Rebuttal Letter to Mother Jones Article Dismissing Election Fraud [View All]

[Time for change]

Here is the article that I am referring to. It is an abbreviated version of a longer article, which I had access to because I subscribed to the magazine. My letter was written with the assistance of KaliTracy, who called the article to my attention.


Dear Editor:

I would like to express my displeasure at your recent article, “Recounting Ohio”, by Mark Hertzgaard. His dismissal of arguments for election fraud in Ohio were quite sloppy at best, and were meant to sweep the issue under the rug at worst. This is an issue that is of crucial importance to our country. Without fair elections we don’t have a democracy. And as long as U.S. citizens don’t understand the extent to which our elections are not fair, our chances to garner the political support necessary to ensure that we have a democracy are diminished.

In “Recounting Ohio”, Mr. Hertzgaard repeatedly dismissed well supported claims of fraud simply by quoting individuals who wished to dismiss those claims. I don’t consider that practice to constitute serious journalism. Therefore, I challenge you to address the following issues:


Fraud relating to the Ohio recount

In the section of his article titled “The Case of the Dead Computer”, Hertzgaard rightly notes that the Hocking County incident which was called to our attention by Sherole Eaton, is part of a much bigger issue, but then he ignores the bigger issue to concentrate solely on the one incident in Hocking County.

The bigger issue is that there was no fair recount in Ohio. As documented started on page 36 of this article, when it all ended, only one county in the whole state had been recounted. In order to accomplish this, numerous violations of Ohio law were perpetrated, including: At least 17 counties where the recount was chosen by Ohio election officials rather than randomly; at least 6 counties of confirmed tampering with the tabulating machines by voting machine company technicians; and, at least 6 counties for which, even when it turned out that the vote totals didn’t match, election officials still refused to do the required recount. That is the issue – not Hocking County alone.

And with regard to the Hocking County incident, the Triad technician, after taking the machine apart, explained to the election officials how to make sure that the recount matched the original count so that a full recount wouldn’t have to be done. Hertzgaard dismisses this whole incident by noting that: 1) The document that the technician gave to the election officials to enable them to avoid a recount was not referred to by the technician himself as a “cheat sheet”; 2) There were probably other reasons for the firing of Sherole Eaton; and, 3) Triad’s president said that “no tampering whatsoever took place”. The first reason for dismissing this incident is like excusing a man for murdering his wife because the man didn’t refer to his act as “murder”. The other two reasons are not worth commenting on.


The Warren County Lockdown

The salient facts of this episode are that Warren County election officials claimed that a national security alert was issued by the FBI (which the FBI denied), and they used this excuse to lock the doors during their counting of the vote, thereby preventing access to the vote counting by several reporters (not one reporter, as claimed by Hertzgaard). Hertzgaard dismisses this by quoting the Warren County BOE Director as saying that three Democratic election officials were present during the count. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But does that excuse or take suspicion off the fact that a false national security alert was issued by election officials as an excuse to prevent access to the vote count by reporters? Hertzgaard didn’t even attempt to offer an explanation for this bizarre behavior.


Late Miami County surge of 13,000 votes

Actually this was 19,000 votes, not 13,000 as noted by Hertzgaard. Again, Hertzgaard takes the word of a single contract employee to dismiss this issue. The employee claims that a precinct in Miami County is considered to be reporting its votes as soon as a single vote is received. Well, since apparently no other county in Ohio (or any other county as far as I know) does business that way, wouldn’t have it made sense for Hertzgaard to get some additional verification that this is indeed standard practice for Miami County?

And with regard to the 98.55% turnout in one of Miami County’s precincts, Hertzgaard again quotes the BOE Director to dismiss this problem. The BOE Director claims that the error was caught and corrected before the official count was announced. Really? My understanding is that the current official count still includes that 98.55% figure. Did Hertzgaard check that out? Will you check that out, please?


Electronic vote switching in Mahoning County

To explain away this issue, Hertzgaard obtains a quote from a BOE tech specialist, who says that there was a “calibration problem” that affected only 18 machines, and that it was quickly corrected. Were you aware that this phenomenon was part of a nation-wide problem, and that the number of reported incidents that favored Bush (e.g., a voter attempted to vote for Kerry but the machine registered a vote for Bush) outnumbered those that favored Kerry by a 12:1 ratio (and every reported incident in Mahoning County favored Bush)? And, were you aware that this nation-wide phenomenon occurred at nine times the rate in swing states as in other states? Why do you think that almost all of the “calibration problems” favored Bush?


Purge of registered voters

Hertzgaard mentions the purging of 133,000 registered voters, which he rightly notes were mostly Democrats. But then he later claims that this was legal. He doesn’t even bother to quote an election official to make this point (though I’m sure he could have found one without too much trouble.) Are you aware of the great discrepancy between reports of massive increases in new voter registration in Democratic Ohio precincts, compared to Republican precincts, reported by the New York Times? And are you aware that by the time of the November election, all evidence of this massive Democratic registration drive was gone? Why does Hertzgaard simply assume that this massive voter purge was legal, without presenting a shred of evidence to that effect?


In conclusion

There are several other similar examples that I could mention from Hertzgaard’s article, but I don’t want to make this letter any longer than it already is. Dismissing important concerns about our democracy simply by quoting government officials is the worst kind of journalism, and I thought that you knew better than that. You can be certain that I am going to publicize this to an audience who would otherwise be most likely to subscribe to your magazine, and that they will be very interested in your response.