Wednesday, December 01, 2004

John Kerry, Ohio & Juan Gonzales

Thought I was done but went back to the e-mail and Keesha sent two articles.

For all the people who said they went to the site asking Kerry to join the recounts, here's this from The Washington Post:

Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge yesterday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount.
[. . . ]
Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23344-2004Nov30.html


From The New York Daily News (click link for the full article):

Voter fraud in the Ukraine? Give me a break.
It has been a month now and we still don't have a clear count of the votes for our own presidential race from the state of Ohio.
For those who may have forgotten, Ohio supposedly assured George W. Bush a second term in the White House - only the most important job on the planet.
The morning after the election, we were told Bush was ahead of John Kerry in that state's unofficial count by 139,000 votes, or 2.5%.
At the time there were 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots and an unknown number of overseas ballots, but Kerry concluded they would not produce enough of a margin to erase his deficit, so he promptly conceded.
At the same time, given the bitter Democratic memories of the 2000 Florida fiasco, he assured his supporters he would fight to have every vote properly counted this time.
Within a few days, other problems began to show up in Ohio's preliminary tally.
We learned, for example, that an additional 93,000 voters had gone to the polls yet machines had registered no preference of theirs for President. Only a manual recount can tell us for sure what happened to those 93,000 ballots.
Then, red-faced election officials in Franklin County admitted a computer error on Election Night had tallied 4,258 votes for Bush in a precinct where only 638 people voted. That correction alone will drop Bush's margin by 3,620.
And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/jgonzalez/

Democracy Now! viewers are familiar with Juan Gonzales. Whether you watch him on DN! or not, there is an e-mail address on his column if you'd like to drop him a note to thank him for covering this when the majority seem completely uninterested in the story. (If you've already read the article and are in a rush to send him a thank you note for drawing attention to this issue, his e-mail is jgonzalez@ edit.nydailynews.com.)

If you'd like to see some TV coverage on this, why not use New York Daily News' e-mail function to send the article to The Today Show? Maybe that would help broadcast TV find this story?

Today's picked at random. It's the number one rated daytime "news" show. (I did watch Today regularly as I got ready each morning until I gave up on it and all other TV "news.") Their e-mail address is today@nbc.com and possibly if enough people sent them this story, they might notice it?

[Thanks to the attention Buzzflash has given the Ohio issue since the election, I'm aware that Keith Olberman is covering this issue on his MSNBC show. I'll try to find his blog tomorrow and post it though I'm sure most of you already know where to go to check it out.]