We went to bobforohio.com under donate, we sent in a donatation for your run for Governor, Good Blessings.

Dear RS;
It was indeed gratifying to see so accurate and thorough an explanation of what went wrong in Ohio’s 2004 federal election – especially for this Ohioan who witnessed first hand much of what was cited in the article. I must add, however that there is a larger context that the author appears to have overlooked.
First to a few of the facts; I co-led the team of volunteers that conducted the survey in Cuyahoga County that included the precinct where the voter turn-out was seemingly improbably low (7%). In fact we were asked by the Columbus Free Press to examine several Cleveland area precincts with similar low turn-outs but we decided not to knock on any doors in the one with the lowest turn-out for the simple reason that there were scarcely any doors there to knock on. The entire precinct had been either boarded-up or razed which is indicative of a meta-trend with perhaps even greater potential to impact voter access to the polling process; urban decay and economic displacement. Another nearby precinct where the reported voter turnout was in the low 30% range further confirmed our impressions as the voters we spoke with there lived in conditions of abject squalor despite many of them holding several subsistence part-time jobs. The reasons voters in that precinct gave for not voting ranged from having no time due to their work schedules to health problems and infirmities on election day and also having moved since they last registered to vote. As a rule in urban areas where poverty is the highest residents tend to change addresses with greater frequency.
I also led the team of volunteers who surveyed the Miami County precinct with the reported 98.55% voter turn-out. There we spoke with fully half of the total number of registered voters and while we found enough voters who affirmed that they did not cast ballots to prove the reported 98.55% figure fictional we also noticed something else about that precinct and others like it that we surveyed in neighboring counties. These are examples of white-flight suburban bedroom communities that now congest the Ohio countryside and which tend to attract a disproportionately affluent Republican demographic. The streets there are clean and wide with adequate lighting, the roads are smooth and the houses, schools and churches are warm and spacious, much like the SUV’s and luxury sedans favored by the residents. Comparing the 98.55% (inaccurate) turn-out rate in suburban Miami County to the 7% ( probable) figure for the ruined inner city slum in Cleveland and you begin to see a larger picture that adds economic disenfranchisement
- sometimes compounded by racism as an even greater factor in skewing American elections to the benefit of the owning class.
As for the Connally anomaly where a down-ticket gay-friendly black female Democratic candidate for a seat on the Ohio Supreme court won more votes than Kerry our survey results were inconclusive yet in speaking with voters in one suburban precinct where that discrepancy was the greatest we found a surprising number of Republican voters ( mostly
women) who said they voted for Connally and also for George W. Bush. The reasons they most often gave was that they preferred to elect a female to lesser office even if the candidate belonged to a political party other than their own. Most of them knew nothing of Connally’s politics and many also confided that they did not discuss their down-ticket choices with their husbands.
If Republican women in the all-but-gated suburban metasteses at commuter-length from Ohio’s larger cities were unaware of Ellen Connally’s political views, however so, too was a sizable percentage of working class voters inside the outerbelts unfamiliar with the platform of John Kerry who’s plan for healthcare reform was, by his wife’s own admission virtually inconsequential and whose views on the Iraq war seemed vaguely hawkish. Among all of the Kerry voters I spoke with in Ohio both before and after the election I found precious few who expressed any enthusiasm for their candidate, yet all seemed to hold strong views on the war, healthcare, the environment and a number of other issues on which Kerry was conspicuously silent or noncommittal.
One wonders if the margins by which the election in Ohio and nationally apparently deviated from the public’s will were smaller than the potential number of new voters who might have been inspired by a genuine opposition candidate with an actual platform to run on. Now while the Democrats in Washington are busy approving more funding for the war(s) in the Middle East and haggling over the relative severity of the proposed anti-immigrant legislation ( designed, in part to prevent the addition of millions of new likely Democratic voters to the rolls) one wonders if the DLC will produce a viable candidate armed with an agenda of meaningful reforms sufficient to inspire enough voters to overcome the even greater margin of electoral insecurity caused by the addition of faulty electronic voting machines and increasingly restrictive voter registration procedures – not to mention the continual erosion of real wages.
Evan Davis
freelance journalist with the Pacifica Radio Network.

DKK

Thanks to Mr. Fitrakis and all the others who’ve worked so hard on this issue. Keep up the good work.

It is with great respect and honor to have met some of these people and know how hard they have worked on getting the truth out to the average individual.

These are the people fighting for true justice under the arch of a unabashedly totalitarian administration.