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.
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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