In an article titled "Jim Crow GOP" on TomPaine.com, Air America producer Steve Rosenfeld alleges that "it was Jim Crow tactics... which gave George W. Bush his Ohio victory in 2004."
But, Rosenfeld claims, the conspiracy cannot be acknowledged by Democrats, who presumably would have the most to gain from backing Rosenfeld's accusations if they were true:
Of course, the Democratic Party and their allies will never admit they should have known better and acted to stop these tactics. But you can read between the lines of the DNC’s 2005 report on Ohio that said 2 percent of Ohio’s 5.8 million voters who intended to vote were stopped from doing so. That’s 116,000 voters in a state where George W. Bush’s margin of victory was 118,775 votes.
If the Democrats are alleging that 116,000 people were prevented from voting in a state -- not all of whom supported John Kerry -- then there is no possible way that those voters could have changed the outcome of an election that Bush won by 118,775 votes.
Indeed, Walter Mebane Jr., a respected political scientists at Cornell who served on the DNC task force, disavowed these allegations:
Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University and member of the task force, said Ohio suffered from a "gross administrative failure" on Election Day. But he later said there was no "support whatsoever for the claim that there was a large-scale misallocation of vote from [Democratic nominee John F.] Kerry to [President] Bush in Ohio" and said it is highly unlikely Kerry would have won the state in any case.
...Mebane stopped short of charging that Republicans had deliberately set out to frustrate Democratic voters. He said the scope of the study could not determine whether there was any partisan intent and noted that local election boards, which determine the distribution of voting machines, are bipartisan.
But to Rosenfeld, it's a Republican conspiracy analogous to Jim Crow. Obviously.
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