A few days ago, I linked to a Rolling Stone article by Robert Kennedy Jr., in which he argued that Republicans successfully cheated in Ohio in 2004, throwing what should have been Kerry’s election to Bush.
At the time, I took a “maybe it was stolen, maybe it wasn’t” view. After reading this persuasive Salon trashing of the Rolling Stone article, I’m convinced the election was not stolen. Yes, Republicans (led by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell) cheated and suppressed votes (especially Black votes), but even if they hadn’t Bush would have won Ohio.
Kung Fu Monkey has a sensible assessment:
You will notice, however, Salon lightly skipping over big chunks of Blackwell’s actions, whistling and waving over yonder. No mention of the paper-weight registration trick or the multiple judges who found that Blackwell was interfering, repeatedly, with the election. It is a sad day when Salon‘s rejoinder in defense of the republic is “Sure, Blackwell was plainly a partisan bastard who betrayed the public trust, broke the law, and stole votes. But did he actually steal enough votes to swing the election? If not, no foul.”
…Perhaps the title “Was the 2004 Election Stolen” can be argued either way — but a better question is “Was the 2004 Election Fair?” I believe even the Salon article cedes a definite “no.”
Thanks to “Alas” comment-writer Anono for pointing out the Salon article to me.
Cross-posted at Creative Destruction. If you don’t like the moderation here, give it a try over there.
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Amp, that’s a good assessment, except for the ‘no foul’ part.
The real story here appears to be that Kennedy is happy to mischaracterize and dishonestly report what his sources have said. Which is shocking…I mean, a Kennedy! If you can’t trust a Kennedy, who in this crazy world can you trust?
None of the VJs are totally trustworthy, imo.
I think I see. Yes, votes were suppressed and there was a lot of malfeasance by the Sec. of State, but the election wasn’t stolen. Uhh…OK
Saying that the Republican Party did NOT steal Election 2004 is freaking ludicrous. First, Kennedy does not claim that he has “new evidence”. I don’t know where that fabrication came from, but it didn’t come from Kennedy. Last, the Rove White House has never been a johnny-one-note dirty tricks unit. They’ve alsways used the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun approach. “Hit ’em everywhere, all the time” might be Rove’s personal credo.
I see nothing wrong with Kennedy doing a pre-election synopsis of the evidence — to remind us that we’re looking for a shotgunner this time around, not a johnny-one-note.
What I do fualt Kennedy for — as I fault the entire structures of both major parties, is their corporate silence on the HAVA’s Machiavellian deceits and the resultant sleazeoid vote-counting software.
The first comment on the Salon story is a lengthy bit that rolls all over the issue of Diebold hack-o-matic vote-counting software. When the Congressional slime of both major parties cobbled together the HAVA, it was obviously intended to privitize our electoral system into the hands of Republican Party clients, where “proprietary trade secrets” could be used to hide everything electoral. Secrecy is money-power’s number one weapon against the rabble and our Constitutional rights — and it is nowhere more visible than around the Diebold hack-o-matics..
This clear and obvious, dual-party, digital destruction of democracy is another elephant in the room that nobody connected to the slimeoid parties wants to talk about — including Kennedy.
But that doesn’t justify mindless criticism and reversal of Kennedy’s timely synopsis of what evidence there is of Republican Party foul-play in Election 2004. Its good preparation for what is surely coming at us again in Election 2006.
Kennedy’s treatment of the 2004 evidence also points up the unprosecuted felony conspiracies against citizen rights, in violation of federal statute 18 USC 241. The Kennedy text gies us graphic evidence of the obstruction of justice by the Bush-Cheney appointees for US District Attornies in Ohio. More of that corruption of our legal system coming too.
Bush-Cheney is not Constitutional governance. It is fascist thuggery masquerading as Constitutional governance. The Bush-Cheney and Republican Party crimes against the American people are not politics-as-usual. They are way overdue in legal-realm court trials and imprisonments. Kennedy’s text is an excellent reminder of those facts.
Cynical me – I thought the American way WAS to steal elections. What on earth were Tammany Hall and the Daley Machine for, than to make sure Their Guys got elected and stayed elected? Not that it’s any excuse for what happened in 2000 and 2004 – I think that we’re much more likely to find out about election fraud nowadays than in the past – but very few elections in the U.S. are 100% squeaky-clean. Just one example at random – isn’t there some pretty solid evidence that JFK’s dad helped fix a couple of key districts to help him win the White House? And isn’t historical precedent why we have all these laws on the books about buying votes and registering dead people and voting twice and so on?
IMHO, our goal should be to attain and maintain the high standard we think we already have. This should include a paper trail, and maybe a national standard for voting machines. (I actually think there is an ISO standard, somewhere, that is used when evaluating elections in other countries, but I could be wrong on this.) Voter registrations should be reviewed by three-member panels, one Democrat, one Republican, and one independent or member of other party, and the review should occur both six weeks ahead and the day after the election. (Maybe that’s too much work.) Anyway, I’m not a political scientist or even a political junkie, so maybe there are more and better ways to fix the system than these – we just have to stand up now and start yelling as loudly as we can so that the 2006 election is the cleanest ever.
I still don’t think that the discrepency between the exit polls and the results have been adequately explained.
I don’t think there is any proof that it wasn’t stolen and lots to indicate that it was.
So someone wrote an article in Salon – that means nothing. So someone wants to say it’s all a conspircy theory. That’s no surprise.
I believe the exit polls – before they were changed to match the desired results.
I read Kennedy’s article, then read Manjoo. Wasn’t sure what to think. Then followed this link posted on Shakespear’s Sister:
http://fraudbusterbob.com/blog/2006/06/05/manjoo-errs-in-fact-knows-very-little-about-ohio-election-law/#more-84
Bob Fitrakis, an election protection legal observer in Columbus, Ohio, pretty effectively discredits Manjoo’s criticisms. Worth checking out.
My thought is that the election was stolen. Whether or not Kerry would have won Ohio is moot, and can be argued but never known, because it was an unfair election, and Blackwell did everything he could to ensure that Bush won. If I go to your house and steal your tv, then I’ve stolen your tv. If you had every intention of giving me your tv as a gift, although humorously ironic, it doesn’t change the fact that I stole your tv.
So it seems that the bottom line here is that while it’s hard to say whether or not the election siphoned enough votes from Kerry that he illegitimately lost the election, most of us still feel that the election was stolen from the American people.
The difficulty with the Raznor/Kim purity position is that every election is dirty. People lie and cheat and steal to get hold of power. Even if the guys and gals at the top are clean (which happens), people below them aren’t. Nobody’s organization is ever pure enough for everybody to refrain from trying to shift things a little bit.
So we either sigh at the fallen state of human nature and try to keep things as clean as we can, with procedures like paper trails for voting, bipartisan electoral committees, requirements to show ID at the polling place, and so on, or we just give up on democracy and select a king. Although I kind of like the sound of “Your Royal Highness”, I gotta admit that my odds of being the #1 guy are good, but not a lock; we might as well try this democracy way of things for a while longer.
The difficulty with Roberts position is that is how large-scale fraud and theft of votes are being rationalized.
“People lie and cheat and steal to get hold of power”
So – so what?
The “what” is that they should have been prosecuted for it. And they are not.
And are you Ok with our country being stolen and sold down the river by fascist idiots?
Meret, there are a lot of Democratic lawyers in Ohio. There are a lot of Democratic officeholders in Ohio. There are a lot of Democrats who are tied into the system. And you know what? The more tied in people are, the less likely they are to say “this was criminal” and to talk about filing charges. Maybe that’s because they’re part of The Conspiracy, and are protecting their co-conspirators. More likely, that’s because they’ve seen politics from the inside, and they think that what happened in Ohio (and, in the opposite direction, in Wisconsin) is the regrettable business-as-usual of a functional democracy.
If people did illegal things, they should be prosecuted. I am morally certain that there are actors in both major parties, and probably most of the minors, who committed crimes as part of their pursuit of victory in 2004. But I haven’t seen any credible evidence that “fascist idiots” have stolen the country. In fact, when I look at the population groups talking that way, I am singularly unimpressed by their seriousness, their good faith, or their rationality. The only people who are even slightly credible are those, like RFK, who are flogging what they know to be dishonest hackery for their own immediate partisan purposes – snagging a few votes and a few dollars from the nutfudge fringe.
For instance, imposing the ridiculous paper weight specification for registrations was not legitimate (although not illegal either) and it was quashed by the courts. The tight restriction on provisional ballots (that they had to be cast in the correct precinct) was arbitrary and anti-democratic, but it was also within the legitimate power of the secretarty of state of Ohio, as determined by judicial review. The failar of the electoral commissions for Cleveland and surrounding areas to adjust the distribution of voting machines to reflect the pattern of new registrations in the summer and fall was discriminatory, and possibly intentionally so, but it doesn’t even represent an attempt to steal the election at all (as it wasn’t an action taken by Republicans).
What exactly is the crime for which people should be prosecuted? Perhaps it is people’s difficulty understanding the statistics of exit polls and believing ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims? But who are we supposed to prosecute for that?
Up in New Hampshire, the Republicans ran a phone jamming attack on a campaign office on election day (2002, state-wide election). That was a criminal dirty trick, and it is likely that people will go to jail for it. I have heard of nothing in Ohio that rose to that level, nothing that could even conceivably be charged as a crime (oh, actually, there was the election official who made a false report of an FBI warning, which I believe is prosecutable, but does not appear to have been part of an attempt to fix the election).
Fascist idiots won the election fair and square, despite employing plenty of dirty tricks. Those 50,000 people removed from the rolls in Florida in 2000 that Florida wasn’t able to get around to restoring to the rolls in time for the 2004 election? A gross dirty trick that was swamped by the victory margin in Florida. There weren’t 90,000 votes prevented or created in Ohio, and there certainly weren’t 3 million vbotes shifted, blocked or created nation wide. If a non-relevant number of votes being tainted by election dirty tricks means the election was still stolen (if I come into your house and nudge your tv towards the door, and tehn you give it to me as a gift, have I still stolen it?), does that mean that if somewhere a democratic supporter leafleted inside the exclusion zone around a polling place that the Democrats stole the election too?
Dirty trickery that sways the election totals by a tenth of a percent, or even by half a percent is still a problem (although plenty of dirty trickery is not even a crime), but it is not the same thing as the election being stolen.
Consider if Gore had been strategically right in the Florida election recount of 2000 (in guessing that a selective recount would push him over the top, but a state wide recount wouldn’t), and had prevailed in the courts. Then he would have been elected president despite actually losing Florida, which would be a perversion of the electoral process, but one only possible in an exceptionally narrow election. Would this result have cast our entire electoral system in to doubt and meant that we were no longer living in a Democracy?
No.
Even worse, focusing on the moon-bat claims (e.g. exit poll results show that the election was systematically cooked across multiple states, several of them controlled by Democrats, several of them using paper ballots) makes it harder to focus on the legitimate problems (inadequate voting machines, partisan control of elections used to discourage voting, black voters illegitimatedly stripped from the rolls in Florida and still not restored 4 years later, etc).
only one problem
no one can prove or disprove the veracity of secret electronic black box ballot counting.
People don’t lie about who they voted for, which is why exit polls have been the single most reliable way in the world on EARTH to track election results in advance of ballot counting.
the election was stolen, as will the 2006 election. But no need to worry about 2008.
Chimpy aint leavin office.
I’m tempted to get snarky, but first, I’d like to know what you would consider to be a stolen election, Amp. Openly stuffing ballot boxes?
To Charles: Let me grant for a moment that there really were enough legitimate votes for Bush to have won without chicanery. To call it not theft is a bit like saying that if someone steals your property when they would only have had to ask to have been given it, it’s not theft. That wouldn’t wash in court — it’s the actions that count, not whether they would have been necessary in retrospect.
Thanks brynn for the article. It’s refreshing to see someone with actual expertise weigh in.
I’m not going to comment on exit polls because I’m no expert. I’ll only note that if people systematically cannot tell the truth about who they voted for then, God help your country indeed.
Mind you, the REAL question is this: if unfair, unfree elections are just fine and not worth protesting, fighting legally or exposing widely, then what earthly point does political activism have?
Mind you, the REAL question is this: if unfair, unfree elections are just fine and not worth protesting, fighting legally or exposing widely, then what earthly point does political activism have?
Good question. The effect the malfeasance in the last 2 general elections has had on me is to make me question whether or not I do really live in a representative republic. If I can’t count on free & fair elections, can I really trust whatever government is in power?
Alzo, as has been noted before, private companies have no place in public elections. Not in tabulating votes, anyway. The proprietary counting software (sans audit trail) used by most of the electronic voting machines makes a mockery of the system that I was brought up to respect (at the least). Political parties have no place in vote counting except as observers (to be fair, I’m not sure how best to avoid that).
Did the political malfeasance steal the election for Bush in ’04? It doesn’t really matter if I can’t believe that our elections are free, fair and honest.
If I can’t count on free & fair elections, can I really trust whatever government is in power?
You cannot trust whatever government is in power, regardless of how they were chosen. Government is fire and force.
Dei,
Ask Jake what he thinks of your analogy.
Jake,
I agree that the fear that the elections aren’t free, fair and honest is serious problem, and I agree that elections should not be done without paper trails, and that they shouldn’t be done by private companies (although I don’t really see any reason that private companies should not manufacture the machinary on which they are done), also, and probably even more importantly, they should be overseen by bipartisan commissions, and not by partisan elected officials. Additionally, felons should be allowed to vote.
However, I see the “the sky is falling! the Republicans stole the election!” stuff as being part of the problem: it misdirects people’s attention away from the real problems with the electi0ns (campaign financing is vastly more of a problem with our election system than any of Blackwell’s (2004) or Harris’s (2000) shenanigans), and it leads to gleeful declarations that there is no reason to vote because the Republicans are just going to steal the election (e.g. this thread, or any of John Snead’s posts on the subject). I supsect that there will be at least as many democratic votes lost in 2006 to people not voting because they believe our election system is a fraud as will be lost to Republican shenanigans.
Dei,
If you think the fact that Republicans are marginally less likely than Democrats to agree to answer exit polls is really one of the worst things wrong with this country, you have some pretty bizarre priorities.
marblex,
So why were the exit polls in 1992 just as far off as the exit polls in 2004? And why do exit polls not tend to produce at all reliable results in much of Europe?
Oh, and thanks for doing your part to suppress the vote.
Serious election fraud can be spotted by exit poll results, because serious election fraud doesn’t involve pushing the results by 0.5%. If the exit polls had showed Kerry winning by 10% and the results had shown him losing by 20%, then the exit polls would be telling you something. When you are trying to spot small election fraud (for which there is no evidence here, Ohio elections definitely were honest, although they weren’t prefectly fair or perfectly free), exit polls aren’t going to help you.
Or maybe there’s no reason to vote because only Democrats whose policies can barely be distinguished from those of Bush ever seem to be in the top slot. Or maybe there’s no reason to vote because Democrats who get themselves in a rage when Democratic votes are meddled with don’t seem to make a peep when 3rd Party voters already struggling in an ever more inhospitable system find their votes meddled with by Democrats, etc. and so forth.
In short, who cares ? This system and the environment it thrives in have way bigger problems than one or two supposedly rigged elections between a pair of warmongering, duplicitous, entrenched, corporate-owned, rich White male shitheels who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves and their equally rich cronies. Get back to me when we finally see our way clear to doing something about that.
Yeah, see, that I buy.
Like I said, talk about (or even try to do something about) the real problems, not some fantasy of paranoia involving exit polls.
Yes, Charles, analogies suck. They seem to be unavoidable, but they still suck. As does Dei’s.
I agree w/ you about the manufacturing of voting equipment – no reason not to have it done by private companies. As for vote counting… no private entity should be involved in either the counting or the creation of proprietary software for the counting. “Bipartisan”? How about non-partisan or multi-partisan? Bipartisan cedes the whole system to two parties that don’t give a shit about any of us.
I also agree that talk of “Republicans stealing the election” can be distracting. But I think that a real example from within our lifetimes can also be an aid to the discussion if it gets us talking about campaign finance reform (the single most important issue, IMO), structure, methodology, etc. Although I seem to be the only one who believes that “vote by mail only” is a very, very bad thing and, in the long run, will not reverse the trend of fewer and fewer people voting.
What leads me to the possibility that there is no point in voting is when I have no way of knowing whether the declared winner really won or not. But the idea that there is no point in voting is far from new. I love the button that reads, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them.” For most folks who don’t vote, there seem to be two prevalent reasons. First, that they have no interest & don’t care. Second that nobody that they can vote for is actually going to do anything for them or do anything that is really important to them.
Personally, I vote in every election because there is a(n ever fainter) possibility that my vote may actually mean something. At worst, it’s a waste of a couple of minutes.
Thom Hartmann referring presumably to the Salon article:
“The Republican rebuttals/attacks have already begun, starting with a particularly tragic hit-piece in one of the higher-profile “online magazines” that claims to authoritatively quote so-called but unnamed “experts” who doubt Kennedy’s sources, and takes a clip of Ohio law so out of context as to essentially reverse its meaning in support of the Republican talking points….
Kennedy’s article is an in-depth, on-the-ground report from Ohio about the 2004 election. In it, he acknowledges that he is building on the work of many who preceded him – this was a story not particularly difficult to uncover, even though the mainstream media has chosen to ignore it. Seminal investigations were done by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus, Ohio Free Press, and by Michigan Congressman John Conyers, who held hearings in Ohio that resulted in a summary report now available in book form titled What Went Wrong In Ohio (all referenced by Kennedy)….
Kennedy, however, has a name and reputation that demands instant recognition in the mainstream American media. And he didn’t just recycle the work of those who preceded him – he went to Ohio, talked with elections officials, looked over records, investigated the investigators, and only included in his story those facts he felt were sufficiently solid that they could, as he told me, “convince a jury.” In fact, he is calling for criminal investigations into his evidence, for indictments of culpable Republican officials, and jury trials….
So far, it seems that the mainstream media is going to pass on doing any of their own first-source reporting, while Kenneth Blackwell begins the process of destroying evidence, which he’ll be legally authorized to do in the next few months.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0604-20.htm
Jake Squid wrote:
Yes, but soon that won’t be enough to slake your thirst for waste. It’ll take volunteering for the candidate before you can truly understand the joys of waste and futility. Quit now, while it’s still easy. :p
Been there, done that. But my point is that voting doesn’t entail wasted months & dashed emotional health. (Then again, neither does working for a candidate that nobody has ever heard of – in fact, you feel damned good when they get 12 to 17 percent of the vote)
14% !!! [preens] Plus, I get to keep the lawn sign !!!
Maybe we could make voting more glamourous to the great unwashed if we marketed it as a gateway drug.
Charles,
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the ‘lying’ Americans. Generally, exit polls are used as a gauge of how fair an election is: if you ask a representative proportion of people who they voted for, there should be a correspondance between it and the final outcome. If there is a large and systematic variation, then there’s a problem. It could be that people are *afraid* to admit that they voted for who they voted for. Why? What kind of serious, systematic voter intimidation is going on here? If there is that intimidation, then that is a serious problem. It could be that the manner of polling that is used to find a representative section to ask is very badly skewed. Given the natural interest in and how much is at stake, one would expect that the polling process will be the best that’s on offer. If that is systematically at serious fault, then there’s a problem too — polls are used extensively to gauge awareness of issues, highlight problems, inform policy. If the best they can do is produce crap then the not-best they can do… Or, someone could be tampering with the voting process. Which, unfortunately, is a long way from far-fetched.
You think that pointing to the problems of 1992 refutes my argument but you prove my point brilliantly. You identify just why it’s a very big problem: stealing destroys the basis of legitimate governance, no matter who is doing it. It is true that currently, the Republicans have by far the bigger and more systematic way of doing it (I’m wondering if you’re not going to be stuck with Republican presidents for a long, long time to come now), but no, it’s not just them AND IT IS WRONG. Got that? It doesn’t become right or matter less if it’s Democrats doing it. It destroys the basis of a democratic government and ultimately it sows the seeds of real discord. It’s not a case of just making noise when the result is at variance with what one desires. Voting irregularities should have been exposed, investigated and resolved many years ago. They weren’t. What’s different about 2004 (or ought to be) is that it is too obvious to ignore and it should no longer be.
Unfortunately, I will be very surprised (pleasantly surprised but still) if there is any systematic movement to get the election process reformed so that it is transparent. Which it really should be, in any case. It’s not the case that politicians are inherently criminal. What is true is that they are ambitious people playing for what is for them a big prize (at whatever level of government you may be talking about). If there is a way for them to make that bit more sure it goes their way, they will. It is entirely natural and entirely unacceptable. There’s no foolproof election system, but there are systems whereby the process is too open and too scrutinised to make gaming it worthwhile. I could almost lay good money on the line that such a system won’t be in place in the U.S.A. in 2008 but it’d feel like I’d be robbing anyone who took me on.
Dei,
Umm, the exit polls favored Clinton in 1992, just like they favored Kerry in 2004.
You do understand that if the exit polls showed something meaningful, it would be a nation-wide system of small scale (a 1% or so everywhere) vote fraud (not just the sort of shenanigans we saw in Ohio, New Mexico, Wisconsin (?) and Florida), that happened in states where the elections were run by Democrats as well as Republicans, that happened in states no matter whether they used Diebold systems, opti-scans, or pencil and paper ballots, and that no one noticed any sign of anywhere?
That is what you are claiming happened, both in 2004 and 1992, both times in the Republicans favor.
And you are confident that such a vast secret conspiracy is more likely than that a survey with significant procedural problems (misses the last hour of voting, has to be done at a significant distance from the polling place, by only slightly trained surveyers, with a relatively small sample of polling places, and a relatively small sample of voters) sometimes systematically misses its target by 1.5%.
Is that really what you mean to be claiming, or do you just not understand what it is that you are claiming?
I worked just about every major election cycle (presidential and midterm) from 1980 until 1994.
Then I became even more jaded and cynical and gave up completely. I don’t think the system is broken, I think it’s like the rest of what’s wrong with life in America — elections, candidates and issues have become packaged and sold.