Just an editorial worth reading before the week is through (sorry, not online):

Dayton Daily News
Friday, December 3, 2004
EDITORIAL
Jesse Jackson wrong to keep hope alive
By the Dayton Daily News
The effort of some diehards to prolong a sense of uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election in Ohio is pathetic.
Most Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry, have long since come to terms with reality. But there’s a small, hard-core group that trades alleged horror stories over the Internet and that wants to fight on. It has found a high-profile spokesman: the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He’s calling Ohio “the “Florida of 2000.”
The spokesman is speaking nonsense. For example, he wants Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to recuse himself from the whole post-election process.
“You can’t very well be a team owner and referee the process,” Rev. Jackson says of the Republican secretary of state.
But he needs to take that problem up with the Ohio Constitution. It makes the secretary of state an elective office. And the secretary’s main job is to oversee the administration of elections. If he is going to recuse himself now, he might as well recuse himself from office.
Anyway, however much some Kerry supporters might need a partisan monster to point to – a Katherine Harris of 2004 – Mr. Blackwell does not qualify. He has made decisions favoring both parties. His office was instrumental in keeping Ralph Nader off the ballot, something a Democratic secretary of state would have been eager to do. And, just before the election, he tried to keep Republican challengers out of the polling places.
True, he fought for a strict interpretation of the law about counting provisional ballots, taking a position the Democrats didn’t like. But the courts upheld him. (And, anyway, the vast majority of those ballots are being counted.) And, yes, at one stage he did make an embarrassing fuss about the kind of paper that could be used for voter registrations; but he backed off.
He was also the Republican who tried after 2000 to replace the punch-card system that Democrats had railed against. And now he is complying with the legal demand of the two minor-party candidates for a recount.
At any rate, the sense in which Secretary Blackwell administers elections is very sharply restricted. Elections are essentially run, and votes are counted, by local election boards that are evenly divided between the two parties. Partisan checks and balances are the essence of the system, prevailing down to the precinct level.
Says Rev. Jackson, “We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing.” By whom? Are the Democrats at elections boards and the polling places complaining about the Republicans? No.
At one stage, some Kerry supporters were hoping that the provisional ballots – those cast by would-be voters whose names weren’t showing up on the lists at polling places – would help their candidate. That isn’t happening to any large-enough degree.
So the problems that are showing up here and there – 8,000 provisional ballots being rejected in Cuyahoga County, for example – don’t have the potential to overturn the 130,000-vote margin that President George W. Bush came out of Election Day with.
Still, a little more “process” is in order, some examination of problems that arose, with an eye, if nothing else, to avoiding such problems in the future.
What’s not in order is the suggestion of some great fraud where there is none. Some people will take advantage of the inevitable flaws of elections to confuse other people, to sow doubts. Those people do harm, not good. They undermine the legitimacy of every close election outcome. The fact is, the system worked pretty well. People should know that.