[A-List] None Dare Call It Stolen

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ohio, the election, and America's servile press

By Mark Crispin Miller

Harper's Magazine (August 2005)

Whichever candidate you voted for (or think you voted for), or even if you did
not vote (or could not vote), you must admit that last year's presidential race
was - if nothing else - pretty interesting. True, the press has dropped the
subject, and the Democrats, with very few exceptions, have "moved on". Yet this
contest may have been the most unusual in US history; it was certainly among
those with the strangest outcomes. You may remember being surprised yourself.
The infamously factious Democrats were fiercely unified - Ralph Nader garnered
only about 0.38 percent of the national vote - while the Republicans were split,
with a vocal anti-Bush front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr of
Georgia; Ike's son John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan's chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, William J Crowe Jr; former Air Force Chief of Staff and onetime
"Veteran for Bush" General Merrill "Tony" McPeak; founding neo-con Francis
Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various large alliances of
military officers, diplomats, and business professors. The American Conservative,
co-founded by Pat Buchanan, endorsed five candidates for president, including
both Bush and Kerry, while the Financial Times and The Economist came out for
Kerry alone. At least fifty-nine daily newspapers that backed Bush in the
previous election endorsed Kerry (or no one) in this election. The national
turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept
the ruling party from the White House. And on Election Day, twenty-six state
exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry, a statistical failure so
colossal and unprecedented that the odds against its happening, according to a
report last May by the National Election Data Archive Project, were 16.5 million
to 1. Yet this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united
liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself - this
president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

How did he do it? To that most important question the commentariat, briskly
prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith - a silent
majority heretofore unmoved by any other politician - had poured forth by the
millions to vote "Yes!" for Jesus' buddy in the White House. Bush's 51 percent,
according to this thesis, were roused primarily by "family values". Tony Perkins,
president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage "the hood ornament
on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term". The
pundits eagerly pronounced their amens - "Moral values", Tucker Carlson said on
CNN, "drove President Bush and other Republican candidates to victory this week"
- although it is not clear why. The primary evidence of our Great Awakening was
a post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in which 27 percent of the
respondents, when asked which issue "mattered most" to them in the election,
selected something called "moral values". This slight plurality of impulse
becomes still less impressive when we note that, as the pollsters went to great
pains to make clear, "the relative importance of moral values depends greatly on
how the question is framed". In fact, when voters were asked to "name in their
own words the most important factor in their vote", only fourteen percent
managed to come up with "moral values". Strangely, this detail went little
mentioned in the post-electoral commentary. {1}


THE PRESS HAS HAD LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT MOST OF THE STRANGE DETAILS OF THE
ELECTION - EXCEPT, THAT IS, TO RIDICULE ALL EFFORTS TO DISCUSS THEM. YET THE
EVIDENCE THAT SOMETHING WENT EXTREMELY WRONG LAST FALL IS COPIOUS


The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the
election - except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them. This animus
appeared soon after November 2, in a spate of caustic articles dismissing any
critical discussion of the outcome as crazed speculation: "Election paranoia
surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged", chuckled the Baltimore Sun
on November 5. "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed", proclaimed the Boston
Globe on November 10. "Latest Conspiracy Theory - Kerry Won - Hits the Ether",
the Washington Post chortled on November 11. The New York Times weighed in with
"Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" - making mock not
only of the "post-election theorizing" but of cyberspace itself, the fons et
origo of all such loony tunes, according to the Times.

Such was the news that most Americans received. Although the tone was scientific,
"realistic", skeptical, and "middle-of-the-road", the explanations offered by
the press were weak and immaterial. It was as if they were reporting from inside
a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that
there was no fire. {2} Since Kerry has conceded, they argued, and since "no
smoking gun" had come to light, there was no story to report. This is an oddly
passive argument. Even so, the evidence that something went extremely wrong last
fall is copious, and not hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit
by local papers and haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the
evidence is lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for the
last half-year, has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is a
veritable arsenal of "smoking guns" - and yet its findings may be less
extraordinary than the fact that no one in this country seems to care about them.


On January 5, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on
the House Judiciary Committee, released Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in
Ohio. The report was the result of a five-week investigation by the committee's
Democrats, who reviewed thousands of complaints of fraud, malfeasance, or
incompetence surrounding the election in Ohio, and further thousands of
complaints that poured in by phone and email as word of the inquiry spread. The
congressional researchers were assisted by volunteers in Ohio who held public
hearings in Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati, and questioned more
than two hundred witnesses. (Although they were invited, Republicans chose not
to join in the inquiry.) {3}

Preserving Democracy describes three phases of Republican chicanery: the run-up
to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up. The wrongs
exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney also went in heavily for
those) but specific violations of the US and Ohio constitutions, the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act,
and the Help America Vote Act. Although Conyers trod carefully when the report
came out, insisting that the crimes did not affect the outcome of the race (a
point he had to make, he told me, "just to get a hearing"), his report does
"raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said that the Ohio electors
selected on December 13 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law,
let alone Federal requirements and constitutional standards". The report cites
"massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies" throughout the
state - wrongs, moreover, that were hardly random accidents. "In many cases",
the report says, "these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and
illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J Kenneth Blackwell,
the cochair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio". {4}

The first phase of malfeasance entailed, among many other actions, several
months of bureaucratic hijinks aimed at disenfranchising Democrats, the most
spectacular result of which was "a wide discrepancy between the availability of
voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more
Republican, suburban and exurban areas". Such unequal placement had the
predictable effect of slowing the voting process to a crawl at Democratic polls,
while making matters quick and easy in Bush country: a clever way to cancel out
the Democrats' immense success at registering new voters in Ohio. (We cannot
know the precise number of new voters registered in Ohio by either party because
many states, including Ohio, do not register voters by party affiliation. The
New York Times reported in September, however, that new registration rose 25
percent in Ohio's predominantly Republican precincts and 250 percent in Ohio's
predominantly Democratic precincts.)

At Kenyon College in Gambier, for instance, there were only two machines for
1,300 would-be voters, even though "a surge of late registrations promised a
record vote". Gambier residents and Kenyon students had to stand in line for
hours, in the rain and in "crowded, narrow hallways", with some of them
inevitably forced to call it quits. "In contrast, at nearby Mt Vernon Nazarene
University, which is considered more Republican leaning, there were ample
waiting machines and no lines". This was not a consequence of limited resources.
In Franklin County alone, as voters stood for hours throughout Columbus and
elsewhere, at least 125 machines collected dust in storage. The county's
election officials had "decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though the
analysis showed that the county needs 5,000 machines".

It seemed at times that Ohio's secretary of state was determined to try every
stunt short of levying a poll tax to suppress new voter turnout. On September 7,
based on an overzealous reading of an obscure state bylaw, he ordered county
boards of elections to reject all Ohio voter-registration forms not "printed on
white, uncoated paper of not less than eighty pound text weight". Under public
pressure he reversed the order three weeks later, by which time unknown numbers
of Ohioans had been disenfranchised. Blackwell also attempted to limit access to
provisional ballots. The Help America Vote Act - passed in 2002 to address some
of the problems of the 2000 election - prevents election officials from deciding
at the polls who will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, as earlier Ohio
law had permitted. On September 16, Blackwell issued a directive that somehow
failed to note that change. A federal judge ordered him to revise the language,
Blackwell resisted, and the court was forced to draft its own version of the
directive, which it ordered Blackwell to accept, even as it noted Blackwell's
"vigorous, indeed, at times, obdurate opposition" to compliance with the law.

Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more
Democratic voters through a technique known as "caging". The party sent
registered letters to new voters, "then sought to challenge 35,000 individuals
who refused to sign for the letters", including "voters who were homeless,
serving abroad, or simply did not want to sign for something concerning the
Republican Party". It should be noted that marketers have long used zip codes to
tafget, with remarkable precision, the ethnic makeup of specific neighborhoods,
and also that, according to exit polls last year, 84 percent of those black
citizens who voted in Ohio voted for Kerry. {5}

The second phase of lawlessness began the Monday before the election, when
Blackwell issued two directives restricting media coverage of the election.
First, reporters were to be barred from the polls, because their presence
contravened Ohio's law on "loitering" near voting places. Second, media
representatives conducting exit polls were to remain 100 feet away from the
polls. Blackwell's reasoning here was that, with voter turnout estimated at 73
percent, and with many new voters so blissfully ignorant as to have "never
looked at a voting machine before", his duty was clear: the public was to be
protected from the "interference or intimidation" caused by "intense media
scrutiny". Both cases were at once struck down in federal court on First
Amendment grounds.

Blackwell did manage to ban reporters from a post-election ballot-counting site
in Warren County because - election officials claimed - the FBI had warned of an
impending terrorist attack there. The FBI said it issued no such warning,
however, and the officials refused to name the agent who alerted them. Moreover,
as the Cincinnati Enquirer later reported, email correspondence between election
officials and the county's building services director indicated that lockdown
plans - "down to the wording of the signs that would be posted on the locked
doors" - had been in the works for at least a week. Beyond suggesting that
officials had something to hide, the ban was also, according to the report, a
violation of Ohio law and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Contrary to a prior understanding, Blackwell also kept foreign monitors away
from the Ohio polls. Having been formally invited by the State Department on
June 9, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
an international consortium based in Vienna, had come to witness and report on
the election. The mission's two-man teams had been approved to monitor the
process in eleven states - but the observers in Ohio were prevented from
watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in
some cases, the election itself. "We thought we could be at the polling places
before, during, and after" the voting, said Soren Sondergaard, a Danish member
of the team. Denied admission to polls in Columbus, he and his partner went to
Blackwell, who refused them letters of approval, again citing Ohio law banning
"loitering" outside the polls. The two observers therefore had to "monitor" the
voting at a distance of 100 feet from each polling place. Although not
technically illegal, Blackwell's refusal was improper and, of course, suspicious.
(The Conyers report does not deal with this episode.)

To what end would election officials risk so malodorous an action? We can only
guess, of course. We do know, however, that Ohio, like the nation, was the site
of numerous statistical anomalies - so many that the number is itself
statistically anomalous, since every single one of them took votes from Kerry.
In Butler County the Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court took in 5,347
more votes than Kerry did. In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland precincts "reported
an incredibly high number of votes for third party candidates who have
historically received only a handful of votes from these urban areas" - mystery
votes that would mostly otherwise have gone to Kerry. In Franklin County, Bush
received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer, and, in Miami County, just
over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush's column after all precincts had reported. In
Perry County the number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered
voters, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown,
perhaps to make up the difference, reported negative 25 million votes.

In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County - both Democratic strongholds - the
arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective
punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast, as in West Palm Beach back in
2000. In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president - representing nearly
seven percent of the electorate - mysteriously dropped out of the final count.
The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting
the county's election director to admit that prior tests of the machines had
failed. One polling place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines
were locked up somewhere and no one had the key. In Hamilton County many
absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because county
workers, in taking Ralph Nader's name off many ballots, also happened to remove
John Kerry's name. The Washington Post reported that in Mahoning County "25
electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush
column", but it did not think to ask why.

Ohio Democrats also were heavily thwarted through dirty tricks recalling Richard
Nixon's reign and the systematic bullying of Dixie. There were "literally
thousands upon thousands" of such incidents, the Conyers report notes,
cataloguing only the grossest cases. Voters were told, falsely, that their
polling place had changed; the news was conveyed by phone calls, "door-hangers",
and even party workers going door to door. There were phone calls and fake
"voter bulletins" instructing Democrats that they were not to cast their votes
until Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day. Unknown "volunteers" in
Cleveland showed up at the homes of Democrats, kindly offering to "deliver"
completed absentee ballots to the election office. And at several polling places,
election personnel or hired goons bused in to do the job "challenged" voters -
black voters in particular - to produce documents confirming their eligibility
to vote. The report notes one especially striking incident:

In Franklin County, a worker at a Holiday Inn ob served a team of 25 people who
called themselves the "Texas Strike Force" using payphones to make intimidating
calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system. The
"Texas Strike Force" paid their way to Ohio, but their hotel accommodations were
paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the street.
The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a likely voter with being reported to
the FBI and returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the
police, who came but did nothing.


THE WASHINGTON POST REPORTED THAT IN OHIO'S MAHONING COUNTY "25 ELECTRONIC
MACHINES TRANSFERRED AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF KERRY VOTES TO THE BUSH COLUMN", BUT
IT DID NOT THINK TO ASK WHY


The electoral fraud continued past Election Day, but by means far more complex
and less apparent than the bullying that marked the day itself. Here the aim was
to protect the spoils, which required the prevention of countywide hand recounts
by any means necessary. The procedure for recounts is quite clear. In fact, it
was created by Blackwell. A recount having been approved, each of the state's
eighty-eight counties must select a number of precincts randomly, so that the
total of their ballots comesto three percent (at least) of the county's total
vote. Those ballots must then be simultaneously hand counted and machine counted.
If the hand count and the new machine count match, the remaining 97 percent of
the selected ballots may be counted by machine. If, however, the totals vary by
as little as a single vote, all the other votes must be hand counted, and the
results, once reconfirmed, must be accepted as the new official total.

The Ohio recount officially started on December 13 - five days after Conyers's
hearings opened - and was scheduled to go on until December 28. Because the
recount (such as it was) coincided with the inquiry, Conyers was able to
discover, and reveal in his report, several instances of what seemed to be
electoral fraud.

On December 13, for instance, Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for
Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that operates the
tabulating machine had been "modified" by one Michael Barbian Jr, an employee of
Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county's voting machinery.

Ms Eaton witnessed Mr Barbian modify the Hocking County computer vote tabulator
before the announcement of the Ohio recount. She further witnessed Barbian, upon
the announcement that the Hocking County precinct was planned to be the subject
of the initial Ohio test recount, make further alterations based on his
knowledge of the situation. She also has firsthand knowledge that Barbian
advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that
[the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count. {6}


ACCORDING TO HOUSE REPUBLICANS, IT WAS THE DEMOCRATS WHO WERE THE CYNICAL
MANIPULATORS, SPINNING "FANTASIES" AND "CONSPIRACY THEORIES" TO "PLANT THE
INSIDIOUS SEEDS OF DOUBT IN THE ELECTORAL PROCESS"


The committee also learned that Triad similarly intervened in at least two other
counties. In a filmed interview, Barbian said that he had examined machines not
only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and
Guernsey counties; his purpose was to provide the Board of Elections with as
much information as possible - "The more information you give someone", he said,
"the better job they can do". The report concludes that such information as
Barbian and his colleagues could provide was helpful indeed:

Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad
employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course
of behavior to provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots. The cheat
sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how
many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In
that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by
state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law -
to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and
effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount.


The report notes Triad's role in several other cases. In Union County the hard
drive on one tabulator was replaced after the election. (The old one had to be
subpoenaed.) In Monroe County, after the three percent hand count had twice
failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and
took away the old one. (That machine's count matched the hand count.) Such
operations are especially worrying in light of the fact that Triad's founder,
Brett A Rapp, "has been a consistent contributor to Republican causes". (Neither
Barbian nor Rapp would respond to Harper's queries, and the operator at Triad
refused even to provide the name of a press liaison.)

There were many cases of malfeasance, however, in which Triad played no role.
Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers, led by Green Party recount
manager Lynne Serpe, monitored the count throughout Ohio. {7} They reported
that: In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina
counties, the precincts for the three percent hand recount were preselected, not
picked at random, as the law requires. In Fairfield County the three percent
hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the machine count - but despite
protests from observers, officials did not then perform a hand recount of all
the ballots, as the law requires. In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were
marked or altered, apparently to ensure that the hand recount would equal the
machine count. In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were
improperly unsealed or stored. Belmont County "hired an independent programmer
('at great expense') to reprogram the counting machines so that they would only
count votes for President during the recount". Finally, Democratic and/or Green
observers were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or were
not allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam, Allen,
Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan counties. In short,
the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as required by Ohio law.

That is what the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee found, that
is what they distributed to everyone in Congress, and that is what any member of
the national press could have reported at any time in the last half year.
Conyers may or may not have precisely captured every single dirty trick. The
combined votes gained by the Republicans through such devices may or may not
have decided the election. (Bush won Ohio by 118,601 votes.) Indeed, if you
could somehow look into the heart of every eligible voter in the United States
to know his or her truest wishes, you might discover that Bush/Cheney was indeed
the people's choice. But you have to admit - the report is pretty interesting.

In fact, its release was timed for maximum publicity. According to the United
States Code (Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15), the President of the Senate - that
is, the US Vice President - must announce each state's electoral results, then
"call for objections". Objections must be made in writing and "signed by at
least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives". A challenge
having been submitted, the joint proceedings must then be suspended so that both
houses can retire to their respective chambers to decide the question, after
which they reconvene and either certify or reject the vote.

Thus was an unprecedented civic drama looming on the day that Conyers's report
appeared. First of all, electoral votes had been contested in the Congress only
twice. In 1877 the electoral votes of several states were challenged, some by
Democrats supporting Samuel Tilden, others by Republicans supporting Rutherford
B Hayes. In 1969, Republicans challenged the North Carolina vote when Lloyd W
Bailey, a "faithless elector" pledged to Richard Nixon for that state, voted for
George Wallace. {8} And a new challenge would be more than just "historic".
Because of what had happened - or not happened - four years earlier, it would
also be extraordinarily suspenseful. On January 6 2001, House Democrats,
galvanized by the electoral larceny in Florida, tried and failed to challenge
the results. Their effort was aborted by the failure of a single Democratic
senator to join them, as the law requires. Al Gore - still vice president, and
therefore still the Senate's president - had urged Democrats to make no such
unseemly waves but to respect Bush's installation for the sake of national unity.
Now, it seemed, that partisan disgrace would be redressed, at least
symbolically; for a new challenge from the House, by Representative Stephanie
Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, would be co-signed by Barbara Boxer, Democratic senator
from California, who, at a noon press conference on January 6, heightened the
suspense by tearfully acknowledging her prior wrong: "Four years ago I didn't
intervene. I was asked by Al Gore not to do so and I didn't do so. Frankly,
looking back on it, I wish I had".

It was a story perfect for TV - a rare event, like the return of Halley's comet;
a scene of high contention in the nation's capital; a heroine resolved to make
things right, both for the public and herself. Such big news would highlight
Conyers's report, whose findings, having spurred the challenge in the first
place, would now inform the great congressional debate on the election in Ohio.

As you may recall, this didn't happen - the challenge was rejected by a vote of
267-31 in the House and 74-1 in the Senate. The Boston Globe gave the report 118
words (page 3); the Los Angeles Times, 60 words (page 18). It made no news in
the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, or US News & World Report.
It made no news on CBS, NBC, ABC, or PBS. Nor did NPR report it (though Talk of
the Nation dealt with it on January 6). CNN did not report it, though Donna
Brazile pointedly affirmed its copious "evidence" on Inside Politics on January
6. (Judy Woodruff failed to pause for an elaboration.) Also on that date, the
Fox News Channel briefly showed Conyers himself discussing "irregularities" in
Franklin County, though it did not mention the report. He was followed by Tom
DeLay, who assailed the Democrats for their "assault against the institutions of
our representative democracy". The New York Times negated both the challenge and
the document in a brief item headlined "Election Results to Be Certified, with
Little Fuss from Kerry", which ran on page 16 and ended with this quote from
Dennis Hastert's office, vis-a-vis the Democrats: "They are really just trying
to stir up their loony left".

Indeed, according to the House Republicans, it was the Democrats who were the
troublemakers and cynical manipulators - spinning "fantasies" and "conspiracy
theories" to "distract" the people, "poison the atmosphere of the House of
Representatives" (Dave Hobson, R, Ohio), and "undermine the prospect of
democracy" (David Dreier, R, California); mounting "a direct attack to undermine
our democracy" (Tom DeLay, R, Texas), "an assault against the institutions of
our representative democracy" (DeLay); trying "to plant the insidious seeds of
doubt in the electoral process" (J D Hayworth, R, Arizona); and in so doing
following "their party's primary strategy: to obstruct, to divide and to destroy"
(Deborah D Pryce, R, Ohio).

Furthermore, the argument went, there was no evidence of electoral fraud. The
Democrats were using "baseless and meritless tactics" (Pryce) to present their
"so-called evidence" (Bob Ney, R, Ohio), "making allegations that have no basis
of fact" (Candice Miller, R, Michigan), making claims for which "there is no
evidence whatsoever, no evidence whatsoever" (Dreier). "There is absolutely no
credible basis to question the outcome of the election" (Rob Portman, R, Ohio).
"No proven allegations of fraud. No reports of widespread wrongdoing. It was, at
the end of the day, an honest election" (Bill Shuster, R, Pennsylvania). And so
on. Bush won Ohio by "an overwhelming and comfortable margin", Representative
Pryce insisted, while Ric Keller (R, Florida) said that Bush won by "an
overwhelmingly comfortable margin". ("The president's margin is significant",
observed Roy Blunt, R, Missouri). In short, as Tom DeLay put it, "no such voter
disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004 - and, for that matter, the
election of 2000. Everybody knows it. The voters know it, the candidates know it,
the courts know it, and the evidence proves it."

That all this commentary was simply wrong went unnoticed and/or unreported. Once
Bush was re-inaugurated, all inquiries were apparently concluded, and the story
was officially kaput. By March talk of fraud was calling forth the same
reflexive ridicule that had prevailed back in November - but only now and then,
on those rare moments when somebody dared bring it up: "Also tonight", CNN's Lou
Dobbs deadpanned ironically on March 8, "Teresa Heinz Kerry still can't accept
certain reality. She suggests the presidential election may have been rigged!"
And when, on March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its
study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news
only in the Akron Beacon-Journal. {9} The article included this response from
Carlo LoParo, Kenneth Blackwell's spokesman: "What are you going to do except
laugh at it?"

In the summer of 2003, Representative Peter King (R, New York) was interviewed
by Alexandra Pelosi at a barbecue on the White House lawn for her HBO
documentary Diary of a Political Tourist. "It's already over. The election's
over. We won", King exulted more than a year before the election. When asked by
Pelosi - the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi - how he knew that
Bush would win, he answered, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take
care of the counting."

King, who is well known in Washington for his eccentric utterances, says he was
kidding, that he has known Pelosi for years, that she is "a clown", and that her
project was a "spoof". Still, he said it. And laughter, despite the counsel of
Kenneth Blackwell's press flack, seems an inappropriate response to the prospect
of a stolen election - as does the advice that we "get over it". The point of
the Conyers report, and of this report as well, is not to send Bush packing and
put Kerry in his place. The Framers could no more conceive of electoral fraud on
such a scale than they could picture Fox News Channel or the Pentagon; and so we
have no constitutional recourse, should it be proven, finally, that the wrong
guy "won". The point of our revisiting the last election, rather, is to see
exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate reforms.
Those who say we should "move on" from that suspicious race and work instead on
"bigger issues" - like electoral reform - are urging the impossible; for there
has never been a great reform that was not driven by some major scandal.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization",
Thomas Jefferson said, "it expects what never was and never will be". That
much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since "the news"
has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove's fevered dreams. Just as 2+2=5
in Orwell's Oceania, so here today the United States just won two brilliant
military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in a democracy
(like the Iraqis), and last year's presidential race "was, at the end of the day,
an honest election". Such claims, presented as the truth, are nothing but
faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that one chooses to be
homosexual, that condoms don't prevent the spread of HIV, and that the universe
was made 6,000 years ago.

In this nation's epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and democracy, the
press has unilaterally disarmed - and therefore many good Americans, both
liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise of self-government.
That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if we face it, and endeavor
to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This democracy can survive a plot to
hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or
unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.


Notes

{1} Another poll, by Zogby International, showed that 33 percent of voters
deemed "greed and materialism" the most pressing moral problems in America. Only
twelve percent of those polled cited gay marriage.

{2} Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, stood out as an heroic exception, devoting many
segments of his nightly program Countdown to the myriad signs of electoral
mischief, particularly in Ohio.

{3} The full report can be downloaded from the judiciary Committee's website at
www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf and is also, as of May,
available as a trade paperback, entitled What Went Wrong in Ohio. I should note
here that, in a victory for family values, the publishers of that paperback are
my parents, Jordan and Anita Miller.

{4} When contacted by Harper's Magazine, Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo
dismissed Conyers's report as a partisan attack. "Why wasn't it more than an
hour's story?" he asked, referring to the lack of media interest in the report.
"Everybody can't be wrong, can they?"

{5} Let it not be said that the Democrats rose wholly above the electoral fray:
in Defiance County , Ohio, one Chad Staton was arrested on 130 counts of vote
fraud when he submitted voter-registration forms purportedly signed by, among
others, Dick Tracy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Michael Jackson, and Mary Poppins. Of course,
depending on party affiliation, the consequence of election misdeeds varies.
Staton, who told police he was paid in crack for each registration, received,
fifty-four months in jail for his fifth-degree felonies; Blackwell, for his part,
is now the GOP front-runner for governor of Ohio.

{6} In May 2005, Eaton was ordered by the Hocking County Board of Elections to
resign from her position.

{7} The recount itself was the result of a joint application from the Green and
Libertarian parties.

{8} Offended by the president-elect's first cabinet appointments (Henry
Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et al), Bailey was protesting Nixon's
liberalism.

{9} On the other hand, the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been
reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA
Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and
ABC (which devoted a Nightline segment to the "conspiracy theory" that the exit
polls had been correct).


Mark Crispin Miller is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon (W W Norton, 2002) and,
most recently, Cruel and Unusual (W W Norton, 2004). His next book, Fooled Again,
will be published this fall by Basic Books.


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/