Salon.com December 21, 2004
Copyright 2004 Salon.com, Inc.
By Tim Grieve
Rep. John Conyers
isn't ready to declare the election stolen, but he'll continue to dig
into the droves of complaints -- and fight to fix the broken U.S.
election system.
For
those who believe that the 2004 election was stolen by George W. Bush,
Karl Rove and an unholy alliance of party operatives and voting-machine
impresarios, a 75-year-old Democratic congressman from Detroit has
emerged as the last best hope for American democracy. Almost alone in
official Washington, Rep. John Conyers has insisted that the nation
understand -- and then correct -- the problems that plagued the 2004
vote.
With little attention from the media and little support even from members of his own party, Conyers
has launched his own probe of the 2004 election. His early conclusion:
There may not have been an active conspiracy to suppress the vote and
steal the election, but all those problems in Ohio -- the long lines in
Democratic precincts, the voting machines that may have switched votes,
the suspicious actions of a voting-machine company representative, the
trumped-up concerns about terrorism in Warren County, the
Republican-friendly rulings by the state election official who also
happened to chair the Bush-Cheney campaign -- well, those things didn't
all happen by accident, either.
"You know, orchestrated attempts don't always require a conspiracy," Conyers told Salon on Monday. Conyers
said that Bush's supporters in Ohio may have worked to suppress the
vote based on cues rather than orders from party officials. "People get
the drift from other elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk
about how they're going to win the election."
Conyers
isn't looking to overturn the election, and he won't say that the
Republicans stole it; coming from a member of Congress, such an
allegation would be "reckless," he said. But neither is he willing to
put the election of 2004 behind him yet. This is the second
presidential election in a row in which Republicans have succeeded in
suppressing the vote, Conyers said, and he wants to ensure that
the system is changed so that it won't happen again. He'll continue his
investigation, he'll join the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a protest rally in
Ohio on Jan. 3, and when the new Congress meets in January he'll push
for further investigation and reform.
Conyers spoke with Salon by phone from Detroit.
Your
first public forum on the 2004 election was called "Preserving
Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?" Do you know the answer to that
question yet?
Well, dozens and dozens of
things went wrong. It depends on what part of the state we're going to
examine. In Hocking County, a private company accessed an election
machine and altered and tampered with it in the absence of election
observers. It disturbed a deputy chair of the election in the county so
much that she has given a sworn affidavit that has been turned over to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we're in the process of
running that down. But what about in Cleveland, Ohio? There, thousands
of people claimed that their vote for Kerry was turned into a vote for
Bush. Poll workers made mistakes that might have cost thousands of
votes in Cleveland. And in Youngstown, machines turned an undetermined
number of Kerry votes into Bush votes as well. Provisional ballots were
thrown out. There were several conflicting rules. There was mass
confusion. In Warren County, they talked about [the possibility that]
terrorism might close down the election. I mean, please.
What
we're doing, understand, is we're collecting the complaints, the
grievances, the outrages, the indignities that people suffered, and
then we've got to process them to find out what is valid and what needs
to be further examined and what needs to be tossed out. It's not like
every complaint is one that has to be counted. What we're trying to do
is make the system better.
Do you believe that there was an orchestrated attempt to steal the election?
Well,
you know, orchestrated attempts don't always require a conspiracy.
People get the drift from other elections and the way [campaign
leaders] talk about how they're going to win the election. When you
have the exit-polling information discrepancies that occurred in 2004,
where the odds of all the swing states coming in so much stronger for
Bush than the exit polls indicated -- they say that that is,
statistically, almost an improbability.
[People]
are saying, "No, no, no, that doesn't mean much." But it means a lot.
It feeds this growing, [but] not provable feeling among millions of
Americans that this was another unfair election.
Do you have that feeling?
Sure,
I have a feeling that whenever we can come across ways to make
elections fairer or work better or improve the process or simplify the
regulations or make voting more available to people who have language
problems or disabilities, we have a responsibility to do it. We're
trying to improve the system. I'm not trying to attack the outcome.
What we need is a system where there are only a few of the kinds of the
tens of thousands of complaints that we already have.
Do you believe the outcome of the election would have been different if it had been conducted more fairly?
I
have no way of saying that because this gets into conjecture. I make
one conjecture and somebody else makes a counter conjecture, and where
are we? We're all, "This is what I think." I'm not as concerned about
what I think as I am about what people told me went wrong on Election
Day that we in Congress, especially the Judiciary Committee, have the
responsibility to correct.
But is there
any real chance that anything will be corrected? The entire nation was
focused on the problems with the electoral system in 2000, yet very
little seems to have changed. If meaningful reform didn't come then,
how can anyone expect it to come now?
I
thought that the Help America Vote Act would improve things
dramatically. And although it helped in places, the provisional ballot
[process] was misinterpreted. We couldn't get all these private
companies to come up with a paper trail on their machines. And with the
precinct machines, there was quite a disparity in the conservative
counties in Ohio as opposed to the Democratic areas where there were
only a few machines.
Republican precincts had plenty of machines, and people could vote quickly.
Instantly, yeah. And we had people waiting for hours only miles away.
So what comes of all of this?
First,
we've got to collect the complaints. Second, we've got to investigate
them and bring forward the ones we're willing to stand by. And then we
have to examine how we correct them. There needs to be, generally
stated, more federal regulation over presidential elections. There are
just way too many differences, from not only state to state but also
county to county.
So far, which complaints are you willing to "stand by"?
It's
not a matter of my claiming ownership over the complaints. I'm just
doing my job. If all of them are valid, that's what I'm going to
present. If half of them are valid, that's what I'm going to present.
I'm not going forward with complaints that don't reach the level of
believability or credibility.
The complaints you've described in this interview -- do they meet that level of believability and credibility?
Oh
yes, and plenty more reach that level. So we've got a problem. Many
people in the media are saying, "Look, the election's over, and yes, we
had problems." It's like many people are just taking this. Then we have
the hundreds of thousands of people who are outraged and supportive of
me for carrying on and trying to make sure we get to the bottom of all
these grievances that have been brought forward.
We've
received e-mails from hundreds of those people, and many of them seem
certain that the election was stolen, or at least that the outcome
would have been different if the election had been more fair.
Sure.
But you're not there yet.
Well,
no, that's not why I'm doing this. I'm not trying to get there. I'm
trying to do the kind of job that people will say, "I think the
congressman and those working with him are going about this in a fairly
impartial, effective manner" -- and not that they're coming in as
thieves trying to upset the election result. To me, that would not be
what I'm in Congress to do. I mean, I would be doing this if it were
just the reverse. A fair election process applies to everybody --
Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike.
Four
years ago, when it came time for Congress to certify the election
results, a number of House members rose to protest the certification of
the Bush electors from Florida. Not a single member of the Senate
joined them. Do you expect the same thing to happen this time around?
No,
I think the Senate is going to go along with an inquiry this time. I
don't think they would embarrass themselves to let this happen two
times in a row.
Has any senator said to you that he or she will call for an inquiry?
No,
I haven't talked with a single one. I'm not citing somebody who I know
is going to do it. I'm not aware of anyone. I just don't think the
Senate would get caught in that position.
You
haven't exactly enjoyed a groundswell of support from other members of
Congress. Are there Democrats in Congress who support what you're doing
but won't come forward and say so publicly?
Well,
there are Republicans who support what I'm doing who haven't been
willing to come forward. Look, calling for fair elections is not the
most radical thing in the world. We're not positing some revolutionary
theory here. We're asking that the people who complained be given a
fair hearing.
Have any Republicans actually told you that they support your efforts?
I'd rather not comment on that.
Are you surprised that none of them have said so publicly?
No, not really. If you had a majority leader like theirs, you'd probably think twice about it yourself.
What
about the Democratic leadership? Harry Reid, the new Senate minority
leader, says he'd rather dance with Bush than fight him. Should the
problems in Ohio change the way Democrats in Congress think about
accommodating Bush in his second term?
Well,
I'm not sure how much accommodation is going to happen. I listen to
Bush talking about "reaching out," which he talked about the first
time, and we had the most divided federal system in memory. And now
those kinds of phrases are being tossed about during the Christmas
holiday again. Please. I don't put much stock in it.
Bush billed himself as a "uniter, not a divider."
I keep reminding myself of what he said. He sure didn't unite anybody I knew of.
And what about John Kerry? Have you spoken with him about your investigation?
His
lawyer was in Columbus for our hearing there last week. And he has
also, at the same time, asked for a full recount in Delaware County
[Ohio].
Has the Kerry campaign done enough? A lot of Democrats think Kerry conceded too soon.
It's
easy to be in an armchair somewhere saying, "You've got to do this;
you've got to do that." He had more in his control. And besides, he's
the candidate. I wish he'd listened to me more, and everybody wishes
that the guy they voted for would listen to them more. But he's the
master of his ship.
When you say that you wish Kerry had listened to you more, do you mean during the campaign or in the days after the election?
During the campaign and after.
What do you wish he were doing now?
I
don't want to go into all of this "shoulda, coulda, woulda." I think it
takes our focus off the fact that we had far too many grievances and
misfires in this election that have to be corrected.
But
you don't believe that those problems were the result of a concerted
effort by the Republican Party or the Bush-Cheney campaign? You think
people who wanted to see the president reelected just got the message
somehow that they were supposed to do the things they did?
People
didn't have to get a message. If you use questionable tactics and
generally attempt to suppress the vote -- that's what the Republicans'
strategies were all about: "How do we limit the vote?" Because the more
people who voted, the more imperiled they felt they would be. And from
that kind of an assumption, you can get a whole lot of activities that
might not meet the smell test.
Because
people on the ground understand the overall strategy and then take it
upon themselves to engage in whatever conduct they think will help?
That's what frequently happens, and usually does.
Do
you believe that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell did that? Do
you think he acted with the intent to suppress the vote?
I
know that Kenneth Blackwell made some decisions that were blatant and
outrageous for a secretary of state. How he felt that his head was big
enough to be chairman of the "Re-elect Bush" committee and also head of
the administration of the electoral vote for the president in that same
state was beyond me.
Is that the sort of issue that you hope to address through legislative reform?
Oh, good night, yeah. There are very few people who did what he did.
Do you think you'll ever be able to prove that there was a coordinated effort to steal the election?
We're
not trying to prove that. This is what we're discussing: We're trying
to improve the situation wherever we can to make a better voting system
in the states.
But a lot of the people who
support your efforts desperately want you to prove that there was a
conspiracy. If the e-mails we get are any indication, a lot of them
believe that the existence of a conspiracy has already been proven.
Well,
you know, a citizen's point of view may be different from a federal
lawmaker's point of view. The citizens are entitled to form their own
opinions. They can assert that easily. A member of Congress, the
ranking member of Judiciary ... I can't make those assertions without
proof. That would be reckless.
So you don't make them.
No, I don't.
What do you do?
We pass laws. We make laws and we try to correct the system through the legislative process.
And what conclusions have you reached about how the system can be fixed?
Everyone
is beginning to reexamine the appropriateness of the Electoral College.
We realize that provisional balloting needs to be streamlined and
simplified. We know that there should be paper trails in computers.
We're beginning to wonder if we haven't privatized the electoral system
so that the computer tabulators can do more and know more than the
electoral commissions of the counties themselves.
In
the meantime, what do you say to all of the people who believe in their
hearts that our democracy is broken and that the election was stolen?
I
ask and invite everybody to turn in any evidence that they want that
helps proves whatever position they believe, or even a position they
don't believe. But this isn't a hunch and suspicion game. This is very
serious business. Either there were defects so numerous and so
plentiful that we had a faulty election, or we had an election that had
these defects [but they didn't alter the outcome of the election]. And
as we go forward with trying to improve the process, my whole objective
is not to change the election result but to try to improve the process
itself.