Speaking of Questionable Validity of Electronic Voting Systems...

As many of you probably know, John Kerry (finally!) has questioned some of the voting count and practices from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio which - as you also remember - was the tipping point state for the so-called Bush win. Only almost two years late, John, but... well.. there are huge questions about the Ohio vote that have never been adequately answered, including a whole host of irregularities on a rather monumental scale. [Here are some links to stories this week covering it in detail: The Free Press, Tom Paine's articles declaring that Kerry actually won Ohio, and a must-read from Harpers here.]

Much like in Florida four years before with Katherine Harris both serving (in her capacity as Secretary of State) as the person in charge of validating the vote AND acting as George W. Bush's state wide campaign coordinator (which she then used to ride into the House of Reprehensibles in 2002), Ohio's Secretary of State Ken Blackwell also was in charge of validating the votes AND being a Bushie operative. And again like Harris, Blackwell is now running for office himself, and counting heavily on support from the GOP who owes him a great debt for making certain Dubya won.

If Ohio had not been "declared" as a win for Bush in 2004, Dubya would not have had a second term (and his first ride into office in 2000 was more a matter of selection than election). The vote as counted was EXTREMELY narrow, with Bush counted for a win of less than 118K votes out of the 5 million cast. This "tip" gave Bush the electoral college votes needed to continue destroying U.S. and the planet for another four years. [For some of the details, check the archives of the Toledo Blade as well as this article from January 2005 Rolling Stone magazine. Searching on "Blackwell Ohio Toledo Blade" for example gives you a big start.]

Mind you, it's bad enough that a very significant percentage of the U.S. population believes that two if not more vote counts have been "fixed" (example: electronic voting manufacturer Diebold had its top man promising to "deliver the vote" for Bush). At least twice, there is very good reason to believe that the wrong man (if you call Dubya a man) was sent to the White House.

But what is far more criminal is that there is NOTHING in place to prevent this from continuing, while almost every week, there is a new disclosure at how easy it is to "fix" the electronic voting systems. We need to be screaming loudly and following it with action.