Tomorrow, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers will ask his committee to subpoena Townhall.com Contributing Editor Ken Blackwell and force him to answer questions about the…wait for it…the 2004 election in Ohio.   No joke.

Someone please remind the good chairman that nobody sane thinks Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state at the time, did anything but conduct clean and fair elections.

In 2004, every major Ohio newspaper told Conyers and other hyperventilating conspiracy theorists to get lost when they were peddling bogus stories about Ohio’s election results.

Here is a sampling of what Ohio’s finest said at the time:

Ohio’s African-American voters cast ballots in record numbers in 2004.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Thursday, May 26, 2005

The intense campaigns to get Ohio's black residents and college students to the polls for the 2004 presidential election apparently paid off. 

A new survey by the U.S. Census Bureau shows about 586,000 black Ohioans cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election - 67 percent of all black residents eligible to vote. That was up from 55 percent four years ago, when about 502,000 blacks voted. Nationwide, 60 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot in 2004.

Turnout for young voters jumped even higher: 55 percent of Ohioans between 18 and 24 - nearly 600,000 voters - cast ballots, compared to 38 percent four years earlier, according to the survey. The national average was 47 percent for that age group in 2004.

Newspaper and government investigations found voting machines were distributed fairly. 

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Monday, January 17, 2005

When they stood on the floor of Congress recently to protest the results of Ohio’s presidential vote, Democrats told a national audience about their suspicious hunch: People in Democratic strongholds were short-changed on voting machines on Election Day.

Voter groups and activists have lobbed the same accusation for weeks.  Long lines in urban areas, such as Cleveland, kept John Kerry supporters from voting, they say.

But a Plain Dealer analysis show that, in Cuyahoga County at least, the elections board distributed machines equally to city and suburban polling locations.

Voting machine distribution in Columbus “actually favored black voters.”

The Columbus Dispatch

Friday, July 1, 2005

The Franklin County Board of Elections made mistakes last November, the U.S. Department of Justice said yesterday, but it did not discriminate when it allocated voting machines.

Too few voting machines, bad data on how many voters were eligible, a sharp increase in voters from the 2000 election and a lengthy ballot in Columbus caused long lines at some polls, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division Concluded.

But contrary to complaints that predominately black precincts had fewer voting machines than in 2000 suffered the longest lines last November, “The allocation of voting machines actually favored black voters,” voting section chief John Tanner said in a letter Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Nick Soulas this week.  The prosecutor’s office represented the elections board during the inquiry, which began last winter.

And ... 

Dayton Daily News

Friday, July 1, 2005

The U.S. Department of Justice found no evidence of discrimination in the distribution of Franklin County’s voting machine in the 2004 presidential election, according to a report.

Cleveland Plain Dealer asks why would the black Democrat who runs elections in Franklin County disenfranchised black Democrats.

Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Ohio’s bipartisan elections system make the kind of GOP conspiracy that some allege all but impossible to execute.  Every county board of elections consists of two Democrats and two Republicans.  So when [Jesse] Jackson and other national Democrats question Ohio’s outcome, they demean their own allies.  William Anthony Jr., the African-American who chairs both the Franklin County Democratic Party and its elections board, has been personally stung by Jackson’s slander: “Why would I sit there and disenfranchise my own community?” he asks.