Punk'd
While I fully believe that no election will feel completely legitimate in the United States until we truly get nationally accepted standards for voting that are sensible (i.e., paper trails for electronic voting machines) and fair (the same number of voting machines and polling places per X number of people), I am not of the opinion that this election was stolen. The NYTimes magazine has a great piece written by Matt Bai, who followed some of the leaders in the ACT (America Coming Together) effort to turn out the vote for Kerry on the day of the election. Previously, he'd written about the Republican ground game, and it looks like that almost stealth effort (at least in the eyes of the groups working on the Left) paid off enormously. It's a good read, but here are the key summarizing grafs:

Why wasn't it enough? In the days that followed, theories circulated claiming that Republicans had stolen votes from Kerry by messing with the results from electronic voting machines. But the truth was that the Bush campaign had created an entirely new math in Ohio. It wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, or even four. But with so many white, conservative and religious voters now living in the brand-new town houses and McMansions in Ohio's growing ring counties, Republicans were able to mobilize a stunning turnout in areas where their support was more concentrated than it was in the past. Bush's operatives did precisely what they told me seven months ago they would do in these communities: they tapped into a volunteer network using local party organizations, union rolls, gun clubs and churches. They backed it up with a blizzard of targeted appeals; according to the preliminary results of a survey done by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, one representative home in Portage County, just outside Cleveland, received 11 pieces of mail from the Republican National Committee.

This effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.

For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''

In hindsight, it seemed significant that Bouchard, months before, felt constricted enough by ACT's legal and financial realities to shift its focus, moving canvassers out of more contested counties and precincts and away from the business of trying to convert undecided voters. In the end, these were the voters Kerry needed. But Bouchard and his troops ran smack up against the inherent limits of a 527 in a presidential campaign. They could turn out the vote, but they couldn't really alter its shape.

Therein, perhaps, lies the real lesson from Ohio, and from the election as a whole. From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and especially after the disputed election of 2000, Democrats operated on the premise that they were superior in numbers, if only because their supporters lived in such concentrated urban communities. If they could mobilize every Democratic vote in America's industrial centers -- and in its populist heartland as well -- then they would win on math alone. Not anymore. Republicans now have their own concentrated vote, and it will probably continue to swell. Turnout operations like ACT can be remarkably successful at corralling the votes that exist, but turnout alone is no longer enough to win a national election for Democrats. The next Democrat who wins will be the one who changes enough minds.