Grady Cothen, retired head of the SBC's huge publishing house, in his book What Happened to the Southern Baptist Convention? (pp. 15-16) summarized a press report from the meeting:

The same press report said that the registration secretary of the convention promised an intensive investigation into alleged irregularities in voting procedures during the election of the president.  Since the Rogers' majority was only 163 votes, some thought the outcome was in question.  Some churches had more than the legal limit -- ten -- messengers.  Some messengers registered twice, and some pastors registered for all ten of their messengers -- a practice since disallowed.  One pastor registered for himself, his wife, and four children.  Under questioning by another pastor, he admitted that the children were out at the KOA campground and not at the convention.  Another pastor told of watching a man mark eleven ballots in the presidential election and turn in all of them.

Ten years later, after Mainstream Baptists like myself had mobilized clergy and laity to go to the Convention and vote for moderate candidates, I sat in the Convention hall in San Antonio and waited for the results of the presidential election.  The votes were being counted by people appointed by fundamentalist takeover presidents.   When the time went well beyond the ordinary period for reporting the results, someone said that the committee was recounting the ballots.  

Recounts were unprecedented.  Here are the kinds of questions that went through more than one moderate Baptists' mind:  Why did they need a recount?  Was the outcome unacceptable to the counters?  Was the outcome unacceptable to the leaders who had to report it?  Can we trust the people counting the ballots?  Who knows?  

When the results were finally reported, the fundamentalist candidate won by the slimmest margin in the history of the takeover -- 50.53% of the vote.

As a moderate, mainstream Baptist who witnessed the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, I see ready parallels between the concerns about voting irregularities in American civic life and those that plagued the Southern Baptist Convention.  

Many moderate Baptists left the Southern Baptist Convention in 1988 and never returned.  They didn't have to.  They were free to leave their denomination.  But, what do you do when you lose confidence in the electoral mechanisms of your nation?  Do you pack you bags and move?  Or, do you study your opponents tactics and devise countermeasures?

That is why I recommend Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again:  How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.  We need to fully understand the challenge that we are facing when we work to preserve democracy in America.

All of the information that I shared about the Southern Baptist Convention is "circumstantial" evidence.  None of it has been substantiated in a court of law -- though some of it might have been had someone pressed the issue in the courts. Circumstantial evidence gains gravitas from the breadth, quantity and credibility of the sources, but someone has to weigh the evidence.

Miller brings together a lot of "circumstantial evidence" of voting irregularities, some might call it "Voting Fraud," in the 2004 election.  At this moment, none of it has been substantiated in a court of law -- though some of it might be if were brought before the courts.   Congressman John Conyers has compiled a lot of evidence about what went wrong in Ohio.  Miller documents the evidence about what went wrong in the rest of the country.  I highly recommend reading both of them.  Weigh their evidence for yourself.

While we organize to face the rise of the Dominionist and Theocratic Right, we need to make sure we work to counteract the dirty tricks they are pulling to keep our votes from counting.