I would say it is because most people think we simply lost and not that there was massive fraud.
First, since many people keep misstating this, Ohio was not voting on DRE's(direct recording device/electronic voting) for the most part. We had only 6 counties if I am not mistaken (I did pre-election research on this so I am pretty sure it was 6).
One of them (mine), Franklin, was using Danahur machines that we have had for about 10 or 12 years now. It was one of these machines that produced the 3,900+ extra votes in Gahana. What happened there seems perfectly reasonable to me. One of the cartridges was read incorrectly by a cartridge reader. A new reader read it correctly and the in-machine memory matched the number it reported. By the way, during canvassing each of the cartridges will be re-read so if any other cartridge had an error it will be caught then, hopefully.
Now, do not think that I am saying it is all ok and so what if we have unreliable , un-audit able vote cartridges. I completely agree that we need paper ballots for any kind of electronic machine. I'm just saying that holding this incident up as proof of fraud is quite frankly laughable. Proof of unreliability of electronic voting with no back-up is another story entirely.
For what it is worth the entire state will be getting machines with paper audit in the next year or two. We actually put off buying machines without a paper trail a few months back. Frankly, though I was part of the effort to write and harass Blackwell in to not buying them, I thin kwe were HAD on that issue. It was a rock and a hard place. The machines we were going to buy were unacceptable. Clearly, if we are going to buy machines we should wait to get ones with paper ballots , which we did. Problem is it leaves us with a lot of spoiled punch cards just like Florida had in 2000. The biggest problem here is not the spoiled votes themselves but which votes get spoiled. In Florida , nationally and in Ohio too it is overwhelmingly minority and poor districts that have the most spoiled votes. This is because the rich white districts have punch card checking machines right in the polling place. If there is an error with your ballot you get to fix it before you turn it in. Not so in the poor and minority districts. You just give the punch card over and if it later turns out your vote wasn't recorded... too bad!
Blackwell also pulled some other "standard" tricks (and some new ones too). A huge shortage of machines in poor and minority districts. Voter intimidation groups (though there weren't nearly as many of them as the hype suggested there would be). They actually had the nerve to change the rules for provisional ballots AFTER (9 days after to be exact) the voting had already took place (adding a requirement for the person's birth date that the previous rules specifically said was not required or cause for rejection).
Now is that fraud or just business as usual? It was all legal or mostly legal. Personally I find it despicable but I'm not so sure that the vast majority don't see just as "the way things are" . That it is too late to do anything about it. And it probably is quite frankly.
I would suggest you might want to support the Cobb campaign's efforts to recount Ohio.
http://votecobb.org . Follow the donate link. I understand there are other places to donate. I was a bit confused by all of them in fact. To be sure that went it specifically to the recount efforts I felt more comfortable going through the Cobb campaign. That said, visit this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=201x2617before you decide where to donate.
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