The 2004 Vote revisited

For those of you who follow this blog you know that I am on the side of folks who say that Bush won Ohio. Not necessarily without shenanigans, but he won it. This was in opposition to many of my peers. However I laid out me case pretty damn clearly. You can find my argument here:

Greg Palast: Liberal Whites Blinded
Palast, Ohio, and the Real Court Case
Palast, Ohio and the Real Court Case Part II
Ohio Certifies

Over at Salon.com there is an article entitled Was the 2004 election stolen? No. Where the author, critiquing a book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., makes the same exact points I made. The one thing that he added, which debunks a charge I made in Palast, Ohio and the Real Court Case, regards Matt Damschroder:

As to Kennedy's argument that Republicans deliberately engineered the long lines, he's on pretty shaky ground. To be sure, there is ample evidence that election officials throughout the state failed to respond to the surge in voter registration seen in the 2004 race. But it is far more accurate to see their actions as part of a larger picture of incompetence in the midst of massive changes in election procedures -- especially changes in voting technology -- than as part of a GOP plot. Kennedy elides the fact that in Ohio, decisions about voting-machine allocation and precinct location are determined by local boards of elections, which are bipartisan; any Republican effort to allocate machines in a way meant to harm Democrats would have necessarily involved Democratic officials.

The case of Matt Damschroder, the Republican chair of elections in Franklin County whom Kennedy cites, is instructive. As Cornell's Walter Mebane determined, Franklin County's allocation of voting machines was clearly biased against African-Americans. But Mebane's report (PDF) contains some important caveats. Franklin County's allocation of voting machines can be seen as biased if you look at the number of black voters who were registered by Election Day, but decisions about how to allocate voting machines are made months before then. That's why Mebane also notes that "if the allocation of voting machines is compared to information about the size of the active electorate that was available to Franklin County election officials at the end of April, 2004, then the allocation of machines is not biased against voters who were active at that time in precincts having high proportions of African Americans."

The difference reflects the reality that in the last few months of election season, registration surged in Ohio. That Franklin County's voting-machine allocation was considered unbiased in the spring and biased in the fall arises from the fact that the county failed to respond to these electoral changes.

Mebane doesn't let Damschroder off the hook. He says county officials "ignored information during the late summer and fall that should have showed them that the November electorate would be substantially larger. Between April and November, the active voter population in the county increased by more than 15 percent. If nothing else, the surge of new registrants should have indicated that their plans made in mid-summer would prove woefully insufficient."



The article is a good read though if you read my blog, most of the arguments presented there would be old news to you.