Doubtlessly, needlessly long lines disenfranchised some Ohio voters. This is inexcusable. Does it help explain the apparent Bush victory? I doubt it.

What I saw on the street in Columbus was that the Republicans were better funded, better organized, and smarter about mobilizing their voters. I bet they also knew more about their people than the Democrats. The Democrats were polling, whereas the Republicans conducted a census. The Republicans were probably more successful in tailoring communications to individual voters and I’m sure they had a plan to get each one to the poll.

What will the Republicans do next with this machine? Rove and Norquist have been candid about plans for a political realignment. They are likely to have some success. Can the Democrats continue to block hard right judicial appointments? I also expect organized political pressure to bring the media into conformity.

Voting itself was anti-climatic. I got in line at 6:30AM, voted at 8:00AM. No challengers or operatives in the poll itself. Very quiet and neighborly (as befits Ohio). Ohio law forbids even wearing buttons in the polling place.

When I got home, I found a Republican encampment across the street from my house. Apparently the law firm that owns the building is giving them the parking lot, and perhaps office space. Lots of strangers milling around. There are over 30 cars with W stickers, and 6 white vans (there are probably more about, because one van is numbered ‘10’).

Is this HQ for South Columbus? Or just for my precinct (we and they are about a block north of the church where we vote)?

I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with this. Just experiencing shock and awe at the resources they are deploying.

We used to live right on the border between the largely Jewish Point Breeze neighborhood and Homewood, the African-American neighborhood that John Edgar Wideman writes about. I mean literally on the border: every family south of us was white, and my next door neighbor and most other families to the north were black. A terrific place to live. I once saw August Wilson walking down the street. Our neighbor Sarah is Henry Aaron’s sister-in-law, and my son played chess with him when he visited. Well-kept secret: there are American cities where blacks and whites get along just fine.

Anyway, John Kerry signs are dense on both sides of the border. No surprise: If he can’t carry the East End of Pittsburgh, I want my contributions refunded. However, when you cross in to Homewood, there are suddenly multiple signs on each block saying “Protect your vote. If you have a problem, call {number redacted}.” People are ready.

There has been an impressive effort to register new voters here. My colleague Deena has been canvassing African-American neighborhoods for months. (By the way, she reports that many felons have the false belief that they cannot vote. In Ohio, however, felons can vote unless they are currently incarcerated. Given the statistics about the proportions of African-Americans who have felony convictions, there may be a substantial disenfranchisement right there.)

According to Mark Niquette of The Columbus Dispatch (see his fine article), the Republican counter was to send a letter to each new registrant. (Gotta wonder: the Republicans have also been registering voters and must have lists of those they registered. Were Republican new registrants sent letters?) If the letter was returned to the sender, the Republicans took that as evidence of possible voter fraud, and filed a challenge. This gambit was clever. It’s likely, however, that this method of finding fraud has a high rate of false negative errors (that is, it would miss cases of true but sophisticated voter fraud) and a high rate of false positive errors (it identifies valid voters as frauds, e.g., because of Post Office delivery errors, moves that lack forwarding addresses, or errors in recording voter addresses). If you have done mail survey research, you know that the cumulative rate of these false positive errors is significant.

Anyway, the Republicans generated an amazing 35,000 challenges this way, which suggests that the denominator of new registrations may be huge. A challenge apparently has to be made by another registered Ohio voter, not an organization, so lists of registrations to be challenged were parcelled out to Ohio Republicans.

A challenge ordinarily leads to a hearing. Summit County is in NE Ohio, and contains Akron (check the county website, which proclaims the region to be ‘The High Point of Ohio’—you may have to drive through to appreciate their sly humor). The Summit County hearing quickly identified many false positive errors and led the Republicans to withdraw the challenges in embarrassment. Statewide, the Democrats sued (successfully, at least for the moment) to stop the hearings on the grounds that the challengers had insufficient evidence. After all, the individual Republicans were filing challenges about complete strangers based on what headquarters told them about a returned piece of mail.

One of the (many) things being litigated now is what will happen to the challenged voters on Tuesday. (“Challenged voter?” sez Kathi, “That’s you in a nutshell.” Me: “You’re changing the subject.”) The fact that the hearings were stopped didn’t make the challenges go away. We are still in the first inning of this one.

10/28/04 2:33 PM EST. I get a robot phone call from Ken Blackwell, the (Republican) Ohio Secretary of State. Big deal: Clinton called last night. If Ohio is Florida 2004, Blackwell will be Katherine Harris. I know you are thinking, “Das eine Malals Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce,” but Harris nailed farce, so Ken has his work cut out for him. He reminds me that I can only vote in my correct precinct and asks if I know where this is (Me: “Yes.” Ken: “Excellent. Goodbye”). Some Ohioans view this an attempt to suppress the vote by getting people to worry about where they should go. That seems paranoid.

6:25 PM. At the OSU rally (30,000 present). A large group (1K?) of students for Bush marches in. Some of them were bused here, because later I see them being bused out. They are kept behind barriers at the periphery of the crowd, but everyone can hear their chants. The girls keep doing a fainting shriek that is surprisingly difficult to ignore. Kathi (a psychiatrist – and my research partner – and wife!) asks “How can anyone with a brain vote for Bush?” Me: “Empirical question. Let me go get one of them and we’ll take him to the MRI machine.” I get The Look. “Hey, 8 Tesla. If something’s in there, we’ll find it.” Bush will speak on Friday at the Nationwide Arena, where our NHL team plays. A much more expensive and, of course, controllable venue.

6:37 PM. The local pols speak. One of them says that the issue in this election is “the arrogance of one-party rule.” The PA plays “Keep on Rockin in the Free World.” I want to believe that this is a movement to restore democracy, and that it would survive either candidate’s victory. I’m encouraged that comments about process (“Did anyone have to sign a loyalty oath to get in here?”) play as well or better than points about jobs.

7:45 PM. Columbus’s Democratic Mayor takes the stage. “I’m Mike Coleman, and I am Mayor of the epicenter of the election.” He points out that the 2000 election was decided by 500 votes in Florida, and there are 50,000 students at OSU, so right here, right now “You can change the world.” We all look at each other—we’re on the fulcrum.

8:00 PM. BRUCE! I read the other day that Bush rocks his crowds – compared to whom? Springsteen’s a terrific speaker to boot. He closes with “No retreat, baby, no surrender!” What a step up from Clinton’s Fleetwood Mac or – christ – Dukakis’s Neil Diamond.

8:15 PM. Bruce introduces Kerry. Supposedly, Kerry’s crowds lack intensity. Not this time! Kerry is brief, clear. Not as good as Bruce, and he knows it and isn’t bothered by it. I am thrilled that the line “I will be a President who believes in science” gets a huge response from the crowd. No mention of the munitions. He promises that every child in America will get health insurance. As a professor of pediatrics, I find this breathtaking. How pathetic is that? Less impressively, he promises to make America energy independent. He makes a complicated point about property tax funding and equality of educational opportunities, and to my surprise the crowd really responds. The reason, I think, is that OSU gets a lot of bright kids from farm counties who describe Columbus as “the big city.” (You can rip tendons keeping a straight face here.) They meet suburban kids who went to schools that had everything, and draw the appropriate conclusions.

9:12 PM. We are walking down High St. to our car. A bus full of students for Bush drives by with their heads out the window yelling slogans. Do they follow the Kerry campaign? This bus is all white males in white shirts and ties. Perfect. Not an OSU look, to put it mildly, so it must be how the right wing does nose rings. Hypotheses about incestuous sexual preferences are exchanged.

I don’t have any qualifications for this, other than being fascinated by this place and time. I’m a quantitative psychologist doing medical research in the OSU Pediatrics Department. I don’t know anything about philosophy, economics, or political theory (or cold temperature physics, or…). I’m such a dork that when I had the chance as a college freshman to take a class on The theory of justice from Rawls his own self, I passed because I thought his voice would put me to sleep. If only that was the worst educational choice I ever made.