Reply #14: But look what else Chabler said... [View All]

After Chabler said he had heard the rumors, there's this:

He said he hopes the latest report from investigators quells any such rumors and "brings the case to a speedy conclusion."

As I said earlier, Chabler is one who'll make noise when there's a reason to. Also, I know Sgt. Baumgartner who worked this case. He's the straightest of straight arrows.

I don't put anything past the R* operatives either, except, well, this particular burglary. I recall reading about burglaries, vandalism, and even shootings (through windows) at other political headquarters during the campaign season. Both sides were the victims in these incidents.

For the Republicans to have messed with the vote in Lucas County, I don't think it would have taken a burglary to do so. In fact, I would think tinkering would take place at the BOE, not at an individual party's headquarters. I have a friend who worked the Lucas County recount and she reported to me in the early days of that project that the numbers were working out pretty well. It's not over yet -- there's still something that has to be done on Tuesday before we'll know the final outcome of the machine count that followed the 3% hand count. But the last I heard from her, she said if the election was messed with, she thinks it was at some other level in the process, such as software alterations. She has no basis to make charges in that regard; it's just what looks more likely to her than the counting end of things.

I think our county had something like a 50% or higher rejection rate on provisional ballots, which I thought was pretty high. I also had trouble making the turn-out reports match what I had seen at polling places. Official turn-out was high, but I expected it to be even higher given the long lines at various polling places I checked throughout the day. Now that I've learned about the shortage of voting machines, I'm wondering if that's enough to explain why there were such long lines rather than a huge up-tick in turn-out. I've been voting in Lucas County for decades and *never* saw lines before except for one year when we had a highly controversial school levy on the ballot -- and even then, the lines were much shorter than on Nov. 2, 2004.

We did have problems with machines not working on election day. Also, in one case, the machines were locked in an office at a school that was a polling place. Voters who came early either couldn't vote or they had to wait for school to open so the machines could be moved into the polling room. I heard of another place that ran out of pencils, which caused a delay. All the incidents I heard about on the news took place in precincts that were heavily African-American.