WP,pg1: What Happened in Ohio: GOP Won with Accent on Rural, Tradtional

What Happened in Ohio
GOP Won With Accent On Rural and Traditional

By Paul Farhi and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 4, 2004; Page A01

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 3 -- By all the conventional yardsticks of Ohio presidential politics, Sen. John F. Kerry was a smashing success. He turned out droves of supporters, many of them first-time voters, and won more votes on Tuesday than any Democrat in state history -- and more than George W. Bush did in 2000 when he took the state from Al Gore.

Yet if Kerry's campaign operation performed admirably in this complex and critical battleground state, President Bush's volunteer army of 85,000 gave more than equal effort. By early Wednesday, Kerry was forced to confront the stark math from the Buckeye State: Bush had stormed to such an overwhelming advantage in rural and exurban counties that his victory was secure, even if Kerry were to insist on a protracted audit of uncounted provisional ballots....

***

People living in and around Ohio's six biggest cities -- Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Akron and Dayton -- flooded polling stations to vote the Democratic ticket. Kerry won Cuyahoga County, part of the Cleveland area, with nearly 51,000 more votes than Gore won it by four years ago (his campaign says it exceeded its goal for black votes in Cuyahoga by 25 percent). His margin in Columbus's Franklin County was 10 times that of Gore's.

But it was not enough. Bush matched his 2000 performance in Ohio's urban areas, but his campaign more decisively brought out waves of voters in his rural base. Compared with 2000, his vote totals and margins of victory soared all across Ohio's Appalachian southeast and its southern and western farm belt. He even won over Ohio's Amish, capturing Holmes County in the heart of Amish country with 76 percent of the total....

***

Campaign operatives and analysts point to the same motivating factor: Bush's conservative positions on social issues, particularly his opposition to abortion and his advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The president developed a national strategy based on those issues during a year when many voters put morality-based themes at the top of their own agendas, exit polling showed....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23754-2004Nov3.html

We are in a war, we have mounting debt, health care is becoming a monstrosity of graft, and our jobs are all flying away as we speak. These people will rue the day they decided outlawing abortion and stopping two guys from kissing each other are more important than the domestic and international security of their own country.

fucking killed us. :mad:

even more of our troops in Iraq.

The history of democratic voting is a history of ballot recounts and the ability to do same.

The legitimacy of democratic elections is inexorably predicated upon the electorate's ability to verify the results which is only possible with a tangible ballot.

A ballot that cannot be physically verified or interrogated is no different than a vote by someone with no verifiable name or address.

and the promise to deliver Ohio to Bush

My gut tells me that there's no way that small town populations in these counties are greater tan those with Ohio's large cities.

And Ohio has lots of cities.

The election was STOLEN in Ohio!

Professor 2

*

The exit polls are supposedly wrong about who won, but right about why the other guy won?

What sense does that make?

All those rural counties with evoting machines all went for * eh? I'm not surprised.

Who the hell is in Ohio examining the records? Somebody must know and be able to get us organized. You can bet the pukes are sending teams to Ohio right now.

don`t want none of them fags and lesbo`s marry`n and got to put the ten commandments in them schools..sorry i`m not joining cracker nation..this is america or what is left of it.

Bush's biggest rallies in Ohio were held with the White Supremacists who have strongholds in rural Central and Southern Ohio. This is the "base" of those who voted against their own best interests in the desire to totally dismantle all Civil Rights and Hate Laws. They don't really give a damn about moral values or faith-based initiatives. They just want the freedom to publicly express their hate, and to dominate others and Bush panders to them because HE shares THEIR values.

That person was a genius (for Bush) because it became the motivating factor in choosing the next president. The cable shows spent mountains of time discussing the "gay" problem and effectively banned all discussion of the important things.

So, I presume whoever came up with it was a conservative republican.

little sickly sicky. Who can paint the devil as godly for these people, that and lots of $$$$$ to continue. But then there are more millions Rs intolerance of 'other'& the greedy.

getting on the ballot.

They know that tech workers can choose where they live and if Ohio ends up like the Deep, rural South then the workers won't want to live there. Then, the tech companies (and there are a lot of them in Ohio) suffer from a smaller talent pool to draw from.

Do these folks understand that * supports Civil Union which makes his proposed Constitutional Amendment nothing more than posturing about linguistics.

Linguistics is more important than War....conservative?

seemed to them to be a god-fearing, plain-spoken common man, just like them. Saw an article in The Columbus Dispatch back on September 20, that addressed the issue of Amish and voting. They usually don't vote, and even though they are against the war, "Christian values" were the trump card. Sigh...

What did you expect?

Sadly, genetic problems have caused many Amish children in my county to be retarded. Their numbers are way out of proportion to the county population.

voting machines. How could anyone be that naive?

Rove planned it with Diebold.

Does anyone honestly believe that the republican manufacturers of these inauditable machines did not tell Rove exactly how they could dishonestly manipulate these machines to republican advantage?

I am thinking about starting a business. Anyone want to buy a bridge? Great price! Cash only.

MSNBC, April 16, 2004

Rove also predicted that “we’re going to win Ohio comfortably” in the race against Bush’s Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
snip---
“I don’t mean that it’s going to be close,” Rove said. “What I mean is, it’s going to be where everybody is going to be paying a lot of time and attention. I think we’re going to win Ohio comfortably, but I do think that Democrats are going to contest it strongly.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4760238/

Voting Machine Controversy
by Julie Carr Smyth

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

Looks like NE Ohio was in good shape for us. We lost Clark County, though - the Guardian letter writing campaign seems to have backfired.

This is the BusCo approved version of what happened Election 04. This gives them their 'MANDATE' to a full court press for Armageddon Rapture Crusades and whatever other evils they want to carry out.
And you better unite behind their madness or die.

To repeat- The Dems lost BECAUSE OF FRAUD, insured by Diebold and related strategies in the making for at least four years. And big media is complicit.

The mass purchases were stopped. Ohio mostly uses punch cards.

I read an article awhile back that it would be more efficient for the cheaters to fix the machines that count all the votes. I assume that means electronic and paper ballots?

Supposedly won the state by 130K so we are to believe that the rural counties (primarily in the western part of the state) gave Bush a 348K net gain in votes. Nope doesn't add up*.

*- 218,000-23,000 = 195,000 Kerry lead...195,000 + 130,000 (supposed W win total) = 348,000

What exactly are you counting?

gay hating uneducated shit people.

Like virtually everyone here, I strongly disagree with the anti gay-marriage worldview, and would like to see civil protections and recognitions conferred upon same-sex unions. I would, in short, like to see gay couples kissing on the courthouse (or church) stairs and head off to their honeymoons. More to the point, I would like to see them come home from their honeymoons and become stable families contributing to the community in which they live. Strong families of whatever stripe are the bedrock of our culture.

From the polls I've read, it's not that most of the "uneducated shit people" hate gays, it's that they want marriage to be limited to man/woman couples. Sure, some of them hate gays, but not most of them. You have to get inside their minds a little to understand why they hold this position. They see a special quality arising between couplings of woman and man, and don't see it between man and man or woman and woman. We do. I think they arrived at their conviction the same way we arrived at our view. They have their texts, we have ours. They have their truisms, we have ours. I believe we have something they do not, however. Our idea of marriage would promote more people being in lasting, monogamous bonds of love. That seems to me among the most fundamental of "family values." It's the sort of argument that can, over time, win new supporters from the ranks of those who currently oppose the idea. Not all of them, of course...but enough of them to create majority support.

Calling them uneducated shit likely will not help persuade them to adopt a different opinion. Some of them *are* uneducated shit, but that can be said of any sufficiently large group of people. If you want to win elections, don't call potential supporters a piece of shit. It's just dumb.

As a social issue, gay marriage today is like interracial marriage was 75 years ago. Reasonable and desirable to some, wrong and immoral to others. The immorality aspect was largely a residue of earlier, less enlightened times. But times change.

Social evolution happens by degrees. Let me ask you something: are you more likely to be persuaded by someone who's flecking you with spittle as they scream what an ignorant loser fuckhead you are for having a different opinion? Or by someone who affords you some basic respect as she applies the steady pressure of a superior argument?

There's a line from The Shawshank Redemption that sums this up: "Oh Andy loved geology...an ice age here, a million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time."

...which they've bent over backwards to discredit, since they showed Kerry up by 4% in Ohio.

snip
Campaign operatives and analysts point to the same motivating factor: Bush's conservative positions on social issues, particularly his opposition to abortion and his advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The president developed a national strategy based on those issues during a year when many voters put morality-based themes at the top of their own agendas, exit polling showed.
<snip>

Com'on guys...get your stories straight.

Are we to believe that those same Fundies-- who were hell-bent on voting the moral issues-- consistently LIED to the exit pollers and said they'd voted for Kerry?

:crazy:

4,000 extra votes for Bush

<http://www.franklincountyohio.gov/boe/04UnofficialResults/Unofficial%20Abstract%20of%20Votes%20General%202004.pdf>

I've been posting this all over the place, hoping to get people talking. Haven't heard it on the news. It's close to 4,000 fraudulent (pardon me "erroneous") votes for Bush, people!!! Just from one tiny 638-vote precinct in OH.


http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.
Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result
The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.
The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.
In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.
Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.
The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.
When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem

They are on it all over the place, rationalizing why Kerry didn't win Ohio.

Remember the number 1 rule when you're confident: never complain, never explain. Well, they're explaining all over the place. Loss of confidence means they know they can be found out.

Damage Control.

of reports of VOTING FRAUD --that's what won in Ohio.

Professor 2

that are capable of giving Bush 4,000 extra votes because of glitches helped, didn't they?

as"spoiled". the malfunctioning machines to AfricanAmer polling plcs --no attempt to read clear intent.

the WP won't be able to deny it soon.

At least, that's my hope. :thumbsup:

A few people have linked a couple of articles, but I think they could use some more people chiming in on the subject.

Let's make it hard for them to ignore.