Robert Kennedy’s long, exhaustive, investigative piece in Rolling Stone magazine about voting irregularities in Ohio does an enormous service to the cause of making elections in America more free and fair. The article lists about a dozen credible instances where the GOP improperly tried to suppress the vote by purging voter registration rolls, discounting newly registered voters (most from Democratic precincts), highlighting GOP shenanigans on election day at polling places, and even making a good case for some good old fashioned ballot box stuffing in some rural Ohio counties.

That said, Kennedy is on much less firm ground when he tries to sell the notion that the voting machines were rigged, that Secretary of State Blackwell personally oversaw a massive vote fraud operation, that there is anything to the notion that there is proof of fraud in the difference between exit polling and the actual vote counts, that corporations involved in making the voting machines participated in any fraudulent activities, and that a full recount would have changed the eventual outcome.

Overall in fact, this is a jaw-dropping piece of partisan hackery. It might have been helpful if Kennedy had bothered to look into charges of Democratic vote fraud that were also swirling around in Ohio on election day and before. And a helpful overview of charges of Democratic vote fraud in other extremely close states that were lost by the President – specifically Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three of the most heavily unionized states in the nation and featuring Democratic governors with their hands on the polling machinery – would have given his critique an air of authority and legitimacy.

Instead, Mr. Kennedy decided to mix in the most base of smears directed at a Republican gubernatorial candidate with his fact flakes, thus bringing much of his good work down to the level of the gutter.

This country is in desperate need of electoral reform. Not only do both parties plan and organize disenfranchisement operations, they have developed techniques over the years that have gone far beyond dirty tricks like graveyard voting, ballot box stuffing, and the outright bribery of voters, which are election day traditions in many parts of the nation and have been for almost two hundred years. Kennedy’s article reveals some of the dirty little secrets of our democracy and of our political parties (although again, Kennedy’s beautification of Democrats by not accusing them of any wrongdoing is laughable). The long and short of it is, the system is broke and there is apparently not much that anyone is willing to do about it.

Kennedy’s critique is strongest when detailing GOP efforts to disqualify registered voters, especially voters newly added to the rolls. There is also a good case made that the distribution of voting machines was deliberately manipulated to make likely Democratic voters wait much longer to vote than likely Republican voters. There were also enormous problems with the so-called “provisional ballots” that were supposed to be given to people who either had questionable registrar information or were voting in the wrong precinct.

This last charge was not confined to Ohio as both Democrats and Republicans across the country sought to fiddle with the requirements of the law. The statute in both Democratic and Republican controlled states appeared to be honored in the breach as there were numerous complaints in Wisconsin about Republican voters being disenfranchised the way Democrats were in Ohio (among other outrageous examples of Democratic vote fraud in that state).

Some of the charges against Blackwell are spurious:

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.

There was very good reason to cite that “arcane” regulation – massive, systematic Democratic voter registration fraud:

The unfortunate fact is that Ohio election authorities experienced an unprecedented number of fraudulent voter registrations and some organizations appear to have been engaged in efforts to facilitate and pay for the submission of fraudulent voter registration forms.

This point was noted by Keith Cunningham, President of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, when he testified about the election in Ohio before the House Administration Committee in March 2005. During his testimony, Cunningham remarked that “disruptive” and “distracting” political activists on the ground in Ohio made it increasingly difficult for elections officials to do their jobs.

Cunningham: “[T]he November 2004 election was probably the single most difficult thing I have ever tried to manage in my life. … For instance, the card we send out to voters that tell them where they’re registered, what your precinct is. I spent the better part of an afternoon arguing with somebody that the type on that card was too small, when it’s the same card we’ve been sending out for some time and it’s the default setting on the printer. My belief is that not everyone in November 2004 was dealing in good faith. And there were people on the ground and present in Ohio who … were attempting to create chaos and confusion in hopes that out of it could come something that could be exploited.” (266)

Part of the “chaos and confusion” referenced by Cunningham stemmed from the thousands of fraudulent voter registrations submitted to elections officials in every corner of Ohio.

This is what happens when you make charges without giving any context to someone’s actions. Blackwell was responding to massive, systematic, planned voter registration fraud. Groups like the NAACP (paying for voter registration with crack cocaine), ACORN (massive voter registration fraud resulting in the arrest and conviction of several of their Ohio employees who were paid $5 for each new voter signed up), Americans Coming together (ACT), and the nation’s oldest purveyor of voter registration fraud, the AFL-CIO all sought to game the system and hand Ohio to the Democrats in a blatantly illegal scheme to place fraudulent or non-existent names on the voter list so that operatives would be able to vote several times. This is a time honored scheme in Democratic states and appears to have taken place in Wisconsin, a state the President lost by a mere 11,000 votes.

I urge you to read this link for a detailed description of what Blackwell had to deal with. Much of what is criticized in Kennedy’s piece could easily be chalked up to Blackwell’s grim determination to make sure that the registration process – already strained to the limit with more than 1.5 million new names – didn’t degenerate into a democratic farce. This concern regarding registration fraud also played a hand in the snafus with provisional ballots although clearly, Republicans failed to abide by the law in many, many cases.

Such lack of context permeates Kennedy’s critique:

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)

What? Nothing about the legions of Democratic challengers who were also present? I guess we ought to just put the halo on Democrats in Ohio right now rather than waiting for the Vatican to bestow sainthood.

And in a rerun of issues surrounding the 2004 Florida debacle, Kenned pulls out the same, tired canard about “ballot crawl” – the practice that some voters inadvertently or out of sheer stupidity vote for the wrong person on the punch card ballot:

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)

This is the “idiot factor” at work and there is little to be done about it. The fact that it happens in precincts where people are less educated:

In an attempt to bring illiteracy to the attention of the American people, the U.S. Department of Education pointed out a decade ago that an alarming 47 million American adults were functionally or marginally illiterate. Arguably, little meaningful progress has been made in the fight to reduce illiteracy in the most affluent nation in the world.

A 2001 Newsweek article pointed out that an astonishing 47 percent of Detroit, Mich. residents, or almost one-out-of-two adults in the predominately African-American and urban city were functionally illiterate. By way of comparison, only 6.7 percent of citizens in Vietnam are functionally illiterate.

“Ballot crawl” is a problem of reading, not fraud. This is another dirty little secret of American politics – a sizable minority of people (black and white) are unable to function in our democracy as a result of their being marginally or functionally illiterate. I don’t see Kennedy or Conyers advocating doing anything about it either when they attempt to intimate fraud where remedial reading classes are called for.

Kennedy really jumps the shark when trying to tie the idea of massive vote stealing by the GOP to the skewed exit polls. Ed Morrisey does an excellent job debunking this canard:

News flash: mathematics is an exact science. Polling isn’t, and for at least one basic reason—you can’t force people to participate. The only people answering exit polls are those inclined to share their opinions. It also relies on the skill, integrity, and execution of the actual polltakers, many of whom are hired with little training. Moreover, reporting results in the middle of the sample almost always guarantees bad conclusions.

And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what two research firms looking into the exit poll debacle found:

Indeed they did. And, as I pointed out on election night, the high turnout was playing havoc with the computer models anyway:

A word about exit polls…they take a couple of dozen “key” precincts and average turnout, party reliability, and a few other mundane factors to project a winner. The big turnout here COULD be skewing the computer models and not giving confidence to the networks.

Indeed, that is what happened. An increase of almost 17 million Republicans offset an increase of 15 million Democrats. Rove won the numbers game and Democrats still can’t believe it. And the forecaster’s models broke down as a result of the unpredictability in the increase in voters.

Any notion that the exit polls were going to reveal who won can safely be put to rest by the projected results in these states:

But Kerry winning by 16 in PA? Up 15 in MN? Kerry by 17 in NH? These numbers aren’t just wrong, they’re numbers taken from some kind of weird parallel universe where bloggers don’t exist! How could they have gotten it so wrong?

Not to mention the poll’s split of 59% women and 41% men. Did anyone bother studying that anomaly?

Those exit polls also showed Kerry winning North Carolina and Arizona – two states where there are no charges of vote fraud and which the President carried comfortably. I wonder if Mr. Kennedy would be kind enough to explain that?

In summary, Kennedy should have applied Occam’s Razor to his Exit Poll theory; given multiple explanations for the same outcome, the simplest is probably true. And it’s a helluva lot easier to say that the exit polls were wrong rather than positing the notion of massive, nationwide vote fraud.

Finally, Kennedy raises legitimate questions about the recount of the vote by the state. There apparently were many irregularities in following established procedures and the law for which Mr. Blackwell should be criticized. But would a recount really have given the state and therefore the election to Kerry? The candidate himself didn’t think so and was advised I’m sure by the most knowledgeable and savvy pols in his party. Besides that, it would have been asking too much to expect the President’s lead of nearly 128,000 votes to disappear entirely in a statewide recount. Such an eventuality would have no precedence in American history which is why Kerry probably conceded in the first place.

If I sound dismissive of most of Kennedy’s article, I don’t mean to. As I pointed out, he makes several troubling and valid points about what happened before and after election day in Ohio. Overall, however, his criticisms ring hollow due to his total disregard for Democratic tomfoolery – especially the blatant disenfranchisement campaign carried out against overseas citizens (among many other transgressions) in next door Pennsylvania by Governor Ed Rendell – a state where Kerry’s margin of victory was smaller than Bush’s in Ohio.

What I applaud Mr. Kennedy for is in bringing these issues out into the open for discussion. I have no idea how to solve these problems – I will leave solutions to others. But there is no doubt in my mind that the problem of election and registration fraud is getting worse and threatens our entire democratic system. Best heed the calls for reform now before people lose faith in our system of government entirely.

UPDATE

The Editors make some interesting points about the article while taking some righty bloggers to task for inconsistency. Check out some of the comments as well – some of them still don’t get the fact that the exit polls were so far off thanks to methodology, not conspiracy.

Kim Priestap:

The Democrats just can’t accept that they lost in 2000 and 2004. As far as they are concerned, power is their right, their entitlement. Therefore, as they see it, Democrats don’t lose elections. The elections are stolen from them, which is why Kennedy puts all his eggs in his the-exit-polls-were-accurate basket. Now their target is Secretary Blackwell. And it appears that no smear is low enough for them.

I would say there is a lot of truth in that but in RFK’s case, I think he did raise some legitimate issues.

UPDATE II 6/3

James Joyner does a first class job debunking many of Kennedy’s theories and links to a Salon article that also criticizes Mr. Kennedy’s fact flakes.

A decent critique of the Ohio vote in 2004 would have included the intense scrambling for new voters that caused the Democrats to step over the line of legality and the Republicans to respond by trying to suppress some of the registrations. Again, Blackwell was in an impossible position but, as one of my non-partisan commenters pointed out, it is ludicrous to have the state Chairman of one party’s nominee in charge of seeing that a fair vote is conducted. The appearance of impropriety is too great to give much confidence to the people that nothing underhanded is going on.

Tristero also notes the Salon article and walks back a little from his flat statement that the 2004 election was stolen. He believes Kennedy should acknowledge his mistakes and apologize.

The last forecast I saw for hell did not show any cooling trends in the near future.

UPDATE: 6/7

Readers who have come here via The Poorman Institute must be a little confused. I’m sure they were expecting to read a piece that tries to whitewash Republican malfeasance during the election, when in fact I praise Mr. Kennedy for bringing many of these issues – including the deliberate disenfranchisement of Democratic voters – into the light.

No, the Editors did not direct you to the wrong link. And no, I will not descend to the level of the barnyard to point out that whoever wrote that post did not read much of what I had to say and further, did not give even a hint that both sides were doing their best to supress the other’s vote in Ohio on election day.

To say otherwise is moronic…or is it “moranic?”