Matt Taibbi: 'Highly irregular: The Ohio 2004 election story is going to come back'
The facts Taibbi outlines:
* As was the case in Florida, the secretary of state (Kenneth Blackwell, in Ohio), who is in charge of elections, was also the co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign.
* In a technique reminiscent of the semantic gymnastics of pre-Civil Rights Act election officials, Blackwell replaced the word "jurisdiction" with "precinct" in an electoral directive that would ultimately result in perhaps tens of thousands of provisional ballots--votes cast mainly by low-income residents--being disallowed.
* Blackwell initially rejected thousands of voter registrations because they were printed on paper that was, according to him, the wrong weight.
* In conservative, Bush-friendly Miami County, voter turnout was an Uzbekistan-esque 98.55 percent.
* In Warren county, election officials locked down the administration building and prevented reporters from observing the ballot counting, citing a "terrorist threat" (described as being a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10) that had been reported to them by the FBI. The FBI made no such report. Recounts conducted during this lockdown resulted in increased votes for Bush.
* In Franklin County, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush in a precinct where there were only 800 registered voters.
That 98.55% county really gets to me. So the total of number of voters in the hospital, drunk in a bar, high on meth, too lazy to go out, unaware of the political process, totalled less than 1.5% of the county? In America? Something happened.
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You could check the percentage of the population who voted in Miami county as compared to surrounding counties. If you do, you'll find that about 51.6% of the total population of Miami voted, and that the other counties around it ranged from 47.1% to 52.4%, where Taibbi must think people were coming out of the ground to vote.
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