http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse30.html Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in. Consider: In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven't been counted. Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds -- like Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 -- a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's vote can be made.
Um, I've been pretty skeptical of this, but hell yeah, it's pretty damn fishy that a month later they haven't counted the votes. If this were soccer, the referee would be adding an epic 8 minutes of stoppage time to make up for the leading team's shenanigans. Here's what I don't get. On the one hand, it was 130,000 votes difference. Not 500, not even 50,000. So there would have to be pretty massive problems for this to turn the election, far worse than what happened in Florida. So I have a hard time believing the Republicans are being all nefarious and trying to cheat their way into the White House. OTOH, that being the case, why in hell are they delaying? The best explanation I can think of is that they know there are serious problems, problems big enough to wake up the media when it comes out. (Just to put a random figure out there, let's say that 130,000 drops to 40,000.) Bush still wins, but confidence in Republican fair play is gonna take a big hit, not to mention it would further undermine the notion of a mandate. Can anyone else come up with a reason why they didn't take care of this stuff 3 weeks ago???
It's far more likely that voter fraud occured in Pennsylvania than Ohio, and Kerry won PA by tens of thousands votes less than Bush won OH (despite the fact that PA is a slightly bigger state).
And Jesse Jackson, who is an implacable enemy of the current administration yet who remained completely on the sidelines this election until late September when he was given a huge "consulting" contract by the Kerry campaign is your unimpeachable source for this nonsense? I happen to live in Ohio. I happen to know that most of what he's saying here is either a) grossly distorted or b) a complete fabrication. My favorite Jesse contention, which he started making last week, was that the Elections board in Columbus intentionally understaffed polling places in black precincts, which created long lines which discourabeg voters thus "disenfranchising" them. The Head of the City of Columbus Election board, a black Democrat, thinks it's a bit over the top to claim he was trying his best to keep other black Democrats away from the polls, but he's probably under the sway of Karl Rove somehow. The overvote from Gahanna was caught before the BoE ever got the numbers. The discrepancy between votes cast and individual candidates tallys in Cleveland (another solidly Democrat town with Democrat election officials) was a computer glitch which never affected the candidate tallies. I believe that Jesse knows this stuff and knows that it's all hogwash. This need of some on the left to try and gin up some question, however tenuous, about the election result is simply disgusting. In any case, all this "the votes still haven't been counted" garbage, which he claims is an "outrage" is, as one expects with this sleaze, a lie. Ohio law requires the SoS to certify the results by December 3. They will do so. If Jesse doesn't like Ohio law, tough titties - nobody asked him. But to imply that there's some plot going on is absurd. And what the judge said was simply that until Dec 3, when the final result is certified by law, no one has grounds to request a recount. Period. Jesse Jackson is a "reverend" in the same sense that Col. Sanders was a military officer. He needs to go back to his day job - blackmailing large corporations into giving him huge sums of money in the name of racial equality.
Isn't it usual for the final tally to be sometime in December? I don't feel like looking for links, to be honest, but I thought it was pretty standard for the final totals to be reported later. The laws on this are relics of an earlier, pre-computers/telephones/telegraph/anything-but-horses age, but they are the laws, at any rate.
Nobody is delaying anything. They've been counting since election day (see the Ohio SOS website). Certification happens on Dec 6th. At that time, candidates can request a recount.
Marc Cooper had an interesting take on this in the "big picture" sense: A lot of truth in this. http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/02/dissonance-cooper.php