NYT op ed: Kerry "almost certainly would have won Ohio"
By theyrereal
In the 2004 presidential election, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) "almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots," writes columnist Bob Herbert for Monday's edition of The New York Times. Here are more snippets from the column, which I culled from this link at RawStory.com.
- Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.
- No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush.
- Walter Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University, did a statistical analysis of the vote in Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus. He told Kennedy, "The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans."
- "Mebane told me that he compared the distribution of voting machines in Ohio's 2004 presidential election with the distribution of machines for a primary election held the previous spring. For the primary, he said, "There was no sign of racial bias in the distribution of the machines." But for the general election in November, "there was substantial bias, with fewer voting machines per voter in areas that were heavily African-American."
And in some really shocking news (to me at least), it turns out that poll workers in San Diego County were allowed to keep the Diebold voting machines AT THEIR HOMES before the elections.
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UPDATE: For those who say we need absolute "proof" that votes are stolen electronically, I disagree wholeheartedly. Why would I wait for "proof" that someone stole my valuables from my home IF I LEFT MY FRONT DOOR UNLOCKED WHILE I WENT ON VACATION? After all, maybe I just misplaced them, or maybe I sold them and am committing insurance fraud.
It seems abundantly clear that these machines are simply unacceptable. We cannot accept anything other than the most foolproof methods POSSIBLE to elect our leaders. Otherwise, Democracy itself is a sham.
We do not need proof that past elections were stolen. We only need proof that the machines are NOT acceptable, which we have in abundance.
