The Obfuscation Report

"The right to vote is supposed to mean something in the United States. The idea of going to war overseas in the name of the democratic process while making a mockery of that process here at home is just too ludicrous."


By BOB HERBERT

I remember fielding telephone calls on Election Day 2004 from friends
and colleagues anxious to talk about the exit polls, which seemed to
show that John Kerry was beating George W. Bush and would be the next
president.

As the afternoon faded into evening, reports started coming in that the
Bush camp was dispirited, maybe even despondent, and that the Kerry
crowd was set to celebrate. (In an article in the current issue of
Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes, "In London, Prime Minister
Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with
President-elect Kerry.")

I was skeptical.

The election was bound to be close, and I knew that Kerry couldn't win
Florida. I had been monitoring the efforts to suppress Democratic votes
there and had reported on the thuggish practice (by the Jeb Bush
administration) of sending armed state police officers into the homes
of elderly black voters in Orlando to "investigate" allegations of
voter fraud.

As far as I was concerned, Florida was safe for the G.O.P. That left
Ohio.

Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been
anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Mr.
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. Mr. 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.

Mr. Kennedy's article echoed and expanded upon an article in Harper's
("None Dare Call It Stolen," by Mark Crispin Miller) that ran last
summer. Both articles documented ugly, aggressive and frequently
unconscionable efforts by G.O.P. stalwarts to disenfranchise Democrats
in Ohio, especially those in urban and heavily black areas.

The point man for these efforts was the Ohio secretary of state, J.
Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who was both the chief election
official in the state and co-chairman of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign
in Ohio - just as Katherine Harris was the chief election official
and co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida in 2000.

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 Mr. Bush.

For example, the shortages of voting machines and the long lines with
waits of seven hours or more occurred mostly in urban areas and
discouraged untold numbers of mostly Kerry voters.

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 Mr. Kennedy, "The allocation of voting
machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in
precincts with high proportions of African-Americans."

Mr. 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."

Mr. Mebane said he was unable to determine whether the machines were
"intentionally" allocated "to create these biases."

Mr. Kennedy noted that this was just one of an endless sequence of
difficulties confronting Democratic voters that stretched from the
registration process to the post-election recount. Statistical analyses
- not just of the distribution of voting machines, but of wildly
anomalous voting patterns - have left nonpartisan experts shaking
their heads.

The lesson out of Ohio (and Florida before it) is that the integrity of
the election process needs to be more fiercely defended in the face of
outrageous Republican assaults. Democrats, the media and ordinary
voters need to fight back.

The right to vote is supposed to mean something in the United States.
The idea of going to war overseas in the name of the democratic process
while making a mockery of that process here at home is just too
ludicrous.