Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

...As Half of Ohio's Counties Fire Up Blackwell's New Diebold Electronic Diebold Voting Machines
Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back?

With so much going on, we haven't had much time to report here on the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Ohio Mainstream Corporate Media will have no choice but to look into it.

With 44 of Ohio's 88 counties for the first time using Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines last Tuesday -- most of them the same Diebold, Inc. machines that were decertified in California -- you must take a look at the extroarindarily inexplicable results of the 4 ballot initiatives that would have reformed voting in the Buckeye State and removed Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (a hard-right Bush partisan) from elections entirely.

Simply put, the polls published in the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch just two days before the election, matched almost identically on the one ballot initiative supported by Ohio's Governor Taft, but the 4 that called for Electoral Reform? Didn't synch up by a long shot:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

FULL STORY and EXTRAORDINARY DETAILS...