Wizblog

Grasping At Strawmen

Peter Kirsanow exposes the Democrats' lame attempt (yes, still) to add Ohio/2004 to Florida/2000 in the mythology of black voter disenfranchisement.

When initial claims of disappearing votes, voter intimidation, and rigged "Republican" election machines proved false, they tried to make the most of less-titillating claims that long lines, inadequate numbers of voting machines, and partisan election officials "disenfranchised" voters...

...If there was a conspiracy to disenfranchise Ohio voters, black or white, its execution was profoundly inept. Ohio voter turnout increased from 4.9 million in 2000 to 5.5 million in 2004. Estimated black-voter turnout alone rose by 25 percent.

Many of these black voters apparently failed to pay attention to the subtext of the disenfranchisement claims — that Republicans were trying their best to prevent blacks from voting. Yet President Bush's percentage of the black vote in Ohio increased from 9 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004. The total number of black votes cast for the president in Ohio increased by more than 100 percent...

...The final refuge of the mythologists was purported irregularities related to Ohio's 160,000 provisional ballots. The mythologists contended that Blackwell had erected formidable barriers to casting provisional ballots and had discarded/invalidated huge numbers of them (presumably to the detriment of John Kerry). But as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, more than 75 percent of such ballots were counted as valid — a percentage more than three times greater than the percentage of provisional ballots counted in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts. In fact, it just so happens that Ohio counted a higher percentage of provisional ballots than any other state in the country.

Timothy Carney suggests the reason the Democrats have made such a big issue of the Ohio vote is that it gave them a pretext for inflicting some political damage on Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell. He fits a profile that scares the stuffing out of Democratic leadership...a young, intelligent, competent, charismatic black Republican:

As a party, the Democrats need to fear Blackwell. He is skilled, conservative, and on his way up. He could be governor in a couple years and who knows where he could go from there. So Democrats have an interest in sullying his name before it gets big.

After Thursday's debates and the protests Ohio Democrats have raised since the election, once Blackwell's name is mentioned on the national stage again, every major newspaper reporter will reflexively call him a "controversial figure" who is "at the heart of the much-criticized 2004 election in Ohio."