Funk Babblings

Remember when I mentioned that there would be a lawsuit about the Ohio vote?

Now you can go read the 93-page lawsuit, and the related motion for injunction against the Electors submitting their votes.
Or go read a summary at dKos.

The detailed allegations include both "traditional" methods of vote fraud, and new methods using electronic voting and vote-counting machines. The bottom line is that according to these calculations, Kerry should have won Ohio by at least 142,537 votes, rather than losing it by 119,000.

I doubt this will actually change the Ohio result (Eris will be busy if it does), but there's a thin sliver of hope here. At the very least it will publicize the major problems we had this year, and is likely to begin Ken Blackwell's downfall.

I figured that Ken Blackwell (both Ohio campaign chair for Bush and in charge of voting for Ohio) had probably manipulated the Ohio vote somehow, but I never expected that we'd get this close to proving it....

First, of course, were the hours-long lines in Democratic-leaning areas such as parts of Franklin county. Everyone thought it was was just a symptom of high turnout, but it turned out that not only did those precincts have fewer voting machines than in 2000, but there were machines left unused in storage. In addition, elections officials were more concerned with getting the machines to the polls by the end of the day than by the beginning of the day. (The Columbus Free Press seems to be the best, though not the most objective, source for this information and continuing coverage. The Columbus Dispatch also has a story.)

But that's old news now.

The Greens and Libertarians showed the value of third parties by leading the fight for an Ohio recount. (See votecobb.org for more information.) Apparently they were getting close to something, triggering a coverup effort from Blackwell....

(I'm getting all this through Daily Kos diaries, in case it's not obvious from the following links. Be sure to read the comments for further information, and follow the links to primary sources.)

Ohio Election Investigation Thwarted by Surprise Blackwell Order:
On Friday in Greene county, recounters were told they had to stop their count because Blackwell had locked down the ballots, which were no longer considered public record. However, Ohio law requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying, makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to prohibit any person from inspecting the election records, and defines violation of these provisions as election fraud.

Ohio Poll Records Left in Unlocked Building
Then Friday night, despite the lockdown order, the ballots and related records were left in an unlocked building, and there was apparently evidence that people were in there overnight.

And finally (for now)....
Monday morning a lawsuit will be filed relating to the Ohio election problems.

Remember, it was the coverup that brought Nixon down, not the original crime. This time the coverup may only bring down Blackwell, but it's a start.

(Oh yeah, at noon today there were "You Stole My Vote" protests at all the state capitals.)

Update: New Study: More Absentee Votes than Voters in Ohio

Update 2: Keith Olbermann at MSNBC is on the story.

I'm a bit numbed by the election and the political outcome (about which I may have more to say later), and have been focusing more on issues closer to home that I have a little more control over.

But if you're the sort of person that still wants to deal with the big issues right now (masochist!), here are a couple of articles....

• The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
  
• Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz

Election day is almost here, and it can't come fast enough for me. Among other things, it means the end of my (physical) mailbox and answering machine being filled with Republican lies. "John Kerry will raise your taxes"? Nope, not unless you make at least $200,000 a year. (And if you do, were your taxes really that bad under Clinton? Cause that's what they'll go back to under Kerry.) "John Kerry supports a 50 cent gas tax hike"? Nope, a decade ago he mentioned that it might be necessary, that's all; he didn't even vote for it, though Dick Cheney did. Oh yeah, and that thing about Kerry voting 98 times to raise taxes? Cheney voted 148 times to raise taxes. Cheney must be really liberal. The good thing is that the Republicans seem to think our suburb is a lock for them, so they're encouraging us to vote; we're not likely to face polling-place challenges as we cast our votes for Kerry. I should probably update my driver's license with my current address just in case though.

Then there's that issue that the Republicans keep dismissing as ludicrous: the draft. Everyone else looks at Bush's plan to "stay on the offensive", and wonders where he'll get the manpower to keep invading more countries, considering we're already overextended -- keeping people longer than they signed up for ("stop-loss"), and calling back people whose terms of service were over. Turns out that the Selective Service System has already recommended a draft plan that includes drafting men and women with specialized skills (medical professionals, computer specialists, linguists) up to age 34 -- possibly up to age 44 for medical professionals. The counter-argument here is that the SSS's job is to plan for a draft, but that still doesn't answer the question of where Bush will get all the troops to stay on the offensive. (Those words out of Bush's mouth send chills down my spine.)

(Cross-posted from Daily Kos, where you can take the poll if you register)

I'm a registered Democrat sitting here in North Canton, Ohio, a Republican-leaning suburb in a swing county in Jeff Seemann's district. And I just got a phone call from George W. Bush.

( Read more... )

Update: Complete details, including an MP3 and transcript of the call and scans of the flyer they mailed with an absentee ballot request form, are now up on a separate web page.

So, any bets on who Kerry picks as Vice President?

The leading candidate these days seems to be John Edwards, the last competition standing in the primaries. (Sorry, but Kucinich didn't count as competition.) But his total governmental experience amounts to a Senate term he's finishing out now.

For a while it seemed like Kerry would pick Dick Gephardt, but the only people that excites are the rapidly-shrinking ranks of union members. Gep turns off everyone else.

If Kerry wants national security and diplomatic credentials he might pick Gen. Wesley Clark, but he's never held elective office, and showed himself to be a weak campaigner in the primaries. There are also some senators that might be chosen for similar reasons, but they're all pretty old -- not a good match for a guy who looks like a cadaver at 60. (Compare with the buzz for young-looking 50-year-old Edwards.)

Not too long ago rumors were floating around that Kerry wanted Republican Senator John McCain as VP, but McCain doesn't want the job. For a Republican in today's partisan climate, I like McCain, but I wouldn't want him as Kerry's VP. The interest does give some clues about what Kerry might be looking for - war hero, national security, unification of the country, making a splash with a bold choice.

Well, it seems that the latest rumor is that Kerry is considering Howard Dean. Dean had been initially discarded (even by Dean himself) as a VP possibility because he's another New Englander, and everybody always wants geographic balance. On the other hand, Clinton/Gore are both southerners, and Bush/Cheney are both Texans (despite Cheney's house in Wyoming). Maybe that "geographic balance" thing is just code for "there has to be at least one southerner on the ticket, preferably two." Dean also has plenty of executive branch experience and loads of followers.

The most interesting thing about choosing Dean is that Kerry's image is more centrist than his reality, while Dean's image is more left than his reality. I guess the combination would let them merge the image and reality of both.

Anyway, I know I'd be happy with a Kerry/Dean ticket. I don't think it'll happen, but it would be really cool. I'm sure next week there'll be some other rumor floating around.

The second of two entries inspired by chronarchy's newfound anti-Republicanism

In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, I supported Howard Dean. One of the reasons I did goes back to a conversation I had with autumnfey a few years ago after she moved to Vermont. She had said that Vermont was deeply divided between the conservative farmers and the liberal hippies. So when Dean came along on the national scene, I figured that anyone who could get re-elected over and over again in a state divided like that had a pretty good chance of winning over people from both sides of a divided electorate nationally. I became more convinced of that the more research I did; in Vermont his critics included people on the left who thought he was too pro-business, and people on the right who thought he was too pro-environment. And even though some of his positions were to the right on mine, they were the kinds of things that would make many on the right take a closer look and possibly support him.

Yet early on, the press branded Dean a liberal. Strange, since most of his positions were to the right of many of his rivals, including John Kerry. This perception of Dean as a wacko liberal seems to have been fed by three factors:

• Many liberals gravitated to his campaign, despite being more idealogically aligned with Dennis Kucinich. Those liberals decided that Kucinich was too far left to be elected, and Dean was far enough to the right of Kucinich that he seemed electable (as I described above). (It also helped that Dean came out early on against Bush's policies, rather than trying to gain the support of people who like Bush's policies.) Since liberals liked Dean, the press concluded that Dean must be a liberal.
  
• He came out against the Iraq war when most of the country was in favor of it, making him *obviously* an antiwar liberal, even though he supported Gulf War I and Afghanistan. (Unlike Kucinich, he was not in favor of just pulling out of Iraq once we went in, but rather wanted to put more troops in, including getting many more countries to help out.)
  
• He was in favor of civil unions for gays, and had signed a first-in-the-country law enacting them in Vermont (after the Vermont Supreme Court said something needed to be done). *Such* a liberal thing to do. (However, unlike Kucinich he was not in favor of gay marriage.) This endeared him to the gay community, which made up a large portion of his early support.
  

(A side effect was that the Kucinich people resented Dean for being considered the liberal candidate when he really wasn't all that liberal.)

That's the way things stood a year ago. My how times have changed. Now more than half the country thinks Iraq just wasn't worth it, and even people on the right are saying we need to get out now. And now with gay marriage happening, more than half the country is in favor of either civil unions for gays or gay marriage; civil unions are on their way to acceptance, and the debate today is about gay marriage. The landscape under Dean has shifted to the left, putting his positions on these two issues slightly on the right of the debate, and Kucinich doesn't look quite as nutty as he used to.


BTW, the gay marriage thing gives me another reason to wonder why so many people like Orson Scott Card so much.