Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Four (cont.)
Offsetting the Democrats’ registration efforts, Blackwell, the secretary of state, approved a massive purge of voter rolls in the state’s big cities. The names of more than 300,000 people who had not voted in two previous national elections were expunged. Newly registered voters were targeted by the Republican National Committee and state GOP officials. The Ohio Republican Party mailed more than 200,000 letters to new voters, urging them to vote Republican. About 30,000 of them were returned as undeliverable, allowing Republican volunteers to challenge more than 35,000 voters, primarily in minority urban areas, on the ground that there was evidence that they did not live where they claimed to live.
In early September, less than a month before the filing deadline, Blackwell announced that election officials would process new registrations only if they were printed on 80-pound white paper stock. He later rescinded his rule — six days before the registration deadline. Blackwell also gave local election officials broad authority to deny would-be voters the right to cast a ballot, an act a federal appeals court ultimately ruled illegal, but which created massive confusion on Election Day.
“Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,” Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who held hearings on problems with the Ohio vote, told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during his lengthy deconstruction of the 2004 election published by Rolling Stone.
On Election Day, the Republican Party deployed 3,600 operatives who fanned out to 32 Ohio counties — most of them predominately black and urban — to watch for vote fraud. In a legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican workers were allowed into the polling places themselves to challenge voters’ eligibility. But with this victory in hand, Republican officials said their workers would primarily be observers, not active challengers, and apparently they did not cause significant disruptions at the polls.
Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said Ken Blackwell “made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake.”The Democrats also dispatched troops to front lines across the country. “Right now we have 10,000 lawyers out in the battleground states on Election Day,” boasted Michael Whouley, who served as Kerry’s political strategist. Joining the partisan poll-watchers were nearly 1,000 observers from the U.S. Department of Justice, delegated to enforce civil rights laws. Also standing by were more than 1,300 computer experts, volunteers from the NAACP and People for the American Way, and hundreds of law-school students. About 4 million votes had been “lost” in the 2000 election due to confusing ballots, equipment glitches, and disenfranchised voters, according to researchers at the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. The watchdogs on both sides weren’t about to let that happen again. But rather than smoothing out the process, the massive deployment practically guaranteed an adversarial outcome.
“The woods really aren’t any drier in 2004 than they were four years ago, but more people have matches,” said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan electionline.org.
And Ohio offered plenty of tinder. On Election Day, voting machines were scarce and lines were long in many low-income precincts. Statewide, black voters reported waiting an average of 52 minutes to vote, compared with 18 for white voters. In a number of locations, voters were forced to stand in line for hours in the rain. Democrats charged that identification requirements were illegally administered, and nearly two out of three black men were required to show identification. Acceptance of provisional ballots varied widely from precinct to precinct.
Was the 2004 election stolen in Ohio? As with Florida in 2000, it is a debate that may never come to a conclusion, so deep is the partisan divide.
In his extensive investigation of the events in Ohio for Rolling Stone, Kennedy, whose political leanings are obvious, had no doubts. “I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004,” he wrote. The New York Times found just the opposite: “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.” The Washington Post labeled allegations of massive fraud as the “latest conspiracy theory.” The disparity of views on the subject devolved into a mini-war pitting Internet bloggers against the “mainstream media,” which came in for intense criticism on the web for failing to pursue what many believed was overwhelming evidence of vote fraud.
Ultimately, however, one fact remained: Kerry conceded the election to Bush. “The 2004 election exceeded the margin of litigation in states such as Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere because President George W. Bush won the states by enough votes that the problems encountered, if resolved, would most likely not have changed the outcome,” concluded the nonpartisan electionline.org. That view was shared by others, including the Democratic National Committee, which after a five-month study concluded that Kerry still would not have garnered enough votes to defeat Bush if things had gone smoothly in Ohio. The study also cited the myriad of problems that had plagued the election process — especially difficulties encountered by minority and younger voters — which cast a cloud over the integrity of the process and those who administered it.
Part One: A difficult problem to quantify
Part Two: “Swilling the Planters with Bumbo”
Part Three: The strange story of Florida’s 2000 election
Part Four: A second messy election: Ohio 2004
Part Five: What impedes election reform efforts
Listen to or download the podcast
Sarah Laskow contributed reporting to this story.
Susan Q. Stranahan is a freelance journalist. For 28 years, she was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered environment, business, and the courts. Her stories were a major component of The Inquirer’s coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting. Stranahan is the author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Fortune, Mother Jones, and Time. She lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania.
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