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Post by Moses on Dec 16, 2004 20:40:05 GMT -5
Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A01 (Excerpts) COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door. She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote? Fifteen minutes, her mother replied..... Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots..... similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities. In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column. [Youngstown-- “not intentional”?! How does anyone say this with a straight face who knows Ohio?!] In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged. [This was intentional, believe me-- we sued the state in the past for intentionally disenfranchising these same voters previously -- BOTH parties were involved in the past] "There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year that demand reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election law program at the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor. "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want to minimize that." Franklin County election officials -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats -- say they allocated machines based on past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But they acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters..... [Washington Post Establishment blah blah- see link to read-- skipped here] A patchwork quilt of state rules governs voter registration and provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls -- studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. But in Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single provisional ballot in 2004..... A Heated Run-Up [ In Ohio] Two decisions proved pivotal. Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct where they reside. For cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati, where officials long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the ruling promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take those ballots, but the alternative is disenfranchisement," said Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes Cleveland. Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County boards are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type of machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County, officials decided to quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines. Other counties decided to muddle through. At Kenyon College, a surge of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox County officials allocated two machines, just as in past elections.
In voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus, election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines. "Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no." After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry. Franklin County officials say they allocated machines according to instinct and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the need to examine the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles, we'll have to look more closely at this," he said. [Translation: “We will take no action and people will forget about this”]
On Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans voted, 900,000 more voters than in 2000. In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers, and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse their lateness. "It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it being this bad." Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations had been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election," Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept telling me, 'You must be mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted. I felt like I'd been scrubbed off the rolls." Aftermath of Nov. 2 .... Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and turnout was lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote. In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to vote. "They had to skip classes and skip work," said Matthew Segal, a 19-year-old student. ....Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." "It happens every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. "It's something we have to live with, and we can fix it." As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and officials disqualified about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati and its Ohio suburbs, 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them to the wrong table. In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the provisional ballots. Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for conservative third-party candidates. ....In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and talk of Republican conspiracies mounted. "A lot of folks who, having put an enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed in the righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County election board. Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to play down the anger. National Democrats -- including the chief counsel for Kerry's campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm Bush's victory. But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.' "How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?" Slevin reported from Cincinnati. Special correspondents Michelle Garcia in New York and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.
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Post by Moses on Dec 23, 2004 6:41:09 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on Dec 23, 2004 16:04:59 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on Dec 28, 2004 20:48:34 GMT -5
Ohio GOP Election Officials Ducking Subpoenas as Kerry Enters Stolen Vote Fray By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman The Columbus Free Press Tuesday 28 December 2004 Columbus - Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell refused to appear at a deposition on Monday, December 27. The deposition was part of an election challenge lawsuit filed at the Ohio Supreme Court. Meanwhile John Kerry is reported to have filed a federal legal action aimed at preserving crucial recount evidence, which has been under GOP assault throughout the state. Richard Conglianese, Ohio Assistant Attorney General, is seeking a court order to protect Blackwell from testifying under oath about how the election was run. Blackwell, who administered Ohio's November 2 balloting, served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. James R. Dicks, Miami County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, filed a motion to block a subpoena in his county while Conglianese filed to block subpoenas in ten key Ohio counties. President George Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney and White House Political Advisor Karl Rove received notice that they will be deposed Tuesday and Wednesday, December 28 and 29. The trio's Ohio attorney, Kurt Tunnell, so far claims his clients have not been properly served. Under Ohio law, the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court is responsible for serving the three. Meanwhile, the Election Protection legal team has collected new statements under oath describing more voting and vote-counting problems on November 2. Voters in Trumbull County have testified that on Election Day they received punch-card ballots where holes were already punched for Bush. Meanwhile, a notarized affidavit signed by Angela Greene, who voted at Whitehall Yearling High School in central Ohio's Franklin County, stated that one of the malfunctioning electronic voting machines at her polling place was delivered without a cartridge – meaning votes cast might have gone uncounted. In Miami County, Blackwell certified a 98.6% turnout in the Concord Southwest precinct, comprised of 520 votes for Bush and 157 for Kerry. This statistically improbable turnout has all but 10 of the 689 registered voters casting their ballots on Election Day. A preliminary canvas by The Free Press of less than half the precinct found 25 registered voters admitting they had not voted, meaning the official tally was almost certainly fraudulent. The nearby Concord South precinct certified a 94.27% voter turnout, with 468 alleged votes for Bush versus 182 for Kerry. Miami County is included in the election challenge since it somehow reported nearly 19,000 additional votes after 100% of the precincts had reported on Election Day. In Madison County, where public records requests were filed to obtain voting records, the voting results provided by the Madison County Board of Elections came directly from a private company, Triad Governmental Systems, Inc. An email dated November 29, 2004 from Brandon Sandlin of Triad reads as follows: “Hello to all in Madison County! Attached you will find the cumulative report (oh49unov.pdf) with over and under votes reported as well as the official abstract (oh49abs.pdf). These reports may be printed for your records and then mailed to the state along with your other certification reports.” Coming from a private corporation, Triad's letter underscores the barriers to making a reliable independent public assessment and recount of Ohio's presidential tally. In Mahoning County, the Washington Post reported new affidavits documenting electronic "vote hopping" from Kerry to Bush. This means voting machines highlighted the choice for Bush before the voter recorded a choice of his or her own. The legal team has been told by a computer expert that this may mean the machines were pre-set on a Bush vote as a default. The Free Press has obtained dozens such sworn statements of vote hopping. The legal team is also exploring new evidence that in Coshocton, Ohio, write-in votes wrongly defaulted to Bush when run through the voting machine. On December 23, U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr. of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Triad President Brett A. Rapp inquiring whether or not Triad possessed remote access capabilities for any of the 41 counties where its election tabulation software or computers are in use. Attorneys for the election challenge team are also exploring ties between Triad and the Tallahassee-based company Datamaxx. Ohio public safety and police agencies use the Datamaxx DMPP2020 software for its LEADS computer systems. Datamaxx makes numerous remote access products that law enforcement can access with mobile and handheld computers. CommSys, a Dayton, Ohio-based company provides technical support for Datamaxx. The Free Press has also obtained a list of all voting machines assigned in Franklin County, including serial numbers. The list contains at least 42 machines originally assigned to predominantly African-American and inner city wards that voted 80% for Kerry, and where voters waited in line for three hours and more on Election Day. These 42 machines were blacked out on the list, raising the question of whether these were among the 68 machines the Franklin County Board of Elections has admitted holding back in the warehouse despite obvious shortages at certain polling places. Affidavits from poll workers confirm that numerous requests for more machines were made through election day, but that few if any were delivered. Franklin County Board of Elections Chair Bill Anthony claims that low-level poll workers refused to accept the machines assigned by high-ranking election officials. But he has yet to provide specific details. Anthony has repeatedly claimed that he was a watchdog for Democratic interests in the election, but he was a political appointee of the Republican Secretary of State. Under Ohio election law, the members, directors and deputy directors of all boards of elections are assigned by the Secretary of State. They hold these paying jobs at his discretion regardless of whether they are Democrat or Republican. A major argument of those who claim Ohio's 2004 presidential election was fraud-free centers on the myth that local precincts are run as bipartisan operations, deflecting charges of partisan interference while failing to account for the fact that the principles all owe their jobs to the Secretary of State, who in this case served as co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign. These problems add to the established pattern of problems that favored Bush at Kerry's expense. Despite the legal stonewalling, lawyers directing the election challenge case are still pursuing evidence-gathering efforts. Three expert witnesses are scheduled to be deposed on Thursday and Friday, including specialists in statistics and vote counting irregularities. The challengers are seeking a January 4th hearing before the Ohio Supreme Court. Members of Congress meet in Washington on January 6 to evaluate the Electoral College vote. Led by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), it is virtually certain numerous members of the Congressional Black Caucus will challenge that vote. But the assent of a Senator is required for the challenge to go forward, and thus far none has definitively confirmed. Despite ducking depositions, Blackwell is escalating his public appearances in hopes of becoming Ohio's next governor. On January 12, 2005, Blackwell is scheduled to speak at the exclusive Scioto Country Club on the topic of “Ethics in Leadership.” Blackwell became nationally known after disenfranchising voters who had not registered on 80-pound bond paper stock under an archaic Ohio law. He reversed longstanding Ohio tradition that allowed voters to cast provisional votes by county by ruling that none of these votes would be counted unless the voter was in the right precinct. He also was recently censured for running a “get out the vote” campaign for Issue One, a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and spousal benefits. Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was reported to be filing a brief in federal court in relation to the activities of Triad and events in Hocking County, where serious questions have arisen as to the integrity of the recount. Kerry previously circulated a letter to all 88 counties requesting information on how the vote was conducted. The Kerry campaign raised millions of dollars from grassroots supporters with the promise that "all votes would be counted." But the Democrats are not known to have helped fund the legal work of the Green and Libertarian Parties and their grassroots Election Protection supporters, who have raised the money for the shoestring campaign that has kept the legal challenges alive thus far. An Election Protection rally in downtown Columbus has been set by Rev. Jesse Jackson for 2pm Monday, January 3. It will be followed by a national gathering in Washington January 6, to take place as Congress evaluates the Electoral College and the Ohio votes, which have allegedly given George W. Bush another term in the White House.
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the upcoming "Ohio's Stolen Election: Voices of the Disenfranchised, 2004," a book and film project from freepress.org.
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Post by Moses on Dec 31, 2004 22:29:51 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on Jan 5, 2005 13:11:35 GMT -5
[/size] Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff Wednesday 05 January 2005 Executive Summary[/center] .<br> We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority and Democratic voters: * The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, "27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry." (See Powell and Slevin, supra). Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to "provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election." * Mr. Blackwell's decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell's decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states. * Mr. Blackwell's widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election. * The Ohio Republican Party's decision to engage in preelection "caging" tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges. * The Ohio Republican Party's decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges "can't help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration." * Mr. Blackwell's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots 6 likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell's order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA. Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for: * There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell's apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities. * We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors. * There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each - accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president. * There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known thirdparty candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush. Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete): [/b] * Mr. Blackwell's failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes[/color]. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472 provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state. * Mr. Blackwell's failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount. * The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.
Download Full PDF Document: truthout.org/Conyersreport.pdf Size: 3.22 MB 102 Pages
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Post by Moses on Jan 20, 2005 12:31:15 GMT -5
www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1102Ohio's GOP Attorney General launches revenge attack on Election Protection legal teamby Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey WassermanJanuary 19, 2005 COLUMBUS -- In a stunning legal attack, Ohio's Republican Attorney General has moved for sanctions against the four attorneys who sued George W. Bush et. al. in an attempt to investigate the Buckeye State's bitterly contested November 2 election. Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt, Cliff Arnebeck and Peter Peckarsky were named by Attorney General James Petro in a filing with the Ohio Supreme Court. Petro charges the November Moss v Bush and Moss v. Moyer filings by the Election Protection legal team were "frivolous." Petro is demanding court sanctions and fines. "Instead of evidence, contesters offered only theory, conjecture, hypothesis and invective," the Attorney General's January 18th memo about the suit said. "A contest proceeding is not a toy for idle hands. It is not to be used to make a political point, or to be used as a discovery tool, or be used to inconvenience or harass public officials, or to be used as a publicity gimmick." But Cliff Arnebeck says it has been Petro and Ohio's partisan Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who have stonewalled the election challenge legal proceedings. Both have refused to submit any evidence to the court to refute the allegations in the election challenge case - claiming George W. Bush did not win a majority in Ohio - and Petro's office has also refused to allow any Ohio public election official to be deposed. "Their cage has been rattled and they popped their cork," Arnebeck said. "The chairman of the Ohio Republican Party is going berserk because he can't stand the fact we are not going away. We are still pursuing the legal investigation and the legal interrogations. They are just besides themselves because they cannot withstand cross examination." Petro's filing is widely viewed as revenge for the heavy toll on the credibility of the Ohio GOP and Petro's cohort, Secretary of State Blackwell, caused by grassroots activists. Spurred by the lawsuit, by extensive coverage at freepress.org and other web sites, and by a nationwide grassroots campaign that was escalated by Rev. Jesse Jackson and a series of public hearings around Ohio and in Congress, some three dozen Senators and Representatives mounted the first-ever challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation. Capping an unprecedented campaign by citizens concerned about a wide range of disturbing and suspicious flaws in Ohio's voting process, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) exercised their rights under an 1887 federal statue to force a two-hour debate in both houses of Congress on whether the Ohio Electors designed for George W. Bush should be seated. Both Ohio's Republican Senators, George Voinovich and Mike DeWine, angrily denounced the action. The campaign arose from widespread irregularities largely blamed on Blackwell, who both administered the election and served as co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney campaign. In the past week, Ohio media widely reported that Blackwell has sent out a fundraising letter soliciting contributions from corporate donors, which is illegal under Ohio law. Petro's office has yet to indict Blackwell. Blackwell says the letter was "a mistake" and pledged to send back any such contributions. He also claimed credit in the letter for delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush, a boast that has infuriated many Ohioans who believe the election was administered in a partisan manner. Petro's move to sanction the four election protection attorneys could result in stiff fines. The Ohio Supreme Court is dominated by Republicans. Chief Justice Thomas Moyer was re-elected in a bitterly contested November vote about which the election protection team raised challenges in its Moss v. Moyer filing. Nonetheless, Moyer refused to recuse himself. Among other things, Moyer's court refused to require Blackwell, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Presidential Advisor Karl Rove to be comply with a notice of deposition. Those refusals, and the January 6 Electoral College vote for Bush, prompted the team to withdraw both filings. Arnebeck has since filed another action attempting to stop Bush's inauguration. That filing, in U.S. District Court in Ohio's Southern district, was filed late last week and seeks to depose Blackwell for his role in election "fraud" that awarded Bush the state's presidential vote and a second term as president. There has also been discussion of the possibility of filings based primarily on civil rights violations against African Americans and students who were denied the right to vote on November 2 for a wide range of reasons, most importantly a shortage of voting machines in critical precincts. Petro's brief repeatedly scorns the now-dismissed 2004 presidential election challenge as a frivolous suit, without any basis in fact. However, what his brief does not state is how the Secretary of State's office, assisted by Petro's office, effectively administered a gag order on almost all presidential voting records and election officials after the election. Petro says the election challenge team could not prove election fraud, as required by Ohio law. The challenge legal team, as in other lawsuits, sought to use the discovery process to boost their claims. Needless to say, Petro's office used every avenue to deny them that right - and then seeks to sanction them for improperly using the court discovery process. Petro's action raises suspicions that revenge and an attempt to chill further legal actions are the core motivations for this latest GOP assault on the election protection process. Still, these tactics will not end scrutiny of Ohio's 2004 presidential vote. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have requested a federal GAO report on election irregularities in the state. Those Democrats have also produced a report detailing many Election Day problems that is now part of the congressional record and will be the basis for federal legislation later in the 109th Congress, many representatives and senators have said.
Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Bob Fitrakis, of OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION: VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004, a book/film project upcoming from www.freepress.org. Contributions for that and for the election protection legal defense effort can be sent through freepress.org/store.php and to the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, 1240 Bryden Road, Columbus, OH 43205.
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Post by Moses on Feb 3, 2005 10:23:36 GMT -5
February 3, 2005
EDITORIAL
Blaming the Messengers
One of the strengths of our democracy is that citizens are free to question the results of an election. But four lawyers who did just that in Ohio, contesting President Bush's victory, are now facing sanctions. These lawyers, and other skeptics, may not have cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome. But punishing them for trying would send a disturbing message. Clifford Arnebeck and three other lawyers contested the vote totals in Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes put President Bush over the top. Ohio had many problems on Election Day, including lines of up to 10 hours to vote, and a shortage of voting machines in African-American neighborhoods. But they were nowhere near widespread enough to erase Mr. Bush's margin of more than 118,000 votes. The lawyers also charged fraud, but they never proved their case. Ohio's attorney general, who represents Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell in the matter, has asked the State Supreme Court to sanction Mr. Arnebeck and the others for mounting a "frivolous" challenge. Even though their case was weak, these lawyers did a public service by raising concerns that many voters shared. The burden put on Ohio's courts by their challenge was minimal. Courts know what to do when they get a weak case: throw it out. Imposing sanctions would be likely to deter people from raising concerns about future elections, and ultimately undermine public confidence in the electoral process. The Ohio Supreme Court should make it clear that people have the right to challenge election results without fear of retribution. It is odd that Mr. Blackwell, of all people, is requesting sanctions. He made many bad decisions as Ohio's top elections official, including one to reject voter registrations filed on insufficiently thick paper, an order he later retracted. Mr. Blackwell and the officials responsible for the 10-hour lines have not been held accountable for putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of Ohio voters. It will be a poor reflection on our election system if the only ones punished are the lawyers who tried to point out these deficiencies.
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Post by Moses on Mar 15, 2005 10:11:06 GMT -5
Vanity Fair
March 2005
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
OHIO’S ODD NUMBERS
No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry’s, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines
If it were not for Kenyon College, I might have missed, or skipped, the whole controversy. The place is a visiting lecturer’s dream, or the ideal of a campus-movie director in search of a setting. It is situated in wooded Ohio hills, in the small town of Gambier, about an hour’s drive from Columbus. its literary magazine, The Kenyon Review, was founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939. Its alumni include Paul Newman, E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Winters; Robert Lowell, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and President Rutherford B. Hayes. The college’s origins are Episcopalian, its students well mannered and well off and predominantly white, but it is by no means Bush-Cheney territory. Arriving to speak there a few days after the presidential election, I found that the place was still buzzing. Here’s what happened in Gambier, Ohio, on decision day 2004. The polls opened at 6:30 AM. There were only two voting machines (push-button direct-recording electronic systems) for the entire town of 2,200 (with students). The mayor, Kirk Emmert, had called the Board of Elections 10 days earlier, saying that the number of registered voters would require more than that. (He knew, as did many others, that hundreds of students had asked to register in Ohio because it was a critical “swing” state.) The mayor’s request was denied. Indeed, instead of there being extra capacity on Election Day, one of the only two machines chose to break down before lunchtime.By the time the polls officially closed, at 7:30 that evening, the line of those waiting to vote was still way outside the Community Center and well into the parking lot. A federal judge thereupon ordered Knox County, in which Gambier is located, to comply with Ohio law, which grants the right to vote to those who have shown up in time. “Authority to Vote” cards were kindly distributed to those on line (voting is a right, not a privilege), but those on line needed more than that. By the time the 1,175 voters in the precinct had all cast their ballots, it was almost four in the morning, and many had had to wait for up to 11 hours. In the spirit of democratic carnival, pizzas and canned drinks and guitarists were on hand to improve the shining moment. TV crews showed up, and the young Americans all acted as if they had been cast by Frank Capra: cheerful and good-humored, letting older voters get to the front, catching up on laptop essays, many voting for the first time and all convinced that a long and cold wait was a small price to pay. Typical was Pippa White, who said that “even after eight hours and 15 minutes I still had energy. It lets you know how worth it this is.” Heartwarming, until you think about it. The students of Kenyon had one advantage, and they made one mistake. Their advantage was that their president, S. Georgia Nugent, told them that they could be excused from class for voting. Their mistake was to reject the paper ballots that were offered to them late in the evening, after attorneys from the Ohio Democratic Party had filed suit to speed up the voting process in this way. The ballots were being handed out (later to be counted by machine under the supervision of Knox County’s Democratic and Republican chairs) when someone yelled through the window of the Community Center, “Don’t use the paper ballots! The Republicans are going to appeal it and it won’t count!” After that, the majority chose to stick with the machines. Across the rest of Ohio, the Capra theme was not so noticeable. Reporters and eyewitnesses told of voters who had given up after humiliating or frustrating waits, and who often cited the unwillingness of their employers to accept voting as an excuse for lateness or absence. In some way or another, these bottlenecks had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts. So did many disputes about “provisional” ballots, the sort that are handed out when a voter can prove his or her identity but not his or her registration at that polling place. These glitches might all be attributable to inefficiency or incompetence (though Gambier had higher turnouts and much shorter lines in 1992 and 1996). Inefficiency and incompetence could also explain the other oddities of the Ohio process—from machines that redirected votes from one column to the other to machines that recorded amazing tallies for unknown fringe candidates, to machines that apparently showed that voters who waited for a long time still somehow failed to register a vote at the top of the ticket for any candidate for the presidency of these United States. However, for any of that last category of anomaly to be explained, one would need either a voter-verified paper trail of ballots that could be tested against the performance of the machines or a court order that would allow inspection of the machines themselves. The first of these does not exist, and the second has not yet been granted. I don’t know who it was who shouted idiotically to voters not to trust the paper ballots in Gambier, but I do know a lot of people who are convinced that there was dirty work at the crossroads in the Ohio vote. Some of these people are known to me as nutbags and paranoids of the first water, people whose grassy-knoll minds can simply cancel or deny any objective reasons for a high Republican turnout. (Here’s how I know some of these people: In November 1999, I wrote a column calling for international observers to monitor the then upcoming presidential election. I was concerned about restrictive ballot-access laws, illegal slush funds, denial of access to media for independents, and abuse of the state laws that banned “felons” from voting. At the end, I managed to mention the official disenfranchisement of voters in my hometown of Washington, D.C., and the questionable “reliability or integrity’ of the new voting- machine technology. I’ve had all these wacko friends ever since.) But here are some of the non-wacko reasons to revisit the Ohio election. First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general—and probable—one nationwide and statewide.) In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. So maybe we have a barn-burning, charismatic future candidate on our hands, and Ms. Connally is a force to be reckoned with on a national scale. Or is it perhaps a trick of the Ohio atmosphere? There do seem to be a lot of eccentrics in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. In addition to this eminence, they also possess distinctive (but not particularly African-American-sounding) names. In 2000, Ralph Nader’s best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight. In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more under- votes than Republican ones. (more)
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Post by Moses on Mar 15, 2005 10:16:44 GMT -5
In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the “glitch” had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.
In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein-type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.
In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of “vote hopping,” which is to say that voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another. Some specialists in election software diagnose this as a “calibration issue.”<br>
Machines are fallible and so are humans, and nuts happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.
This might argue in itself against any conspiracy or organized rigging, since surely anyone clever enough to pre-fix a vote would make sure, just for the look of the thing, that the discrepancies and obstructions were more evenly distributed. I called all my smartest conservative friends to ask them about this. Back came their answer: Look at what happened in Warren County. On Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and homeland security, officials “locked down” the Warren County administration building and prevented any reporters from monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what “scale,” that on a scale of 1 to 10 the terrorist threat was a 10. It was also claimed that the information came from an F.B.I. agent, even though the F.B.I. denies that.
Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the G.O.P would have felt the need to engage in any voter “suppression.” A point for the anti- conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact-same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.
Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many “vote hops” the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.
There are some other, more random factors to be noted. The Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, was a state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign at the same time as he was discharging his responsibilities for an aboveboard election in his home state. Diebold, which manufactures paper-free, touch-screen voting machines, likewise has its corporate headquarters in Ohio. Its chairman, president, and C.E.O., Walden O’Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” (See “Hack the Vote,” by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, April 2004.) Diebold, together with its competitor, E.S.&S., counts more than half the votes cast in the United States. This not very acute competition is perhaps made still less acute by the fact that a vice president of E.S.&S. and a Diebold director of strategic services are brothers.
I would myself tend to discount most of the above, since an oligarchy bent on stealing an election would probably not announce itself so brashly as to fit into a Michael Moore script. Then, all state secretaries of state are partisan, after all, while in Ohio each of the 88 county election boards contains two Democrats and two Republicans. The chairman of Diebold is entitled to his political opinion just as much as any other citizen.
However, there is one soothing explanation that I don’t trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be “a conspiracy so immense” as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.
I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be “in on it.” This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. “Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were ‘in control’ and no comparison studies,” she explained. “The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded.” In these circumstances, she continued, it’s possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes.
In the bad old days of Tammany Hall, she pointed out, you had to break the counter pins on the lever machines, and if there was any vigilance in an investigation, the broken pins would automatically incriminate the machine. With touch-screen technology, the crudeness and predictability of the old ward-heeler racketeers isn’t the question anymore. But had there been a biased “setting” on the new machines it could be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state’s voting machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It’s not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the meanwhile …<br>
I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. “Well, I understand from what I have read,” she said, “that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties.” That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn’t quite enough, either. So I asked, “What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?” My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: “Then that would be quite serious.”<br>
I am not any sort of statistician or technologist, and (like many Democrats in private) I did not think that John Kerry should have been president of any country at any time. But I have been reviewing books on history and politics all my life, making notes in the margin when I come across a wrong date, or any other factual blunder, or a missing point in the evidence. No book is ever free from this. But if all the mistakes and omissions occur in such a way as to be consistent, to support or attack only one position, then you give the author a lousy review. The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.
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