What's going on in Ohio and Florida? Will the election be honest?

[mzmolly]

Ohio: What's the status on the Diebold "fix" and the Secretary of State fiasco?

Florida: What's being done to ensure voters there are not disenfranchised again?

Thanks to residents of both states, the reason I ask is because I think Kerry will win both states if the votes are counted "legit" like. ;)

[grannylib]

1. Last I hear, Florida's machines had crashed again, so now they are

sitting there with covers on and will not be used until the election. Supposedly they were "fixed" before being covered up. Yeah, I know just about how they were "fixed," and I don't mean "repaired."
You know damn well the Repugnicans will try to steal the election again; it is the only way they can win it. If all eligible voters are allowed to vote and their votes are counted, we win this one hands down, no contest.

[mzmolly]

4. They're going to use the machines that crashed?

My gawd. :( I agree with you it's ours if the election is on the up and up.

[Philostopher]

2. As far as Ohio goes ...

last I had heard, fewer than ten counties were using electronic voting machines. The machines they bought were already purchased before all the testing, and before Blackwell started trying to get Diebold machines in everywhere. The only county I am sure is populous that's using the machines -- I believe they're Sequoias -- is Franklin, but it's a biggie. Franklin County includes much of Columbus. Meigs County also was on the list, last I heard, it's somewhere in (usually more Democratic) northeastern Ohio. On edit: most of the others seemed to be rural farming counties that fairly reliably go Republican anyway, though I could be wrong.

Blackwell has been held up at most of the things he's tried to do to suppress new voter turnout. The Internet registrations/paper weight thing didn't go his way, nor, as of now, did the 'no provisional ballots period' thing. He's appealed on the provisional ballot issue, but the district court that found against him, in Toledo, said it felt it was clearly a matter of attempting to disenfranchise poor and minority voters who move more often and don't always know exactly where their polling places are come general elections.

I don't know if there are any big legal alternatives left for Blackwell to hand Ohio to Bush* dishonestly, other than polling place intimidation, inciting violence and lying to new voters who don't know their rights. Anybody who believes the Ohio GOP won't try to do these things -- and more, and possibly incite violence to cause the closures of polling places in poor and minority-heavy neighborhoods -- is wearing rose-colored glasses. I expect inner-city voting in Ohio to resemble attempts to vote in a banana republic. I so want to be wrong, but as close as Ohio is, and as much play as it's had as 'necessary to win' -- I hope for the best, but expect the worst.

[mzmolly]

3. Yikes!

Kerry has Ohio if this election is relatively honest, but that remains to be seen.

[Philostopher]

8. I've been saying it for a week, now.

The Ohio GOP is going to have to get its nails dirty to cheat, this year. Apparently, even though they've been in charge of the overwhelming number of offices in the state for almost a dozen years, now, the Ohio GOP still doesn't control the district courts, which have been shrugging off all Blackwell's challenges to fair voting for everybody. They won't get off with any kind of 'clean' cheating, they'll have to leave their fingerprints on it, and they hate to do that, though they will if they must. Any time I start to feel optimistic, I remember how they beat Dick Celeste out for a second term, back in the '80s -- they rooted around in some legal records and found out that he and his wife had separated in the mid-seventies because he'd had an affair with another woman, then plastered this information all over the place, even though he and his wife had made it up and all was forgiven. Reputedly, the Republican who beat Ted Strickland a couple of times down in his district before he won used to start a whispering campaign somewhere a couple of months before the election that Strickland was gay. Ted married late, and I don't know if he ever had any kids, but because he was a bachelor on into his early 40s, they managed to convince a lot of people who must now be voting for him that he was gay, in a rural, very conservative district in southern Ohio.

I put nothing past them. Winning is the only thing, for them. They'll shoot themselves in the foot to win, and they may well do that this time. Blackwell seems to be partly on his own, this year -- he's pissed off Larry Householder and a lot of the old-time Republicans. I don't think Voinovich thinks much of him. He may just have shat his nest going after Householder, but I don't know how dirty the old time Republicans in this state are willing to get in support of greasing the skids for Bush*. I'm hoping the internal implosions in the Ohio GOP may hobble their efforts, but this may be the one time in the past five or six years they can bring themselves to stand each other long enough to accomplish something.

[creeksneakers2]

5. I'm worried

that the GOP will try to use Ohio's electoral votes to Bush even if Kerry wins Ohio. The RW conspiracy is already saying massive fraud is taking place in Ohio on the Dem side. If Kerry wins Ohio by a small margin, and Bush loses the EC by less than 20 votes, the GOP could say that they need the Republican legislature to right the wrong of a fixed election.

[mzmolly]

7. "Voter fraud" = their pre-emptive strike against the honest results

that are sure to show Kerry as the winner.

[dave502d]

6. Jeb job is to make sure FL not honest.

[Was_Immer]

9. The elections havent been honest since Herbert Hoover lost!