HIGHLY IRREGULAR 
The Ohio election story is going to come back. 

By Matt Taibbi
July 27, 2005

I was in Washington last week, covering a story in Congress, when a friend invited me to a panel discussion in the basement of the Capitol building. I agreed before he told me what the subject was. Boy was I bummed when I saw the title on the e-circular:

What went wrong in Ohio? A Harper's Magazine Forum on Voting Irregularities in the 2004 Election.

Oh, Christ, not that, I thought. Like a lot of people in this country (and like most all of my colleagues in the journalism world), my instinctual reaction to the Ohio electoral-mess story has always been one of revulsion and irritation. Almost on principle I had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote; there is a part of me that did not want to be associated with any sore-loser hysteria of the political margins, and in particular with this story, the great conspiratorial Snuffleupagus of the defeated left.

It had always seemed to me that I understood the psychology of the Ohio story without having to examine the facts involved. I thought the story appealed most directly to a group of people who were still reeling after 2000, an election which George W. Bush not only lost according to the popular vote, but plainly stole in the electoral college. The evidence for this theft has been there for everyone to see for five years now; few serious thinkers even dispute the matter anymore, just as few Democrats would even bother denying now that John Kennedy stole the 1960 election.

Yet, Bush remains president. And not only has he remained president, he hasn't even had the decency to act embarrassed about it. He's remained president right out in the open, in front of our faces, like he's proud of that s__t.

For a certain segment of the population, this state of affairs must have been psychologically unacceptable. Somewhere deep inside, they must have been clinging to the absurd notion that if the president is caught stealing an election, he is to be automatically removed from office, and perhaps even jailed. And so they nursed this notion in their breasts through 2000, and then—just like that, like the hansom magically appearing at Cinderella's door—the Ohio story fell in their laps. Ohio, it always seemed to me, was a wish their hearts made.

That in itself didn't make the Ohio story illegitimate. It did, however, make it something I wanted to avoid precisely because I disliked George Bush. On some level I suspected that the more publicity the Ohio mess got, the more discredited Bush's political opponents would be in the end. The media, I knew, would dismiss the Ohio story in exactly the casually vicious manner described above—as hysteria, as the delusional work of professional conspiracy theorists, as the behavior of sore losers unable to accept George Bush's clear popular victory.

That last part, incidentally, was the formulation most journalists used when picking their official excuse for ignoring the '04 Ohio story. Because Bush really did win the popular vote, they argued, there was no point in investigating a possible electoral fraud in Ohio, because no one had really been cheated out of office.

That idea allowed the media simply sidestep the entire issue, and escape having to make a pronouncement about the legitimacy of the Ohio elections—something they seemed hell bent on avoiding.

Even when they had a completely plausible excuse to at least investigate the Ohio charges on their own—after Michigan congressman John Conyers issued a lengthy report detailing the Ohio indiscretions—the big dailies still blew off the case. The New York Times mentioned the Conyers report only in the context of a 381-word page A16 item in January about John Kerry endorsing the election results ("Election Results to Be Certified, With Little Fuss From Kerry," 1/16/05). That piece ended with a quote by Dennis Hastert, who dismissed the Conyers report as the work of the "loony left."

I can only speak for myself, but I think that as a result of all of this, I was inclined to dismiss as a waste of time any discussion of what happened in Ohio. The story wasn't going anywhere. Even if there was evidence of wrongdoing, how could it possibly be more incontrovertible than the evidence in Florida? And given that nothing happened when Bush stole the election in front of the entire world in Florida, why bother making a fuss now in Ohio—especially since John Kerry was clearly many millions of votes less of a victim than Al Gore?

Well, I don't think that way anymore. After attending this panel, and speaking to the congressmen involved in the preparation of the Conyers report (in particular Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a former Ohio secretary of state) I'm convinced that Ohio was a far more brazen and frightening subversion of democracy than Florida.

Here's the thing about Ohio. Until you really look at it, you won't understand its significance, which is this: the techniques used in this particular theft have the capacity to alter elections not by dozens or hundreds or even thousands of votes, but by tens of thousands.

And if we ignore this now, we're putting proven methods for easily ripping off major elections in the hands of the same party that had no qualms whatsoever about lying its way into a war in Iraq. In the hands of a merely corrupt political party, a bad election or two would be no big deal. But these clowns we have in power now imagine themselves to be revolutionaries, and their psychology is a lot like that of the leadership of Enron, pre-meltdown—with each passing day that they get away with it, they become more convinced by a delusion of righteousness.

Obviously people who have followed this story before know the basic facts already, but for those who ignored Ohio until now, here's a very brief greatest hits of Ohio irregularities:

• As was the case in Florida, the secretary of state (Kenneth Blackwell, in Ohio), who is in charge of elections, was also the co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign.

• In a technique reminiscent of the semantic gymnastics of pre-Civil Rights Act election officials, Blackwell replaced the word "jurisdiction" with "precinct" in an

electoral directive that would ultimately result in perhaps tens of thousands of provisional ballots—votes cast mainly by low-income residents—being disallowed.

• Blackwell initially rejected thousands of voter registrations because they were printed on paper that was, according to him, the wrong weight.

• In conservative, Bush-friendly Miami County, voter turnout was an Uzbekistan-esque 98.55 percent.

• In Warren county, election officials locked down the administration building and prevented reporters from observing the ballot counting, citing a "terrorist threat" (described as being a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10) that had been reported to them by the FBI. The FBI made no such report. Recounts conducted during this lockdown resulted in increased votes for Bush.

• In Franklin County, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush in a precinct where there were only 800 registered voters.

And so on. There are dozens more such glitches, which taken together suggest that the exit polls in Ohio, showing Kerry the victor, were probably accurate. But this is just a primer. More facts next week, plus an interview with Sherrod Brown—and a guide to what to do next.

ON THE ROPES 
Don't expect much noise from the Democrats over Ohio. 

By Matt Taibbi
Aug 3, 2005
nypress.com
Volume 18, Issue 31

I met Sherrod Brown, the Democratic congressman from Ohio and that state's former secretary of state, at an inconvenient time. It was the last week in July, which meant that Brown, like everyone else in Congress, was busy trying to squeeze every last bit of urgent Washington business in before taking off for August recess.

Moreover, I saw Brown the day before the CAFTA vote, a grueling fiasco that ultimately proved to be a tough 24 hours for everyone with any job connected with Congress. Stories are only now trickling in about Tom Delay, Bill Thomas, Mike Oxley and Jim Kolbe charging down the hallways of the Cannon building shouting threats in all directions, like the Four Horsemen of the Beady-Eyed Apocalypse. Brown, a youngish, gregarious type with a philosophical attitude toward his job and congress in general, was taking one last break before the big nighttime CAFTA square-off; he greeted me at his door in a wrinkled shirt and socks.

I had scheduled an interview with Brown on another subject, but I also wanted to ask about the Ohio electoral scandal, an issue that he's played a significant role in publicizing. Brown, along with fellow Ohio member Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and Michigan Democrat John Conyers, is one of just a handful of congressmen still trying to get the press to take a second look at Ohio. Last week, he didn't sound hopeful.

"The thing is, we're not really free to keep pursuing it," he said. "The reality is that we have too many other things going on. We have more important immediate concerns."

On the eve of the CAFTA vote, Brown sounded like a man who didn't want to use all of his rhetorical bullets on Ohio. When I asked him about Ken Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state who has come under fire for his conduct during the last election, Brown chose to speak in generalities rather than refer to the specific charges laid out in the report issued by his colleague Conyers.

"Some of the things Blackwell did undoubtedly hurt turnout," he said. "And turnout traditionally aids the Democrats. Part of the Secretary of State's job is to get people to vote. I think what we saw with Blackwell was that he never encouraged more people to vote."

I asked him if he thought anyone would ever be able to tie Blackwell's numerous indiscretions to the Bush campaign.

"I doubt it," he said. "I doubt we'll ever know."

Well, s__t, I thought. This is depressing.

I promised in this space last week that I would have an interview with Brown, but I don't want readers to get the wrong idea—the man really was busy, and my meeting with him was rushed, for a variety of reasons. I had also planned to speak with Conyers, but that didn't pan out, either.

But I get the sense that even if I'd had all the time in the world with those few Democrats still on the record as being interested in the Ohio story, they wouldn't have had much to say. The party in general has been so effectively marginalized that its elected officials now seem to be rationing political capital the way men in lifeboats ration rainwater.

The aforementioned Conyers, the leader of the congressional effort to reopen Ohio, is in the middle of a desperate struggle to preserve his relevancy on the House judiciary committee, where he is the ranking Democrat. Last week, while attending a committee hearing, I watched as Conyers struggled repeatedly to get blimp-shaped committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner to recognize him. In the hearing I watched, Conyers and other Democrats (especially our own Jerrold Nadler, who appears to inspire Sensenbrenner's particular loathing) had to shout out "Mr. Chairman!" four, five, or even six times before Sensenbrenner would open the floor for their remarks. In the current Congress, Democrats have to fight just to force the Republicans to respect normal legislative procedure.

Things have gotten so crazy in this Congress, and in this political environment in general, that the Democrats now have to watch their backs 24 hours a day, just to make sure they're not being cheated out of something.

In the abovementioned judiciary committee, there was an incident recently that underscored the problem. During the debate over the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (also known as CIANA; this was a bill designed to prevent minors from traveling across state lines to circumvent parental-notification regulations for abortions in their own states), representative Nadler introduced a series of proposed amendments. But Sensenbrenner, in the official committee report, took it upon himself to rewrite the amendments in his own language. Nadler's amendments had to do with exempting from prosecution certain people (relatives, taxi drivers, etc.) who may have assisted the minors in crossing state lines; Sensenbrenner rewrote them in a way that implies that these people were all sexual predators. An example of the rewrites:

DEMOCRAT VERSION: a Nadler amendment allows an adult who could be prosecuted under the bill to go to a Federal district court and seek a waiver to the state's parental notice laws if this remedy is not available in the state court.

GOP REWRITE: Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have created an additional layer of Federal court review that could be used by sexual predators to escape conviction under the bill.

The bill had nothing to do with sexual predators.

I bring this up because ideology is increasingly not the defining characteristic of this Republican party. What distinguishes this party is its cheating. In CAFTA, in defiance of House rules, they hold the floor open for as long as it takes to get their vote. They not only do this, they proudly announce that they're doing this. In the House, they have made a habit out of disallowing Democratic witnesses, shutting off debate, conveniently miscounting votes and committing brazen acts of slander and libel, like this Sensenbrenner business.

The party routinely refuses compliance with FOIA requests, as well as requests from the Inspector General and the General Accounting Office. It lied and continues to lie outrageously with regard to the Iraq war. It has convinced the country and even themselves that there is something immensely clever, and even principled, about the way that it lies, cheats and bends laws and rules to get what it wants.

In recent years it has been fashionable to compare these current Republicans with the Nazis and other totalitarian monsters. I've tended to resist those comparisons, but we've reached a point where it's looking more and more appropriate to describe the neoconservative attitude toward the rule of law as having many things in common with those other revolutionaries. These neocons may not have the authoritarian bent of the German fascists or the Russian communists. They're far more interested in stealing and deregulating than in controlling, censoring and governing. But it is more and more clear that, like these other notorious movements, they view adherence to rules and to the law as a failure of will and a political weakness.

That is why we in the media need to reexamine the 2004 election. If they really did steal it, we can't just let it slide. Because they'll do it again. And forget about the Democrats being able to do anything about it. They have their own problems.