And Yet... (8 page)

First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the state supreme court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general—and probable—one nationwide and statewide.)

In eleven other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. So maybe we have a barn-burning, charismatic future candidate on our hands, and Ms. Connally is a force to be reckoned with on a national scale. Or is it perhaps a trick of the Ohio atmosphere? There do seem to be a lot of eccentrics in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. In addition to this eminence, they also possess distinctive (but not particularly African-American-sounding) names. In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more undervotes than Republican ones.

In Precinct 1B of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes
for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the “glitch” had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.

In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein–type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

In Mahoning County,
Washington Post
reporters found that many people had been victims of “vote hopping,” which is to say that voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another. Some specialists in election software diagnose this as a “calibration issue.”

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this:
in practically every case
where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and
in practically every case
where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

This might argue in itself
against
any conspiracy or organized rigging, since surely anyone clever enough to pre-fix a vote would make sure, just for the look of the thing, that the discrepancies and obstructions were more evenly distributed. I called all my smartest conservative friends to ask them about this. Back came their answer: Look at what happened in Warren County.

On Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and homeland security, officials “locked down” the Warren County administration building and prevented any reporters from
monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what “scale,” that on a scale of one to ten the terrorist threat was a ten. It was also claimed that the information came from an FBI agent, even though the FBI denies that.

Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the GOP would have felt the need to engage in any voter “suppression.” A point for the anti-conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.

Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many “vote hops” the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.

There are some other, more random factors to be noted. The Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, was a state cochair of the Bush-Cheney campaign at the same time as he was discharging his responsibilities for an aboveboard election in his home state. Diebold, which manufactures paper-free, touch-screen voting machines, likewise has its corporate headquarters in Ohio. Its chairman, president, and CEO, Walden O'Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” (See “Hack the Vote,” by Michael Shnayerson,
Vanity Fair,
April 2004.) Diebold, together with its competitor, ES&S, counts more than half the votes cast in the United States. This not very acute competition is perhaps made
still less acute by the fact that a vice president of ES&S and a Diebold director of strategic services are brothers.

I would myself tend to discount most of the above, since an oligarchy bent on stealing an election would probably not announce itself so brashly as to fit into a Michael Moore script. Then, all state secretaries of state are partisan, after all, while in Ohio each of the eighty-eight county election boards contains two Democrats and two Republicans. The chairman of Diebold is entitled to his political opinion just as much as any other citizen.

However, there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be “a conspiracy so immense” as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.

I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be “in on it.” This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. “Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were ‘in control' and no comparison studies,” she explained. “The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded.” In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes.

In the bad old days of Tammany Hall, she pointed out, you had to break the counter pins on the lever machines, and if there was any vigilance in an investigation, the broken pins would automatically
incriminate the machine. With touch-screen technology, the crudeness and predictability of the old ward-heeler racketeers isn't the question anymore. But had there been a biased “setting” on the new machines it could be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It's not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the meanwhile. . . .

I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. “Well, I understand from what I have read,” she said, “that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties.” That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, “What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?” My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: “Then that would be quite serious.”

I am not any sort of statistician or technologist, and (like many Democrats in private) I did not think that John Kerry should have been president of any country at any time. But I have been reviewing books on history and politics all my life, making notes in the margin when I come across a wrong date, or any other factual blunder, or a missing point in the evidence. No book is ever free from this. But if all the mistakes and omissions occur in such a way as to be consistent, to support or attack only one position, then you give the author a lousy review. The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures ATMs, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.

(
Vanity Fair
, March 2005)

A
S WE WERE
waiting for the cameras to roll in a Washington studio just before Christmas, my
faux bonhomme
host, Pat Buchanan, inquired offhandedly as to my citizenship and residency status. I innocently told him that my paperwork for naturalization was in the system, but that Homeland Security had racked up an immense backlog of applications. Then up came the music for the next segment—which was to be about the display of religious symbols on public land—and before I knew it, Buchanan was demanding to know by what right I, a foreign atheist, could presume to come over here and lecture Americans about their Christian heritage.

Synthetic outrage is de rigueur in the world of American cable-TV news, and I was almost as surprised by the authenticity of my own fury as I had been by the extreme inexpensiveness of Buchanan's ambush. More than two decades in Washington—and all that time beseeched by Buchanan to be a guest! Three children born in the country, and all three as American as the day is long! An unblemished record of compliance with boring correspondence from the IRS! As the blush of anger left my cheek, however, I dimly realized that I was not resentful of Buchanan's abuse of his own hypocritical hospitality. Rather, I felt that my very own hearth was being profaned. Don't be telling me to go home, big boy. I
am
home.

Seething a little more in the limo that bore me away, I understood why I had not even thought of one possible riposte: “Don't you take that tone with me, you German-Irish fascist windbag. I don't have to justify my presence to riffraff like you. Tell it to Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh—and meanwhile, don't stab our boys in Iraq in the back.” Had I said that, or anything like it, I would truly have been sorry, at the time as well as later. (On the other hand, I shall always covertly wish I
had
said it—though had I done so, the prefix to “bag” would not have been “wind.” One hopes to keep one's well of meticulous English pure and undefiled; but then again, there's no demotic abuse like American demotic abuse.)

In writing a biography of President Clinton, who was our contemporary at Oxford, my English friend and colleague Martin Walker had some success with a book titled
The President We Deserve
. The volume was also published in London, with the no less eloquent title
The President They Deserve
. I had just completed work on a short biography of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and had found myself referring in the closing passages to “our” republic and “our” Constitution. I didn't even notice that I had done this until I came to review the pages in final proof. What does it take for an immigrant to shift from “you” to “we”?