While Ohio's electoral delegation will likely vote 20-0 in favor of reelecting the president today, agreement that Bush won the state remains far from unanimous.
At a morning rally in Columbus, Rev. Jesse Jackson, congressional Reps. Maxine Waters and John Conyers, and representatives of voting rights organizations filed a last-minute lawsuit seeking an injunction against certifying the state's election. The lawsuit accuses the Bush-Cheney campaign of "high-tech vote stealing," and argues that there is sufficient evidence of fraud to halt the electoral process until a thorough investigation can be completed. According to the Associated Press, "Jackson said the challengers noticed Bush generally received more votes in counties that use optical-scan voting machines and questioned whether the machines were calibrated to record votes for Bush.
The dissidents claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democrat-leaning precincts, organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place and confusion over the counting of provisional ballots by voters whose names did not appear in the records at polling places."
If the lawsuit were to be successful, the Ohio Supreme Court could throw out the election results, or even award the state's votes to Kerry. At this point, that seems a long shot -- for starters, Ohio's top court has a Republican majority.
One name conspicuously absent among the plaintiffs was John Kerry's, the man protesters are declaring is the rightful winner. "I can't for the life of me understand why Kerry isn't fighting harder for this," Cliff Arnebeck, head of the Alliance for Democracy, told the L.A. Times. "Maybe it's some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you're not supposed to show up the other guy."
Shares