Was the 2004 election stolen?

Rolling Stone now has online the massive (208 citations!) piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" As you might guess, Kennedy's answer is "yes" -- the piece is sub-titled, "Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."It's a long but compelling read, the best on the subject I've read so far (previous stories by Greg Palast and others were sketchy, incomplete and/or relied too much on unprovable speculations about voter intent, projected voting patterns, etc.).Indeed, our own intrepid reporter Jordan Green did an exhaustive investigation of what was known two months after the election -- honing in on the issue of "spoiled ballots" -- and concluded that, while the problems were very serious, the outcome of the election likely wouldn't have changed.What Kennedy successfully does in the Rolling Stone story is pull together much of the various research, voter testimony, and other pieces of information that have been gathered since November 2004, and presents a convincing picture of massive disenfranchisement. Drawing on this broader swath of data, the conclusion that the elections could have gone the other way is more convincing.My only reservation is that, by banking their entire message on the claim that the election was "stolen" and "Kerry would have won," Kennedy and Rolling Stone might be distracting from the bottom-line issue: that high-level political operatives, especially Ohio's 2004 Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and co-chair of Bush's Ohio re-election committee (and now a GOP candidate for governor), actively and deliberately attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of honest voters -- something that is wrong whether or not it would have affected the outcome of the 2004 elections.The "real" 2004 election results will never be truly known; but the illegal and immoral actions of these political leaders is undeniable. Let's focus on that.UPDATE: DKos Diarist Steven D highlights one of the most significant points in Kennedy's article: that the media absolutely refused to seriously look into the story. It would be one thing if reporters dove into the election issue and came up with adifferent conclusion (as we did at the time). But to just ignore it? Steven excerpts the relevant passage from the Rolling Stone piece: The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. "I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers," he said. "And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped." Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. "I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters," he said. "The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?" Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. "You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble," he said. "You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our electoral system."UPDATE 2: Here is a rejoinder at Salon.