GEORGE W BUSH - The Election conspiracy

George W Bush won the 2000 presidential election by the narrowest margin in more than 100 years.
He lost the popular vote, meaning more Americans voted for Al Gore to take up the White House than chose the eventual winner.
Bush was handed power thanks to the complex electoral college system under which each state has a certain number of electoral votes based on its size and population.
To sit in the oval office, a candidate must gain 270 electoral college votes, Bush scraped home with 271.
The key swing state was Florida, whose 25 electoral college votes decided the election. Controversy over the methods of vote counting, the handling of a recount and the influence wielded by the Republican party has raged ever since.
In the official final tally, Bush won the state, which has a population of more than 18 million people, by just 537 votes.
What happened next, as they say, is history.
Bush was faced with the impossible task of finding a proportional response to the 9/11 twin towers attacks, and subsequently launched the "War on Terror" which deeply scarred America's moral authority around the world and eventually became as unpopular at home as it was overseas.
With public support for the Iraq war waning by the day, the 2004 election saw Bush challenged by Vietnam veteran and Massachusetts senator John Kerry.
On the face of things Bush won the election by a much clearer margin than in 2000.
He carried 286 electoral college votes and won the popular count by a margin of just under three million.
However, unlike 2000, where Florida and a few disputed counties formed the basis of the democratic party's grievances, the allegations in 2004 were much more serious, and implied organised vote rigging and suppression of voters.
The opinion polls throughout the election had favoured Kerry, leaving plenty of his supporters to question how the incumbent had held his office with seeming ease, and whether their voices had been heard?
Whatever the grumbles of the Democrats, Bush was duly sworn in for a second term, surpassing the achievement of his father, and writing himself into the history books as one of the most deeply unpopular Presidents ever.

The 2000 general election, and in particular the Florida ballots, have been poured over and analysed for almost a decade.
The conspiracy runs that George W Bush, with the full might of the notoriously tough Republican party behind him, cajoled, bribed, and swindled his way to the narrowest of victories in the swingiest of swing states.
Florida was called for Gore initially, then for Bush, then put back in the "too close to call" column by TV pundits as the election descended into farce.
It took more than a month to sort out the melee and declare a winner, and many conspiracy theorists were unsurprised to find that Bush, brother of the state governor, was given the nod.
Much of the controversy centred on the "hanging chads" that had been punched through thousands of ballots, leaving the voting machines unable to count them, and forcing Gore to call for a hand recount.
Frustrated by the pace of work, the obstacles presented by Republican election officials, and the verdicts of the conservative state supreme court, the Democrats had to abandon their calls for a manual vote count, and accept the possibly faulty machine readouts.
Theorists see this as a deliberate conspiracy by the Republicans to make sure only their votes made it to the final count, and ensure that their man landed in the White House.
Conspiracy theories surrounding 2004 take a much darker turn, with some convinced that Bush was able to suppress voters, purge registers and use faulty voting machines to influence the outcome of ballots in several key states.
If Florida was the focus in 2000, then Ohio took centre stage in 2004.
The poster boy for the 2004 conspiracy theorists is Robert F Kennedy Jr, who wrote a detailed article for popular magazine Rolling Stone in 2006, claiming that scheming by Republican officials had cost 350,000 Ohio citizens their right to vote.
Republicans stand accused of blocking voters from getting to the ballot box, and targeting democrats, and in particular black democrats, with various underhand tactics including caging lists.
RFK Jr claims one in every four Ohio voters arrived at their polling place to find they were not registered, and points to the role of Republican election officials in making sure Democrats were not on those lists.
One thing is for sure, if Bush and his party did pull off this conspiracy, it goes down as one of the most elaborate and successful schemes of all time.

- It is almost impossible to say with 100 per cent certainty that Bush gained more votes in Florida in 2000 than Al Gore. With no recount by hand, there was no way the state supreme court and the returning officers could accurately reflect the outcome of such a tight election.

- Evidence that caging lists and other nefarious tactics were employed to keep voters from having a voice in the 2004 elections is persuasive.

- Thousands of Ohio voters did report being unable to vote when they arrived at the polls in 2004, despite having registered beforehand.

- Some voters, particularly black men, found themselves wrongly listed as felons in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.

- The exit polls from 2004 were wildly wrong, predicting wins for Kerry in states that would have seen him easily into the White House.

- What has been pointed to as "election fraud" by many democrats, is, in fact, common electoral game playing by both sides.

- The election of Bush in 2000, though by the narrowest of margins, was fully ratified by the US Supreme Court, who upheld the state laws of Florida and deemed the new President to have been properly elected.

- George W Bush won the 2004 popular vote by almost three million, showing that unlike 2000, the vast majority of American voters wanted him to remain in the White House.

- The co-ordination of a conspiracy on the scale being alleged would require thousands of election officials, not one of whom has come forward since to provide evidence of a cover-up.

- Voters not being registered, some being wrongly listed as felons and some ballots being missed by faulty machines are all evidence of poor equipment and bad organisation, not a conspiracy.

It is easy to look back on the disastrous Presidency of George W Bush and feel we have all somehow been tricked. Maybe there is some comfort in the theory that this was a conspiracy, a scam, an elaborate plan to install this man and further the conservative agenda that gripped America under his leadership. But the truth is that where theorists see a plot, those who examine the facts see a nation that became complacant about its democracy. The debacle of 2000 and the cheap cons of 2004 broke no serious rules. This was not conspiracy, but incompetence. In a nation so bitterly divided along strict partisan lines, it is imperative that the US refines and improves its haphazard election system. George W Bush may not have been a great President, but he was not an election thief.....