MICHIGAN: THE MOOD
Battlegrounders
[Henry Payne 11/04 06:40 AM]
Republicans in Michigan are breathing a sigh of relief today - and not only because President Bush won a second term, despite narrowly losing Michigan.
In Detroit, mostly white Republican poll watchers dispatched to monitor mostly-black city vote counting encountered uncomfortable, racially charged situations. Poll watchers overseeing absentee vote-counting at Cobo Center, for example, reported widespread fraud in the counting of ballots. The incident raised the specter of a politically dicey GOP lawsuit, a move now less urgent given Bush's national victory.
"Craziest thing I've ever seen," said one poll watcher. "They had 100 tables and just five poll watchers trying to monitor them. Every table had a pile of empty ballots. If the machine rejected a ballot, the workers would just take a fresh ballot, fill it in the way they thought the voter wanted (Detroit voted heavily for Kerry), and then put THAT ballot through the machine." The poll watcher also reported unsigned ballots being counted in the machines, a violation of absentee procedures.
Alarmed by this open fraud, the party brought in more poll watchers only to be confronted, according to a Detroit Free Press account, by a Kerry campaign lawyer "who arrived and began yelling at the 20-30 GOP lawyers." Policemen were called to restore order to the proceedings after which the additional Republican poll watchers were all escorted off the premises.
The Cobo vote fraud was the most serious incident in an evening that included a judge ruling for Republicans when poll watchers were cast out of other polling places. Democratic voters, in turn, complained that "they felt intimidated by a stranger watching them and wanting to check identification" according the Free Press account. All in all, an unsettling evening here in Southeast Michigan. |
