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election 2004
Why 2020 Is Starting to Feel Like 2004
Sixteen years ago, leading Democrats shied away from doing the right thing. Today, they're perilously close to making the same mistake
Jun 03, 2019
On March 15, 2003, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, at the time a decidedly second-tier presidential candidate, took the stage at the convention of the California Democratic Party. The first thing he said, to a thunderous cheer, was this: "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq." He then ran through a litany of his party's failures to stand up to George W. Bush and the GOP, and finished with a rhetorical flourish that instantly made him a serious contender: "I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
While Dean didn't win the nomination, his candidacy shone a bright light on the way Democrats had become timid and fearful, always worrying that if they were too clear in their criticism of the war or the administration that the public would reject them. More important, he showed how disgusted so many in the rank-and-file were with the way their representatives had been acting, and what a hunger there was for a more forceful brand of opposition.
Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Sixteen years later, the situation is not precisely the same, but it has some important parallels. That same fear--that if Democrats make their beliefs fully known or act too forcefully in opposing a Republican president, then the public will react against them--survives, even if it doesn't dominate the party's upper reaches the way it did in 2003. As they were back then, they are desperate to unseat the president, but divided on how best to do it. And on the question that dominates their internal debates, they seem to be concerned mostly with whether it's too politically risky to do the right thing. Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair to those many Democrats who voted to authorize the war in the fall of 2002. Some may have sincerely believed that it was a good idea. But coming a little over a year after September 11--and amid a constant barrage of Republican assaults on their patriotism--the fear of looking insufficiently "tough" dominated their thinking as they considered authorizing the use of force.
And it wasn't hard to see that the Bush administration was carrying out an enormously deceptive propaganda campaign to convince the public that if we didn't invade Iraq, at any moment they'd attack us with their fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. When Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," there was no doubt he was lying, along with the rest of the administration.
But ambitious Democrats were certain that opposing war would be politically disastrous. So among those who voted to give the invasion the green light were future presidential candidates John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. History has not been kind to them on that score.
At the time, though, they justified their vote by arguing that the threat from Saddam was indeed a terrifying one. In stark contrast, it's almost impossible today to find a Democrat who doesn't agree on substantive grounds that Donald Trump deserves to be impeached. Many thought so even before Robert Mueller released the report detailing his findings, but the rest certainly do now, after Mueller laid out not only how Trump sought and welcomed help from the Russian government to win the 2016 election but the repeated attempts he made to obstruct the investigation.
And Trump adds to the grounds for impeachment on a near-daily basis. When the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment for Richard Nixon in July 1974, one of the articles cited the fact that he had "failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas" issued by Congress. Trump has not only done that multiple times, he has declared that he will simply refuse to comply with any and all congressional investigations of him and his administration.
There are no Democrats saying his actions don't warrant impeachment. The ones who oppose it, or at least oppose it for now, argue that it would be politically disadvantageous for Democrats. You might or might not find their arguments persuasive (I don't, though I'm willing to grant that no one knows for sure), but it's hard to imagine that when the history of the Trump era is written, declining to impeach him will look like some kind of profile in courage. As I've argued before, the simplest moral calculus says that if Donald Trump deserves to be impeached, then Donald Trump should be impeached.
The latest California party convention happened this past weekend, and there was no one who broke out with the kind of striking criticism of their party that Howard Dean managed in 2003. That's because there are already plenty of Democrats running for president who are not only ready to impeach Trump but are also advocating sweeping policy change. "When I lead the Democratic Party, we will not be a party that nibbles around the edges," said Elizabeth Warren. "Our Democratic Party will be a party of bold, structural change." In a similar vein, Pete Buttigieg said of President Trump, "He wins if we look like more of the same. Which means, surprisingly, that the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe."
There was a figure they and others were not-too-subtly referencing: Joe Biden, who not only advocates a more moderate set of policy solutions but recently said that when Trump is out of the White House, "You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends," and they'll be ready for bipartisan governing. Biden's friend Mitch McConnell no doubt had a good laugh at that one.
While Biden is leading the polls at the moment, you can bet that his circa-2002 approach to the Trump presidency will become an issue as the primary race goes on. The question is whether the party is fundamentally different now than it was then, and whether they're looking for something else in their next leader.
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Your Worst Fears About Fox News Are Confirmed By New Study
Everyone knows the news outlet serves as a virtual propaganda tool, but new research shows just how effective they are at it
Sep 08, 2017
Fox News Channel has been recognized since its inception in 1996, when it was established by Republican operative Roger Ailes, as a right-leaning news source. But a new study published in the American Economic Review shows just how influential the channel is when it comes to changing viewers' minds, causing them to shift to the right on political issues--and even influencing election outcomes in ways that the outlet's more liberal counterparts don't.
Researchers at Emory and Stanford universities found that watching only three minutes of Fox News coverage per week would make Democratic and centrist voters one percent more likely to vote Republican in the 2008 election.
According to the study, this means that if Fox News hadn't existed in 2004, George W. Bush would have captured nearly four fewer percentage points, making John Kerry the popular vote winner. In 2008, Barack Obama would have won in a landslide if it weren't for Fox, capturing 60 percent of the vote, with John McCain winning 6.34 percent fewer votes.
Notably, the research shows that Fox appears driven by its ability to shift its viewership to the right even more than it's guided by its bottom line. According to Vox, the study finds "that Fox isn't setting its ideology where it ought to, to maximize its viewership. It's much more conservative than is optimal from that perspective. But it's pretty close to the slant that would maximize its persuasive power--that would result in the largest rightward movement among viewers. CNN, by contrast, matched its political stances pretty closely to the viewer-maximizing point, showing less interest in operating as a political agent."
CNN and MSNBC are also not as effective at shaping viewers' opinions. "Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," said the authors of the study. While Fox was able to convince 58 percent of Democratic viewers to vote for Bush in 2000, and persuaded sizable minorities of Democrats to vote Republican in the following two elections, MSNBC did not have the same effect on conservative viewers in the same elections.
Fox News Channel "is consistently more effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC which has corresponding estimated persuasion rates of just 16 percent, 0 percent, and 8 percent," said the study.
The study confirms earlier research done after Fox was introduced in 1996, including a 2007 report from Berkeley which found "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000...Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican."
The newest research confirms what many critics already suspected about Fox News: that it's pushed conservative ideals and Republican agendas since its beginning, serving as a tool used by the GOP establishment to shift viewers to the right--and even swing elections.
The study did not analyze Fox's impact on the 2016 election, but according to a Pew Research poll taken in January, Fox News was the most-watched news source among Trump voters during the campaign, with 40 percent of his supporters relying on the channel for their news.
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U.S. Health Care Is Bad For Your Health
Jun 03, 2007
One of the most contentious issues of the U.S. presidential campaign will be how to fix what many agree is a malfunctional health-care system. Adding fuel to the fire is a study published last month detailing the shortcomings of U.S. health care when compared to the systems of other developed countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The study, entitled "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care," released by the Commonwealth Fund in New York, finds that not only is the U.S. health care system the most expensive in the world (double that of the next most costly comparator country, Canada) but comes in dead last in almost any measure of performance.
Although U.S. political leaders are fond of stating that we have the best health-care system in the world, they fail to acknowledge an important caveat: It is the best only for the very rich. For the rest of the population, its deficits far outweigh its advantages.
For the Republican presidential candidates, health care hasn't become a major issue -- yet. The three leading Democratic candidates, however, are outspoken critics of the health-care system and argue for the need to increase coverage to most, if not all, Americans.
This new study not only confirms the findings of previous Commonwealth Fund studies, but also a previous analysis by the World Health Organization in 2000 that found the overall performance of the U.S. health-care system ranked 37th among the countries included in the analysis.
The Commonwealth study compared the United States with Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Although the most notable way in which the United States differs from the other countries is in the absence of universal coverage, the United States is also last on dimensions of access, patient safety, efficiency and equity.
The other five countries considered spend considerably less on health care, both per capita and as a percent of gross domestic product, than the United States. The United States spends $7,000 per person per year on health care, almost double that of Australia, Canada and Germany, each of which achieve better results on health status indicators than the United States. This suggests that the U.S. health-care system can and must do much more with its substantial investment in health.
The United States also lags behind all industrialized nations in terms of health coverage. The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no health insurance coverage during 2005, an increase of 1.3 million over the previous year. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States.
According to the Children's Health Fund, 9 million children are completely uninsured in the United States, while another 23.7 million - nearly 30 percent of the nation's children -- lack regular access to health care.
Compared to the other countries studied, the United States lags behind in the adoption of information technology and other national policies that promote quality improvement. Up-to-date information systems in countries such as New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom enhance physicians' ability to monitor chronic conditions and medication use, including medications prescribed by other physicians. In other countries, experienced nurses are working to monitor chronic conditions, thus easing the physicians' burden.
The United States also ranks last among the countries studied, both in terms of efficiency and equity. The United States has poor performance on national health expenditures and administrative costs. In terms of equity, Americans with below-average income were more reluctant to visit a physician when sick, and more often did not get a recommended test, fill a prescription or undergo a needed treatment or seek a proper follow-up on a condition.
Only a thorough reform can solve the U.S. health care system's deep structural problems. It is imperative that everyone is adequately insured and has the possibility to afford good care. At the same time, the United States must make sure to incorporate the advantages of modern health information technology and to ensure an integrated medical record and information system.
Lessons from other countries' experiences could be applied and adapted to the U.S. situation. In a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, from the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health stated, "The U.S. health-care system is considered a dysfunctional mess." Given the seriousness of the situation, this is an understatement.
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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House
Jun 01, 2006
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''
Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)
''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.''
Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''
What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)
But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)
Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)
''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''
The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)
''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''
When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)
There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.
According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)
''I'm afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never going to show up on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky Board of Elections, told local reporters. ''Many of them are young people who have registered for the first time. I've called some of these people, and they are perfectly legitimate.''(75)
On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge(76) -- but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's ruling, stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.
On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail does not implicate fraud,'' the court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79) Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)
Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84)
This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)
IV. Barriers to Registration
To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to ROLLING STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet Blackwell's order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card.(90)
Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that ''is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.''(91) The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their efforts invalidated.(92) Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no longer accept its own registration forms.(93) Even Blackwell couldn't follow the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September 28th -- six days before the registration deadline.(94)
But by then, the damage was done. Election boards across the state, already understaffed and backlogged with registration forms, were unable to process them all in time. According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials,(95) and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards.(96) Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent.(97)
Despite the widespread problems, Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration errors after the election -- in Toledo -- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state.(98) The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of elections and the county Republican Party.(99) The GOP post was previously held by her husband, Tom Noe,(100) who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush campaign.(101)
State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ''areas of grave concern.''(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ''We may not get to them.''(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline -- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised ''several thousand'' voters from Democratic strongholds.(107)
The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations(108) -- records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official tampering with the documents.(109) Investigators slammed the elections board for ''a series of egregious blunders'' that caused ''the destruction, mutilation and damage of public records.''(110)
On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank ballots were kept out in the open, ''with no security measures in place.''(111) The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.(112)
In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a ''Victory 2004'' rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of ''grass-roots'' activists for special praise: ''I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.''(113)
V. ''The Wrong Pew''
In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were mandated in 2002, when Congress passed a package of reforms called the Help America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of the most egregious injustice in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of lawfully registered minority voters from the polls because their names didn't appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's registration proves valid.(114)
''Provisional ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea Wang, an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act. ''But then different states erected barriers, and this new right became totally eviscerated.''
In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible.(115) When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: ''By not even mentioning this group -- the primary beneficiaries of HAVA's provisional-voting provisions -- Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(116)
But instead of complying with the judge's order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul -- saying that he'd rather go to jail than follow federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr's ruling on October 23rd -- but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all -- denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.(119)
We will never know for certain how many voters in Ohio were denied ballots by Blackwell's two illegal orders. But it is possible to put a fairly precise number on those turned away by his most disastrous directive. Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct -- a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places. On October 14th, Judge Carr overruled the order, but Blackwell appealed.(120) In court, he was supported by his friend and campaign contributor Tom Noe, who joined the case as an intervenor on behalf of the secretary of state.(121) He also enjoyed the backing of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who filed an amicus brief in support of Blackwell's position -- marking the first time in American history that the Justice Department had gone to court to block the right of voters to vote.(122) The Sixth Circuit, stacked with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided with Blackwell.(123)
Blackwell insists that his decision kept the election clean. ''If we had allowed this notion of ?voters without borders' to exist,'' he says, ''it would have opened the door to massive fraud.'' But even Republicans were shocked by the move. DeForest Soaries, the GOP chairman of the Election Assistance Commission -- the federal agency set up to implement the Help America Vote Act -- upbraided Blackwell, saying that the commission disagreed with his decision to deny ballots to voters who showed up at the wrong precinct. ''The purpose of provisional ballots is to not turn anyone away from the polls,'' Soaries explained. ''We want as many votes to count as possible.''(124)
The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)
In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)
All told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's registration barriers did the trick. Black voters in the state -- who went overwhelmingly for Kerry -- were twenty percent more likely than whites to be forced to cast a provisional ballot.(129) In the end, nearly three percent of all voters in Ohio were forced to vote provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots were ultimately rejected.(131)
VI. Long Lines
When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning.(132)
A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.(135)
The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)
Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)
''No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep. Kucinich. ''He's a rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute details of his office. There's no doubt that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.''
At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers report concluded that the ''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies to specifically target Democratic areas.''(140)
In Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters(141) -- more than half of them black(142) -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000 machines to handle the huge surge.(143) ''On Election Day, the county experienced an unprecedented turnout that could only be compared to a 500-year flood,'' says Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.(145) But instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder decided to ''make do'' with 2,741 machines.(146) And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines.(147) An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.(148)
The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.(149) ''The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.(150)
By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.(151) A lawsuit ensued, and the handwritten affidavits submitted by voters and election officials offer a heart-rending snapshot of an electoral catastrophe in the offing:(152)
From Columbus Precinct 44D:
''There are three voting machines at this precinct. I have been informed that in prior elections there were normally four voting machines. At 1:45 p.m. there are approximately eighty-five voters in line. At this time, the line to vote is approximately three hours long. This precinct is largely African-American. I have personally witnessed voters leaving the polling place without voting due to the length of the line.''
From Precinct 40:
''I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.''
Precinct 65H:
''I observed a broken voting machine that was not in use for approximately two hours. The precinct judge was very diligent but could not get through to the BOE.''
Precinct 18A:
''At 4 p.m. the average wait time is about 4.5 hours and continuing to increase?. Voters are continuing to leave without voting.''
As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots.(153) But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.(154) When closing time came at the polls, according to the Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens who had waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio law, which stipulates that those in line at closing time are allowed to remain and vote.(155)
The voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly Democrats. Because of the unequal distribution of voting equipment, the median turnout in Franklin County precincts won by Kerry was fifty-one percent, compared to sixty-one percent in those won by Bush. Assuming sixty percent turnout under more equitable conditions, Kerry would have gained an additional 17,000 votes in the county.(156)
In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties -- most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,''(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''(159)
The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ''there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.'' Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ''I have faith,'' he ruled, ''that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.''(161)
In fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling stations, where they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic precincts. By the end of the day, thanks to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list of 35,000 names from its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to the survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the polls because of registration challenges -- even though federal law required that they be provided with provisional ballots.(163)
VII. Faulty Machines
Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)
In addition to problems with electronic machines, Ohio's vote was skewed by old-fashioned punch-card equipment that posed what even Blackwell acknowledged was the risk of a ''Florida-like calamity.''(170) All but twenty of the state's counties relied on antiquated machines that were virtually guaranteed to destroy votes(171) -- many of which were counted by automatic tabulators manufactured by Triad Governmental Systems,(172) the same company that supplied Florida's notorious butterfly ballot in 2000. In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for president at all -- most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president -- generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji -- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.(174)
Most of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In Cleveland, where nearly 13,000 votes were ruined, a New York Times analysis found that black precincts suffered more than twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-leaning precincts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning precincts.(176) Last April, a federal court ruled that Ohio's use of punch-card balloting violated the equal-protection rights of the citizens who voted on them.(177)
In addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre miscounts known as ''ballot crawl.'' In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily African-American precinct, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka was credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In Precinct 4N, where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik and Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across Cleveland -- 11M, 3B, 8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ''It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party candidate,'' the Conyers report concludes.(179)
But it's not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was credited with twenty percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004, compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)
VIII. Rural Counties
Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.
Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)
Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says. ''That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?''
They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''
How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)
In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)
The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.
In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)
The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.'' (194)
Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195)
IX. Rigging the Recount
After Kerry conceded the election, his campaign helped the Libertarian and Green parties pay for a recount of all eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under state law, county boards of election were required to randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both by hand and by machine. If the two totals reconciled exactly, a costly hand recount of the remaining votes could be avoided; machines could be used to tally the rest.
But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ''random'' sample of three percent used for the recount.
''If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts,'' said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. ''They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.'' (196)
Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton caught an employee of Triad -- which provided the software used to count punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties (197) -- making unauthorized modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the Conyers committee that the same employee also provided county officials with a ''cheat sheet'' so that ''the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand-recount of the county.'' (198) After Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired.
(199) The same Triad employee was dispatched to do the same work in at least five other counties. (200) Company president Tod Rapp -- who contributed to Bush's campaign (201) -- has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand. (202)
Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the presidential ballots. (203) If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it's no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election. (204)
X. What's At Stake
The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ''We're in a terrible fix,'' Rep. Conyers told me. ''We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That's why our citizens are not up in arms.''
The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. ''I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers,'' he said. ''And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped.'' Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. ''I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters,'' he said. ''The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?''
Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. ''You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble,'' he said. ''You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our electoral system.''
Federal officials charged with safeguarding the vote have also failed to contest the election. ''Congress hasn't investigated this at all,'' says Kucinich. ''There has been no oversight over our nation's most basic right: the right to vote. How can we call ourselves a beacon of democracy abroad when the right to vote hasn't been secured in free and fair elections at home?''
Sen. John Kerry -- in a wide-ranging discussion of ROLLING STONE's investigation -- expressed concern about Republican tactics in 2004, but stopped short of saying the election was stolen. ''Can I draw a conclusion that they played tough games and clearly had an intent to reduce the level of our vote? Yes, absolutely. Can I tell you to a certainty that it made the difference in the election? I can't. There's no way for me to do that. If I could have done that, then obviously I would have found some legal recourse.''
Kerry conceded, however, that the widespread irregularities make it impossible to know for certain that the outcome reflected the will of the voters. ''I think there are clearly states where it is questionable whether everybody's vote is being counted, whether everybody is being given the opportunity to register and to vote,'' he said. ''There are clearly barriers in too many places to the ability of people to exercise their full franchise. For that to be happening in the United States of America today is disgraceful.''
Kerry's comments were echoed by Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ''I'm not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided,'' Dean says. ''We know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. It should not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate elections. That's what we suspect has happened, and we'd like to safeguard our elections so that democracy can still be counted on to work.''
To help prevent a repeat of 2004, Kerry has co-sponsored a package of election reforms called the Count Every Vote Act. The measure would increase turnout by allowing voters to register at the polls on Election Day, provide provisional ballots to voters who inadvertently show up at the wrong precinct, require electronic voting machines to produce paper receipts verified by voters, and force election officials like Blackwell to step down if they want to join a campaign. (205) But Kerry says his fellow Democrats have been reluctant to push the reforms, fearing that Republicans would use their majority in Congress to create even more obstacles to voting. ''The real reason there is no appetite up here is that people are afraid the Republicans will amend HAVA and shove something far worse down our throats,'' he told me.
On May 24th, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried unsuccessfully to amend the immigration bill to bar anyone who lacks a government-issued photo ID from voting (206) -- a rule that would disenfranchise at least six percent of Americans, the majority of them urban and poor, who lack such identification. (207) The GOP-controlled state legislature in Indiana passed a similar measure, and an ID rule in Georgia was recently struck down as unconstitutional. (208)
''Why erect those kinds of hurdles unless you're afraid of voters?'' asks Ralph Neas, director of People for the American Way. ''The country will be better off if everyone votes -- Democrats and Republicans. But that is not the Blackwell philosophy, that is not the George W. Bush or Jeb Bush philosophy. They want to limit the franchise and go to extraordinary lengths to make it more difficult to vote.''
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.
American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.
Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ''is the right upon which all other rights depend.'' Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.
--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.
3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004.
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2.
James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,'' September 2005, pg. 10.
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.
12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes.''
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5
15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November 4, 2004.
19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, "U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine," Associated Press, December 11, 2004.
Daniel Williams, "Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election," The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.
23) Mitofsky International Web site
24) Tim Golden, "Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners," The New York Times, August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data." FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount," U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.
41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, "Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States," November 2, 2004.
43) John McCarthy, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer
45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.
47) kenblackwell dot com
48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.
49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, "Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush."
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.
56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004. 63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.
66) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, "Early Returns on Election Reform," George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.
74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
75) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
76) Miller v. Blackwell, (S.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004)
77) James Drew and Steve Eder, ''Court Rejects GOP Voter Challenge; Some Counties Hold Hearings Anyhow; 200 Voters Turned Away,'' Toledo Blade, October 30, 2004.
78) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
79) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
80) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
Greg Palast, "New Florida Vote Scandal Feared," BBC News, October 26, 2004.
81) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
82) Greg J. Borowski, ''GOP Demands IDs of 37,000 in City,'' Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 30, 2004.
83) "The Disenfranchisement of the Re-Enfranchised; How Confusion Over Felon Voter Eligibility in Ohio Keeps Qualified Ex-Offender Voters From the Polls," Prison Reform Advocacy Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2004.
84) Preserving Democracy, 64.
Note: Additional reporting contributed to this paragraph.
85) Gardner Selby, ''Hundreds of Texans Ride Bandwagons Around U.S.; Volunteers Say Election is Too Important Not to Hit the Campaign Trail,'' San Antonio Express-News (Texas), October 15, 2004.
86) ''Down to the Wire,'' Newsweek, November 15, 2004.
87) Lynda Gorov and Anne E. Kornblut, ''Gore to Challenge Results; No Plans to Concede; top Fla. Court refuses to order resumption of Miami-Dade County,'' The Boston Globe, November 24, 2000.
88) Al Kamen, "Miami ?Riot? Squad: Where are they Now?" Washington Post, January 24, 2005.
89) Al Kamen, "Walking the Talk," Washington Post, April 21, 2006.
90) Secretary of State Directive, No. 2004-31, Section II, September 7, 2004.
91) Tokaji, pg. 1227 and Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1971(a)(2)(B) (2000).
92) Jim Bebbington and Laura Bischoff, ''Blackwell Rulings Rile Voting Advocates,'' Dayton Daily News. 93) Congress of the United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, letter from Conyers to Blackwell.
94) Catherine Candisky, ''Secretary of State Lifts Order on Voting Forms; Lighter Paper Now Deemed Acceptable for Registration,'' Columbus Dispatch, September 30, 2004.
95) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2004, Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition, updated May 9, 2006, page 14.
96) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page 5.
97) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page. 1.
98) Lucas County Board of Elections -- Results of Investigation Following November 2004 General Election, April 5, 2005, Richard Weghorst and Faith Lyon.
99) "Feds Confirm Investigation of GOP Campaign Contributor," The Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 28, 2005.
100) Mark Naymik, ''Coin Dealer Raised Chunk of Change for Bush,'' Plain Dealer, August 7, 2005.
101) Christopher D. Kirkpatrick, "Noe Indicted for Laundering Money to Bush Campaign," Toledo Blade, October 27, 2005.
Mike Wilkinson and James Drew, "Grand Jury Charges Noe with 53 Felony Counts," Toledo Blade, February 13, 2006.
102) Lucas County Report, pg. 2.
103) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
104) Lucas County Report, pg. 10.
105) Lucas County Report, pages 9-10.
106) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
107) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
108) Lucas County Report, pg. 18.
109) Lucas County Report, pages 18-19.
110) Lucas County Report, pg. 19.
111) Lucas County Report, pages 4, 6.
112) Lucas County Report, pg. 6.
113) "Remarks by the President at Victory 2004 Rally," Seagate Convention Centre, Toledo, Ohio, October 29, 2004, The White House.
note: Bernadette and Tom Noe?s last name is incorrectly spelled "Noy" in the official White House transcript.
114) Help America Vote Act, Title III, Uniform and Nondiscriminatory Election Technology and Administration Requirements, Subtitle A Requirements, Section 302.
115) Directive No. 2004-33 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections 1 (Sept. 16, 2004.).
116) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
117) Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, ''Defiant Blackwell Rips Judge; Secretary Says He'd go to Jail Before Rewriting Ballot Memo,'' Cincinnati Enquirer, October 22, 2004.
118) Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell, (N.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004).
And Tokaji, pg. 1229
119)Tokaji, pg. 1231
120) ''Judge, Blackwell, Spar Over Provisional Ballots,'' The Associated Press, October 20, 2004. 121) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western Division, The League of Women Voters of Ohio, et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04 CV 7622
122) David G. Savage, Richard B. Schmitt, "Bush Seeks Limit to Suits Over Voting Rights," Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2004.
123) Judge Julia Smith Gibbons August 2, 2002
Judge John M. Rogers November 27, 2002
Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton May 5, 2003
Judge Deborah L. Cook May 7, 2003
124) Darrell Rowland and Lee Leonard, "Federal Agency Distances Itself from Ohio Official; Blackwell Says Their Provisional-Balloting Positions are the Same," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), October 20, 2004.
125) David S. Bernstein, "Questioning Ohio," Providence Phoenix, November 12 -18, 2004.
126) Norma Robbins, ''Facts to Ponder About the 2004 General Election,'' May 10, 2006.
127) Fritz Wenzel, "Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of November 2nd Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County," Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
128) Interview with Stephanie Tubbs Jones
129) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 6.
130) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
131) Ohio Secretary of State Web site, Provisional Ballots; Official Tabulation, November 2, 2004.
132) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to ?Lost? Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
Christopher Hitchens, "Ohio?s Odd Numbers," Vanity Fair.
Additional analysis by Bob Fitrakis, editor of the Columbus Free Press, and Richard Hayes Phillips.
133) Democracy at Risk, pg. 3.
134) Preserving Democracy, pg. 29.
135) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
136) Bernstein, Providence Phoenix 137) U.S. Election Assistance Comm'n, Funding for States,
and Tokaji, pg. 1222.
138) ''The Battle Over Voting Technology,'' PBS, Online NewsHour, December 16, 2003.
Paul Festa, ''States Scrutinize e-Voting as Primaries Near,'' CNET News.com, December 8, 2003.
139) Preserving Democracy, pg. 27.
140) Preserving Democracy, pg. 30.
141) Matt Damschroder, chairman of Franklin County Board of Elections.
142) Preserving Democracy, pg. 26.
143) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
144) Correspondence with Matt Damschroder.
145) Suzanne Hoholik and Mark Ferenchik, "GOP Council Hopes Rising; Party expects ruling on peititions will put its candidate on ballot," Columbus Dispatch, March 26, 2003.
146) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.
147) Mark Niquette, "GOP Strongholds Saw Increase in Voting Machines," Columbus Dispatch, December 12, 2004.
148) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
149) Columbus Free Press editor, Bob Fitrakis.
150) "Voting Machine Allocation in Franklin County, Ohio, 2004: Response to the U.S. Department of Justice Letter of June 29, 2005," Walter R. Mebane, Jr., February 11, 2006, Page 13.
151) Tokaji, pg. 1238.
Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).
152) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).
153) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, slip op. At 1 (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).
154) Washington Post, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, December 15, 2004.
155) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.
156) Affidavit of Richard Hayes Phillips, December 10, 2004.
157) Mark Niquette, "Finally, It's Time to Vote; U.S. Appeals Court Overturns Ban, Allows Challengers Back in Polling Sites," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 2, 2004.
158) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-738, page 3.
159) James Dao, "The 2004 Campaign: Ohio, G.O.P. Bid to Contest Registrations is Blocked," The New York Times, October 28, 2004.
160) Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell; In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division; Case no. C-1-04-738.
161) Dan Horn, Howard Wilkinson, and Cindi Andrews, "Supreme Court Justice Allows Challengers," Cincinnati Enquirer.
162) Tokaji, pages 1237-1238.
163) Democracy at Risk, pg. 20.
164) The Columbus Free Press.
165) "Errors Plague Voting Process in Ohio, Pa." The Vindicator, November 3, 2004, Vindicator Staff Report
166) Voters Unite catalogues news reports from around the country that give examples of dysfunctional voting machines, among other election stories.
167) The Columbus Free Press.
168) Jim Woods, "In One Precinct, Bush's Tally was Supersized by a Computer Glitch," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 5, 2004.
169) Hitchens, Vanity Fair.
170) Letter from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, to Doug White, President, Ohio Senate 3 (Feb. 26, 2004).
171) Sixty-eight counties used punch card ballots. Thirteen used optical scan machines. Seven used touch-screen technology.
172) Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls For FBI Investigation Into Ohio Election," The Associated Press State & Local Wire, December 15, 2004.
173) Tokaji, Page 1221.
174) Jim Konkoly, ''Volunteers Complete Local Recount,'' Coshocton Tribune, December 18, 2004.
175) New York Times, "Voting Problems in Ohio Spur Call for Overhaul," James Dao, Ford Fessenden, December 24, 2004.
176) Ken McCall and Jim Bebbington, ''Two Precincts had High Undercounts, Analysis Shows,''Dayton Daily News, November 18, 2004.
177) Lisa A. Abraham, "Punch-Card Voting is Illegal," Akron Beacon Journal, April 22, 2006.
178) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
179) Preserving Democracy, pg. 57.
180) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
181) Analysis completed by using official tallies on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
Official tallies for Kerry:
Official tallies for Connally:
182) Preserving Democracy, pg. 55.
183. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
184. Letter from Rep. John Conyers to Chris Swecker, assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. See attached affidavits.
185. Miami County Board of Elections.
186. Confirmed by Bob Fitrakis of the Free Press
187. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
188. Erin Miller, "Board Awaits State Follow Up," The Evening Leader.
189. "Preserving Democracy," pages 58-59.
190. The Associated Press, "News Groups Sue Ohio Elections Chief Over Poll Access," Associated Press, November 2, 2004.
and
Mark Crispin Miller, "None Dare Call It Stolen," Harper's, August 2005.
191. Incidents in Warren County were catalogued in a series of articles by the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Erica Solving, "No Changes in Final Warren Co. Vote Count; E-mails Released Monday Show Lockdown Pre-planned," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 16, 2004.
Erica Solving, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.
Erica Solvig and Dan Horn, "Warren Co. Defends Lockdown Decision; FBI denies warning officials of any special threat," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 10, 2004.
Erica Solvig, "Warren Co. Recount Goes Public; After Election Night lockdown, security eases up," Cincinnati Enquirer, December 15, 2004.
192. Erica Solvig, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.
193. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
194. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 52.
195. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
196. Joan Mazzolini, "Workers Accused of Fudging '04 Recount; Prosecutor Says Cuyahoga Skirted Rules," The Plain Dealer, April 6, 2006.
197. Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls for FBI Investigation Into Ohio election," The Associated Press, December 15, 2004.
198. Affidavit, December 13, 2004, Sherole Eaton, Re: General Election 2004, Hocking County.
199. Jon Craig, "'04 Election in Hocking County; Worker Who Questioned Recount is Asked to Quit," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), June 1st, 2005.
200. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 81.
201. www.opensecrets.org
202. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 82.
203. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 83.
204. Ohio Secretary of State's press office.
205. Count Every Vote Act of 2005
206. Dena Bunis, "Senate Limits Immigration Debate," The Orange County Register, May 24, 2006.
207. Tokaji's blog, Election Law at Moritz, "McConnell's Voter ID Amendment," May 22, 2006.
208. United States District Court Northern District of Georgia, Rome Division.
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Senator Kerry, Prepare for your Moment of Truth
Aug 30, 2004
Memo to Senator John Kerry: whether you like it or not, the moment of truth in this campaign has arrived.
You chose a flawed, phony script in Boston and beforehand. You left a glaring omission in the biography you presented to the electorate. Treating it as ballot-box poison, you forbade all of your champions on the Fleet Center podium to mention it, much less sing your praises for it.
Now your worst enemies are forcing the issue to the limelight. This time you duck it only at your peril. You cannot obfuscate or equivocate any longer. It is time for you to admit, once and for all, that you were, and are, a Vietnam veteran who turned against the war. If you're worth the faith that we the people long to invest in you, you'll say it proudly, and remind us why that war was such a colossal crime.
It is obvious to any person who has a passing regard for facts that those fellow Swift boat veterans who oppose you politically do not stand "for truth." We know the charges they have so far brought are scurrilous, specious and cruel, and their tactics straight from the Karl Rove playbook of dirty tricks. Yet the painful reality is, they have exploited the very large opening your efforts to bury your anti-war record created.
For the Swift Boat group does have a serious point to make - and it's the one they haven't made yet. What these guys have against you, their real animus has nothing to do with what you did in Vietnam, but what you did when you returned - your activism and testimony against the war. To these guys, you are "Hanoi John," a traitor. That is the heart of the issue. That is the charge you have ducked so far, and the one you need to answer.
It's not about whether you shot yourself in the foot over there. It's about how you're shooting yourself in the foot now.
Your anti-war stance of 1971 has become your greatest vulnerability, simply because you've been unwilling to embrace it. Yet for many of us who are familiar with your life story, it actually represents your greatest strength. Opposing that misbegotten war, putting on your uniform and telling the Senate why, required authentic, gutsy, true leadership.
You have staked your candidacy on the claim that you can be trusted to guide the ship of state through dangerous waters. You cast this election, correctly, as a choice between a phony leader and a real leader. Yet by refusing to own up to this admittedly controversial example of your leadership, you have undermined your case. This is the unkindest flip-flop of all.
Fortunately, the Swift boat veterans are handing you a huge gift, if you will only perceive it as such--one last opportunity to demonstrate true leadership again. Remember that most of us still perceive the Vietnam war as the tragic colonial misadventure that it was. We need you to remind us, forcefully, of this truth our nation so painfully learned. And we need you to remind us that then and now, dissent is patriotic, not treasonous. This is true leadership--the right thing to do both morally and politically.
I know I'm asking you to do something risky. And I know the reasons why you'll be tempted to duck the issue again - reasons relating less to the Vietnam war than to the Iraq war. But here as well, the traps that Rove and company have set for you are traps of your own making. I cringed to hear you refuse to rethink your vote for the Iraq war, to hear you say you would have voted yes even if the stream of lies coming from the White House had been exposed. You thought you were evading the trap this time, not taking the bait, denying them another chance to call you flip-flopper. But instead, you were taking yourself, and all of us, deeper into the quagmire.
Iraq is the reason you are afraid to answer the "Hanoi John" charges; Iraq is the reason you have tried to expunge 1971 from your biography. You know that the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, while far from absolute, are considerable. You know we should not have gone into Iraq, and you know how hard it will be to get us out. And you know that ninety percent of the delegates in Boston, and the majority of the American public, now oppose this war. Yet you will not denounce it, you defend your vote to authorize it, and you promise only to try to persuade more allies to come aboard this sinking ship. You know these choices have alienated a crucial part of your base and done yourself out of what should be your strongest campaign issue.
Your own personal Iraq quagmire is, in microcosm, the quagmire facing the nation as a whole. And we need you to steer yourself and all of us out of it in as swift a boat as you can command. It so happens that the way out of Iraq leads, once again, through Vietnam. That is the unenviable duty for which you have actually reported. It's also why you could be, should be, exactly the right leader for this historical moment - if only you would rise to the occasion and be the anti-war veteran that you are.
When your views evolve as the truth slowly sets in, when you admit that you were wrong and plot a new direction to correct the error, that's not flip-flopping. That's courage. A much stronger and more mature courage than staying the course when it's a stupid course. We the people are ready for this message. In my view, this is the message that will lead to victory in November - not just victory, but victory with a mandate to bring meaningful change to our foreign policy and healing to our deeply troubled political culture.
That's why the campaign bumper sticker on my car says: "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The John Kerry who said those words is the John Kerry we need in the Oval Office.
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Nader's "Grassroots" Campaign...Courtesy of GOP
Jul 20, 2004
Four years after the Florida debacle, with nearly all of Ralph Nader's longtime progressive allies now tactically supporting Kerry in swing states to retire the Bush regime, the Nader campaign has created none of the grassroots thunder of 2000. Indeed, it's been a hollow enterprise -- attracting a few leftwing sects and polemicists.
Given this vacuum, it's no surprise that pro-Bush forces have rushed to Nader's side. What is a surprise is the brazenness of their support. And, how readily Nader has accepted the right-wing help.
Nader has complained -- correctly in at least one state -- of covert Democratic efforts to keep him off ballots. But in Michigan, he has no such excuse. In that key battleground state, after Nader volunteers had collected only 5,000 of the 30,000 signatures necessary to get on the ballot, Michigan's Republican Party came to the rescue with 43,000 Nader signatures.
Nader campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese initially took a principled stand, telling Associated Press last week that the campaign would not accept the GOP's help: "We won't take any signatures from them." But within hours he flip-flopped, AP reported, saying the campaign might accept the Republican signatures if state officials did not certify Nader as the nominee of the Reform Party in Michigan, which is split into two factions.
Yesterday, team Nader made it official: They'll accept the "independent" ballot line provided by the Republican signatures in case they fail to get the Reform Party nomination: "We have to get on the ballot somehow," said Zeese.
If Nader picks up the Reform line in Michigan, it will be with the strong backing of the party's national chairman, Shawn O'Hara, who told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter: "I'm doing everything I can to make sure John Kerry never gets around the White House." O'Hara is a former evangelist who now says he supports abortion rights but admits he once supported the execution of doctors and nurses who perform abortions. (The Reform Party, which ran rightwinger Pat Buchanan for president in 2000, still maintains an anti-immigrant stance.)
In Oregon, another swing state where Nader could tip the election to Bush, he only needed to attract 1,000 registered voters to a nominating convention to get on the ballot. Four years ago, 10,000 activists rallied for Nader in Portland. But in April, he couldn't rally even 1,000 supporters.
Once again, the Right rode to the rescue. When Nader made a second attempt at a convention on June 26, Oregon's Republicans enlisted the anti-choice, anti-gay Oregon Family Council and the corporatist Citizens for a Sound Economy to recruit rightwingers to attend and sign Nader's petition. The CSE's phone script asking Republicans to put Nader on the ballot explained the need to "pull some very crucial votes from John Kerry." Nader's Oregon coordinator said he saw nothing wrong with rightwing help: "It's a free country. People do things in their own interest."
With Democrats engaging in dirty tricks of their own in Oregon (a county leader urged Dems in an email to attend but refuse to sign), Nader again fell short of the needed 1,000 -- despite the Republican help. Nader's campaign hasn't submitted names from the second convention to state officials, apparently embarrassed at how many will be shown to be registered Republicans.
Citizens for a Sound Economy is a lavishly-funded corporate front group, chaired by former top Republican leader Dick Armey, that lobbies against virtually everything Nader has ever lobbied for. Asked by CNN why such a group would back him, Nader dissembled in the extreme, referring to it as a group "opposed to Congressional pay raises" (perhaps the one issue out of a thousand that Nader and CSE have in common) -- as honest as identifying Pat Buchanan as a Palestinian rights advocate.
After Oregon, Armey's army issued a news release pledging to help Nader get on ballots "in key battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere."
Besides activists, Republicans are deploying money behind Nader. On July 9, when the San Francsico Chronicle reported that 1 of 10 big Nader donors had also donated to Bush and the Republicans, Nader's vice presidential running-mate Peter Camejo told a Chronicle reporter that the campaign would consider returning money from Republicans hoping to help Bush against Kerry: "We don't want that money."
Days later, Camejo flip-flopped, telling the same reporter: "It is conceivable that pro-Bush, pro-Republicans believe we have a right to be on the ballot. We will not establish lie detector tests for people who give us money."
Camejo's new line was in keeping with Nader's laissez-faire attitude on accepting GOP cash: "Republicans are human beings too," he argued in a recent radio debate.
As a progressive, I've admired Ralph Nader for as many years as I've disliked the corporate centrism of Democrats like John Kerry. But compared to the corporate and religious rightwing forces behind Nader, Kerry is a paragon of progressive virtue.
For many of us inspired by Nader's 2000 campaign, it was easy four years ago to dismiss the charge that "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" as a Democratic defense of the corrupt status quo. Today, the sad reality on the ground is that a vote for Nader in these swing states is a vote for Bush's money, his organization, his rightwing activists.
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Perils of the Dead Center
It's traditional in presidential politics for Democratic candidates to tack toward the center once they've secured the party's nomination. In the current election year, however, this conventional strategy may prove unwise or even disastrous for Senator John Kerry.
Apr 20, 2004
It's traditional in presidential politics for Democratic candidates to tack toward the center once they've secured the party's nomination. In the current election year, however, this conventional strategy may prove unwise or even disastrous for Senator John Kerry.
Having dispatched his rivals handily, Kerry now confronts two more imposing obstacles. One, of course, is the incumbent and his $200 million war chest; the other is within his own party. The Democrats' perennial problem is the disconnect between the party's elite funders and its mass base. In contrast, the GOP enjoys a relative harmony of interests between the corporate class that underwrites its campaigns and the conservative constituencies that mobilize for the vote. Right-wing interests, especially of the Christian sort, can create havoc at certain times on certain issues, but successful Republican pols like Dubya know the proper tactics for keeping their coalition in order.
Democratic politicians don't have it so easy. The party's powerful donors, exemplified by the Democratic Leadership Council, invariably urge White House contenders to behave like Republicrats. In this view, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were too liberal to win, but Bill Clinton got elected because he campaigned as a "New" Democrat and avoided (or triangulated) the left. Joe Lieberman's campaign this year represented DLC thinking across the board, with Edwards and Kerry behind by a nose in the race to the right.
DLC centrism has become the conventional wisdom of the so-called "liberal" pundits of the press. This centrist media voice, to which Senator Kerry is clearly listening, is now clamoring for a Kerry-McCain ticket. (Can you recall a time when a Republican was ever urged to make any important appointment from another party?) Whatever wisdom there may be in this appeal from within the Democratic party to eschew the perception of liberalism, it does not match the thinking of the large majority of Democrats, Independents, and non-voters.
In recent days, Senator Kerry has repeatedly emphasized his centrist credentials. At a top-dollar fundraiser, he assured well-heeled New Yorkers that he was "not a redistribution Democrat." He has already begun retracting his own proposals for new spending programs, signaling Wall Street that paying down Dubya's deficit will trump his domestic agenda. He swiftly approved of Bush's craven concessions to Ariel Sharon -- concessions that sound the death knell for Middle East peace negotiations -- for fear of showing insufficient fealty to the Israeli right.
This all surely placates the DLC mandarins, but it must be recognized that these are perilous tactics. The more daylight he darkens between himself and Bush/Cheney, the more he legitimates their policies and alienates those left-liberals who ought to be his most fervent supporters.
A large, motivated activist base will be crucial to success in the 2004 election. The country is intensely polarized. The current administration is perhaps the most radical in the history of the presidency. A tremendous number of Americans (not to mention foreigners) have noticed this. People are fired up. The zeitgeist is zinging with renewed liberal pride. Howard Dean's unexpected early ascent captured the spirit of this most crucial of election years.
What Dean did wrong has been amply discussed. He put too much emphasis on one issue, the Iraq war; he let TV characterize him (with a yelp) instead of marketing a persona; most critically, he alarmed elites by thinking outside of boxes and by challenging the DLC head-on, prompting the party brass to circle the wagons. But remember also what Dean did right. He electrified a large group of young, activist volunteers; he cast the election in dramatic, almost epic terms, with his "take back the country" appeal; he directed that appeal largely toward the fifty percent of the U.S. electorate that customarily declines to vote. The White House race has lost a lot of pizzazz since Dean's departure, and that is bad news for the Kerry campaign.
This is why Kerry's move to the center, seemingly a safe tactical gambit, is actually fraught with danger. A tepid, equivocal, middle-of-the-road campaign is precisely not what we need right now. The clear majority is calling for a bold, mature, compelling, aggressively expressed alternative to the vision of plutocracy and global empire driving the current regime.
From now through November, we can expect the Bush campaign, and pundits across the spectrum of mainstream media opinion, to portray Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal." This is not only an unfair, Red-baiting stereotype, it is an insidiously calculated fallacy. Being a Massachusetts liberal is emphatically (*)not(*) Kerry's problem. Kerry's problem is that he's a boring, vacillating, equivocating centrist.
Kerry's overwhelming success in the primaries puts the lie to the claim that it's activists at the fringes who choose the party's nominee. Primary voters, if we accept exit poll data, chose Kerry because his demeanor seems to convey the gravitas of "electability," rather than because of his legislative record or his stance on issues. A cursory look at Kerry's record reveals that when the heat is on, on some of the defining issues of our times, he can be counted on to vote (*)against(*) progressive positions: on the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, NAFTA, fast-track approval of trade negotiations, and Clinton's welfare reform, to name five examples.
On many other issues, of course, Kerry's positions are notably different from the Republicans, and even from more conservative Democrats in Congress. I'm not saying that electing Kerry wouldn't be a change for the better. I'm saying that he will only win the 2004 election by courageously displaying the vision, guts and backbone to speak truth to power and really stand for something.
Some of Kerry's most crowd-pleasing catchphrases turn out rather vacuous on inspection, such as his promise to appoint an Attorney General "whose name is not John Ashcroft." This is enough to get a shout of approval, but it does beg the question of whether and to what degree the police-state apparatus Ashcroft has constructed would stay in place under a Kerry administration. The vagueness of his gestures to the left, coupled with the specificity of his reassurances to the right, send clear signals about how Kerry intends to campaign, and presumably govern if elected.
Senator Kerry, like Clinton-Gore and other centrist Democrats, may believe he has the left over a barrel. He may assume that progressive voters are stuck with him and will therefore stick with him. And he may be correct, given the high stakes of this year's race. But he cannot count on committed, dynamic support from the left while running to the right. He needs to reach out to Dean voters, Nader voters and non-voters with specific policy statements that show he's accepting input from these quarters.
At least he could be emphasizing the progressive aspects of his record. For all the Senator's talk about his brave service in Vietnam, many would find equally courageous his leadership among antiwar veterans once he came home. Is he mentioning this on the stump? Has he brought up his leading role in exposing the huge vipers' nest of criminals that was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International? This is arguably his greatest accomplishment in politics; does he remind listeners of this, or -- dare I say-- boast about it?
Like most Bush opponents, I find Ralph Nader's decision to enter the '04 race distressingly tone-deaf. Bush/Cheney have by now proven demonstrably different from Clinton/Gore in numerous respects, weakening Nader's contention that the two parties are all but indistinguishable. If he wanted to, Kerry could probably bump him from the race with a few tactful but forthright statements, perhaps some artfully-plagiarized lines from Nader's speeches, a few campaign promises. I'm hoping he'll try since he needs all 2.9 million of those votes. But I'm not holding my breath. Instead of courting progressive voters, I fear Kerry may actually drive many of them back to Nader with his centrist strategy. If this happens, again, he'll have nobody to blame but himself. The $200 million GOP machine will not be defeated by a lukewarm lesser-of-two-evils. This year of all years, we need a candidate who is not a Republicrat.
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Top Ten Responses To -- "I Love Kucinich But He Can't Win"
Jan 25, 2004
How many times have you heard someone say: "I love Kucinich ... but I just don't think he's electable"? I often encounter staffers for other candidates out here in Los Angeles where I'm based, and even they often say these words to me. Saul Landau recently said on National Public Radio that Dennis's name has apparently been changed to the hyphenated 'Kucinich-ButHeCan'tWin.' The Congressman himself has been asked about the phenomenon repeatedly in the presidential debates.
Our campaign's overarching theme is 'Fear Ends / Hope Begins.' Over and over again, people say to us: "Dennis stands for so many of my hopes and dreams. But I so intensely fear George Bush's re-election ... that I will not vote for Dennis, or donate to Dennis, or volunteer for Dennis. I will support instead some other, lesser candidate who does not really reflect my aspirations for the human community, but who has a better chance of winning on November 2nd."
At the Kucinich campaign, we believe our single most effective strategy now to gain new votes is to move these individuals to change their minds.
Now that the cold primary season has commenced, there is little doubt that this as our most fertile garden to till. This is about mobilizing support from those who are already with us! These are votes that are already rightfully ours! This is about persuading people to defy their fears, and to vote their hopes and dreams.
NUMBER TEN: The Democratic Primaries Are Far From Over. The Nomination Could Still Be Seized By Anyone.
The results in Iowa left the presidential race more muddled and uncertain that at any time in recent memory. Most normal Americans (i.e., those who don't obsess about politics as much as the people probably reading this essay) have just since the New Year started paying any attention to the Democratic presidential contest at all. All winter long, the polls forecast a Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt battle for victory ... only to have John Kerry and John Edwards emerge suddenly ascendant. All the remaining seven candidates have significant strengths that are bound to translate into significant vote totals. All have weaknesses ' a shortage of money and organization here, a shortage of experience or a shortage of charisma there. Many of the multiple February 3rd states, at least as they are polling today, are simply too close to call. It is difficult to imagine any alternative to numerous candidates garnering numerous delegates in the primaries over the next six weeks. We are not even close to a 'presumptive nominee' ' not even John Kerry if he wins New Hampshire as well as Iowa.
We at the Kucinich campaign would not wish ourselves to be so far behind today in money, endorsements, and poll numbers. But because that is where we find ourselves at the dawn of 2004, the 'expectations' for our candidacy among the pundits and the party establishment are extremely low. If we simply do 'better than expected' in Iowa and New Hampshire, it could unleash a tidal wave of new endorsements, new donations, and new voter support ' precisely from the 'I love Dennis but he can't win' crowd. The enormous amount of dormant support out there for Dennis is our secret weapon! If the first 7 or 8 primaries both see Dennis do 'better than expected' and leave the race quite muddled and uncertain, Dennis could emerge as no less than the new media darling of the presidential contest.
NUMBER NINE: Dennis Is The Most Electable Candidate In A Face-Off Against George Bush.
We believe that Dennis may well be the candidate best equipped to ensure that George Bush emulates his father - and rides off into the sunset as another failed one-term president. What was the consensus verdict after the 2002 Congressional election debacle for the Democrats - That if Democrats run like Republicans, Republicans will surely win. That the Democrats need to present voters with a clear distinction, a clear choice, and a clear alternative vision. "It's Democrats above all who need big ideas," says former Clinton and Gore pollster Stanley Greenberg, "who need to create an election that is about something." The lesson of 2002 is that the candidate with the best chance to beat George Bush will be the candidate who offers the starkest contrast to George Bush. And no one can dispute that that candidate is Dennis Kucinich.
Is there any Democrat who would better motivate our liberal and progressive base in November 2004 - generating not just votes, but midnight oil and shoe leather? One of the central theses of both John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's 2003 book 'The Emerging Democratic Majority' and E.J. Dionne's 1997 book 'They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era' is that broad demographic, geographic, economic, and political changes are making us more and more a Democratic country. But historically among voters of color -- who become a greater proportion of the electorate with every election cycle -- the more progressive the candidate the greater the turnout on Election Day. Dennis, indeed, is the candidate who can best mobilize this "emerging Democratic majority."
In addition, no one could secure the allegiance of more Ralph Nader voters than Dennis Kucinich. Al Gore and Nader together received 3.5 million more votes than George Bush in November 2000. But not ALL those Nader voters will likely vote for ANY Democratic nominee in November 2004. Surely, more of them would turn out to support Dennis than they would any other Democratic candidate. And given how many states would have swung the other way but for the Nader candidacy (he received 99,000 votes in Florida), these voters could make absolutely the decisive difference in the 2004 election.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Dennis has a great many weapons to wield in the national security debate. Dennis can make a comprehensive case that George Bush's foreign policies have generated new foreign enemies. That George Bush's defense policies have weakened our defenses. That George Bush's responses to 9/11 have made future 9/11s far more likely to occur. (So much for Republicans being "strong on defense.") And our man has a comprehensive alternative to offer. Dennis Kucinich will accommodate rather than alienate, employ carrots far more than sticks, and dry up the swamps of hopelessness and humiliation that cause insecure youth to head down the terrorist road. Dennis Kucinich will be both tough on terror and tough on the causes of terror. In Dennis Kucinich's America our nation will abide by Lincoln's precept: "The only lasting way to eliminate an enemy is to make him your friend." And that is a winning message for the post 9/11 world.
Also contrary to the conventional wisdom that sees Dennis as 'too far left' to attract swing voters, Dennis has a history of winning votes from blue collar 'Reagan Democrats' - because no one better illuminates how Bush's policies favor the rich and leave them out in the cold. Dennis has a track record in building broad ethnic coalitions. And Dennis is an experienced and seasoned politician, having fought and won grueling political battles as a city council member, a mayor, a state senator, and a member of the U.S. Congress.
Finally, Dennis is from Ohio, a key Midwestern battleground swing state with 20 electoral votes. Dennis has defeated Republican incumbents three times in Ohio. No Republican in the history of this nation has ever been elected President without carrying Ohio. Dennis can win Ohio for the Democrats. And as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.
NUMBER EIGHT: If Voters Believe Dennis Truly Has 'No Chance Of Winning the Nomination' Then For Them There's No Danger In Voting For Him In The Primary!
When people say, 'Dennis cannot win,' they themselves are often unclear about what they mean. Do they mean Dennis cannot win the nomination? Or do they mean that if Dennis does in fact win the nomination, he cannot win the general election? These two very different propositions lead to very different conclusions.
If Voter Vanessa likes Dennis but believes Dennis would lose to George Bush on November 2nd, then a decision to vote for someone else in the primaries might make sense if Dennis was a frontrunner, if Vanessa believes that Dennis has a real shot at the nomination, if the pundits thought Dennis had any chance at all of becoming the Democratic candidate for president.
But they don't.
Most voters and most of the punditocracy have written off any possibility that Dennis can win the nomination. Here in my town the mighty Los Angeles Times never refers to our man as anything other than 'long shot candidate Dennis Kucinich.' Ted Koppel famously dismissed him as a 'vanity candidate.' If Vanessa believes that Dennis has no chance of emerging as the nominee, then a primary vote for Dennis carries no danger of anointing the wrong candidate to face-off against George Bush. For Vanessa, there is no risk that she will help choose a candidate who is going to get blown out in the general. There is no peril.
There is no worst-case scenario.
NUMBER SEVEN: Dennis Will Support The Nominee.
Dennis is unalterably committed to supporting whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee for president, and to working tirelessly this fall to defeat George Bush. Dennis toiled arduously in 2000 to win Ohio for Al Gore. There is no 'Nader scenario' regarding Dennis Kucinich, because Dennis Kucinich is a Democrat, not a Green. A vote for Dennis in January or February or March will not take a single vote away from the Democratic nominee in November. How does a dollar or a day or a vote devoted to Dennis in early 2004 adversely affect the prospects of the eventual nominee in November 2004?
NUMBER SIX: The Nominee May Adopt Some Of Dennis's Ideas if Dennis Gets Enough Votes.
The more support Dennis generates this winter and spring, the more likely it will be that the eventual nominee - if it is not Dennis - will choose to incorporate some of Dennis's important ideas. If Dennis does better than expected in money, in volunteers, and in votes, the Democratic candidate who emerges may conclude that there is indeed support for things like the abolition of nuclear weapons, a great crusade for economic justice, and the conviction that an expanded ethic of human unity will be no less than the Great Story of the 21st Century. The nominee, consequently, may embrace some of these ideas and explicitly campaign upon them.
This phenomenon has already played out in the campaign. For example, after Dennis strongly rejected Bush's request for $87 billion for Iraq, both John Kerry and John Edwards followed his lead. Dennis's unapologetic opposition to NAFTA and the WTO has caused all the candidates to talk more about fair trade.
And consider the other, bleaker scenario. If all the 'I love Kucinich -- but he can't win' crowd support someone else, the 2004 Democratic nominee AND the Democratic Party establishment AND the chattering classes will conclude that there is not much support for the things our candidacy is about. "Gee," they will say, "there's not much interest in withdrawing from NAFTA and the WTO, for putting the brakes on the PATRIOT Act, for creating a Department of Peace to stand alongside the Department of Defense, is there - After all, Dennis Kucinich ran for president on that stuff - and he never did better than 3%."
"Win or lose the nomination," says Kucinich endorser Ben Cohen, "his grassroots presidential campaign is the vehicle for expanding the party, moving it in a progressive direction, bringing in new voters, and reaching out in a serious way to bring back disaffected voters." The more votes Dennis receives this winter and spring, the more power progressives will exercise to shape the character of the Democratic platform in the summer of 2004, and of the Democratic Administration which we fervently hope will take office on January 20, 2005.
NUMBER FIVE: At A Brokered Convention, Dennis Could Play A Crucial Role.
Several pundits have raised the possibility that 2004 might see the first brokered Democratic convention since 1960. That means that the Democratic primaries may not decisively settle on a candidate, and that the decision will have to be hammered out at the convention itself - with delegates as the currency of negotiation. And that means that Dennis's influence could be quite tangible and quite decisive.
Many factors point to a real possibility of the first brokered convention in a generation. The rise of proportional voting over the previous winner-take-all systems in state primaries. The importance of the nearly 800 party honcho 'super-delegates' (which means that a candidate cannot guarantee the nomination unless he wins more than 60% of the elected delegates). The accelerated front-loading of the process (which means that by the morning of March 3rd nearly half of the delegates will already have been chosen, making it simply mathematically more difficult for any presumptive frontrunner to achieve victory after that time).
If the brokered convention scenario does come to pass, every single vote cast for Dennis in January, February, and March will translate into delegates that Dennis will wield in Boston in July. Those delegates will enable Dennis to tangibly influence the platform and positions that the Democratic candidate adopts. Those delegates could enable Dennis to decisively influence who the Democratic candidate will be. And who knows' At a brokered convention, the Democratic Party just may conclude that the candidate with the best chance to defeat George Bush is the one who poses the most striking alternative to George Bush - Dennis Kucinich.
NUMBER FOUR: Electoral Outcomes In 10 Months -- Or A Better World In 10 Years?
Mother Jones writer George Packer recently quoted D.H. Lawrence: "The ideas of one generation," wrote Lawrence in 'Making Love to Music', 'become the instincts of the next."'There is something worse than losing," continues Packer, "and that is losing pointlessly. ... The way for the party not to lose pointlessly is to proceed incautiously. The most attractive candidate will be the one who airs ideas that risk alienating ... because the ideas might be good ones, and might catch the public pulse ... and might make future victories possible."
Has there been any political candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy more capable of mobilizing the fires in the bellies of committed activists than Dennis Kucinich? If voters support Dennis with their money and their sweat and their votes, it will stoke the engines of social change - far beyond the fate of Kucinich for President.
"Victory," says the inestimable Jonathan Schell, "does not come through the ballot box alone. It sometimes comes by circuitous paths. ... Changing hearts and minds can at times be as important as changing the President. ... When in doubt, it's best to err on the side of speaking the truth."
Must we resign ourselves only to vote for a candidate who can rescue us from a dismal present? Or can we free ourselves to vote for a candidate who can lead us toward a brighter future? Are we concerned solely and exclusively about what is going to happen in America in 10 months? Or can we interest ourselves in the human condition and the fate of the earth in 10 years and beyond? There is much more at stake here than simply choosing a candidate for president. A vote for Dennis Kucinich is a vote for the American dream, for the promise of what America can become. As the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently put it: "America, you've never been America to me; and I swear this oath: you will be!"
NUMBER THREE: The Left, The Right, And The Center ... Can Change.
We reject the notion that the American electorate is set in stone - e.g., 45% hard left, 45% hard right, and an all-coveted 10% "in the center." We know that the center has moved over time. A great many ideas and initiatives that were once considered hard left - women's rights, civil rights, human rights, gay rights, labor protections, environmental protections - are now much more in the mainstream, much more "moderate,'" much more "centrist." The anti-war, anti-corporate, and anti-globalization movements of recent years - manifesting in some of the largest demonstrations in history - are surely not far behind.
We believe that many Kucinich proposals now considered hard left will one distant day be similarly considered as mainstream, centrist, and broadly accepted by most of the right-thinking people of the time. One of the best vehicles for accomplishing that shift in the center of American politics is a liberal and progressive presidential campaign. And Dennis Kucinich is the most liberal and progressive candidate American voters have had the opportunity to embrace in quite a long time. A vote for Dennis Kucinich is a vote to shift the center of gravity of the American political debate. For 2004 and beyond.
NUMBER TWO: Living Up To Your Own Ideals.
"If it feels good -- do it" said one of the mottos of the 1960s. While one might debate whether that guidance is optimal for all of life's scenarios, it certainly is for the great democratic act of voting. We believe that it simply feels better to walk out of the voting booth knowing that you were true to yourself, that you stood up for what you believe. Demonstrating support for the things you support is the essence of what voting is all about. We believe that the whole point of democracy is to vote for the world you aspire to create. Election Day is a day to let go of doubts and fears. Election Day is a day to reach for our hopes, to cleave to our dreams, and to stand up for the America we can become. That is the only way to be fully a citizen of any political community.
A vote for Dennis today is a vote for what the Democratic Party OUGHT to stand for at the dawn of the 21st Century. And it's a vote for what the Democratic Party CAN stand for - if only the people who believe in Dennis actually have the courage and integrity to vote for Dennis.
Especially now. There will be plenty of time to choose between the lesser of two evils in the general election. As the Texas sage Molly Ivins exhorts us: Vote with your head on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. But in the caucuses and primaries, vote with your heart.
NUMBER ONE: Moving History Forward - Like Other Noble Presidential Candidacies Of The Past.
Presidential campaigns in American history have often been about much more than winning and losing. Presidential campaigns can be about driving the engines of history. Consider Bruce Babbitt and Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon in 1988, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson and Alan Cranston in 1984, John Anderson in 1980, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 (laying the groundwork for both John Kennedy and the 1960s), Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs in the first decades of the 20th century (without whom Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal would have been inconceivable), Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive campaign of 1912. None of these efforts resulted in triumph at the ballot box. Yet all of them broadened the public conversation. They pressured the structures of power. They inspired new generations of progressive activists. They were beacons in the political night. They served to generate debate, to inject new ideas into the public arena, and to accelerate our progress toward a brighter morning.
And so too will be the presidential candidacy of Dennis Kucinich. BUT NOT VERY MUCH ... unless those who believe in him actually vote for him.
Victor Hugo famously said: "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." Many of Dennis's ideas, we might admit, are ideas whose time has perhaps not quite yet come. Our job is to bring their time ever closer, to hasten their arrival in the train station of history. How will the time for such ideas ever come, if we do not choose to vote for those with the vision and integrity to articulate them? A vote for Dennis Kucinich is the quintessential exercise of what Thomas Jefferson liked to call "practical idealism." If politics, as every undergraduate knows, is the art of the possible, then a vote for Dennis Kucinich is a mechanism for expanding the parameters of political possibility.
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A Citizen's Challenge to the Democratic Presidential Candidates
Nov 06, 2003
Emboldened by the success of inciting nationwide fear to justify it, George W. Bush is squandering American blood and treasure in a fraudulent war. His willful and overt betrayal of the public trust is unprecedented, and it should become the transcendent issue of the presidential campaign.
Never before has a President consciously deceived the American people with fright, in order to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. What greater high crime and misdemeanor can there be? If the Congress lacks the will even to speak of impeaching George W. Bush, then you, Presidential candidates, must assure his removal. The man is morally unfit to be President.
In varying degrees you all oppose the war. Several of you indict the President for having misled you, prior to voting on the war resolution. Others saw Saddam Hussein's threat as insufficient to justify the invasion. You have condemned the bait-and-switch tactics. These efforts are laudable, but the President's fear mongering to deceive the American people needs to be a central and explicit focus of this campaign.
Many Americans don't sense the President's betrayal. It was not accomplished with a single bald-faced lie or some other conspicuous event, but by an incremental and cumulative process of exaggeration, distortion, and reliance on militant symbolism and metaphor. It began with the trigger event of 9/11, continued with the Axis of Evil speech, grew with the "war on terrorism" rhetoric, and then it catapulted us by design into combat. The betrayal was not episodic and visible, but programmatic and alluring, and that is why so many Americans supported the war.
But the war is a symptom. George W. Bush is the disease, and his betrayal of the public trust is the issue.
The attack on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon was the ingenious achievement of a depraved fanatic. Within hours President Bush knew that. He knew it was not the first step into to cataclysmic violence-a poisoned continent or a nuclear Armageddon.
No one will dispute the horror of September 11th, but it was not as severe or as threatening as the attack on Pearl Harbor six decades ago, to which the Bush people immediately compared it. More people were killed on 9/11, they shrilled, but that is typical of their misleading hyperbole. In jeopardizing national security, four jetliners flown by lunatics are hardly equivalent to wave after wave of Japanese bombers and a naval armada at sea.
But President Bush undertook deliberately, immediately and for the next two years, to strike fear and anxiety-yes, even terror-into the American psyche. Painting images of an Axis of Evil, of "mass destruction" from horrific weapons in the hands of shadowy and demonized "terrorists," George W. Bush himself became the greatest terrorist of all.
There are books and DVD movies on the streets today describing this deception, this brilliant campaign of propaganda.
Today the situation in Iraq is epic tragedy, a colossus of failed policy. With exquisite justice, it is becoming a political liability for the Bush Administration.
And the American economy is teetering, utterly unsustainable. It survives only by exporting millions of high paying jobs and by importing a billion dollars of foreign capital each day-to finance not investment, but consumption. This, too, is a huge political liability.
His foreign and domestic policy in shambles, the President presses his only tawdry success, the campaign of fear and deception. His Administration continues to trumpet the "war on terrorism." Condoleezza Rice pictures mushroom clouds over America. Vice President Cheney warns of an "ultimate nightmare," of losing "hundreds of thousands of lives in a single day of war."
No, international terrorism is not to be treated with indifference or minimized, but magnifying the threat into a terrifying delusion is yet more irresponsible. Still, we hear on the Sunday morning talk shows, "The American people know it is better to fight the terrorists on the streets of Baghdad than on the streets of New York."
We accept that inane comparison because we have been propagandized, persuaded to do so. We are a trusting people, wanting to believe in the good will and integrity of our leaders. And we do.
Never have we been so betrayed.
This is the overarching issue in the campaign today, and you, Presidential candidates, need to address it head on. You need to call the willful deception for what it is, and you need to show how it was accomplished. Yes, it will demand much political courage to counter and correct the exaggerations and distortions of the last two years, in order to help America understand its betrayal. Nothing will call for greater statesmanship, compassion, and skill. But no one in America today has a better opportunity-or more responsibility-to do this than the nine of you.
A recent newspaper story about a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, displays your challenge: "President Bush...brought a crowd to its feet Monday when he declared: 'The enemy in Iraq believes America will run...America will never run!'" Now, his betrayal completed and beyond notice, the President invokes the determination and courage of the American character, and his audience cheers.
It is despicable to exploit the patriotism of trusting people, but the case against President Bush must be made with grace, not invective. The people in Birmingham and elsewhere, who believe George Bush is telling the truth, will not and should not accept blindly a simple, impassioned accusation to the contrary. You need instead to show them the evidence, carefully and truthfully, and then ask them to judge if it justifies the conclusion of betrayal. The answer is self-evident to many Americans: your challenge is to make it so for the rest.
You have the statesmanship, the compassion, and the skill to raise this issue and to pose these questions. The defeat of George W. Bush will be more assured when you do.
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