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Edited on Fri Jan-07-05 04:23 PM by shance
This article came to me from Tom Paine this morning. Normally I like Tom Paine. However, I don't know who "Russ Baker" is, and his writing is not only insulting in my opinion, its misleading and inaccurate. Apparently he's a founding fellow at the Fourth Estate Society, (whatever that is).
Election 2004: Stolen Or Lost
Russ Baker
January 07, 2005
<snip>
Many of us fear that the Ohio election was stolen because people—like talk show sleuths, blogger number-crunchers, forensic attorneys, crusading professors and partisan activists—keep telling us so. We don't even know most of these people, yet we gladly forward their e-mails and Web links, their pronouncements, analyses, essays and statistical exercises. While their credentials may not be that impressive, we listen to their conspiracy theories because—frightened by the direction our country has taken—we want to believe them.
"While a variety of methods were used to perpetrate the election fraud of which there is clear and convincing evidence in the form of the exit polls, …it is likely that traditional easily detectable means were one of the principal methods of the election fraud."
Strong words indeed. Among the evidence supporting them:
* Specific instances in which strange or troubling things happened when people voted or while votes were being counted.
* The discrepancy between exit polls and the final result.
This week, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., released a report that catalogues widespread problems in the Ohio vote. The report concludes that the "massive and unprecedented" voting irregularities in Ohio were in many cases caused by "intentional misconduct and illegal behavior." Sounds like fraud to me.
Conyers' report is considerably tamer and more cautious than earlier pronouncements out of his office, and certainly more so than many of the allegations being circulated on the Internet. Much of his report, however, is based on charges emerging from the Contest. Let's see how such charges hold up under close scrutiny.
Voting Irregularities
Charge: Misallocation of voting machines
Finding: True
Intentional? Probably not
The Contest petition lists specific counties where voting irregularities occurred, including Franklin and Trumbull: "In Franklin County there was a discriminatory assignment of more voting machines per registered voter to precincts with more white voters than African-American voters…."
William Anthony is the chairman of the Franklin County board of elections. As an African-American and a Democrat himself (in fact, he is the county chairman and works as a union representative) Anthony resents the suggestion that Franklin County authorities somehow worked to help Bush. "I worked my ass off in those precincts," he says of African-American areas of the county.
A precinct-by-precinct historical comparison of registered and actual voters, and of voting machine assignments, does show that some precincts with a large African-American population ended up with fewer machines per person than some mostly white precincts. But Anthony points out that Franklin County faced a number of challenges.
For one thing, it was using very old electronic voting machines that under new state law will be defunct by the next presidential election, when every county will be required to have a paper trail for recounts. Given the short lifespan of the machines, it didn't make economic sense to buy more of them. So it was a matter of allocating a scarce resource. That resource was stretched thinner by an increasing population. Franklin County had a spurt of growth in outlying areas, with blocks of apartments sprouting recently where cornfields had been. Suddenly, authorities had 29 additional precincts to conside—requiring approximately 200 more machines.
Also, although incoming voter registration figures showed surges in certain areas, that didn't mean the newly registered would necessarily vote. And certainly not in greater numbers than in many established precincts where a high percentage of registered voters typically went to the polls.
When the county elections director recently explained the machine assignment process as "a little bit art, a little bit science," he was ridiculed by the critics. But in fact, what he meant was that a whole multiplicity of factors had to be considered—it wasn't a simple formula.
(Tipped your hand Russ. It SHOULD be a SIMPLE formula)
<snip>
Significantly, the people making these decisions aren't necessarily Bush partisans. Every county in Ohio, by law, divides its elections personnel evenly between the Democrats and Republicans. This means that where the chief administrator of elections is, say, a Republican, the chairperson of the elections board is a Democrat. In the case of Franklin County, two individuals shared the task of allocating machines—and one was a Democrat.
<end>
So, we are going to see more of this kind of stuff. People posing as "Democrats" and/or liberals at liberal websites and publications so they can essentially write doubt creating, divisive, muddying articles like this one.
Asking substantial questions are one thing, denying reality and the facts like Mr. Baker has done, is another.
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