In a spasm of botherism, the staff of Morning Joe on MSNBC chose to attack (former) Sen. Barbara Boxer for holding up the pro forma counting of Electoral Votes in 2005, comparing it (superficially) to the Republican plan to hold up the count on Wednesday.
Mika Brzezinski: The last three times a Republican has been elected President, Democrats in the House have brought objections to the states the Republican nominee won. In 2005, Senator Barbara Boxer of California [unflattering picture presented] lent Senate support to the move when she objected to George W. Bush’s electoral votes in Ohio, citing voting irregularities in the state.
[Morning Joe on MSNBC, 4 January 2021]
Brzezinski goes on to cite other Democrats who praised what Boxer did, but contrasting them with statements by these same Democrats criticizing Republicans for objecting to electoral votes for Joe Biden. She ends by calling on Democrats to mute their criticism of Republicans, given this history.
It’s worth pointing out how dissimilar Democratic resistance to George W. Bush’s re-election is to the current case. The election results in Ohio in the November 2004 election were widely challenged, including challenges in the House by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan:
Democrats have complained of voting-machine shortages in urban precincts of Ohio that normally vote strongly Democratic. They have cited reports that some voters in those districts felt intimidated by Republican agents, or that Democrats' names were wrongly purged from registration lists.
Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, had issued a report claiming “numerous, serious election irregularities” in the Ohio election, attributed partly to “intentional misconduct and illegal behavior” by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
[Democrats hold up vote certification : A routine ritual turns into partisan protest by Brian Knowlton, New York Times, 7 January 2005]
At the time, Bush’s win depended on the vote in Ohio. If it is true that irregularities in Ohio took the vote away from Democratic candidate John Kerry and gave it to Bush, then the re-election of Bush was invalid. This is much more believable than that some mythic conspiracy stole thousands and thousands of votes in multiple states from Donald Trump last year to give the election to Biden. Bush only won Ohio by 118,601 votes.
According to analysis in January 2006 by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted”. [Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.]
In other words, there’s a very large difference between the Democratic challenge in January 2005 to Bush’s re-election and Republican challenge this month to Biden’s election. There’s evidence to back up the Democratic challenge, but no one has presented verifiable evidence to back up Trump’s claims.
Also, the effect of voter irregularities in the one state of Ohio had the potential to change the results of the 2004 election, whereas even if all the claims this year were validated, it’s unlikely to get Trump re-elected.
What were the irregularities cited?
Sen. Boxer joined a complaint by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH, District 11) that alleged “irregularities including disqualification of provisional ballots, alleged misallocation of voting machines, and disproportionally long waits in poor and predominantly African-American communities.” [2004 United States election voting controversies, Wikipedia]
These followed the report by Conyers of “numerous, serious election irregularities,” particularly in Ohio, that led to “a significant disenfranchisement of voters.” [Bush carries Electoral College after delay, CNN]
In Sen. Boxer’s press release, she cited a number of issues that led her to support their challenge to the Ohio Electoral Votes:
Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote? Why were voters at Kenyon College, for example, made to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there were only two machines for 1300 voters?
Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately long waits?
Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed 5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly African-American districts?
Why did, in Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?
Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush. Thankfully, they fixed it – but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
Why did Franklin County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the suburbs? This also led to long lines.
In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?
[Barbara Boxer Senate Website Press Release]
There’s another important reason why the comparison of the 2005 challenge to the 2021 challenge is difficult to justify. In 2004, voting machines were much more controversial and easily manipulated. Fewer of them had audit trails. The procedures were not as rigorous. The elections were not under as much scrutiny.
But there are some real points of comparison, and those points still need to be addressed. Both elections operated under intense efforts by Republicans to deny votes to minorities and others they thought would vote Democratic. These efforts included attempts to write rules that tended to exclude would-be Democratic votes, kick people off the rolls if they might vote Democratic, and distribute polling places and voting machines in a discriminatory manner.
The history of this voter suppression should be remembered, particularly because it was clearly evident from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections. Yet, the Obama Administration and Congress have failed to really take on this issue. That’s one of the reason elections are still close enough to steal. We need to address the ongoing voter suppression, so that we don’t have to win by four, five, or ten percent margins to “win”.
Anyone can challenge the electoral count and claim they are doing it to make sure the results are accurate, thus supporting democracy. But the truth is that the challenge by Tubbs Jones and Boxer in 2005 actually was about getting the vote right and showing that the presidential election was legitimate.
That’s simply not true of the Republican effort, and the media knows it. So, they should not be holding up the 2004 example to suggest “both sides do it”. No, we don’t. We aren’t doing the same thing. The Republicans are trying to gaslight the country into believing someone behind the scenes interfered in last November’s elections to steal the White House from Donald Trump. Yet, if you look at how the election was conducted, what you see is systematic discrimination against Democratic voters.
And the key thing to remember out of all this is: If Republicans succeed in getting an Electoral College majority for Trump, they would be taking the presidency away from the majority of voters, who voted for Biden and Harris by a margin of about 7 million in the popular vote. That’s right, if the Republicans succeed, they will be taking away democracy.
The media should be concentrating on the real problem: Voter suppression. How about some in-depth stories about how Republicans have tried in every way conceivable to hold on to power by gaming the system? Right now, in Georgia, they are demanding people registering for the first time to vote have a vehicle registration. We don’t need to guess why they are doing this. They are trying to suppress the votes of the poor and the young, who might tend to vote Democratic. Joe? Mika? Are you going to do a segment on this?
Why is this issue important now? Why not just let shows like Morning Joe have their political commentary?
First of all, major broadcasters like MSNBC are seen and often believed by millions of Americans. These networks have a responsibility to get it right.
But second, I’m worried this is an early sign that corporate media is going to go back to fat, dumb, and happy once Trump leaves office. The existential threat to democracy (and thus to press freedom) will have subsided, and they may think they can go back to pretending the Democrats and the Republicans are just two sides of the same coin.
No. That’s not good enough. That will let the Democratic Party off the hook. It can just go back to taking big dollar donations and issuing big dollar propaganda. And who knows how the Republican Party will spin out of control?
This is another reason why we should support progressive media. I just did a survey of several progressive news/commentary sources here. At some point, progressive media will be a counterbalance to corporate media.
And then maybe shows like Joe’s will be a little more thoughtful in their commentary.