Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

[idrankwhat 0]

Quote

Quote

Blackwell, in Ohio, is impeding voter registration...

HAHA! so they would have you believe. He followed ohio election law to exacting standards.....

Yea. He's a real stand up guy. Besides all the other crap he pulled in 2004 now he's the chief election official AND a gubernatorial candidate. Anyone else see the obvious problem?

[Gravitymaster 0]

Rest assured, we checked out Election 2004 thoroughly
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Ted Diadiun
Plain Dealer Columnist
Atop the June 15 issue of Rolling Stone magazine you will find the following, in white capital letters on a black background: "DID BUSH STEAL THE 2004 ELECTION? How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio."

Yes, he did, writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a long, exhaustively footnoted piece that flows over 16 pages in the magazine.

The early exit polls that showed John Kerry winning the election; the stories of lost, delayed and denied voter registration cards; the long lines and other problems at many polling places; and the presence of Secretary of State Ken Blackwell as an overarching malevolent Republican presence all led Kennedy to conclude that a vast and wide-ranging series of conspiracies resulted in Kerry losing an election that the majority of Ohio voters wanted him to win.

So why, some readers have asked, hasn't The Plain Dealer written anything about this story? More importantly, why has Ohio's largest newspaper forced readers to depend on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rolling Stone for the real story about what happened in the 2004 election?

Taking the second question first, the truth is that this newspaper has reported in detail on most of the issues raised in the Kennedy piece. Before, during and after the election, Plain Dealer reporters covered the campaign and the election and the vast array of accusations surrounding both in exhausting detail. Here is what they found, and reported in the newspaper:

There was no shortage of mistakes made in vote counting. There were voters who should have been registered but weren't, polling places with lines that were too long and without enough voting machines, and decisions from Blackwell that appeared to be partisan.

All these mistakes and misjudgments took votes from both candidates, but probably more from Kerry. But they didn't add up to nearly enough votes to swing Ohio from Bush to Kerry.

The mistakes were often a result of lack of foresight and bad judgment, but they were bipartisan in nature and not a result of Republican chicanery.

Several reporters spent the bulk of their time running down accusations and rumors in the weeks following the election. The most complete report was in the form of a chart on Dec. 5, 2004, that put together allegations and explanations for 18 conspiracy theories. I asked the good folks at Cleveland.com to restore that link for today's column. You can see it at: www.cleveland.com/pdgraphics/voting.

So how is it that our reporters reached such different conclusions from Kennedy's?

It's the difference between journalism and advocacy.

A good journalist gathers the facts, interviews the principals, explains the seeming anomalies and then presents it all to the readers in an understandable way.

In his piece, Kennedy presented the facts that supported his point of view, ignored the ones that did not, read people's minds and packed it all up into a conspiracy that doesn't wash. Here are just three examples:

Kennedy offers the exit polls as proof that the election was flawed by saying, (A) Election Day exit polls are always right, and (B) the 2004 exit polls had Kerry winning the election; therefore (C) the election must have been stolen.

But Brad Coker, president of the Mason-Dixon polling firm that called Bush's 2.5-percentage-point win in Ohio practically right on the nose for The Plain Dealer, says that's nonsense - exit polls are often wrong.

He cited an example from the 2004 Florida exit poll that was partially based on the pollsters' expectation that 18- to 29-year-old voters, a group that leaned heavily toward Kerry, would account for 17 percent of the vote there.

The exit poll was weighted accordingly for that age group, but it turned out that the age group actually accounted for only 13 percent of the vote, which skewed the poll inaccurately toward Kerry.

In his online footnotes, Kennedy refers no less than a half-dozen times to a five-month-long post-election investigation commissioned by the Democratic National Committee called, "Democracy at Risk." Somehow, he never gets around to quoting the DNC investigative team's conclusion that "The statistical study of precinct-level data does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush."

Kennedy saw conspiracy in a Franklin County foul-up that resulted in far too few voting machines at a polling place in a heavily black area that would presumably vote mainly for Kerry.

But he didn't tell his readers that the chairman of the Franklin County elections board, who oversaw the county's voting machine allocation, was a black man who also chairs the county Democratic Party. Not a likely candidate to steal votes for Bush.

Space precludes a thorough airing of all Kennedy's accusations, but you can find a fascinating point-by-point review on Salon.com, which is not normally a place where Republicans go to seek succor. Here's the link: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/index_np.html

So why hasn't The Plain Dealer written a similar story about the Kennedy accusation to put all this to rest?

Metro editor Jean Dubail, who oversees the newspaper's political coverage, puts it this way:

"My first reaction after reading the thing was how little actual news there was in it," he said. "A lot of it was completely familiar, things we had written about and/or put in the chart. After you consider it all, what have you got? Somebody who just doesn't like the outcome. I mean, how many times do we have to cover the same territory?"

Kennedy wound up the piece by charging that Ohio's press has turned a blind eye to the stolen election, refused to investigate all these charges, and simply accepted the result as valid.

Does that make sense to anyone reading this?

For one thing, Ohio's newsrooms are not exactly crawling with Rush Limbaugh Dittoheads whose goal it is to protect the GOP. And any reporter who managed to nail down a story proving that a vast conspiracy cost John Kerry the presidency would become instantly famous and would probably win a Pulitzer. Personal politics be damned, show me the reporter whose nostrils wouldn't flare at THAT possibility.

I've got no argument with Dubail's decision to leave any comment on the Kennedy "investigation" to the Reader Rep, and my guess is that you don't either.

The less somebody knows about the 2004 Ohio election and the farther away from Ohio he is, the more likely he is to find merit in that Rolling Stone piece. And since our audience is right here in Northeast Ohio, I'm sure that most of you have already figured out that it's nonsense.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

edited to add: The Salon link doesn't work. I'll try to get the right one and will post it if I'm able to find the correct one.

2nd edit: I fixed the Salon link. Salon is hardly a right leaning Magazine.

[hairyjuan 0]

get a clue, they are all liaryers.

we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively


wishers never choose, choosers never wish