Because so much went on there. From the Secretary of State invalidating voter registrations because they were on the wrong weight paper to Republican caging lists to other attempts to intimidate minority voters to grossly inequitable distribution of voting machines to Republican challenges to minority voters to electronic voting results much more different from exit polls than other voting methods to the vote tabulations being switched to the RNC server to CNN doctoring its exit polls to match the crooked results coming in. If you’re going to rig an election, far easier to focus on one key state that is near the tipping point.
Blalron, you do realize that Massachusetts (and 13 other states) had a higher Poll/Vote difference than Ohio did in the 2004 election, and Utah wasn’t far behind. Check about 1/2 of the way down this page to see the whole list of “red shifts”.
Plenty of states with higher red shifts than Ohio can’t even laughably be considered battleground states, yet there isn’t a single peep from anyone asking why those states had a change like that. You can talk Ohio conspiracy all you want, but until your theory also explains how states that were never even close to being at risk had higher (or similar) variances, the theory is a pile of crap.
Either it was a nationwide conspiracy encompassing dozens of states, many of which were never in contention, or it was a statistical problem with the polling.
Look who’s talking Mr. Bush Apologist. You backed the bastard in fucking 2004. You are one of the most gullible drones ever to post on this message board. Witness this witless post of yours from 2004:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4587779&postcount=36
You’ve got a lot of damn gall calling ME gullible, monkey boy. You and your fellow minions of mindlessness have helped make American government what it is today, torture-loving, incompetent, corrupt and stupid. Way to go!
I hope every moderate who reads this board will keep the record of the guys YOU’VE backed in mind when they read your posts. It’s YOUR record, too, because you’ve backed Bush to the hilt.
Is it Wednesday already? Wow.
And so, ineluctably, the thread changes away from “what evidence have you got of voter fraud” to the other topic that Evil Captor thinks about while masturbating -
BushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedBushLiedfapfapfap…
You’re gonna get callouses on it.
Regards,
Shodan
But Ohio can’t have been the only state where the outcome was close, but it’s the only state where people are paying attention to. And remember that this is an Administration that can’t seem to keep anything secret, so how the fuck is it that they can keep this a secret?
Oh, and here’s the website of a couple of brothers who made a career out of claiming that elections were rigged.
I don’t think there’s any evidence of Bush involvement. I think overzealous Republicans in Ohio took it upon themselves to do what they could to steal the election. And even that need not have been coordinated. Secretary of State Blackwell was a rabid Bush partisan and was also in charge of the election. Knowing the election was close, he threw as many barriers as possible in the way of minority voters. Other Republican zealots had the motive and opportunity to get into the electronic returns and make a few changes in Bush’s favor.
So, would that be a conspiracy?
Any proof?
Were there similar overzealous republicans in New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, Alaska, Alabama, North Carolina, Connecticut, etc. trying to steal the election, that caused the vote in those states to deviate from the exit polls more than they did in Ohio? Or, were the variances in those states completely unrelated to what happened in Ohio, some mystery effect that did not occur in Ohio, for reasons unknown.
Excellent questions. I’ll have to defer answering for a bit as I gather some facts.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to lose autopsy notes than it is the ballots of a Presidential election in 56 counties. When evidence is intentionally destroyed, it is only natural to be suspicious.
As posited, yes.
The term “conspiracy theory” has tainted the word “conspiracy” and evokes images of Oliver Stone’s JFK, with Kevin Costner playing an overzealous prosecutor playing the Zapruder Film and chanting “back, and to the left. back, and to the left”.
But Oliver Stone notwithstanding, a conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more people to break the law. Since it would take more than two people to destroy all those ballots, a conspiracy can logically be posited as a likely explanation for the missing ballots.
By “this” I mean the process by which ballots are collected, tabulated, and eventually destroyed in a democratic society. This particular incident shows that there is some ambiguity in the process which could easily be clarified by some change in the law. If ballots are to be destroyed, shouldn’t they be destroyed at a very specific time after an election after all possible legal contestations have run their course? If the law clearly said “Two years after an election all ballots are to be destroyed” then I would shrug my shoulders and leave this issue alone.
But it appears that in this instance either the law was flagrantly broken or somebody took extreme care to ensure that they stayed within the letter of the law and with great haste destroyed ballots whose destruction were by no means a requirement. Using Ockhams razor, the simplest explanation tending to be the right one, what do you think the explanation is for these missing ballots?
Your strong disinterest in knowing the truth of this is puzzling.
Based just on the premises you state…that 1) a conspiracy is an agreement between two people to break the law and 2) that it would take more than two people to destroy all the ballots, I would say that your conclusion is an overstatement at best. A better conclusion would be more along the lines of this: “a conspiracy can logically be posited as a POSSIBLE explanation for the missing ballots.” After all, we haven’t even established that a law has been broken.
I would say that the simpler answer is the one I suggested earlier…that there IS no one explanation for what happened to the ballots, but that they were destroyed, lost, or damaged in various ways for various reasons, due to individual office policy, human error, etc.
So the fact that there was a law stipulating a minimum period for which vote records should be retained makes you suspicious that a conspiracy has been at work?
As far as has been determined, this is exactly what has happened. The ballots were destroyed, twenty two months after the election, and all possible legal contestations should have run their course. But the court order contravening Ohio state law was not issued until eight days after that.
The objections of those filiing the legal action are not predicated on any ambiguity in Ohio law. And this whole nonsense about how the destruction of the records constitutes proof of a cover-up is not going to be affected by any law stating that the records must be destroyed. They can simply wait until the legal retention period expires, and then make the same accusations as they are doing now.
Maybe you would, but, as I mentioned, nothing about the law as stated could prevent someone else from making the same amount of hay over (apparently) nothing.
Well[ul][li]there is no evidence to date that any law was broken[]twenty two months doesn’t strike me as “great haste”[]the simplest explanation that I can see does not involve vast conspiracies. Perhaps it does for you.[/ul]As far as I can tell, the simplest explanation is the one contained in my previous post. The officials retained the records for the period established by law. Thus any opponents had twenty two months to come up with something. They failed. The period expired, and the records were destroyed. [/li]
I would presume that at least part of the motivation behind the original law was that, for most reasonable people, enough is enough. Keeping the records around permanently not only raises privacy issues, but having some kind of “statute of limitations” on election challenges makes sense. For heaven’s sake, some of the Usual Suspects are still whining about losing the election in the electoral college seven years ago.
Conspiracies of the scope necessary to bring off fraud on this scale are so difficult to bring off as to be nearly impossible. Somebody always blabs, or some concrete evidence always comes up. BG claims that five million votes were stolen.
It has been twenty two months, and no real evidence has come up. At some point, it makes sense to say, “Look, the election is over, you lost, you had two years to make a reasonable case, you couldn’t do it, the records are now gone so STFU and get over it”.
As I keep asking, what evidence do you have that “the truth of this” involves any criminal activity, or that a conspiracy existed?
Regards,
Shodan
Absent documentation of the date[s] of the destruction, this assertion (the bolded portion) still contains a non-zero component of conjecture. To the extent to which you insist that the conjectural component is zero (or of a value so small as to be unworthy of concern), you will find your disagreement with several here to be irreconcilable.
Exactly. If everything I know so far seems like standard operating procedure, why would I go out of my way to look for evidence that it wasn’t?
Given the Pubbies unblemished record of civic virtue and and electoral purity?
For some reason, I cannot find any coverage of this story by searching the websites of The Columbus Dispatch or The Plain Dealer.