Christopher Hitchens has a new article in Vanity Fair entitled,
OHIO'S ODD NUMBER'S. The lead-in states "No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry's, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines."
Hitchens was never a supporter of George W. Bush per se. He was active before the 2000 election in highlighting the felons list in Florida. Generally speaking, Hitchens holds leftist political views that have evolved unpredictably over time. He has been a relentless critic of Henry Kissinger.
(Ohio Vote stuff below the fold)
I admire him for his beautiful use of language, his excellent book reviews, and his high tolerance for alcohol. I even sympathized with many of his pre-war arguments for invading Iraq. Hitchens has been an agitator against religious and ethnic hatred for a long time and has taken a special interest in Cypriots and the Kurds. I believe he sincerely thought that Iraq would be a better place (especially for the Kurds) without Saddam Hussein, and that the only proper response to 9/11 had to begin with "solving" the containment policy in Iraq.
However, Hitchens has never come to grips with some of the inherent problems with the way the Bush administration chose to solve that problem. The largest shortcoming was the basic dishonesty the Bush team used about motives. Misusing and hyping intelligence was both unnecessary and harmful to their program. Another shortcoming was their failure to share the post-war lucre with potential allies like France, Russia, and China that had a financial disincentive to help us remove Saddam. This led directly to our failure at the United Nations, which was more important than whether those countries deserved a piece of the pie. The Bush administration also failed diplomatically in the region. Most glaringly they gave guaranteed loans in the billions to the Turks, and received a refusal to base our troops in return.
And then there was the inadequate troop deployment that was a direct result of our failure to enlist anticipated support. And then there was our rejection of the State Department reconstruction plan. And then there was our use of torture and renditions. On and on, and Hitchens has never stepped back and asked himself seriously, whether he was misguided to place his trust in the Bush administration to carry out a mission that might have had potential to make us safer, but has manifestly failed to do so.
So enlisted is he in the Iraqi Liberation Project that he developed a hatred of those who criticized its implementation and began to move toward wholehearted and uncritical support of Bush's reelection.
As he says about Kerry in this Vanity Fair article: "...I did not think that John Kerry should have been President of any country at any time."
Yet, in spite of this, he now says that, "The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.'s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise."
Why?
Most of the reasons that Hitchens cites will be familiar to those fraudniks that followed Georgia10's peerless work after the election.
First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discepencies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general-and probable-one nationwide and statewide)...In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry 290, Bush 21, Peroutka 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry 318, Bush 11, Badnarik, 163....In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4f by all third-party candidates combined was eight.
In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combinced undervote of almost 6,000...that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than Republican ones.
In Precinct 1B of Gehanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.
Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day
Hitchens begins the article by detailing the 8-11 hour wait that 2,200 voters from Kenyon College endured waiting to vote on ONE voting machine. There had been two, but one broke down around lunch time. Apparently the mayor of Gambier had requested more machines ten days before the election and was refused.
Hitchens also reports on "vote-hopping" where a vote in one column comes up reported as a vote in another. And he makes an overall point about the trend in such problems:
Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to finge-party losers.
From all this Hitchens draws the proper conclusions. A conclusion NOT DRAWN BY THE ADMINISTATORS OF THIS SITE:
Whichever way you shake it, or hold it up to the light, there is something wrong about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many "vote hops" the computerized machines mights have performed unnoticed...
...there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was said, often in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to be part of the plan. The stakes are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.
I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommenended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people, would have to be "in on it."
And if that doesn't convince RonKfromSeattle, maybe this will:
I asked her finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well. I understand from what I have read", she said, "that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical as she had made no particular study if Ohio, but she replied at once, "Then that would be quite serious."
Indeed. Quite serious. The election was stolen, and instead of getting our hands on the machines and "send(ing) the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit(ing) the party that had engaged in fraud" we worried about looking like sore losers. I'm with Hitchens on this one, even though I'm pleasantly surprised to see that he is with me.