Dialect Drift: "Florida" is now pronounced "Ohio"

[womzilla]

No time right now for a full postmortem of the election. However, for those who are wondering about election fraud, let me welcome you to my original homestead, Franklin County, Ohio:

The Daily Kos: Ohio, Provisional Ballots, Recounts and Fraud by "Hunter"

Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct
638 TOTAL BALLOTS CAST

US Senator:
Fingerhut (D) - 167 votes
Voinovich (R) - 300 votes

US President:
Kerry (D) - 260 votes
Bush (R) - 4,258 votes

You don't have to be the Ohio Secretary of State to figure out the problem there. Let's see if he does.

Bush's real victory margin in Ohio, after all of the provisional and absentee ballots have been counted, is probably less than 40,000. And that's not even counting spoiled but potentially countable votes. (One of the great shames of America is that nearly 3% of ballots cast are uncountable in almost every presidential election.) If there are more than a couple of incidents like this--individual precincts where Bush somehow received 10 times as many votes as were actually cast--expect the fight to re-open.

Or maybe Ohio is the new Mississippi.

Comments

[wizwom.livejournal.com]

Can you say "data entry error?"
I knew you could.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Ignore it.
John Kerry says it don't matter.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

In my canvassing group in Lantana, FL, in Palm Beach County, one of my team members heard two separate incidents from voters voting for Kerry on a machine, and getting their paper receipt and finding it said Bush. My team did report it in.

So despite the seemingly idiotic majority, we're not done with this yet.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I honest to G-d wish you were right.
Perhaps if we had a candidate with some balls rather then John (the Whimp) Kerry I might feel the same way you do.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Of all the post-election lines of analysis, this is the one I find the most supremely irritating.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Likewise.

The Poor Man said this:

Everytime we try make headlong charge and get slaughtered, we regroup, try to figure out what went wrong, and decide we just didn't charge hard enough. We convince ourselves that there's this big army of Deaniacs or young voters or whatever who are going to ride to the rescue, and we call that a strategy. And we lose the House, and we lose the Senate, and we lose the Presidency. We lose the Presidency to an unpopular, incompetent, illiterate, garble-mouthed, radical right retard. I'm not very sympathetic to arguments that we just aren't losing hard enough, and that we'll get 'em next time, slugger.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

My point of view is this.
Kerry's concession came at a time NOT involving recounts, but even before the first counting was completed.
THAT is just plain wrong.
It came only hours after Edwards made that impassioned statement about every vote would count.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Well, my ideal candidate would have no balls to begin with, thankyouverymuch, but I don't like the "whimp" charge being applied to someone just because he doesn't act like a macho bulldog in cowboy boots, nor do I think it's fair. Gathering evidence for the case of voter fraud takes time--it would do no good for Kerry to keep attention on himself by holding back a concession, which isn't legally binding anyway. Wait and see what happens as the evidence mounts.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

"Gathering evidence for the case of voter fraud takes time--it would do no good for Kerry to keep attention on himself by holding back a concession, which isn't legally binding anyway."

I'm not saying there wasn't voter fraud (more then likely there was with this bunch of crooks).
HOWEVER, I go back to my main point.
Those votes not counted even ONCE before Kerry conceded.
That's the problem I have.
If you want to live in what I have come to refer to as a "statistical democracy" (or tyranny) then I suppose you can just stop the count as soon as the statistics tell you it is impossible for one or the other candidate to win.
You CAN do that.
OR, you can dignify the system by finishing the count before you throw in the towel.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It would have taken a statistical miracle for the provisional and absentee ballots, by themselves, to give Ohio to Kerry. I suspect that Kerry thought that openly challenging Ohio on that grounds would lead to ten days of "Democrats are anti-democracy" rhetoric in the so-called-liberal media, which would help no one. As Lavendertook says, the concession isn't legally binding; let's see what happens.