In 2002, Governor Don Siegelman won re-election. Every major network called it. He went to bed a winner — and by four the next morning, he was told they were trying to steal the election. Over 6,000 of his votes had vanished overnight.

In this episode, Siegelman plays his own concession speech from 17 days after the election and walks through, point by point, the evidence behind one of the most brazen instances of election manipulation in modern American history. The ballots and voting equipment were seized before a recount could happen and were never recovered. Karl Rove's own deputy was reportedly on the phone with a county probate judge the night the results changed. And an independent Auburn University study later found the vote count had actually been altered twice — the first pass added votes to his opponent's column but forgot to subtract them from Siegelman's, so the initial results still showed him winning, forcing a second manipulation that subtracted roughly 6,300 of his votes and, oddly, never touched a single down-ballot race.

Siegelman also details the money trail — an estimated $20 million in casino money funneled into Alabama to defeat both his campaign and a education lottery referendum that would have funded free early learning and college tuition for the state's children — and the strange, decades-later footnote that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. devoted a full chapter of his book Billionaires and Ballot Bandits to this exact story, years before later going on to serve in the Trump administration.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Election night 2002 and the vanished votes
• Siegelman's 17-days-later concession speech, in full
• The seized ballots and illegal certification
• The Auburn University study on electronic ballot manipulation
• Karl Rove's political network and the money trail through Alabama churches

This is Episode 2 of Me and the Gov — a series of in-depth conversations with former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, hosted by Nick Collado.

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