Les Jones

Politics > 2004 Election Fraud, Part 1

It's now received knowledge among Democrats that the Republicans stole the election in Ohio. It's common enough for the LA Weekly to casually state that Bush won the presidency "by a disputed nose in Ohio."

Oh, really? The basis of the Ohio claim is that some Democratic-heavy districts had too few machines, and some voters gave up waiting and went home. To summarize: in Democratic districts, presumably with Democratic election officials, there weren't enough machines and the lines were too long, so the Democratic voters went home. And somehow this is the Republicans' fault.

Here's Mark Naymik of the Cleveland Plain Dealer's take on it - Delays at polls weren't a scheme:

Before the Nov. 2 election, the elections board allotted each Cleveland precinct one machine for every 117 registered voters within its boundaries - the same ratio of machines that suburban precincts received.

In other words, the more registered voters a particular precinct had, the more machines it received, regardless of where that precinct was.

And in the end, the busiest precincts - when measured by the number of ballots cast per machine - were actually in the suburbs, not Cleveland, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Meanwhile, what's not being widely reported is indictments against five Democrats from the Kerry-Edwards campaign who slashed tires on Republican get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

The sons of a first-term congresswoman and of Milwaukee's former acting mayor were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with slashing the tires of [25] vans rented by Republicans to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli said the five were paid employees of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) but were not acting on behalf of the campaign or party.

Admittedly, the five Democrats have only been charged, not convicted, and if none are found guilty I'll eat my hat, but I'm guessing my hat is safe. Yet in Ohio, there's not only no conviction, there's no indictment, no charges, and no names, because there's no specifics. Just vague anecdotes about people who got tired of waiting in line.

To recap. In Ohio, where Bush won by a margin of more than 100,000 votes, there's no evidence of shenanigans, just circumstances atrributed to hidden actors and ill intent. Yet in Wisconsin, where Kerry won by about 11,000 votes, there's an indictment against Kerry-Edwards staffers for slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by Republicans to take voters to the polls. But the spin is that the evil Republicans stole the election by disenfranchising Democrats.

That's just the beginning of the shenanigans in Wisconsin. More tomorrow or Friday on the suspicious voting in that state. As always, anyone who thinks that only one party in a national election cheats is just partisan, but right now the substantiated evidence against Democrats is stronger than the substantiated evidence against Republicans.