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Edited on Tue Oct-18-05 04:14 PM by pirhana
The GOP’s Closet Gay-Rights Voters
If voting machines were hacked, skeptics argue, that could explain some improbable results in three Bush strongholds near Cincinnati. In Warren, Butler, and Clermont counties, Kerry got 132,684 fewer votes than Bush did. But Kerry also got 11,923 fewer votes than C. Ellen Connally, the Democratic candidate for Ohio chief justice. It is “beyond plausible,” argues the Free Press, that Connally, an African American supporter of gay rights, would do better than the top of the Democratic ticket, especially in three Bible Belt counties that overwhelmingly approved a gay-marriage ban on the same ballot. Kerry’s true count must have been suppressed. “Take Ohio without those three counties and Kerry would have carried the state,” argues attorney Cliff Arnebeck, a Fitrakis ally.
Not so fast, replies Michael O’Grady, the legal counsel to the Ohio Democratic Party. O’Grady, who helped advise Connally’s campaign, agrees that her results in those counties do “stand out.” But he credits the 8 to 10 percentage boost that female candidates often get from voters simply because they are female. And, he adds, many Ohioans didn’t know that Connally supported gay rights or even that she was black—her campaign deliberately downplayed those facts.
Exit-Poll Enigmas
The discrepancy between exit polls and the official results is a key part of the skeptics’ argument: Kerry was projected to win nationwide by a close but comfortable 3 percent, and in Ohio by 6.5 percent. But the skeptics betray a poor grasp of exit polling, starting with their claim that exit polls are invariably accurate within tenths of a percentage point. In truth, the exit polls were wrong by much more than that in the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections.
Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, the pollsters who oversaw the 2004 exit polls, concluded that one source of their incorrect forecast was an apparent tendency for some pro-Bush voters to shun exit pollsters’ questions. “Preposterous,” claims Mark Crispin Miller, who also sees trickery in the adjusting of exit polls after the election, though that is utterly routine. And is it really so strange to imagine that Bush supporters—who tend to distrust the supposedly liberal news media—might not answer questions from pollsters bearing the logos of CBS, CNN, and the other news organizations financing the polling operation?
Besides, how do skeptics explain New Hampshire? The state conducted a hand recount of precincts that critics found suspicious; the recount confirmed the official tally, as Ralph Nader’s campaign, which paid for the exercise, admitted. Apparently one reason Bush did better than expected in those precincts was an influx of conservative Catholics who relocated from neighboring Massachusetts—the kind of anomaly that can confound even persuasive-sounding assumptions about voters.
Who Moved My Voting Machine?
But the skeptics have plenty of solid claims as well—starting with the long lines that plagued voters in Franklin County and elsewhere. As the Post reported, voting-machine shortages were the exception in strongly pro-Bush areas but the rule in strongly pro-Kerry districts. The Conyers report calls that an apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s equal protection safeguards.
Matt Damschroder, Franklin County’s Republican elections director, admits he didn’t have enough machines in the field; he says he told his staff to deploy more, “and I believed it had been done, but I heard night that it hadn’t.” The Free Press’ Fitrakis doesn’t buy that honest-mistake argument, and he points out that the law doesn’t care either. “It doesn’t matter if those machines were held back by design or not, the effect is the same,” he says.
Also indisputable is the fact that Damschroder accepted a $10,000 check for the Ohio Republican Party from Diebold, one of the nation’s largest voting-machine manufacturers. Skeptics have distrusted Diebold ever since Walden O’Dell, the company’s CEO and a major donor to the Bush/Cheney campaign, pledged in a 2003 fundraising letter to help Ohio “deliver its electoral votes” to Bush. Damschroder admits the wrongdoing. “I did something unethical, and I’m paying an appropriate penance for it,” he says, referring to the Board of Elections’ ruling in July 2005 that he work without pay for a month. He says he has not recommended Diebold for any product purchased by Franklin County. Indeed, Diebold machines were used in only 2 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
The Great Blackwell Purge
But Damschroder’s transgressions pale beside those of his boss, Secretary of State Blackwell. Now a candidate for Ohio’s governorship, Blackwell made national news before the election by trying to disqualify any voter registrations not written on 80-pound stock paper. It was a directive so ludicrous, and so obviously intended to lower turnout, that an anonymous state official alerted newspapers that Blackwell’s own office was supplying forms on lighter paper stock. The bad publicity forced him to back down.
Even prominent Ohio Republicans distanced themselves from other manifestly unfair Blackwell directives. Take provisional ballots, which by law must be offered to any voter turned away at the polls (say, because the voter’s name doesn’t appear on registration rolls). Blackwell directed that a provisional ballot would count only if cast in the proper precinct—not just the proper county, as before. It was a recipe for chaos, given that some polling places included numerous different precincts, not to mention the fact that Blackwell had reorganized precincts throughout the state, leaving many voters confused about where to appear on Election Day. Some election officials made it clear they would disregard the ruling, including Robert Bennett, who chaired both the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections and the Ohio Republican Party. Blackwell threatened to remove Bennett from the board and his directive stood. In the end, an estimated 46,000 provisional ballots went uncounted. (Blackwell did not respond to numerous requests for an interview.)
Blackwell’s two most potent acts of disenfranchisement, skeptics say, were the purging of 133,000 mostly Democratic voters from the rolls and the non-counting of 92,000 ballots rejected by voting machines as unreadable. “It’s clear to me that somebody thought long and hard back in 2001 about how to win this thing,” says Fitrakis. “Somebody had the foresight to check an obscure statute that allows you to cancel people’s voter registrations if they haven’t voted in two presidential elections.” Fitrakis notes that newspapers reported the purging of 105,000 voters in Cincinnati and another 28,000 in Toledo. But because the purging was conducted gradually between 2001 and 2004, no one saw the big picture until the Free Press connected the dots.
O’Grady, the Democrats’ general counsel, agrees that Blackwell purged voter rolls, especially in large urban counties that figured to lean Democratic. But he points out that the purging was done legally, and he says it wasn’t necessarily underhanded. The Democratic base, he says, is more transient, so a voter may accumulate three different addresses on state voting rolls—a perfectly sound reason for a purge. As for the larger argument that Ohio was stolen, O’Grady says, “That point of view relies on the assumption that the entire Republican Party is conspiratorial and the entire Democratic Party is as dumb as rocks. And I don’t buy that.”
Why Was It Even Close?
In the end, reasonable people may differ about the strength of the skeptics’ case. Personally I came away persuaded there was indeed something rotten in the state of Ohio in 2004. Whether by intent or negligence, authorities took actions that prevented many thousands of citizens from casting votes and having them counted. The irregularities were sufficiently widespread to call into question Bush’s margin of victory. This was not a fair election, and it deserves the scrutiny skeptics have brought to it. They shouldered a task that mainstream media and the government should have assumed—and still should take on, especially since some key questions can only be settled by invoking subpoena power.
Yet it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the White House in 2000 (and who—full disclosure—is friendly with skeptics Miller and Wasserman). First, some of the most far-reaching acts of potential disenfranchisement, such as the purging of voter rolls, were legal—which is why one lesson of Ohio 2004 is that voting systems throughout the nation need fundamental reform. Second, even if Kerry had won Ohio, the national vote went to Bush by 3 million votes. Ohio would have given Kerry the presidency by the same unholy route that Bush traveled in 2000 and that led so many Democrats to urge, rightly, the abolishment of the Electoral College. Third, the skeptics’ position is weakened by the one-sidedness of their arguments and their know-it-all tone. They have a plausible case to make, but they act like it’s a slam dunk and imply that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, bought, or on the other side—not the best way to win people over.
Meanwhile, the focus on vote rigging distracts from other explanations for the 2004 outcome and, more importantly, from what Democrats need to do differently in the future. Paul Hackett, the Iraq combat veteran whose congressional bid is covered elsewhere in this issue, suggests an answer. Hackett, who made no bones about his disdain for Bush and the war, nearly won a district that in 2004 chose Bush over Kerry 64 to 36 percent. Lesson: Democrats can do well, even in staunchly Republican areas, if they give people a reason to vote for them—an unapologetic alternative. Do that in 2008, and the election won’t be close enough to steal.
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