Columbus Dispatch 8-9: Conspiracy in 04 OH vote? "there simply was none."

[demodonkey]

Editorial on media in August 9 Columbus Dispatch. The internets and other opinionated media are at at fault because people on there only read what they want to hear. In reality Blackwell is clean, all is really well in Ohio, etc.

lihttp://www.dispatch.com/editorials-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/08/09/20060809-A8-00.html

"...a significant minority continues to insist that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, especially in Ohio through the efforts of Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

While Blackwell’s partisanship and his role as honorary state chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign raised eyebrows, the vote-stealing charges don’t hold water. Ohio’s votes are counted by county-level boards of elections that are bipartisan, making a widespread conspiracy essentially impossible.

And the long, discouraging lines at inner-city polls were matched by long, discouraging lines at crowded suburban polls.

None of that matters, though, to many readers of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s lengthy essay in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he recounts what he sees as evidence of a pro-Bush conspiracy.

The Rolling Stone article is only the most high-profile of countless print articles and blog entries insistent on finding conspiracy in the 2004 Ohio vote when there simply was none."

[AndyA]

1. Why haven't we heard anything from those bipartisan county-level

boards of elections? I'd like to hear a few of those members who are Democrats state that everything was on the up and up in Ohio in 2004. I'd like to hear them address the issues that have been brought up. Yet I haven't heard anything from them. Where are all these bipartisan board members? Why aren't they defending the 2004 Ohio elections?

[mod mom]

3. They serve at the SOS (Blackwell) pleasure. Also, Blackwell is the tie

breaker whenever the 2 D's and 2 R's vote among party lines (frequent)

[EFerrari]

7. Maybe they're on a conference call with those NM Dems

who didn't want anything to do with, well, anything.

[mod mom]

2. Cols Dispatch will endorse Blackwell (as they did * in '04) They used

bad info on Nov 5 in a map showing the allocation of machines in Franklin Co. When I contacted them after receiving a internal Franklin Co BOE spreadsheet containing how the machines were allocated by precinct (this was the info later used to indicate that inner city low income precincts were adversely effected, that dozens of machines were held back and never distributed, and that high Dem precincts received less machines than in the '04 primary despite huge increases of new voter registration, they never corrected their initial story. They have not been interested in reviewing the sources of the material RFK Jr used (Freepress.org, Fitrakis, Wasserman and R H Phillips etc), yet they are willing to denounce what they never reviewed. Hmmh...

[Botany]

4. Columbus Dispatch

Say nothing happened?

19,000 votes loaded after the polls closed in Miami county

fake terrorist warning shut down the public vote count in Warren county

Long lines @ republican polls? please

360,000 people stripped from voter rolls before the election (dems only)

the fact I saw and heard "it happening" with my own eyes
http://www.thousandreasons.org/get_article.php?article_id=13

Toledo had Tom Noe's wife as head of the BOE and she let people "work on"
voter rolls prior to the election

that the exit polls showed Kerry winning

That Kerry won Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, Canton, Warren,
Youngstown, Stubenville, Portsmouth, Athens, and Springfield but lost the state?

The dispatch knows the true story ... they are part of the problem

[Botany]

5. From a Dispatch reporter

his e mail response about RFK's article

[e-mail]

The analysis is incorrect. The dispatch and other Ohio papers have looked at these issues and come up with different conclusions. Salon, not a conservative bastion, did a critique of the rfk article that hits the major points. Thanks for writing.

[zbdent]

6. The headline is very telling:

"Too many Americans believe only the news sources that share their biases"

Faux, Moonie Times, Drudge, Waaaaah Street Urinal, ...

Wasn't there some sort of statement by the righties that the "real, smart" people don't go off looking at multiple news sources to support their "bias" (viewpoints), implying that, as long as you get your news from one ultra-conservative source, you're good ...?

[Kurovski]

8. Nice try, Dispatch.

If an election smells like shit and looks like shit, it's probably not a fricking rose.

[eridani]

9. Right. And Blackwell got to define who a "Democrat" was

--which means that a fundie minister could be the Repub, and his wife the Dem.