It’s been happenning, it’s ugly, and it is going to get worse. Yesterday, there was an article by RFK Jr. in Rolling Stone re: Kenneth Blackwell and the 2004 elections. As stated by John Conyers,
”Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake. He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.”
It documents the events in Ohio before and after the 2004 election. The first red flag was the results of the exit polling compared to the results that of the election. The second that was detailed is the illegal behavior of Kenneth Blackwell. One of the many charges that is made in the article is the lack of voting machines in inner city precints. As pointed out in the by Kennedy,
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)
contnued
According to Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University, the effect of this was the disenfranchisement of minorities. In addition, there were voting machines that didn’t work. Around Youngstown, approximatley 100 voters claimed they entering ”Kerry” on the touch screen and watched ”Bush” light up–twenty machines had were recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Elsewhere, voters filed sworn affidavits stating that they touched Kerry’s name on the screen and it lit up, and the light had gone out by the time their ballot was completed the Kerry vote disappeared.
In the state’s most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169)
That incident was blamed on a bad memory card that later was changed. The most frightening incident took place in Warren County. 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.
However, no terrorist threat existed. According to the The Cincinnati Enquirer
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 results of Warren county were held back and then adjusted/retabulated after the election, when the number of votes George W. Bush needed to win was realized. 2,426 fewer votes were received by Senator Kerry in the Presidential than were received by Ellen Connally, a poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) The Conyers report re: the 2004 election 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)
There is much more. As Kennedy concludes,
…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 our faith in democracy itself.
And, it appears that the Bush response to the article written by Kennedy is nothing less than more of the same. Instead of addressing these very serious concerns and the need for electoral reform or the issues that are being raised by the organizations that have scheduled hearings re: the flaws in Part D, Bush is now going to encourage the adoption of a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting gay marriage. Pandering to his base, in the hopes that this will be ignored and will go away. Just like Eddie Rosa. The late Mr. Rosa was unable to get his prescriptions under Part D.
