Cover-Up using Mass Hypnosis Campaign:Vote Zealots UnderMine Confidence

MoveOn.Now
The zealots who refuse to accept Ohio's vote count risk undermining
confidence in the system itself
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Most Americans, including the vast majority of those who supported
John Kerry for president, have grasped the most basic reality of
Election Day 2004:

George W. Bush was re-elected. He won roughly 60.7 million votes
and carried 31 states with 286 electoral votes. Ohio's 20 Electoral
College members formally cast ballots for the president Monday in
the Statehouse.

Unfortunately, there is a small, but very vocal, group of Americans
who refuse to accept this reality. They argue that what appear to
be routine technical glitches and human errors were in fact an
elaborate conspiracy to skew the election results. They claim that
long lines at a few polling places, the rather unsurprising result
of high voter interest, were evidence of a systematic campaign to
discourage participation. In short, having failed to get the
outcome they wanted at the polls, they have decided to mount an
irresponsible campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in
the electoral system itself.

Ohio, arguably the most intensive battleground for Bush and Kerry,
has been the No. 1 target of these diehards.

Since Election Day, they have seized on isolated problems in a
relative handful of this state's 11,366 precincts as proof of
greater ills or even criminal activity.

One speaker in Columbus over the weekend likened Ohio to Ukraine.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has complained of widespread "fraud and
stealing."

The Green and Libertarian parties, whose presidential candidates
got a combined three-tenths of one percent of the vote in Ohio on
Nov. 2, have demanded a recount of the state's 5.7 million ballots.
That will cost taxpayers about $1.4 million. A coalition of
critics, led by a former Ohio organizer for Ross Perot, has asked
the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the presidential election, as
well as the outcome in the race for chief justice. The Kerry
campaign, reflecting its leader's maddening desire to have
everything both ways, has said it does not expect a recount to
change anything - yet has also issued a list of things it wants
local elections officials to double-check.

Obviously, there were problems on Election Day. There always are.
Elections are run by imperfect humans. Many individual polling
places are in the hands of civic-minded neighbors with a few hours
of training. Machines malfunction. Voters mess up ballots.

But Ohio has already done its usual intensive post-election audit
and reconciliation, a process designed to spot mistakes. That
canvass resulted in Bush's unofficial 136,000-vote margin being
reduced to the 119,000-vote edge that Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell certified last week.

Ohio's bipartisan elections system makes the kind of GOP conspiracy
that some allege all but impossible to execute. Every county board
of elections consists of two Democrats and two Republicans. So when
Jackson and other national Democrats question Ohio's outcome, they
demean their own allies. William Anthony Jr., the African-American
who chairs both the Franklin County Democratic Party and its
elections board, has been personally stung by Jackson's slander:
"Why would I sit there and disenfranchise my own community?" he
asks.

The recount will go forward because by law it must; history
suggests few votes will change. But it is time to focus on how to
make future elections more efficient.

Clearly it would help if groups that register new voters did not
deliver thousands of applications at the last minute. Ohio also
needs an early voting system to relieve at least some of the
pressure on Election Day. And rather than retreating from
electronic voting machines, the state needs to find a secure system
and back it up with a paper record.

Common-sense solutions can make a difference. Endless sour grapes will not.

Editorial team= Alex Machaskee(owner), Douglas C. Clifton, Robert
M. Long, Brent W. Larkin

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*****

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