2004 election

2004 United States presidential election - Wikipedia

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 2, 2004. Incumbent Republican President George W. Bush and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney, were re-elected to a second term. They narrowly defeated the Democratic ticket of John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, and his running mate John Edwards, a senator from North Carolina.

Bush and Cheney were renominated by their party with no difficulty. Meanwhile, the Democrats engaged in a competitive primary. Kerry emerged as the early-front runner but was faced with serious opposition by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who briefly surged ahead of Kerry in the polls. Kerry won the first set of primaries in January and re-emerged as the front-runner, and Dean dropped out in February. Kerry clinched his party's nomination in March after a series of primary victories over runner-up Edwards, who he ultimately selected to be his running mate.

The September 11 attacks in 2001 decisively reshaped Bush's foreign policy goals and garnered him near-universal support early in his term. However, by 2004 his handling of the war on terror attracted serious debate, particularly over his handling of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bush presented himself as a decisive leader and attacked Kerry as a "flip-flopper". Kerry criticized Bush's conduct of the Iraq War but he had also voted for it. Domestic issues were debated as well, including the economy and jobs, health care, abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research.

:{:{Bush won by a narrow margin of 35 electoral votes and took 50.7% of the popular vote. Bush swept the South and the Mountain states and took the crucial swing states of Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico, the last two flipping Republican. }:

Although Kerry flipped New Hampshire, Bush won both more electoral votes and states than in 2000. Ohio was the tipping-point state, and was considered to be the state that allowed Bush to win reelection. Some aspects of the election process were subject to controversy, although not to the degree seen in the 2000 presidential election. Bush won Florida by a 5% margin, a significant improvement over his razor-thin victory margin in the state four years earlier which led to a legal challenge in Bush v. Gore. This remains the most recent presidential election in which the Republican candidate won Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia.}:

At the time, Bush received the most popular votes in history, a record which would be broken in 2008. Bush's win was the only Republican popular vote victory during the eight elections from 1992 to 2020. As of 2025, Bush is the only Republican president since 1984 to have won re-election to a consecutive second term and since 1988 the only Republican presidential candidate to have won a majority of the popular vote.^[b]

Background

George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court, which declared there was not sufficient time to hold a recount without violating the U.S. Constitution. Just eight months into his presidency, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, suddenly transformed Bush into a wartime president. Bush's approval ratings surged to near 90%. Within a month, the forces of a coalition led by the United States entered Afghanistan, which had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. The Taliban had been removed by December, although a long reconstruction would follow.

:{The Bush administration then turned its attention to Iraq and argued the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq had become urgent. Among the stated reasons were that Saddam's regime had tried to acquire nuclear material and had not properly accounted for biological and chemical material it was known to have previously possessed. Both the possession of these weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the failure to account for them, would violate the UN sanctions. The assertion about WMD was hotly advanced by the Bush administration from the beginning, but other major powers including China, France, Germany, and Russia remained unconvinced that Iraq was a threat and refused to allow passage of a UN Security Council resolution to authorize the use of force.^[3]

Iraq permitted UN weapon inspectors in November 2002, who were continuing their work to assess the WMD claim when the Bush administration decided to proceed with war without UN authorization and told the inspectors to leave the country.^[4] The United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, along with a "coalition of the willing" that consisted of additional troops from the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent, from Australia and Poland. Within about three weeks, the invasion caused the collapse of both the Iraqi government and its armed forces; however, the U.S. and allied forces failed to find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. Nevertheless, on May 1, Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS *Abraham Lincoln*, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking, where he gave a speech announcing the end of "major combat operations" in the Iraq War.^[5]}:

Mission Accomplished speech - Wikipedia

...In November 2008, soon after the presidential election in which Democrat Barack Obama was elected to succeed him, Bush indicated that he regretted the use of the banner, telling CNN, "To some, it said, well, 'Bush thinks the war in Iraq is over,' when I didn't think that. It conveyed the wrong message."^[19]

In January 2009, Bush said, "Clearly, putting 'Mission Accomplished' on an aircraft carrier was a mistake."^[20]

In 2010, the "Mission Accomplished" banner was transferred from the National Archives to the collection of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The banner is not on display.^[21]

American deaths in the Iraq War totaled 104 when President Bush gave his Mission Accomplished speech. A further 3,424 Americans were killed in the war through February 2011, when American combat operations there halted.^[22]

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The 'mission accomplished' moment | Miller Center

Nominations

...

2004 Republican National Convention protest activity includes the broad range of marches, rallies, performances, demonstrations, exhibits, and acts of civil disobedience in New York City to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention and the nomination of President George W. Bush for the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Hundreds of groups organized protests, including United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 800 anti-war and social justice groups, and International ANSWER.Over 1800 individuals were arrested by the authorities, a record for a political convention in the U.S.^[1] However 90% of those charges were eventually dropped.^[1]

Thursday, August 26

Four young professionals and students, who called themselves Operation Sybil, hung a banner over the front of the Plaza Hotel. Two of them rappelled down the front of the hotel, after which they were able to hang the banner more than a dozen stories above the ground. The banner, which measured 60 feet (18 m) wide and roughly three stories high, said "Truth," with an arrow pointing in one direction (toward Central Park, where the United for Peace March was supposed to take place) and "Bush," with an arrow pointing the other direction (toward Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention). The four climbers were quickly arrested and the banner was removed by the police. One police officer was injured in the process when he stepped on a skylight and it broke. As a result of the officer's injury, the climbers were charged with assault of a police officer along with their other charges.^[2][3]

Twelve AIDS activists from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) staged a naked protest in front of Madison Square Garden, demanding debt cancellation for poor countries. They took their clothes off in the crosswalk, stopping traffic, as they joined hands and began chanting "Bush, Stop AIDS. Drop the Debt Now!" "Drop the Debt" and "Stop AIDS" were stenciled in black paint on their chests and backs. Their intent was to tell "the naked truth" about Bush's global AIDS policies – that they are inadequate, and that debt cancellation must be a top priority.^[4]

Seven of the protesters were completely naked, three were semi-clothed, and two others, who stood off to the side, were fully clothed, and held a large banner that read "W: Drop the Debt. Stop AIDS." The two clothed activists climbed on top of a nearby trailer to make the banner more visible. They were later arrested and faced several charges, including endangerment of a police officer, which was a result of the fact that officers had to climb on top of the trailer, which was a generator, in order to arrest them.

Although there were several times as many police officers as there were protesters on the scene, it was seventeen minutes before the activists were arrested. They were represented by Ron Kuby, and all of the charges were later dropped. A few protesters who were semi-clothed were not arrested, and faced no charges.^[5]

The activists later became one of the subjects in photographer Richard Avedon's last project, published in the New Yorker.^[6]

Friday, August 27

Between 5,000 and 6,000 participants took part in the Critical Mass bicycle ride. The monthly NYC Critical Mass ride promoted by the environmental group Time's Up! occurs on the last Friday of each month and prior to this ride had usually attracted about 1,500 riders. Police eventually blockaded roads and arrested 264 people in relation to that event. Most of them were charged with disorderly conduct and held in custody for up to 72 hours. This was the first time the NYPD had made any significant arrests of Critical Mass participants in New York City.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Sunday, August 29

Many protesters showed solidarity with the marchers

Visual pun effigies of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush at the march

Police and fire officers stand amidst debris following the torching of a dragon float

Radical drum corps and marching bands, such as the Rude Mechanical Orchestra shown here, were a common sight.

Signs outside the mobile Bushville in Brooklyn

United for Peace and Justice organized the main march of the week, one of the largest protests in U.S. history, in which protesters marched past Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention. The march included hundreds of separate contingents as well as individual marchers. One Thousand Coffins, a nationwide group of citizens, veterans and clergy, held a procession of one thousand full-scale flag-draped coffins commemorating the fallen troops. Several hundred members of Billionaires for Bush held a mock countermarch. Estimates of crowd size ranged from 120,000 (unnamed police spokesman) to over 500,000 (organizers, second unnamed police source).^[11][12] In March, 2007 NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne stated about the RNC protests: "You certainly had 800,000 on August 29."^[13]

Organizers held a pre-march press conference in front of thousands on 7th Avenue. Several people spoke in opposition to the war in Iraq and Bush administration policies including Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Congressman Charles Rangel, and a father who had lost his son in Iraq.^[14] The whole event lasted six hours, with the lead contingent finishing the march long before thousands of people could even move from the starting point.^[15][16] The City government, under Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had earlier denied the protesters a permit to hold a rally in Central Park following the march, citing concern for the park's grass. The West Side Highway was offered instead, but organizers refused, citing exorbitant costs for the extra sound equipment and problems for the location.^[17] Organizers encouraged people to go to Central Park following the march's conclusion in Union Square. Disturbances were minor, as New York Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly reported about 200 arrests with 9 felonies, most of them occurring after the march had concluded. Incidentally, this was also the day when the Protest Warrior and Communists for Kerry counter-protest groups held their main counter-demonstrations in support of Bush and the RNC.

For the most part, the march proceeded peacefully and without violence. The only major incident during the march occurred when some individuals of unknown affiliations torched a large dragon float between Madison Square Garden and the Fox News building. The float turned into a huge fireball, and the march was halted until firefighters were able to clear the street of debris. Later, there was a minor scuffle as some individuals tried to take some of the Protest Warriors' signs. There were isolated incidents of violent attacks against delegates according to Randal C. Archibold, writer from the New York Times. In his article, "Protesters' Encounters With Delegates on the Town Turn Ugly," he discussed events that occurred in around the theater district, including one incident outside "The Lion King" on 42nd Street, in which a delegate is punched in the face by a protestor running by.^[18]

Monday, August 30

Still We Rise, a coalition of 52 NYC-based community organizations for the poor and people of color marched at noon from Union Square to Madison Square Garden, and held a rally by the Garden.^[19]

At 4 PM, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a national campaign involving over sixty organizations held a rally by the United Nations on the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. Along with many homeless and poor people who have been marching with the PPEHRC through New Jersey and living in a "mobile Bushville" (which settled in Brooklyn a week before the Convention), thousands thronged the streets despite having been denied a permit and marched down Second Avenue and up Eighth Avenue to Madison Square Garden, the police having decided not to stop the protesters. A few troublemakers apparently acting alone disrupted the march towards the end by tearing open police barricades, with one person attacking a plainclothes police detective who had driven his scooter into the crowd (see note below), knocking him unconscious. Police made several arrests and deployed tear gas.

There is considerable dispute involving this incident, as many eyewitnesses said they had no idea this was a policemen, who intentionally rammed his motorcycle straight into a dense crowd, hitting and injuring people, which started the altercation. One source said: "The divide and arrest tactics used by the police in the march have been seen in the past several days in New York here, and as have the use of undercover officers, mopeds and motorcycles."^[20] Another source stated: "Eyewitness reports confirmed that an undercover police officer in a scooter rammed his way into the throngs of protestors, driving as fast as 20 miles an hour, as the police were splitting the crowd, before being knocked off and beaten by an angry demonstrator. 'What kind of person would ram into dozens of people in a scooter with a line of police behind him?' asked protestor Gonzalo Hereda afterwards in disbelief."^[21]

Tuesday, August 31

A group called the A31 Action Coalition^[22] called for massive civil disobedience on Tuesday, August 31.

Members of CODEPINK and others gathered in front of Fox News Channel's headquarters in New York City and held a "Fox News Shut-Up-A-Thon." About 1,000 people protested the network, complaining about lack of balance and deriding it as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.^[23][24]

Most of the protesters from the War Resisters League didn't get very far from the World Trade Center on their 3-mile procession to the RNC convention at Madison Square Garden. They crossed one block and 227 of them were instantly surrounded by police and arrested. The several hundred remaining in the WRL contingent proceeded up a different route and got closer to the convention, and did a "die-in" in the street where 54 more were arrested.

Protest from within the convention

Throughout the convention, there were several protesters who were able to sneak into Madison Square Garden and disrupt the speakers at the podium. Some even described it as surprisingly easy.^[25] Anti-war activists from CODEPINK disrupted primetime addresses three nights in a row and twice during George W. Bush's acceptance speech.^[26][27][28] The father of one of the first U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq was ejected after holding up a sign that read "Bush Lied. My Son Died."^[29][30]

Eleven AIDS activists from ACT UP also infiltrated the convention center during the Republican Youth Convention, chanting anti-Bush slogans and disrupting the event.^[31] One female protester holding a sign was subdued by security, and alleged that she was kicked by a member of the Young Republicans while she was on the ground. Video of this event was shot by a local news station, but it proved to be inconclusive, because while it showed the Republican making kicking motions, it didn't show that any contact was made.^[32]News of the alleged attack spread through the blogosphere, leading a website to identify a person whom they believed was the alleged attacker.^[33] The female protester who was kicked then came forward and said she would consider pressing charges; however, she later decided that it was more worthwhile to expend her energy fighting AIDS.^[34] The identity of the alleged attacker has not been conclusively confirmed. The eleven ACT UP protestors were charged with disorderly conduct, 2nd and 3rd degree assault, and inciting a riot (1 violation, 1 misdemeanor, and 2 felonies), although all of the charges were dropped. A twelfth individual, not associated with ACT UP, was also arrested with them for taking pictures of the action.^[35]

Controversial police tactics

Concerns have been raised about police tactics in arresting nonviolent protesters with many apparently innocent people being swept up in mass arrests.^[36] For instance, a lawyer, along with 1000 other people, was detained in a facility by the New York City Police Department in such conditions that he said that the city had created its "own little Guantanamo on the Hudson", referring to the tortures reported in prisoners camps in Guantanamo. The police closed a street adjoining Union Square where protesters were marching, arresting protesters and bystanders alike.[citation ^needed] People were required to show identification cards or face arrest; the arrested people were not immediately informed of charges against them.

The facility was the then-recently closed Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River, a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted into a temporary prison, though unfit for detention of prisoners. Arrested protesters have complained about extremely poor conditions describing it as overcrowded, dirty, and contaminated with oil and asbestos. People reported having suffered from smell, bad ventilation, and even chemical burns and rashes.^{[37][38][39][40][41]}

In 2014, the city settled the lawsuits. $6.4 million was paid to 430 individual plaintiffs. $6.6 million was paid to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people. The legal fees were $5 million. The city did not admit any wrongdoing.^[42] One of the plaintiffs, artist Constantina Zavistanos, has incorporated her settlement into the art work "Sweepstakes" where viewers are given a portion of the settlement.^[43]

Numerous cases were reported, notably:

A 15-year-old diabetic girl on her way to a movie was arrested.^[44]
A former vice president of Morgan Stanley was arrested while riding her bicycle.^[44]
A 16-year-old protestor was lost to her mother for two days, even though her mother knew about and supported her daughter's participation.^[45]
One of the most prominent personalities arrested was Eric Corley "Emmanuel Goldstein", an important advocate of public rights and independent media, and editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.^[46][47]
Small pens were used to contain "30 to 40 people" at once.^[48]
Many people were detained longer than 24 hours on relatively trivial charges.^[49][50] One was a 23-year-old Montreal student arrested for disorderly conduct and released three days later. "He says he spent a total of 57 hours between the pier and Central Booking, during which time he says he was moved 14 times and repeatedly handcuffed and shackled to other protesters as young as 15."^[51]

The New York Times has also reported on two occasions that the police videotaped and infiltrated protests, as well as acting as agents provocateurs during the protests.^[52][53] In addition, the New York Times reported that prior to the protests, NYPD officers traveled as far away as Europe and spied on people there who planned to protest at the RNC. ^[52][not ^in ^citation ^given]

The City reportedly refused to release the prisoners until a judge threatened to fine it for every extra hour every prisoner would spend in prison. The victims of the arrests have filed lawsuits against the City of New York. Several cases have since gone to court, and it has come out that the charges of resisting arrest in those cases were completely fabricated. Video evidence was shown of defendants complying peaceably with police demands. Many of the cases have since been summarily dismissed. Some of them, as of 2011, however, remain open and are expected to proceed to trial.[citation ^needed]

It barely mattered that Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had certified Biden's unexpected nearly 13,000-vote victory one day before. Also irrelevant was Georgia's unprecedented manual hand count of presidential votes on 5 million paper ballots, which was more than any 2020 swing state has done since Election Day to verify its votes.

Instead, Trump supporters in Georgia, like many across the country, are not just embracing a growing catalog of vote-counting conspiracy theories as the president pressures state officials to reject the popular vote and select him, via Electoral College slates, for another term. Among Trump's ranks are activists who witnessed the latest vote-counting steps as credentialed GOP observers and have studied these steps via social media and online forums. These activists appear to be coalescing into a new right-facing election reform movement, much like left-leaning activists launched a progressive "election integrity" movement after the fraught presidential elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

"Oh my God, where do I begin?" exclaimed Stacey, an official Republican Party observer during Georgia's hand count last week in DeKalb County near Atlanta. Stacey, who didn't want her last names used, was a blond woman in her 40s wearing an American flag sweatshirt and a bracelet with red, white and blue rhinestones and Trump's name spelled out in baby beads. She was taking a break with a friend, another GOP observer.

The pair, like many Trump supporters watching Georgia's audit, said they were citizens who cared about democracy and honest elections. But instead of appreciating that Georgia's first-ever hand count of millions of paper ballots had found and fixed mistakes that added more than 1,000 votes to Trump's total, they were increasingly incensed by the fine print in the election process they witnessed. Their discovery that election administration was under-resourced, complex, opaque and at times, mistake-prone, only affirmed their belief that the process had conspired to defeat Trump. Election officials across Georgia might have been counting every ballot, but that exercise and the overall process lacked the tools to convince a slice of the public that was critical and cynical.

"We're not allowed to talk to anybody—so you can't even ask questions," Stacey said, when asked what concerned her, as she sat in the viewing area inside a vacant department store that DeKalb County had converted into an early voting center and then used for the hand count.

"There's a lot of things," she said. "Like here's a box [of paper ballots]. What is this box? What is it that you're doing? You can't tell. You can't see anything. They're supposed to sort them first, according to the person they voted for, and then they're supposed to count them… But I can't see, because I'm so far away, if that really is a Biden vote going for Biden in the Biden pile—or was a Trump vote, or a Jorgensen vote."

"There's so many unknowns," her friend and fellow GOP observer added. "We don't know where they're bringing them from. We don't know where they're taking them to. Who's watching? Who's watching?" She sighed. "There's a lot of question marks. We feel really powerless. We want to be here with good intentions. But we feel powerless."

There's a direct line between campaign observers such as these women and the affidavits—or sworn statements by witnesses in lawsuits—that Trump's lead lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was waving at a widely ridiculed 90-minute news conference on Thursday, November 19. Giuliani reeled off allegations of dishonest election administration and vote-counting processes in other states that Biden won—denying Trump another term. Giuliani's affidavits, often based on what people thought they saw, which was not necessarily accurate nor the full picture, were from Republican observers like Stacey and her friend.

This sprint by Trump's team to get witness statements from allies and activists on the frontlines in 2020's swing states was what Green and Libertarian Party lawyers did in Ohio in 2004, when they assumed that the election had been stolen for President George W. Bush—not just won by brazen GOP voter suppression tactics. That scramble in Ohio and its aftermath sparked a left-leaning election integrity movement that endures to this day.That movement has helped push every state (including Georgia) to recently replace the all-electronic voting systems acquired a dozen years ago with more accountable paper ballot-based voting. In Georgia, the type of audit that was be done before certifying the general election's winners—which turned into the hand count that drew Trump observers—also emerged in the aftermath of Florida and Ohio.

But now, in 2020, it looks like Trump supporters are discovering election administration issues and may be changing the script that emerged after Ohio's election in 2004 and was embraced in red-run states. That playbook greatly exaggerated the threat of voter fraud—or one person repeatedly voting—to overly police the voting process. State-level responses, such as passing stricter voter ID laws, happened to impede more voters in blue than red epicenters.

Since 2020's Election Day, Trump's supporters have discovered a palette of problems focused less on individuals and more on systemic issues with how elections are run, including Trump supporters discovering how much privatized technology, paid consultants and frustratingly opaque administrative procedures undergird American elections.

For example, after Guiliani spoke, Sydney Powell, a Trump team lawyer,echoed and amplified the kinds of suspicions heard from Trump supporters on Georgia's frontlines. Powell declared that the firms that made America's voting systems were infiltrated with leftist foreigners who could sabotage results. Beyond an operatic performance that caused her to be dismissed by the weekend, that screed was an example of disinformation based on taking a small thread of truth (foreign investment among America's handful of voting system vendors) and layering fearful partisan clichés on top. Where did her claim originate? A blogger active in progressive election integrity circles since Ohio said that it had been "bastardized" from his website.

"This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in," Powell declared, speaking of the hidden hands and local election officials who conspired and acted to deprive Trump of a second term.

"It's completely pointless," said Stacey, the Trump observer in Dekalb County, Georgia, saying much the same thing though not on national television. "This is optics. Take a look around you. I don't care what side of the fence you're on. You can just feel the attitude. There are too many cooks in this stew. They're too many things going on. They bring in ballots to the ballot room. Where's the ballot room?"

"People are assuming that what they are counting is valid," she said, referring to the assembled paper ballots with votes for president. "Where did that come from?"

A New Cause

These sentiments and a growing distrust of election administration and voting technology are not likely to vanish. Legal scholars, such as the University of California Irvine's Rick Hasen, who curates the country's most influential election law blog, have focused on the higher altitude impacts of Trump's failing legal strategies. The president's attacks and smears, though not succeeding in court, were eroding public trust in the democratic process and could even pressure some courts and legislatures to embrace new anti-voting measures.

"The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20," Hasen wrote for the New York Times. "The bad news is that Mr. Trump's wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump's litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts."

At the grassroots level, hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters are discovering eye-popping features about the mechanics of America's voting systems that are fueling more doubt, speculation and outrage. One video that went viral explained that an unadvertised feature in the software used to compile a spreadsheet of all of the votes cast in a county could apply $fractional value$ to any column of vote totals. That feature, called weighted voting, was put there by the country's biggest voting system makers for use in private-sector elections, such as counting different classes of stock in shareholder elections. If someone knew how to use this application, which can multiply any vote total by a fractional value that's greater or less than one, and were not caught doing so, they could possibly alter the reported results. Trump's supporters are seizing such tidbits as revelations of how invisible strings can be pulled.

"Those who pretend to be for Election Integrity but mock the many intelligent and passionate voices calling into question the veracity of our election system simply because they are pro-Trump are themselves making a mockery of the topic," commented one activist on an email thread. "The media, and many of the pretenders in this group, were all for looking into hacking and other forms of election fraud, until...Orange Man Bad. Now, for the first time there is incredible grassroots support to make a real impact on our entire election system."

Meanwhile, broader statements from voting system manufacturers denying that their systems were vulnerable to manipulation and errors are not persuading many Trump supporters. Nor were daily assertions from top statewide election officials in Georgia that the discovery of uncounted Trump votes during the state's hand count were caused by human errors, not the underlying technology or system design.

Since last week's hand count in Georgia, where Voting Booth profiled how Trump observers kept raising claims of stolen votes without producing any evidence, this reporter has heard new details and explanations for behind the scene breakdowns that occurred during the hand count audit. (The presidential recount that begins on Tuesday will use high-speed scanners).

Why were memory cards with uncounted votes left in precinct scanners?Because the state's new machinery from Dominion Voting Systems does not alert poll workers if vote count data on thumb drives in precinct scanners has been successfully uploaded, a longtime voting consultant who was in touch with contractors hired for Georgia's audit said. That exact same problem has roiled countywide elections in Florida, he added.

Did local officials in one Georgia county panic after they could not find 600 paper ballots, but not tell state officials? Yes, this same source said, adding that they found the missing ballots not by recounting every batch of ballots by hand (the audit's protocol), but by weighing the sealed bags containing ballots —one bag was too heavy.

This design flaw (not confirming precinct vote-count data was sent) and panic moment (due to a ballot inventory error that should have been caught before the audit began) were kept hidden from the press and public during the audit. But they are part of an election administration landscape that a cadre of Trump supporters have been discovering.

As Georgia's hand count began, election integrity activist Garland Favorito, who has worked with progressives for 15 years, said that he sympathized with the Trump activists. There were "three top things" driving Trump's supporters, he explained. They did not understand how a candidate who could fill arenas lost to a candidate who had barely left home. They did not trust that millions of mailed-out ballots had not been tampered with somewhere along the line. And they felt abused by mainstream media, who they despised more than Democrats.

Trump's frontline election observers had little appreciation that Georgia's hand count, which was not without flaws, was still more transparent than anything that had been done before. They had little appreciation for the thousands of people who were spending days counting 5 million paper ballots by hand. They did not think that Trump's ongoing efforts to smear the process was at odds with their quest for truth and honest elections. They also did not like Voting Booth's profile of their efforts, they said, because they looked foolish. They did not contest its accuracy, nor realize that reporters from the New York Times, PBS and other media stood near them during the hand count and could have written the same account.

But the cadre of Trump supporters who have discovered the world of election administration are not going away. They don't like what they have seen, even if they do not fully understand what they are looking at. Meanwhile, they and the president are fueling dizzying conspiracies where Americans who don't follow the arcana of elections do not know what to believe. And election officials are not helping to clear the air. Their systems, procedures and technologies do not easily convey ground truths—how votes are cast, counted, secured and verified—apart from noise from campaigns and the backdrop of partisan rules affecting who can vote.

Deep new currents are stirring, despite what many policy experts have said was a well-run election—given the pandemic, unprecedented attacks on the post office and millions of people voting by mail for the first time. How the festering distrust among Trump's supporters evolves into a new right-facing election reform movement is not yet clear. The seeds are planted.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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