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December 28, 2004

Did Bush really win?

Yesterday I was listening to Thom Hartmann guesthosting on the Randi Rhodes show on Air America. He had on a guest who is the staff attorney for a group in Ohio and they were talking about the recent election, particularly in Ohio. That got me to thinking about irregularities in this election.

Today for example we find out that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (R) refused to show up at a deposition yesterday. The deposition was part of an election challenge lawsuit filed at the Ohio Supreme Court. Blackwell is not only the top elections official for the state of Ohio, he was also the Bush/Cheney04 state chairman for Ohio and was on record as promising to help deliver Ohio for Bush.

What is Mr. Blackwell hiding?

Why does there always seem to be a Republican for Bush behind every allegation of either attempted or actual vote fraud or scheme to suppress the right of legal, eligible voters to cast a vote?

Consider the following:

Recent polls suggest that Bush's approval rating is abnormally low for a just re-elected sitting President. That makes no sense for a guy who supposedly won the popular vote by a comfortable margin.

Exit polling data suggests a disparity between how voters thought they had voted and how their votes were apparently counted.

Are these little factoids part of a larger picture?

We're all familiar with the crass, brute force methods used to highjack the first election in the Ukraine. Not surprisingly such crude methods are hard to hide. How does one go about committing election fraud in a way that keeps it below the national radar screen here in America?

One way would be with electronic voting machines. It seems that Republicans have expressed interest in the past in acquiring computer programs which would allow one to rig the votes that are reported from such machines. That sworn affidavit was in Florida. In Ohio we've got a sworn affidavit from an election official in Ohio alleging inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering (PDF) by employees of the company that makes the electronic voting machines in use there.

Several statistics to come out of the Ohio vote seem very strange indeed. The Washington Dispatch noted the following: In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry. While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center. Another curious number that should be investigated is how the Gahanna District ended up with a voter turnout above 100% according to data compiled by the members of DemocraticUnderground.com and confirmed by the Washington Dispatch. Within this recent election, 20,736 voters cast ballots in all of Gahanna's districts while the City of Gahanna only shows that it has roughly 20,130 citizens of voting age. Even with 90% voter registration, 20,736 ballots cast within the City of Gahanna would be an amazing feat worthy of biblical notoriety. Others may call it fraud.

Another way would be a concerted effort to suppress the vote in areas deemed likely to vote for the other candidate.

Preemptive Karma noted several such allegations over the months leading up to this election in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. That last one in Ohio is particularly interesting because it reveals a concerted nationwide effort by the GOP.

There are many more such allegations out there. We at PK didn't post anything close to an exhaustive list of disenfranchisement schemes by the GOP

Another way would be to collect and then throw away Voter Registration forms for anyone who wanted to register for any party other than the Republican Party. That example was from Oregon. But, the same group was known to have been operating is several other states. And who knows how many other groups did the same thing but never got caught?

Think of how many people showed up to vote believing that they were properly registered only to be handed a provisional ballot. Most provisional ballots never end up getting counted. The GOP can claim that provisional ballots by unregistered voters shouldn't be counted and most everyone would agree on the face of it. But, Republicans have got their own fingerprints all over the circumstances under which many of those voters believed that they were legitimately registered to vote.

Why does it always seem to be that we find the GOP's fingerprints all over these schemes to fraudulently win an election?

Did Bush really win?

Posted by Kevin at December 28, 2004 12:58 PM