Harris v Clinton, round 2 -- and much more on vote fraud

Another lockdown in Ohio. The Ohio recount effort quickly ran into an obstacle, and his name is Ken Blackwell. From the Ohio Election Fraud site:

On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that "all voter records for the state of Ohio were "locked-down," and now they are not considered public records."

A voter record is not public? How can a recount take place without access to the data?

A poll book, apparently, was physically yanked out of the hands of a recount volunteer.

Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26 that requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying. ORC Sec. 3599.161 makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to knowingly prevent or prohibit any person from inspecting the public records filed in the office of the Board of Elections. Finally, ORC Sec. 3599.42 clearly states: "A violation of any provision of Title XXXV (35) of the Revised Code constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud within the purview of such Title."

Blackwell's outrageous attempt to impede a legal recount not only makes him a candidate for what used to be called "the big house," he has also created further grounds for a revote. The law is there; only the political will to enforce it remains missing.

Alas, Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro seems to be a Republican ideologue; don't expect anything from an elephant except elephant crap. Perhaps we will get better results from the lawsuit Democrats filed against Blackwell.

It gets worse: A recount volunteer named Katrina Sumner told a writer at Democratic Underground that the Board of Elections offices were kept unlocked during last night's "lockdown." Someone must have made his way into the place, because in the morning she found that a light was on that had not been on the night before.

A janitor? Maybe. Even so, we can't rest easily knowing that anyone could have walked in and tampered with the evidence.

(Hmmm. Did something similar occur in those 11 precincts in New Hampshire...?)

Hallelujah! Sister Beverly has written a repentant epistle!

All right, I won't let the evangelical flavor of yesterday's column seep into today's message. Suffice it to say that the feisty Bev Harris has offered a more conciliatory response to the Curtis tale, as opposed to her original, rather paranoid cries of "disinformation." Her remaining technical quibbles do not strike me as significant. The argument over whether Curtis used the term "Quit Tam" correctly would be relevant only if he claimed to be a lawyer.

This bit seems quite noteworthy:

Most political shenanigans are not conducted by the candidate himself, but by operatives. It is certainly possible for a politician to hold several meetings in which he commits a felony in front of several witnesses, but that's not usually how it is done. A more common technique is an envelope full of cash left in a drawer of an operative, with at least one, sometimes more, buffer layers between the operative and the politician.

Clint Curtis says Feeney himself had meetings to directly discuss election rigging software. Could happen, certainly, but this seems unusual.

But this gets a bit more interesting. As I was checking this out, I got a report from someone completely unrelated, on an entirely different kind of vote-manipulation endeavor, and Feeney's name came up in that, too. So the issue of Feeney's behavior is about as clear as mud.

Sometimes political chicanery is accomplished in a far more direct and obvious fashion than we imagine.

For example, various writers have asserted that Howard Hughes made illegal, under-the-table contributions to both the Nixon and Humphrey campaigns in 1968. According to one respected book on Hughes, HH passed a huge wad of cash to HHH while the two men sat in a car, the pay-off occurring in the furtive fashion of a john paying a streetwalker. Movies and novels have trained us to believe that such men would handle such transactions in a more dignified manner. But real life often lacks dignity.

Disunity, cat-fights and worse: I can't help but feel troubled by the many recent spats -- Harris v. Olbermann, Harris v. Curtis, DemocracticUnderground v. Harris, Olbermann v. Madsen, Everybody v. Fisher. This vituperative spirit of all-against-all recapitulates the sorry history of the Warren Commission critics, who came to hate each other with a passionate revulsion they never would feel toward a gunman on the grassy knoll. If anything I've written has contributed to the atmosphere of acrimony, apologies; if my reform attempts fail, consider my wrists slappable.

These squabbles should not surprise anyone. The suspicion of democracy in peril can make even a reasonable person anxious and touchy.

In that light, you ought to read this plea for unity between the "hearts" and "heads" of the movement to uncover voter fraud. The "hearts" are those folks who demand action now, goddamit! -- while the "heads" are those patient Sherlockians who insist on keeping mum until each and every duck falls into a row.

My own stance? If our discussion focused on a historical matter -- for example, what really happened in Hitler's bunker during the fall of Berlin -- the head should always prevail. But vote fraud is a different matter. We swim within the current of events, and constitutional deadlines loom.

Under such circumstances, you gotta have heart.

Recall, too, the history of the 1990s, when many rightists tried to paint President Clinton as a conspiratorial antichrist. The dark theorists trading in such allegations were operatives of the heart, not of the head. Granted, their hearts were wizened and degenerate and pumped out a vile ichor; even so, they were damned effective at creating a mass movement. Why can't we match that sort of vigor -- while providing (you should pardon the expression) better head?

I'm not arguing in favor of unarranged ducks or thoughtless action. But history books abound in tales of people who thought too much before taking action, who slept the sleep of Oblomov when passion should have roused them to protest.

The wire services are covering this story. The best article comes to us via Associated Press, although even the Moonie-owned UPI has a reasonably respectful offering. The AP story repeats a point previously made by others:

In six states, including Florida and Texas, about three dozen voters complained that they selected Kerry on touch-screen machines but were shown as having voted for Bush until they revised their electronic ballot. Equipment manufacturers blamed the problem on miscalibration.

AP also quotes Ken Blackwell:

"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature and none of them would overturn or change the election results," Blackwell said on Monday when he certified the results.

Ah, but why should every "glitch" favor Bush? Such a remarkable series of events stretches the definition of the word "accident" beyond the limits of its elasticity. But nothing, it seems, is beyond our Ken.

Remember Gahanna County, Ohio? A machine in the New Life Church in this county registered 4258 votes for Bush even though only 638 voters cast ballots. Ohio Republican functionary Cornell McCleary calls this anomalous vote a "prank." The choice of words is telling, since "prank" -- as opposed to "accident" -- implies intentionality, and access to the software.

Incidentally, we should have more to say soon on the subject of voting in church.

A small problem. ESS voting machines in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million vote. Aside from that, everything went well.