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I was reading some of the letters, and I came across this passage in an otherwise very well written letter by Xanthro:
"The type of Republican election fraud that occurs is of the nature of attempting to reduce turnout of Democratic voters. Jamming phone lines, placing signs challenging ability to vote, having police cars patrol near polling places, giving false information on where and when to vote, purging voter rolls, etc. Rarely are these types of activities actually enough to sway even a very close election, and the 2004 election was not one of those rare cases."
In fact, the 2004 election was quite close. A sitting president challenged by a candidate relatively new to the national scene is always going to be a tough race, and Bush had a lot of support going in to the race from the mainstream media.
The specifics of the election aside, Xanthro and others who are not familar with the uses of voter disenfranchisement, should study the politics of the South. For over one hundred years, Blacks had the vote, but there were no African-americans in politics after Reconstruction. Nor were there politicians sympathetic to the interests of Blacks. This is testament to the effectiveness of systematic voter disenfranchisement. Poll taxes, literacy tests and the rest ensured that only a select few would select the so called representative governments of places like Charleston. If suspect Whites went to the polls there were ways to make sure that their votes did not tally, by temporarily jamming a lever. Regardless of which party an election worker was affiliated with, his or her loyalty lay with the dominant class, in this case the White wealthy elite.
After the Voting Rights Act became law and began to be enforced, southern politicians began to resort to more underhanded tactics to supress minority, labor and poor voters. However, now that the federal Attorney General and the Secretary of State of many states are no longer willing to enforce the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, it is possible for Republicans to return to full blown voter disenfranchisement of a scale not seen since the days when it was legally sanctioned. With the press turning its face the other way, there is absolutely nothing to stop the party in power from making sure that the numbers add up the way that some one would like them to, not the way that chance or the voters would have them.
It is naive in the extreme to assume that with the Secretary of State decreeing systematic voter disenfranchisement and with the federal government refusing to intervene that any minor precint level worker would buck the system and protest. In fact, a few did. The only people who reported their stories were the independent internet press. Everyone else went along with the dog and pony show that was the Ohio 2004 election.
I think what Xanthro meant to write was "rarely are these type of activities perpetrated against the types of citizens whom the press feels are worth reporting about, and therefore no one bothers to keep track of the number of votes which are lost." We know that in Florida enough votes were lost to turn the election day count around, because Database Technologies kept records. We may never know in Ohio, but the pattern which the use of the same tactics in other races has produced suggests that they may have been much more effective than some Pollyanna types choose to believe.
