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Lost votes in Ohio and Florida

As outlined in this Daily Kos diary, there is something fishy in Ohio and Florida. The bottom line, though, is that, barring irrefutable evidence of widespread machine errors, there is almost certainly no way in hell for Kerry to gain enough votes in either state to make a difference in the outcome.

If everything breaks Kerry’s way, Ohio could conceivably come within 40 - 50,000 votes, perhaps enough to trigger a recount, but, in reality, not enough to win. The bigger problem is the very real possibility that, just like in 2000, thousands of minority voters were disenfranchised, so their votes will never count no matter what.

Reports of long lines at minority and other heavily Democratic precincts in both Florida (scroll to the bit about the USF campus with nowhere near enough machines to handle the turnout) and Ohio have raised eyebrows.

In a poor neighborhood, a long line is essentially a poll tax, as the voter loses precious work time, and may even endanger her employment status if she’s too long away from work. Some lines in Ohio were 10 hours or more. 10 hours. In line. Most of the people I know would have given up in utter frustration.

So, long lines equal disenfranchisement, and it looks like this was part of the Republican strategy. Where the GOP controlled the voting, machines were under-allocated to minority precincts. They employed lots of pre-election disenfranchisement tricks, too, and all their talk of challenges at the precinct level may well have discouraged countless voters.

Again, the disenfranchised votes will never ever be counted, no matter how many recounts, no matter if fraud is proven, these votes are lost forever.

So, the election is lost - no real chance to gain enough votes in Ohio, and Florida is way out of reach. But I feel that the Kerry team is still working, behind the scenes, to expose some of these criminal activities. Remember: Kerry is a former prosecutor, and Edwards is a feared trial lawyer. They have plenty of cash in the bank previously earmarked for a post-election legal battle, and they made repeated promises to guard against exactly this kind of cheating.

If they can prove widespread fraud, if they can show unequivocally that minorities were disenfranchised in highly disproportionate numbers, then we may see some Bush campaign officials spending some time in jail, and we may even be able to fix the system before 2006.

Reports of computer tabulation and other e-voting problems are rather widespread. The latest buzz has it that the centralized database computers may be having problems (intentionally programmed or not) counting the votes properly. Again, it is extremely unlikely that enough proof will be found to overturn the results, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to improve the system for next time.