Election projection

Mash really got steamed at The New York Times. This is easy to do. The NYT has demonstrated some truly assinine editorial policy, especially as it has regarded electioneering seen in Ohio in 2004 and, more recently, Mexico. But I wouldn't necessarily expect NYT to have any clue about what went on in Mexico when they seem to have no idea what went on in Ohio. Or at least, they appear to have no idea about what went on in Ohio. It is a tad hard to believe that the supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers at the Times could actually be a bunch of naive bumpkins, but considering how easily they are used by the White House as a propaganda rag, this might, in fact, be the case.

The New York Times, newly concerned with voting machine "irregularities," is the same paper that found it necessary to publish a front page story shortly after the 2004 elections calling reports of voter fraud and bizarre vote counts coming out of Diebold machines crazy "conspiracy theories" that were "quickly debunked." This is the same rag that ignored the publication of the Conyers Report, What Went Wrong in Ohio, and joined the MSM ridicule of Conyers' committee investigation into the huge number of reports and testimony regarding election day shenanigans throughout the state, including phoney FBI terror threats, secret ballot counting, and touchscreen voting machines that, when a voter select Kerry on the screen, the entry for George Bush actually lit up. Over and over again.

As is their want, editors at The New York Times wrote an editorial called In Search of Accurate Vote Totals. It seems that only recently, editors at the "paper of record" have learned of serious voting problems associated with Diebold machines, though they still don't seem to want to see what is right in front of their eyes and still insist that the whole mess is simply that, a mess that no one is responsible for. Their opening salvo is as breathless as it is clueless:

It's hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes accurately. Yet there are growing signs that the country is moving into another presidential election cycle in disarray.

Disarray. Chalk one up for the bumpkins.

How is it that NYT editors don't understand that "disarray" is exactly the manufactured environment within which elections are stolen? They seem shocked, shocked, that Diebold machines tested in Ohio's Cuyahoga County showed " unexplained discrepencies" between machine paper ballots -- paper ballots that Diebold has resisted for years -- and the vote totals recorded by the machines. They appear to be utterly baffled as to why 31% of black voters were challenged at Ohio polls in 2004 while only 18% of "others," where others presumably means white.

But the apparent naivete continues when the editorial says,

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year, recently agreed to help preserve the 2004 paper ballots for review in the lawsuit.

Blackwell did no such thing. He was forced, by court order, not to destroy the 2004 ballots, something he is more than anxious to do. Despite Ohio having ballots stored from as far back as 1977, Blackwell sought the destruction of the 2004 ballots as soon as was allowed and it took a lawsuit and an injunction to prevent him from doing so; help preserve the ballots, my ass.

But the idiocy does not stop with this coddling of the notorious Blackwell.

Without bothering to inform readers that serious security issues seen in many voting machines, which keep popping up with alarming regularity, have prevented states across the country from certifying Diebold and other machines, the NYT admonishes New York state for not adopting easily hackable voting hardware.

New York's Legislature was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting machines statewide.

Diebold has resisted attempts to have their software submitted for examination, something that is required under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Indeed, the very reason for the state's inability to pass such a law is that the federal HAVA prevents New York from doing so; the machines are not certifiable under the law.

I don't really expect that The New York Times, or any other mainstream outlet, will recognize what is really going when, come this November, there will be, yet again, wide-spread reports of voter disenfranchisement, "flakey" voting machines, irreconcilable vote counts, and unusually close elections that will be won by Republicans and will be within the "margin of error" of exit polls, which will be further derided as worthless in such close calls. How is this known? Because this is exactly how every election has gone since 2000 and it is exactly how the GOP has won every election since that time.