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Originally Posted by Cowperson
''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''
One of the strongest tests of the veracity of any conspiracy theory is the number of participants required for it to function . . . . . . and that quote in the paragraph above, taken from Kennedy's own piece, tells you this is another one requiring thousands of participants, pretty much all of whom would also need to stay silent or of a like mind over a lengthy period of time, an unlikely event given human nature.
The more people involved, the more compliance required, the more time involved, the less likely a conspiracy theory becomes.
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Are you suggesting that this quote is in any way a reflection of the number of people implicated? If so, that's a spectacular misrepresentation of the article. Let's put a bit of context around that little bit you quoted:
"Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials..."
Taken in context, the quote states that the US electoral system has flaws in it partially because there's no strong top-down system of ensuring fair and accurate results. If anything, the quote is demonstrating how fewer participants are needed for electoral fraud, since there's no strong monitoring system. The text that you quote as demonstrating a massive conspiracy theory is merely complaining about the lack of checks and balances.
I agree fully with your suggestion that the more alleged conspirators, the less likely the conspiracy. Most of the fraud allegations rest around one guy; if you believe that all of the various rules and court challenges Blackwell instituted in the days and weeks leading up to the election were in good faith to reduce fraud, then there's no problem. If you believe that he was intentionally trying to limit new voter registration to disenfranchise thousands of legitimate and mostly Democratic voters, then obviously that's a form of fraud. You don't need to question thousands of people to find the fraud, you merely need to examine the motives of one partisan official.
I believe some accusations about Blackwell (and believed them long before reading this article), but have a hard time with other supposed riggings in Ohio, many of which are based largely on hearsay. I also suspect that there are instances of fraud and attempted fraud that we've heard nothing about from both parties. But I do find it shocking that anyone in the media, in politics, or in the public would be content with an electoral system in which there are so many allegations of fraud; elections should be the most transparent process, and instead they seem to be increasingly invisible and arcane.