During the next 4 months, eugene is going to have to seriously downgrade his presence here on dKos, due to the pressing burden of PhD exams in April. But before I go gently into that dark night (at least for the first quarter of 2005) I felt like I needed to speak out on Ohio.
georgia10 has written an exegesis on the Ohio situation. She calls it fraud, but also recognizes that many of us want more evidence before using that term. So she quite reasonably assembled all the available evidence on the matter in a 56-page opus and made the point that this is enough to warrant a full investigation, by Congress most likely, of what happened in election 2004.
My reactions are below...
For a long time - since November 3 - I have been skeptical of the fraud claims. I was deeply annoyed and even offended by the people I called "fraudniks" - those who felt that unless we all dropped everything we were doing and took up the issue of Ohio fraud 24/7, we were doing Karl Rove's work. And I maintained that they were shooting themselves and their cause in the foot by their maximalist tactics.
I don't regret any of that. I'm not backing off any of that. And yet georgia10 has, so far, convinced me that something is rotten with the 2004 election. I won't call it fraud. Instead, I will call it the death of American democracy.
The problem that needs a name
georgia10 has not produced any evidence that leads me to feel conclusive that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen from underneath him. And in fact I believe it will be impossible to ever prove that he did win.
But she has produced evidence that there was a Republican conspiracy to bend and at times break the rules and the laws in order to give their candidate the greatest chance at victory.
We saw Republicans monkey with the felon lists. We saw them spread disinformation about polling sites, times, registrations. We saw them limit the number of polling stations available in places like Cuyahoga County. We saw them misinterpret the provisional balloting system. We saw them try to suppress recounts.
I feel quite comfortable in saying that the Republicans were using every trick at their disposal to ensure that Bush won the election and that Kerry voters would have a hard time actually voting.
The sad thing is, much of this happened at the level of bureaucratic decision-making, rule interpretation, and resource allocation. When one county in Ohio argued for placing more machines in places where there were more repeat voters - normally Republican - as opposed to places where higher turnout actually happened but where less voters had a consistent turnout record, places which went heavily for Kerry, the decision could be defended on administrative grounds. Such an action seems difficult to contest, and certainly in itself doesn't seem fraudulent.
But it is the overall picture that matters. And, I think the picture that georgia10 paints isn't necessarily one of actual fraud - it is a picture of Republican contempt for democracy.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy, except as a word that can be used to justify their oppressive actions overseas. From the White House to the house next door, Republicans, whether they are the president or your neighbor, are more concerned with power than fairness. They don't care about a well-run system, or that the true will of the people is expressed electorally, or that ballots are counted fairly and honestly. All they care about is winning.
We saw this in 2000, in 2002, and in 2004. We're still seeing it in Washington State. The difference here is that more people still believe in democracy than in a place like Florida - although that is not going to last long, I fear.
Republicans have repeatedly been willing to game the system, using means fair or foul but that are just enough to escape either prosecution or pre-election detection to make them successful. georgia10 speaks of an Ohio court decision on absentee ballots that was handed down at 2PM on November 2 - a decision that went against Kenneth Blackwell. The problem was, the decision did not get effectively communicated to poll workers. Republicans essentially ran out the clock on the election.
Republicans have been the driving force against paper trails and for the recall. They are happy to use the courts when it suits them, and denounce Democrats' use of same when it suits the GOP. Their individual actions seem inconsistent, but together, they speak of a contempt for the average American, for democracy, for the rule of law, and a desire for power, no matter what the costs.
I also think it seems clear that these efforts were organized and perhaps coordinated. The use of secretaries of state as BC04 campaign chairs in a number of states should seem unusual, and telling. It suggests a clear GOP effort to ensure that election rules and practices favored their side where it counted. Closed door meetings between Secs of State and the BC04 campaign - but not with the Kerry campaign (as noted in Colorado) were indicative of collusion.
Where do we go now?
So, what to do now? My feeling is that georgia10 has succeeded in compiling enough evidence of Republican contempt for democracy for major investigations to be opened.
But I don't think we can say Bush is an illegitimate winner of the 2004 election.
Why not? Is this a case of me being willing to open the door but not walk through it? Perhaps.
But nothing produced so far proves there was a Kerry victory that was stolen. What is instead shown is that Republicans screwed with the elections system in ways that make Bush's victory seem tainted - but not stolen - and that Republicans do not give a rat's ass about democracy or fairness.
I think the way we discuss it matters a great deal. Many fraudniks grew shrill by late November and early December as it became clear that most kossacks and other Dems weren't listening to their claims. The shrillness turned mass disinterest into open hostility towards the fraudniks, and for that they only have themselves to blame.
Why? Because Republican malfeasance efforts were given an invaluable shroud by Kerry's concession of November 3.
What most fraudniks did not understand is that Kerry's concession killed any chance that claims of vote fraud or suppression or whatever would gain broad traction. They did not realize that, sadly, our society doesn't see being correct and pointing out injustice as being enough to change minds, to provoke action. Even if your cause is just, it needs to be sold. It needs a political framework. That's not right, it just is.
The fraudniks never crafted such a frame. And with Kerry's concession, they were not going to get much of any assistance from organized Democrats. In the first days after the election, it appeared clear to most average Dems that the party had suffered some serious losses across the board, which made Kerry's loss seem as not anomalous. There was a clear, nationwide Republican tide that was not all-encompassing (see MT and CO for just two examples) but that gave Bush's victory crucial legitimacy.
Moreover, Kerry's concession made Bush the clear winner in the minds of most Americans. If the fraudniks were having a hard time convincing kossacks, that should have been a sign that they would have an impossible time convincing most Americans.
I would suggest that a far superior political framework to discuss these issues is contempt for democracy and for fairness among Republicans than to argue that Kerry's victory was stolen - an argument that can never be won.
We need to flog the GOP repeatedly as the party of vote suppression and shady dealings, of unaccountability, of being anti-democratic.
And yet, I suspect we've already seen the death of democracy. At least as a value and a virtue. Since the 1960s conservatives have argued that white privilege trumped fairness and equal rights - that vocal 'minorities' were somehow perverting the broader national will. Part of their broad response to this has been to weaken democratic practice in this country. They have elevated expression of their will and their ideas over the values that America was ostensibly founded on, the ideals that we supposedly fought all those wars defending.
The fact that we can show the system was gamed and not be in a political position to do anything about it shows how far we have fallen. And it shows the weakness of the Democratic Party, their inability to combat the slide of the very idea they named their party after.
No, really, what can we do?
I don't like ending on that down note. So I won't.
What we need to do with stuff like georgia10's exegesis is spread it far and wide. Boil it down to its essentials - that Republicans set the rules of the electoral game in Ohio to be partisan, to be biased, to be unfair.
And connect to their other repeated attacks on the rule of law, on fair process. The Republicans' embrace of lawlessness in the war on terror, their attack on scientific peer review, their sullying of the ideal of clean elections, are all of a type. They show a raw drive for power that violates all our deeply held ideals and beliefs.
We need to assert those ideals. Contesting this election may or may not further that process, and I'm not convinced a repeat of 1876 will necessarily solve anything. What is instead needed is the reassertion of the rule of law, of individual rights. Of the idea that politics do not ever trump fairness, equality, basic rights, or clean elections.
We need to reassert those ideals in our own party. The Democratic Party is no longer democratic in practice. The sight of Kerry conceding the election in the face of Republican misdeeds at the polls proves yet again that the party leadership, like the Republicans, believes in power over process. That they care more about their own position than that of their constituents.
Our point doesn't need to be that Kerry was the rightful winner of the 2004 election. It instead needs to be that America has lost its democratic way, and everyone who is complicit in it - regardless of party - must pay the price for the death of our democracy. We must never let voters forget that the Republicans are the cause of this, but we must also never let the Democratic Party forget that they did not do enough to stop it, that we will not tolerate undemocratic practices in our party.
So there we have it. Conyers and others should certainly make a stink about this in Congress and we should spread the word ourselves. But we should not do it in the name of John Kerry - that is politically ineffective and does not address the deeper problems. Instead, it must be done in the name of American democracy, the American voter, the American system.