Did Bush steal the 2004 election?

I don't know what to make of this. Scoop: Election 2004: The Urban Legend

Figure 5. Unprecedented! That’s the only word necessary to show the dichotomy of 2004 – Bush losing actual votes in his base, rural America, while gaining an exponential increase in big cities.

claims that the 2004 election results were fraudulent.

Bush had not been a city-friendly President and he had not gone out of his way to help large cities with any initiatives of note. In our largest city, New York, things looked particularly bad. A 2003 poll showed that over 50% of the residents thought that the administration had foreknowledge of the 911 attacks and did nothing, hardly a predictor of great success in that largest of large cities.

But something very unusual happened. … According to the [National Election Pool], Bush made incredible gains in the cities over his 2000 vote share. These gains were large enough to offset his drop in core support in rural areas and give him a 3% victory.

It's strange to imagine that the Republicans would have the means to do this sort of manipulation in big cities, normally a Democratic stronghold. For a convincing case that this really does represent fraud and vote count manipulation I'd like to see a hypothesis about how this might have occurred mechanically. Even better, of course, would be actual evidence.