http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041116-085742-1497r.htm
Ken Blackwell has defended himself in the Washington Times today. His defense is a mixture of negligence and sticking his head in the sand and ignores the very real problems that happened on election day.
He leads off with a diatribe against Michael Moore, "Special interest SWAT teams," and lawyers who he says filed 27 lawsuits involving Ohio. He would have us believe that everything was rosy when it was not. This is typical of the right living in a world of fantasy.
The Election Protection Coalition held hearings over the weekend in which many eyewitnesses testified about the following problems:
- Long lines in Democratic precincts;
- Unprofessional and untrained poll workers;
- Fewer machines in Democratic precincts than in Republican.
Michael Moore has also fielded first-hand complaints about voting problems and has concluded that Ohio is among the worst. I will look at how he addresses the above problems as well as how he addresses the danger of hacking. While I do not think Blackwell told his people, "OK, let's go rig this election and we can all go home," I think he is guilty of gross negligence in ensuring the integrity of the election.
- Long lines: Spun. He spins the reports of long lines as being good for democracy. Hello?? Long lines are bad because employers are only required to give their employees two hours off to go vote. How many people had to go back to work or class because the lines were two hours or more? We may never know. We need a non-partisan SOS who will address problems head-on instead of publishing diatribes against the left in a right-wing Moonie publication.
- Untrained poll workers: Ignored. He talks about how his office trained his workers and set clear standards and policies. But obviously, these policies did not get down to the poll workers. There are many eyewitness reports of workers showing up late, improperly giving out provisional ballots when people's addresses were correct, and not moving disabled voters to the front of the line. Once again, these incidents all happened in Democratic precincts. So, is it OK to train people who work in Republican precincts, but not Democratic?
- Fewer machines in Democratic precincts than Republican: Ignored. According to the eyewitness accounts at the election forums last weekend, there were not enough machines for Democratic precincts, leaving long lines as mentioned above. However, there were enough machines at Republican precincts, meaning lines were much shorter. That is not "order," "transparency," or "integrity" like he would have us believe. That is chaos.
- Potential hacking of the machines: Ignored. We do not know as of this writing whether hacking did or didn't take place. But that is beside the point as far as Blackwell is concerned. The worst omission in Blackwell's piece is that he failed to mention what steps he took to defend the machines against someone hacking into them and altering the totals. This is similar to Bush not taking any steps to protect us from 9/11 as he was too busy vacationing in Crawford, TX. Is he suggesting that we have to have massive hacking going on before he can be bothered to do something about it?
Blackwell's partisanship is a perfect example of why we should have a non-partisan Secretary of State in charge of counting votes. This is just like having an umpire from the Bronx umpiring the 7th game of the ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox. Even if he did not actually tell his people to alter numbers and ballots, many people simply don't trust him to do an impartial job of running the election.