Democratic candidate for Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice, C. Ellen Connally, was defeated by her Republican opponent, four-term incumbent Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, in 81 of Ohio's 88 counties. She was victorious, that is, in only 7.95% of the state's counties. And in the majority of the seven counties she won -- four counties -- she won by fewer than 2,000 votes.
In the county most likely to show Connally favor, the county most likely to give election observers an indication of her potential popularity among partisan Democrats -- heavily-black, heavily-Democratic Cuyahoga County (Judge Connally is herself black, and indeed spent the most important years of her career as a Municipal Judge in Cuyahoga's largest city, Cleveland) -- she received only 59.64% of the vote (294,973 votes out of 494,523 votes cast). While a respectable total, The Advocate assumes, on the basis of this evidence, that Connally could do no more, in any Ohio county, than she did in her home (and demographically well-suited) county. How then did she defeat Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 14 counties? How is it that she was most popular, relative to the top of her party's ticket, in those counties which were most likely to vote in large numbers for the re-election of President George W. Bush?
Recent stories of malfunctioning electronic voting machines in Ohio give any reasoned observer to the 2004 election great pause in responding to the question posed above. The conservative New York Daily News (which, The Advocate notes, endorsed President Bush's re-election) has observed that in heavily-black Ward 4F on Cleveland's East Side -- a Ward which gave 91% of its votes to Al Gore in 2000 -- the ultra-conservative Constitutional Party candidate, Michael Peroutka, received a jaw-dropping 41% of the vote. [Nationally, the largely-ignored Peroutka scored so few votes that his vote tally was statistically insignificant, and not even reported by many news organizations]. In Ward 4N, the Libertarian Party candidate, Michael Badnarik -- also largely ignored nationally, and also flamboyantly conservative on most platform issues -- received a stunning 33% of the vote. In 2000, the total third-party votes coming from Wards 4F and 4N was eight. That's right, eight. [All of these were cast for then-Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader]. Ten other Cleveland precincts netted these two obscure candidates 700 additional votes; in Wards 8G and 8I, the two received 78 votes combined, nearly nine times the total third-party votes from those precincts in 2000 (to wit, nine).
As Daily News reporter Juan Gonzalez wrote in his recent article, entitled "Ohio Tally Fit for Ukraine," "[i]n virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. So far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by Thursday all official results are due."
Despite these irregularities, the Cuyahoga Board of Elections has already certified the county's vote totals to Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Only a recount -- which Secretary Blackwell recently assured MSNBC's Keith Olbermann would occur -- could shed more light on these shocking disparities between historical trends and "actual" results from the November 2nd, 2004 election.
See Related Stories:
("Ohio Tally Fit for Ukraine", The New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez, 12/1/04)
Article
0 comments:
Post a Comment