Open Thread – UPDATE: RFK Jr. Article ONLINE

37 Comments

1. 

   Ed J on June 1, 2006 at 3:58 pm

   Haditha – regardless of what the facts may turn out to be – will be used ceaselessly and purposefully to eliminate American support for the Iraq war and to demonize anyone who still supports it.

   (Emphasis mine).

   The small cohort which still supports this invasion is largely made up of folks like you, Mr. Babbin, who are willing to turn a blind eye on the murder of three-year-olds. “Demonization” of such folks is nothing but accurate labelling.

2. 

   Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:08 pm

   One of many excerpts that hit home from the RFK piece:

   When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ”silly on its face.” Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ”gold standard” for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

   Gold standard for theft, maybe, but not for an election.

   • 

     blksista on June 1, 2006 at 9:33 pm

     and I am not speaking lightly or with frivol about the Dead.  Bobby Kennedy was the very last of heroes for Americans everywhere.  I was wondering just when his seed was really beginning to spring up.

     Let’s hope this boy has some protection in the days to come.

     I remember seeing him on C-Span on a panel before the Dem Convention.  He was on fire, his voice and throat straining with veins standing out, calling BushCo a fascist government in the making.  Well, prescience is his middle name.

     I know this report must have taken hours and hours of righteous sweat, toil, guts and blood.  Need we say more?  The truth takes that much.

     …and fuck Blackwell and the elephant’s ass that brought him here.  Folks should not be fooled about his black face.  He’ll betray us all should he become governor of Ohio.  We’ve got to win in double digits all over our country come November.

3. 

   BooMan on June 1, 2006 at 4:19 pm

   Meanwhile, Raw Story says:

   FEC FINDS GOP SENATE LEADER VIOLATED LAW IN $1.4 MILLION PERSONAL LOAN: DEVELOPING…

   My headline would be:

   FRIST PROVEN TO BE A CROOK

4. 

   Savage on June 1, 2006 at 4:23 pm

   I’m still reading, but if RFK’s article was a diary somewhere else, methinks he’d be banned.  😉

   • 

     TarheelDem on June 1, 2006 at 6:12 pm

     Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article has more facts per line than any “2004 was stolen” diary on “you know where”, even the best ones.  It benefits from not assuming, as most diarists do in breathless prose that the reader knows everything that there is to know about the 2004 election.

     What is different now is two years of thorough research has pulled together all of the threads of analysis that were presented piecemeal in the best diaries about 2004.  Plus, there have been new analyses of the exit polls.  One of the most telling facts presented is a re-analysis of the Litofsky exit poll data that calls into question Litofsky’s explanation that Bush voters were more reluctant to provide data.

     But most interesting of all (and there is a link to it on the Rolling Stone citations page) is the report that was prepared by Blackwell’s own staff that cites the irregularities in Lucas County, OH.  I had never seen this one in the hundreds of diaries about 2004.  The list of failings that the Ohio Secretary of State’s staff cites raise the question “What didn’t the Lucas County Board of Elections not do to swing the election?”

     Kudos to those who worked doggedly to find evidence without prejudging what they would find, most notably Steven F. Freeman, who was most responsible for re-analyzing Mitosky’s data.  And who says “I’m not even political — I despise Democrats.”  Get ready for Freeman’s book.

     • 

       Savage on June 1, 2006 at 9:52 pm

       Ummm… this { ;-} } was meant to alert the reader of the comment that it was a joke… snark, even.  “I’m still reading” clearly was meant to infer… no, not infer… clearly stated that I was still fucking reading it.  I have a better understanding now of exactly how raw of a nerve that is, however, and promise to never joke about it again.  Have a nice day.

       • 

         TarheelDem on June 1, 2006 at 11:07 pm

         Sorry.  When you get my age, emoticons are indistinguishable from spots on the screen.  It’s just that no matter what I might have thought some time ago, the constant gratuitous repetition (even as a joke) has gotten irritating on sites other than “the site that shall not be named”.

         I visit BMT because of the folks who post here and not because it’s a refuge from somewhere else.

         • 

           Savage on June 2, 2006 at 6:30 am

           No problem.  I said it was a joke, not a good joke.  😉

5. 

   Jim S on June 1, 2006 at 4:31 pm

   After reading Kennedy’s article, the tin foil hat is glowing red hot.  One true statement is corporate media is afraid to rock the boat;  their abject failure to point out the corruption, incompetence and illegality of the GOP. No doubt, to avoid the crash of their owners’ portfolios if the truth was ever told.

6. 

   Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:36 pm

   From the RFK Jr. Piece:

   State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ”areas of grave concern.”(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board’s office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ”We may not get to them.”(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline — an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised ”several thousand” voters from Democratic strongholds.

7. 

   Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:42 pm

   Provisional ballot fraud:

   In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible.(115) When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: ”By not even mentioning this group — the primary beneficiaries of HAVA’s provisional-voting provisions — Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.”(116)

   But instead of complying with the judge’s order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul — saying that he’d rather go to jail than follow federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr’s ruling on October 23rd — but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all — denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.(119)

   We got numerous reports of this at the Election Protection Cleveland field office I served in on Election Day.  People were denied the right to vote that had supposedly been protected by the HAVA law.  It was a total GOP Mindf***

8. 

   albert on June 1, 2006 at 4:45 pm

   this article is incredible and my tin foil hat bust into flames half an hour ago.

   On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election.

9. 

   Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:47 pm

   Why the long lines in Dem and minority precincts:

   The long lines were not only foreseeable — they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized — but that didn’t stop officials in twenty of the state’s eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)

   Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)

   ”No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,” says Rep. Kucinich. ”He’s a rather bright fellow, and he’s involved in the most minute details of his office. There’s no doubt that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.”

   • 

     Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:50 pm

     This story for me is like reliving a nightmare.

     • 

       Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 4:54 pm

       I understand what you mean, but, actually I am feeling a bit relieved–now that I got over my intial freaking out, that is.  This story validates everything that we all have been saying all along.  

10. 

    Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    More

    . But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ”We’re in a terrible fix,” Rep. Conyers told me. ”We’ve got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse — to turn down the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That’s why our citizens are not up in arms.”

11. 

    Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 4:52 pm

    GOP Challenges:

    In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties — most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ”ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,”(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP’s attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ”create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”(159)

    The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ”there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.” Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ”I have faith,” he ruled, ”that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.”(161)

    In fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling stations, where they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic precincts. By the end of the day, thanks to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list of 35,000 names from its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to the survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the polls because of registration challenges — even though federal law required that they be provided with provisional ballots.(163)

12. 

    ejmw on June 1, 2006 at 5:01 pm

    That is an incredible and well sourced article.  It should be the task of the entire liberal blogosphere to make sure that issue of Rolling Stone is the best selling issue of Rolling Stone ever.

    Buy 5 copies.  Leave them in waiting rooms, public restrooms, etc., open and dog-eared to that article.

    This is not about reliving past outrage, it is about ensuring future outrage that will be loud enough to be heard immediately and must be dealt with.

    • 

      Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 5:08 pm

      I’m buying one for myself.  Actually, I was thinking about that after I read Steven D’s diary yesterday.  

    • 

      maryb2004 on June 1, 2006 at 5:16 pm

      it is about ensuring future outrage that will be loud enough to be heard immediately and must be dealt with.

      Amen.

13. 

    Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    On May 24th, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried unsuccessfully to amend the immigration bill to bar anyone who lacks a government-issued photo ID from voting (206) — a rule that would disenfranchise at least six percent of Americans, the majority of them urban and poor, who lack such identification. (207) The GOP-controlled state legislature in Indiana passed a similar measure, and an ID rule in Georgia was recently struck down as unconstitutional. (208)

    ”Why erect those kinds of hurdles unless you’re afraid of voters?” asks Ralph Neas, director of People for the American Way. ”The country will be better off if everyone votes — Democrats and Republicans. But that is not the Blackwell philosophy, that is not the George W. Bush or Jeb Bush philosophy. They want to limit the franchise and go to extraordinary lengths to make it more difficult to vote.”

    The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office — which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

    American history is littered with vote fraud — but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.

    Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ”is the right upon which all other rights depend.” Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.

14. 

    Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 5:02 pm

    Lost votes:

    Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud — and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes — in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry’s numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties — and George Bush’s were unusually high.

    Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally — a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report — recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts — suggests that ‘‘thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”(182)

15. 

    Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 5:11 pm

    Ballot tampering:

    How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots — and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ”strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.” (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) — meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn’t vote. (186)

    In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

    The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ”democracies die behind closed doors.” But the decision didn’t stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials — citing the FBI — declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

    In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

    The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it’s determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results — one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) — the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ”It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.” (194)

    Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties — as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio — Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195)

16. 

    Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 5:14 pm

    Rigging the Recount:

    But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ”random” sample of three percent used for the recount.

    ”If it didn’t balance, they excluded those precincts,” said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. ”They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.” (196)

    Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton caught an employee of Triad — which provided the software used to count punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio’s counties (197) — making unauthorized modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the Conyers committee that the same employee also provided county officials with a ”cheat sheet” so that ”the count would come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand-recount of the county.” (198) After Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired.

17. 

    vieravisionary on June 1, 2006 at 5:18 pm

    I just finished reading RFK Jr’s article and I think I need to take more blood pressure medication!  OMG!!! The documented facts presented paint a very, very disturbing picture of our election system.

    These words beautifully summarize our present and future reality unless serious and meaningful laws are enacted (fat change since the current administration will do nothing to address these wrongs.

    “If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.”

    How can we even admonish other nations when we are so morally and ethical broken in the way we conduct our own national elections?  We are truly in “jeopardy” as Thomas Paine wrote early in our nation’s history.  The division of our nation is growing on a daily basis and learning that such under-handed and evil actions will go unexamined in court is sickening.

    This has to stop, now!  Thanks Steven for linking to this eye-opening and very well-written article that exposes the continuing true and unvarnished nature of the Bush administration and the Republican Party.

    • 

      chocolate ink on June 1, 2006 at 11:47 pm

      That is one thing that much of the general public don’t realize…we don’t really have a national unified election system in the country.  The voting is state by state, county by county, all with different systems. There is no national standard for voting for President.

      The very first problem that should be addressed and changed I believe is to make the voting for President a uniform way to vote in every state, every county, every precinct.  That way it would also solve many problems when one county has problems and poll workers in the next county(even precinct I believe) can’t help them fix problem as they have different voting system.  

      This seems to me absolutely crazy and stupid and causes many more problems than need be. And no doubt this contributes to being able to cheat the system with so many thousands of different ways to vote through out all the states.(maybe that is the purpose of it) Given the size of this country there should be a uniform standard for presidential voting.

18. 

    Omir the Storyteller on June 1, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    and my position on saying such things is well known, so you will know what I think of this article when I say . . .

    Holy shit.

    And the thing is, I think all of us in Moonbat Blogtopia knew it all along. While there were a few items there that I don’t remember seeing before, the vast majority of this was reported on election day 2004 and the days immediately following, only to be seen by those who had eyes to see.

    I’m starting to feel like the guy in the movies who’s just seen his friends turning into squid-headed aliens, and the doctor finally assures him that no, he’s not crazy. Unfortunately that’s the point at which the rest of the aliens break into the room, the doctor pulls off his human mask and says “But that just means we can’t let you live,” and the guy is pulled away screaming to be forcibly assimilated or eaten or something.

    Seriously, the big question — literally, the $64 trillion dollar question — is: What do we do now? Bush, Blackwell, the whole cabal of them have been allowed to go not only unpunished for two years now, but actually rewarded. Can we stop this from happening again this November? I firmly believe the Republicans will do anything in their power, legal or il-, to maintain their hold on that power, because they know that once John Conyers gets into a position where he can issue subpoenas, the game is up. So what do we do?

    • 

      Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 5:50 pm

      Thank god for RFK Jr.  What he’s doing is very courageous.  I think because of his spasmodic dysphonia he knows he will never be a politician so he can instaed focus on activism.  This was a true service to his country.

      Tomorrow watch the wingnuts go apeshit with the smears and slanders.

      • 

        Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 6:22 pm

        Agreed–Thank God for RFK Jr.!!  I feel that this is the most courageous, well-documented article that I have ever read.  As you said, this is a true service to his country.  Someone said yesterday, his father would be so proud–bet his whole family is proud of him.  

        And I know what you are saying about the spasmodic dysphonia and the media/appearances/public speaking and all, Steven, but, I just can’t help but wish that RFK Jr. would go for it.  

19. 

    Shalimar on June 1, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    Reading the article made me think of the revolution that doesn’t look like it’s ever going to happen, and also raises this related question:

    Is it really wise for the party creating this vast divide between rich and poor to also be the party that supports unlimited gun ownership?  

    I wonder if this might bite them in the ass if they ever manage to achieve their single-party wet dream.

    • 

      Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 5:53 pm

      They have their single party right now.  Watch these 2006 elections.  I guarantee they will be dirtier than anything we’ve seen yet.

      If the Dems don’t win at least one house of Congress you after all the shit that has gone down the last 2 years alone, you will know that that something is very rotten in the state of the union.

      • 

        Omir the Storyteller on June 1, 2006 at 6:11 pm

        I’m just hoping that the turnout and majority for the Democrats is so high that there’s no possible way they can steal this one. Although after reading that article I’m not sure exactly how large that would have to be — but then we are talking about over 450 Federal elections, not just one.

        • 

          Steven D on June 1, 2006 at 6:28 pm

          More diebold machines are in use now though.

          • 

            Omir the Storyteller on June 1, 2006 at 7:41 pm

            Do you have stats on that? In any case I think I’d be educating voters to do anything they could to avoid those machines — like voting absentee if their jurisdiction allows it. Mine does, so that’s what I do.

          • 

            Street Kid on June 1, 2006 at 8:45 pm

            Why do I have a feeling that absentee ballots will also be shredded?  (Call me a pessimist.)

20. 

    TarheelDem on June 1, 2006 at 8:28 pm

    The Rolling Stone has provided some documents to go along with Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article.  One of them is a report by the Ohio Secretary of State’s staff regarding the performance of the Lucas County Board of Elections in 2004 and earlier.

    Here is the summary of findings:

    Results of Investigation
    As a result of the most recent investigation, it is the investigators’ determination that the members of the Lucas County Board of Elections, at the time of the November 2004 election, were directly responsible for the inefficient and unorganized management of the
    election process in their county. Listed below, in order of importance, are areas of grave
    concern:

    • Failure to maintain ballot security;
    • Inability to implement and maintain a trackable system for voter ballot reconciliation;
    • Failure to prepare and develop a plan for the processing of the voluminous amount of voter registration forms received;
    • Issuance and acceptance of incorrect absentee ballot forms;
    • Manipulation of the process involving the 3% recount;
    • Disjointed implementation of the Directive regarding the removal of Nader and Camejo from the ballot;
    • Failure to properly issue hospital ballots in accordance with statutory requirements;
    • Failure to maintain the security of poll books during the official canvass;
    • Failure to examine campaign finance reports in a timely manner;
    • Failure to guard and protect public documents;
    • Lack of staff election plan;
    • Current administrative operations; and,
    • Non-compliant areas of the administrative oversight status mandates.