Herbert : Kerry almost certainly won Ohio

In a new Op-ed for the New York Times, Columnist Bob Herbert puts a dent in the wall of silence that has surrounded Robert F Kennedy Jr. Rolling Stone Article "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" Excerpted by Raw Story.

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.

Herbert correctly points out here that the almost pavlovian response people had to electronic voting machines like Deibold, ES&S or Triad are actually missing the big picture.

The primary goal in the plot described by Kennedy wasn't just to change specific votes (although that does appear to have taken place in certain instances), it was an all out effort to suppress the Democratic vote using a variety of means. First and foremost, knocking eligible voters off the rolls. Voting Machines like Diebold were a very small part of the overall picture.

According to Kennedy's analysis the enourmous number of Democratic voters who were unable to cast their votes just due to long lines (170,000) were enough to change the outcome of the election. But that was far from the only problem.

The lines themselves were caused in many cases by a lack of voting machines in key Democratic districts, particularly those that were heavily African-American. Herbert writes:

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."

The issue of the purging of the rolls has been hotly debated here , here and elsewhere. It's my feeling - based on my own experience as a poll worker for the last several years - that this was step one in the overall plan. Although the law does allow for the purging of inactive voters and those who have moved to a new county, Ohio election officials appear to have implemented specific purges just weeks before the November election specifically in Democratic districts. The plot had three major elements in my opinion.

Step One. Scrub the Rolls.

When someone who fully intends to vote is removed from the rolls, they are given a provisional ballot when they arrive a the polls. Filling out a provisional ballot takes extra time and tends to lengthen the wait time for subsequent voters. Removing a few inactive voters, or voters who've moved shouldn't normally be a problem. But in Ohio it was a big problem.

Congressman John Conyers found the following in his analysis of the Ohio election.

Just as we witnessed in the Florida presidential debacle four years ago, improper purging and other errors by election officials represent a very serious problem and have a particularly negative impact on minority voters. The fact that the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration
Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors and that the NAACP received more than 1,000 purging complaints on election day indicate that the overall number of voters who may have been disenfranchised as a result of official mistakes and wrongful purging is in the scores of thousands, if not more. Congressional passage of HAVA's provisional ballot requirement was intended to mitigate errors such as this, but Secretary Blackwell's unduly narrow interpretation
of this requirement, as well as weak rules for counting and checking provisional ballots, have
made it far less likely that individuals whose registration was wrongfully purged or never entered
would be able to receive a provisional ballot and have it counted.

Step Two. Force anyone innappropriately scrubed to vote provisionally, which increases the long lines at Democratic Polling locations.

As reported by the Free Press.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly Democratic wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been mysteriously removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn testimony and affidavits given at hearings after the election confirmed that many of these citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal elections and had not moved from where they were registered. In some cases, their stability at those addresses stretched back for decades.

The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional ballots cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 2000. Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a stopgap for people whose voting procedures are somehow compromised at the polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants.

Step Three. Toss the Provisional Ballots.

Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into chaos. Among other things, he demanded voters casting provisional ballots provide their birth dates, a requirement that was often not mentioned by poll workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many provisional ballots were merely tossed in the trash at Ohio polling stations.

Ultimately the largest impact on the vote, and therefore the greatest unknown, were those voters who simply gave up and didn't bother to vote because of the long lines created by all the above. RS Charts.

Rolling Stone estimates here a possible Kerry victory of 1,600 votes, which isn't much. It almost certainly would have triggered a recount and been contested.

The question that is repeatedly asked by skeptics is "Did Kerry really win?" - which is presented as though all the illegal and questionable activity that occurred in Ohio doesn't matter if it didn't change the outcome.

But whether Kerry would have won is not the point, the point is that with so many people's votes cast aside no one can tell if it would have change the outcome.

To this very day we really don't know who actually won and exactly how Ohioans would have voted if they'd had the chance.

This point was made quite eloquently by Kennedy himself.

The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

What this tells us is that many efforts to block and decertify Diebold in states such as Florida and California just might not make a difference in protecting the integrity of the voting process in the long run.

Vyan