisionally - and 35,000 of their ballots were never counted.

A New York Times analysis found that black precincts in Ohio experienced more than twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white precincts. In Dayton, pro-Kerry districts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning districts. Coincidence? You decide.

There was a huge shortage of voting machines, especially in inner city districts that were more likely to vote Democrat. In Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo, which voted for John Kerry by margins of 90 per cent or more, electors waited up to seven hours. Many voters got fed up of waiting and left without casting their ballots.

Kennedy found that "3 per cent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote were forced to leave without casting a ballot. That's around 174,000 voters." It is also much more than Bush's official margin of victory. Would Bush have won Ohio and the presidency if all those people had been allowed to vote?

Kennedy discovered that the electronic voting machines were often unreliable and did not always accurately record votes cast. In 2004, in the pro-Democratic district of Youngstown, Ohio, some voters pressed "Kerry" but saw the machines record a vote for "Bush."

An electronic machine at an evangelical church in the town of Gahanna recorded 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry – in a district where there were only 800 registered voters, of whom only 638 cast ballots.

Kennedy reveals that three of the four companies that supply voting machines for US elections and count the votes - yes, count the votes! - have close ties with the Republican Party. In another Rolling Stone piece, he also produced evidence that electronic voting machines are unreliable, inaccurate and vulnerable to hacking to fix the election result.

In 2004 the Democrats registered hundreds of thousands of new voters. John Kerry was expected to win and was well ahead in most key exit polls on the day of the presidential vote. He lost. 

The 2004 election was stolen by the Republicans. Since then, insufficient action has been taken to prevent it from happening again. Obama, watch out.

To contact the author or for more information about the author's human rights campaigns visit www.petertatchell.net