|
favor of Bush.
As mentioned, this book presents the most crucial documents indicating how this bitterly contested election was actually decided.
But it is also this book's purpose to memorialize the successful grassroots campaign by voting rights advocates that forced an historic Congressional challenge on the floors of the US Senate and House. Acting on an 1887 law that grew out of the stolen election of 1876, a concerned constituency called into question before Congress the electoral votes of an entire state for the first time in US history.
Brought forth by US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), the Ohio electoral delegation challenge was the product of a unique grassroots campaign whose work is also documented here. As the New York Times described it, "In many ways, the debate came about because of the relentless efforts of a small group of third-party activists, liberal lawyers, Internet muckrakers and civil rights groups, who have been arguing since Election Day that the Ohio vote was rigged for Mr. Bush."
The research and writing in this book has focused on Ohio, where we have been collectively reporting on electoral politics for more than three decades.
While the alleged irregularities, frauds and illegalities that transpired here in 2004 have probably generated the most thorough documentation of any state, important parallel assertions have arisen in other states around the country, most importantly Florida and New Mexico.
As journalists and researchers with deep roots in Columbus, the state capitol, we warned of serious problems developing in how Ohio's 2004 balloting was being administered even before the actual votes were cast.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell who oversaw the Ohio election, is an outspoken, extremely controversial partisan who also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, a conflict of interest that aroused much anger.
In his dual role, Blackwell seemed to replay the part of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. In 2000 Harris also served as co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign while administering the election that first gave them the White House. In both cases, Harris and Blackwell termed the elections "highly successful."
But were these "successes" defined in terms of their public servant roles as Secretaries of State? Or were they defined in terms of their partisan roles as campaign co-chairs for George W. Bush?
In this volume's first three documents, we reproduce articles published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout the Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide range of abuses stemming from Secretary Blackwell's office and other sources had already tainted the outcome of the upcoming Ohio vote.
On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically prophetic. The balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array of irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of the questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of official accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in the news since the bitterly contested election of 2000, four years earlier. (Similar questions also arose in Georgia in 2002, where Democratic candidates for Governor and US Senate had substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day, only to lose by substantial margins).
The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as predominantly African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of voting machines. Inner-city voters waited three hours on average and up to seven hours, according to election officials and to sworn testimony of local residents. Many voters stood in the cold rain to cast their ballots while nearby white Republican suburbs suffered virtually no delays. The wait at liberal Kenyon College, located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while voters at a nearby conservative Bible school could vote in five minutes.
To this day no one can definitively tell how many citizens, seeing the long lines, went home or to work or to take care of their children, thus losing their right to vote.
But long waits were hardly the only problems predominantly Democratic voters encountered on Election Day. Selective harassment by partisan poll "inspectors," provisional ballot manipulations, missing registration records, denial of absentee ballots, ab
|
|
