American democracy hangs by a thread in Ohio
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld
and Harvey Wasserman
December 15, 2004
As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a thread
in Ohio.
Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy.
But every new day brings still more stunning revelations -- this time from
Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance
and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave
George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a
lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a
recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City
Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud
and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then,
at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty
illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be
president.
On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of protests
at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new
sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have tainted official
voting machines before a recount could be done, irrevocably compromising
the process.
The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse Jackson,
who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for African-American
citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.
The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote. It asked
an immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors
from meeting and voting for George W. Bush.
Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting until
that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply
ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount.
Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even though the bitterly
contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors had
not been recounted.
In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio
