Reply #64: But, you leave out this part that Conyers said in your snip: [View All]

I think I can predict the initial reaction of many of you who have been closely following the Ohio 2004 Presidential election investigations. You will be disappointed that Mr. Krugman stops short of saying the election fraud and irregularities in the 2004 election cost Senator Kerry the White House. While it is no secret what conclusion I have drawn about that question, I do not share this disappointment.

I know that many of my fellow progressives think the official margin of victory for Bush in Ohio, well over 100,000 votes, is too large a margin to be entirely reversed by proof of fraud or malfeasance. For them to believe that to be the case, they need to see some reasonable quantification of the actual voters who were disenfranchised and, in turn, the actual votes that were lost. After all, unlike the Republicans who still think Saddam Hussein possessed WMD when we invaded Iraq and believe we are winning the war, who think that tax cuts for the wealthy will grow the economy and reduce the deficit, who think a grieving mother and an Ambassador's wife are "fair game," and who think that the way to fix Social Security is to destroy it, we progressives are a “reality based community.”

The problem with answering my fellow progressives' challenge for numbers is that so much of what happened in Ohio centered on unquantifiable events that makes counting the number of disenfranchised voters impossible. How can we determine exactly how many Kerry voters turned around and went home facing hopelessly long lines at the polls? Or how many voters were never registered, and were turned away on election day, because of bizarre and conflicting Ken Blackwell edits about the weight of voter registration forms? Or how many votes were lost because of machine defects or manipulation?

What I can say is what the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff said best in the Conyers report: "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards."* Is there an exact number? No. Was it potentially a net loss of more than 100,000 Democratic votes? I think so. I continue to investigate what happened in Ohio and in the rest of the nation in the 2004 election and maybe someday the evidence will be sufficiently irrefutable to convince every fair-minded person of the extent and effect of electoral wrongdoing in 2004.