Friday, December 10 2004
BENDING DEMOCRACY UNTIL IT BREAKS: On Wednesday U.S. Representative John Conyers, ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, held an "unofficial hearing" to review voting irregularities in Ohio. Conyers opened the hearing by saying:

"The one question I am asked more than any other about the voting irregularities in Ohio is whether John Kerry was the true winner of the election. My answer is that I do not know."

According to the text of his remarks, the Michigan Democrat followed this by declaring quite conspicuously in the present tense that "I very much want John Kerry to be the next President of the United States." With his very next breath, however, Conyers assured the public that, "this is not about John Kerry, this is about the voters."

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was on hand to demagogue the issue with remarks so rote and predictable they can be summed up accurately, if not comically, by their seven word title: "From Selma to Palm Beach to Columbus." In a fit of delusion so great it would make Don Quixote blush, Jackson said, "I urge the Congress to act before Michael Moore comes back and exposes the violations and the capitulation again." You simply cannot make this stuff up.

Other objective voices of moral and professional authority speaking before the Conyers "hearing" on Wednesday included Steve Rosenfeld, a senior producer for Air America Radio.

And Representative Sheila Jackson Lee stood out by delivering a stem winder full of reprehensible rhetoric and racial divisiveness. Here is but a small taste from Ms. Lee:

"Sadly, I can ask question after question about this election and hear nothing but silence from the Republican Party. The reason for this silence is evident; they fear the truth is not in their favor. Truth is the friend of those who are righteous and the devil of those who seek injustice."

Now, given all that you've just read, you would expect the Conyers hearing would be agitating over voting irregularities so great, so egregious and so systemic that they constituted a massive conspiracy to specifically disenfranchise African-American voters. You would, of course, be wrong.

Here are a few examples from the summary of irregularities Conyers and Co. are investigating:

• Cuyahoga County. [MACHINE] Arrows on absentee ballots don’t line up with the correct punch hole. “If absentee voters cast their vote by trying to line up the arrow with the punch card, they could punch the wrong number.”
• Franklin County. [MACHINE] In Columbus, Ohio, overcharged batteries on Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242 systems kept machines from booting up properly at the beginning of the day. Matt Damschroder, Franklin County Board of Elections Executive Director, admitted to Franklin County Commissioners that 77 machines malfunctioned on Election Day.
• Knox County. [LINES AT POLLS] Where voters use touch-screen units, long lines developed and voters turned to a federal judge for help as the time grew near for polls to close. To speed the voting, some of those voters were given paper ballots.
• Hamilton County. Cincinnati. [LINES AT POLLS] People stood in line for over an hour in the rain in some places only to find they were in the wrong line. A lot of them gave up and went home.
• Hamilton County. [ABSENTEE BALLOTS] At least two absentee ballots did not include Kerry’s name. Workers accidentally removed Kerry when removing Ralph Nader’s name.
• Hamilton County. Cincinnati. [MACHINE] Problems with punch card voting machines delayed the start of voting for up to an hour Tuesday morning at a suburban precinct. Voters were unable to slide their punch-card ballots all the way into any of the six voting machines that had ALL evidently been damaged in transit.
• Hamilton County. Cincinnati. [INTIMIDATION] Voters and vote monitors complained that the GOP precinct judge was questioning every voter about his or her address and “being a jerk about it.”
• Mahoning County. [MACHINE] One precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results. [ES&S iVotronic voting machines]
• Mahoning County. [MACHINE] The glass on top of one ES&S iVotronic voting machines was too far from the screen, making it difficult for people to use their fingers to cast ballots. A screen went blank on a Youngstown voter while he cast his ballot.

This doesn't look like a massive conspiracy to me. Nor does it look anything like Selma in the 1960's. What it does look like, and what it really is, is an open election held by human beings in a state in which more than 5.6 million people cast ballots.

Elections will never be perfect. Voters will make mistakes. Election officials will make mistakes as well. Machines will break and there will be confusion. It's foolish to think otherwise when you're trying to facilitate a process for 120 million people to express their opinions within the space of a single day. You can wail and moan over the imperfections in the system, but that really only amounts to crying over the spilt milk of democracy.

Of course we should strive for perfection, even if it is unattainable. And we should do our best to wring instances of fraud and intimidation out of the system as much as humanly possible.

But that's not what is going on here. This is partisan political theatre of the worst sort designed to undermine the integrity of the process. This is a group of Democrats, in the wake of losing another bitter election, taking the myriad of imperfections inherent in our process and blowing them up, stringing them together and assigning heinous motives of conspiracy and racial oppression.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, they do all of this using the self-righteous, morally superior credo that they want to "count every vote." Except they're only interested in counting "all the votes" in Ohio, because that is the only state in America where the outcome of the Presidential election could possibly be altered.

Let's be even more specific: only the truly delusional believe the outcome of the election will be changed. The Democrats don't even believe it themselves, which is why they aren't willing to call for a delay to the certification of the results. But by continuing on with lawsuits and "investigations" alleging voter intimidation and suppression in Ohio (and its decisive 20 electoral votes), Democrats can cast doubt and illegitimacy over Bush's reelection. This isn't going to improve the process or enhance American democracy, but it will help sow racial distrust and division and further the warped Oliver Stone conspiracy theories and the "we wuz robbed" mentality of many on the left.

It would be funny if it weren't so damn tragic. There is something otherworldly about the sight of partisan demagogues who prance and preen under the auspices of saving democracy when what they're really trying to do is to subvert it. - T. Bevan 11:30 am Link | Email | Send to a Friend