NYT Bob Herbert (via RawStory): Kerry 'almost certainly' won Ohio in 2004

[eomer]

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/NYT_Bob_Herbert_Kerry_almost_certainly_0612.html

NYT Bob Herbert: Kerry 'almost certainly' won Ohio in 2004

RAW STORY
_{Published: Monday June 12, 2006}


In the 2004 presidential election, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) "almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots," writes columnist Bob Herbert for Monday's edition of The New York Times.

Excerpts from Herbert's Op-Ed, Those Pesky Voters:

#
Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.

....

No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush.

....

Walter Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University, did a statistical analysis of the vote in Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus. He told Kennedy, "The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans."

Mebane told me that he compared the distribution of voting machines in Ohio's 2004 presidential election with the distribution of machines for a primary election held the previous spring. For the primary, he said, "There was no sign of racial bias in the distribution of the machines." But for the general election in November, "there was substantial bias, with fewer voting machines per voter in areas that were heavily African-American."

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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/opinion/12herbert.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26hp&OP=151d972fQ2F48mv4Q23o5ggQ234NuuQ7C4uQ7C4jN4gfQ26Q22Q26gQ224jNwm5vm5Q23swQ23Q5DV">TIMES SELECT SUBSCRIBERS CAN READ FULL OP-ED HERE

[robbedvoter]

1. ...and therefore, the election. Good, the word gets out. Pass it on.

Any comment, Johns?

[Igel]

2. But he needs another piece of info for the final paragraph

of your quote.

He needs (a) evidence that voter turnout was proportionally the same between the primary and the general election; or, (b) that machines were shifted between precincts in ways not dictated by past voter turnout levels.

I'm sure Mebane knows this, if he means 'bias' to imply a motive or cause for the distribution. Then again, 'bias' in statistics doesn't imply a motive, just a trend.

[mod mom]

3. He needs to insert the knowlege of the SOS/BOE that there were huge

registration drives that favored high Dem precincts.

[Febble]

4. Read Mebane here:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/07/21/timing_and_turnout_in_ohio.php

Edited to add:

and here:

http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/franklin2.pdf

Or even me here:

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/FranklinCountyReport_v2.pdf

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. note on "bias"

Mebane is indeed describing a statistical trend, not necessarily imputing a motive -- although he points out that the outcome shouldn't have come as a surprise. As mod mom pointed out, the registration trends were unambiguous.

I think the most charitable interpretation one can give to what happened in Franklin County is that the BoE had barely enough machines to go around even as of late spring, and as the registration numbers started to surge, they were reluctant to take away machines that they had already allocated. That interpretation may be too charitable. It is hard to tell from here.

[liam_laddie]

7. IIRC -

Franklin County had some 65-70 machines in storage which were never deployed. Hmmm...
In my experience in Hamilton Cty, BOE officials have a certain number "held" for emergency
deployment in case of breakdowns, etc. In the 2004 and 2005 "off-year" elections, punch-cards
were used, as they had been for about thirty years previously. There were also ten vans
positioned around the county with replacement punch-card devices and extra flip-pages for
each precinct in their zone.

I doubt counties can afford "spare" opscan precinct accumulators or DRE's sitting around un-used.
I'm very suspicious of the Franklin County story/excuse. Was Matt Damschroder (sp?) in charge then?
There were plenty of machines in republican-dominant polling places.

In any case, in 2004, friends of mine working minority polling places here (Cincinnati) called for
extra machines which never arrived. There was some suppression, and it didn't help that it was
a terrible, blustery, very rainy day here, 11-2-04. It shall live in infamy...

[OnTheOtherHand]

8. I want to know that too

I can point you to the report where the BoE says, more or less, what they did with all their machines, and I can point you to a couple of Fitrakis's critiques, but I'm not satisfied with either side. (Yes, Damschroder was director then, although I think Anthony once said that the deputy director was in on the allocations or even just did them.)

Oh, a nitpick: the truth about machine allocations om Franklin is somewhere between Anthony's 'there were long lines everywhere' and our 'all the Republicans had plenty of machines.' Some Republican precincts got nailed, too, but nowhere near as many.

I'm certainly not "satisfied" with the result. What a nightmare.

[EFerrari]

5. Better late than never, Bob. I guess when your job is to watchdog

BushCo, the traffic can be overwhelming.