I got linked over to Robert C. Koehler, who's a columnist for the Tribune syndicate, who's written a few things about the "irregularities" in the last election and had them refused by a number of syndicating papers. Had a piece, called The silent scream of numbers, which was spiked by his home paper.

The issue of election fraud is both enormously important and complex, and it's' a shame that Progressives in America made a lot of wrong moves politically in response to what happened on November 2nd.

Koeler had one good segment in the piece he wrote:

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states...

This would be great, if the fucking subtitle of the piece weren't "
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?"

I watched a lot of people who were supposed to be cool completely blow their credibility by making irresponsible, unsubstantiated and patently false claims about what happened on November 2nd. Koehler is the latest.

Which isn't to say there wasn't fraud and abuse in the last election. I believe there most certainly was. I don't think it should be legal for someone who's serving as an overseer of an election (e.g. a Secretary of State) to have any relationship -- let alone a chairmanship -- with one of the campaigns involved. It's a clear-cut conflict of interest, there's clearly solid evidence to be gathered there, and it could become a gripping drama.

As I see it there are principally three avenues of investigation to undertake. The first is, as I've said, Attacking Kenneth Blackwell and Preventing Future Conflicts of Interest by getting laws passed which prevent public servants overseeing elections from coordinating in any way with any campaign that will be contesting under their jurisdiction. Blackwell is planning on Running for Governor. He must not escape justice the way former Florida's Sec. of State Katherine Harris did. There are two clear-cut objectives: forcing Blackwell out of the Governor's race, and using that public drama to highlight the legal changes that need to be made.

The second area of opportunity is in securing the actual systems that record and count votes. We must Attack Diebold and Build A Secure Election System. The current situation is untenable: entrusting the vote to private corporations who are selling insecure products and who's ownership and management may have personal connections to various political parties is irresponsible. It's a weak link in our Democracy. There's no strong evidence that any organized electronic tampering took place in 2004, but there were glitches a-plenty, and the system was so easy to hack you could literally train monkeys to do it. Additionally, the fact that the CEO of Diebold actually said, he'd deliver Ohio's votes doesn't inspire faith in the statis quo.

Finally, a national campaign to make Same-Day Voter Registration available in every state would do a lot to mitigate most low-level forms of fraud. Same-day has also boosted participation by up to 10% in states which have adopted it, an undeniable plus.

These three memes can be woven together into a comprehensive national campaign if the will exists to do it. It could be a real winner on a number of levels. However, a lot of established players are gun-shy on the issue because it has already been bungled.

The Democratic party and Kerry campaigns dropped the ball early. They realized that they democratically lost the election -- in the grand scheme of things, the Bush campaign won the popular vote by a larger margin than Gore did in 2000 -- and that fighting the result would have been politically risky, so they didn't. This created a power vacuum.

And then a bunch of unfortunate actors filled it in. Greg Palast blew what credibility he had right out the window writing a Nov. 3rd column called "Kerry Won." Bev Harris who's outfit Black Box Voting had been doing really well (they pushed the video of the monkey hacking the vote) took a bunch of donations, supposedly for Freedom of Information Act requests, which may have partly gone to her own bank account. Statements, rhetorical softballs, coming out from untrained lefties to the effect that "It's impossible that 62 million Americans voted for Bush" were crushed by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

In short, the cause of reforming our electoral system is already a step behind because it has not been waged as an effective political or legal or marketing campaign. There's time to turn it around, but we've got to focus down on what our goals are, make sure we're using only unimpeachable evidence.

This is one of a host of issue, along with Health Care, Small Business, Bankruptcy and Lending, Energy Independence which could fuse with a serious National Security candidate and a culturally-driven populist movement to create a true governing consensus again in this country.

I will be writing more in this vein over the next month before I go on the road. I have several idea project