Motivated by my eternal outrage at the systematic voter
disenfranchisement that occurred in Ohio last year, I ventured to
the Buckeye State this past weekend as a one man civil rights
crusade determined to uncover the great untold story of the 2004
election. I followed in the giant footsteps of other self-appointed
civil rights arbitrators who in no way represent established
government agencies or any investigative body and have no training,
no subpoena power, no authority, and no specific knowledge of voter
fraud outside of tidbits floating around the left wing of the
blogosphere. I’m talking of course about such patriots and freedom
fighters as John Kerry, John Conyers, Barbara Boxer, and Jimmy
Carter.
Well, okay, that’s not how it went at all. My wife’s friend from
the Peace Corps got married in Columbus and I tagged along. But I
decided to sniff around for an irregularity or two while I was
there.
It ought to have been fertile ground. If you follow the
conspiracy theories that posit George W. Bush no more won
re-election in 2004 than he won the presidency in 2000, Columbus
was the scene of the crime. Some 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters
reportedly stepped out of serpentine lines at Columbus polling
places and drove home without casting a ballot. It matters not that
Bush won Ohio by more than 118,000 votes. Or even that John Kerry
himself acknowledged the Democratic county officials responsible
for this civil rights cataclysm could count and recount the ballots
until the cows came home and it wouldn’t change the outcome of the
election. I was met with a conspiracy of silence.
I asked a burley farmer — on the bride’s side — who sported
arms like tree trunks and hands like catchers mitts whether he’d
been turned away at the polls. His chuckle crinkled his bald head
and made him appear even more menacing than usual. No. No one
stopped him from voting. For George W. Bush, by the way. Same for
his son, who made up for dad’s depilation with aigrettes of hippie
hair. No luck with anyone else from the bride’s side of the family,
not all of whom were Republicans.
Desperate for an irregularity, I approached the only
African-American fellow at the wedding and asked if he’d run into
trouble at the polls. From reading John Conyers full-throated
assault on the 2004 election, I’d come to understand Karl Rove
singled out African-Americans for systematic
disenfranchisement.
“I didn’t vote,” the guy told me. Aha! I was onto something.
Surely he’d been turned away when those Democrat county operatives
in the secret employ of Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
noticed the pigment of his skin. But it wasn’t so.
“I don’t really follow politics,” he concluded.
I struck up a conversation with a naturalized Vietnamese woman
pursuing her Ph.D. in cancer biology. Now we’re cooking with oil, I
thought to myself. John Kerry’s brave defense of Communism in
Vietnam must have encouraged this woman to take an equally brave
stand against President Bush’s oppression here in America. Perhaps
she was turned away at the polls in yet another sad chapter in
America’s colonial experiment.
Peering over both shoulders she whispered to me, “Actually, I
voted for Bush.” Turns out the Vietnamese in America aren’t that
excited about the workers’ revolution and think pretty badly of Mr.
Kerry.
I left Columbus without a single firsthand account of voter
intimidation or disenfranchisement. My crusade went bust.
Turns out though, I was just looking for fraud in all the wrong
places. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has it all over Columbus. The
Philadelphia County Board of Elections last week placed voting
booths in 112 locations that are either illogical, inaccessible,
and, in some cases, even illegal. Voters in the Forty-Fifth Ward
will get to enjoy a pint when they vote at Fibber McGee’s Pub.
Voters in the Twenty-Ninth Ward will need to drop by a vacant
funeral home, a location so morbid in its imagery even Lyndon
Johnson — who benefited from high turnouts in quite a few
graveyard wards — would have to cringe. And perhaps for
convenience sake, voters in the First Ward need to visit the
Democrat Party headquarters to cast a ballot.
My civil rights struggle continues.
