Worth reading about now, as the joint session convenes, re: John Conyers and elections:

Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Conyers overlooks Detroit’s election problems
By Thomas Bray / The Detroit News
John Conyers, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is demanding an investigation into Ohio’s voting. “We’re talking … about thousands of complaints about failure of process, coercion, suppression of the vote,” Conyers asserted on public radio last week.
On its face, it’s the effort of a bitter-ender to deny the obvious. Ohio’s voting, like the voting in most states in every election, wasn’t perfect. Local election officials failed to plan adequately for the increased turnout — some 900,000 more voters than in 2000, creating long lines in many precincts. But nothing has surfaced to suggest systematic fraud. George Bush won Ohio by more than 118,000 votes, a comfortable margin as these things go.
If Conyers was so concerned about voting problems, where was he in 1998 when election officials in his hometown of Detroit took a disgraceful two weeks to count ballots due to lost poll books and miscounting of precinct totals?
Where was he in 2001 when the counting of absentee ballots in Detroit had to be halted in midstream by state officials after it was discovered that the city clerk was simply ignoring state requirements for the use of software that would eject ballots that couldn’t be read by machine?
And where was he when a memo allegedly drafted by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s aides in 2002 claimed that Detroit’s voter rolls were overstated by about 150,000 people — a strong hint that something may be seriously amiss in the Detroit election process, threatening the value of the ballot for people who are genuinely qualified to vote?
Conyers’ outrage appears to be highly selective. The target of his investigative demand — a demand in which he has been joined by Jesse Jackson and others — is the Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, who is black and Republican. In other words, he is one of those non-conforming minorities who is threatening to bust up the liberal plantation from which Conyers and others earn a handsome living.
Moreover, Blackwell has said he plans to run for governor of Ohio — and is leading in the polls among GOP candidates. That would transform him from a relatively minor state functionary into a national figure.
Conyers and Jackson have criticized the fact that Blackwell chaired the Bush re-election effort at the same time he presided over the Ohio election, but that’s not unusual. Local election officials in Columbus and Cincinnati headed the Kerry campaigns in those areas.
So the left is trying to muddy up the Blackwell record, connecting him with the paranoid fears of voter suppression that are supposedly denying blacks of a basic civil right. This paranoia was fanned nationwide by the ill-considered remark of a Michigan state representative, John Pappageorge, who was trying to say higher black turnout could be fatal to GOP hopes. Pappageorge later apologized for having appeared to suggest the remedy lay in suppressing the black vote.
But if Blackwell was trying to suppress the black vote in Ohio, he didn’t do a very good job. Black turnout more than doubled in Ohio.
Claims of voter suppression may also help to divert attention from the real problem in most states, including Michigan, which is that election officials have a hard time purging voter rolls of dead or otherwise non-qualified voters, mainly in the big cities. In the past, any effort to do so brought cries of racism. In 1998, Michigan started to tackle this problem by developing a computerized, statewide list of voters. This eliminated double entries, but it hasn’t solved the problem of matching death rolls and other data bases — including driver licenses — with voter listings.
If John Conyers were serious about protecting the rights of voters, particularly in the area he represents, he would be demanding faster action on this front, not wasting time harassing the Ohio secretary of state.