American Democracy Hangs By A Thread in Ohio
By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
The Columbus Free Press

December 15th, 2004

As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a thread in Ohio

Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations — this time from Toledo — of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio’s twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.

On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of protests at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have tainted official voting machines before a recount could be done, irrevocably compromising the process.

The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for African-American citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The suit seeks to overturn Ohio’s presidential vote. It asked an immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors from meeting and voting for George W. Bush.

Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting until that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors had not been recounted.

In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio’s presidential election was being pursued, the state’s Republican political machine blocked the rights of those seeking to verify the vote.

“Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are witnessing a crime against democracy, a crime against the right to vote and a crime against the Constitution,” said John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the Green and Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio Republicans have ” no right to convene a meeting of the presidential electors prior to the completion of the recount,” he said.

Bonifaz’s remarks came amidst testimony at the second field hearing on the 2004 election held by Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Last week in Washington, the committee opened what it said would be the first in an ongoing series of investigations into what happened on Election Day, when exit polls showed John Kerry heading toward victory but after midnight the returns shifted and network television declared Bush the victor.

“At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10 members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of Ohio’s presidential electors,” Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. “The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has something to hide.”

Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.

Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH), Jerold Nadler (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).

Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the Electoral College certification of the president.

Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state’s elections while also serving as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell’s removal were constantly repeated.

Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local election boards to not allow citizens to review poll registers of voters, a lockdown that is an apparent violation of Ohio state law.

David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate, told the panel that he had confirmed reports that an employee of one electronic voting machine manufacturer had come to one county election office and had taken apart the county tabulator of voting machine results, apparently replacing parts, before that county had conducted its recount. Such an action would taint any recount. “This could be a serious matter,” Conyers replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with committee staff to further investigate the matter.

Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over the weekend he had spoken to John Kerry, who has since sent a letter to each of the state’s 88 county election boards, saying he supported three areas of inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted “forensic computer experts” to examine voting machines, especially those using optical scan technology, because in other states, notably New Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that voting system in place. Kerry also wanted to examine 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president, and 155,000 provisional ballots that were rejected.

But early responses from the counties to Freedom of Information Act requests for their voting records indicate such an effort may already have been sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted to discarding key election data. One county referred requesters to the software company that programmed the county’s voting machines, saying the company’s permission would be required for access to a recount, as the code is proprietary.

New reports of voter suppression and fraud corroborated the Supreme Court filing, which presented a detailed analysis of where votes were incorrectly counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An election challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate was declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme Court to declare Kerry the victor. Numerous witnesses offered testimony to support that conclusion.

A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a temporary restraining order to block Republican presidential electors from meeting until the recount was done and the challenge was litigated. It focused on “overwhelming statistical evidence” that pointed to “statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.”

The TRO filing was primarily based on national and statewide exit poll data, which was the extensive, non-partisan polling done by a consortium of the nation’s major news organizations. Expert affidavits accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll data found that the final vote tallies in all but the most contested battleground states mirrored the exit poll’s predictions. The experts said it was unlikely the exit polls could be so accurate in some states while significantly wrong in others. They said election fraud was the only plausible explanation for the discrepancy.

The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe the fraud occurred - at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 3. At that time of night, Ohio’s final voting returns were being tabulated at regional and county offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit poll data - posted on websites such as CNN - put Bush ahead of Kerry, even though the exit polls expected Kerry to win with 52.1 percent of the vote.

What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania say happened was at this time the raw poll data, showing Kerry ahead, was replaced online and on television by “calibrated” data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the total vote counts, once the results came in from late-reporting precincts - if it didn’t match the raw exit poll results. Ohio’s results didn’t match, and the likely reason is because across the state, in a variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or votes were taken away from Kerry, this shift was first noticed at about 12:30 a.m., when the networks started to report ‘calibrated’ figures, not the raw data.

“The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting the polls were either flawed, within normal sampling error, or could otherwise be easily explained away,” Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO filing. Instead, it simply reported Bush’s final tally as 51 percent to Kerry’s final tally of 48.5 percent.

As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to the packed hearing, the election challenge suit describes how votes were added to Bush’s total, or in many cases, taken away from Kerry - because they were added to the totals of other Democratic candidates further down the ballot.

The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have been boosted by this kind of ‘vote-shifting’ was C. Ellen Connally, an African-American candidate for Ohio Chief Justice, who was little-known and outspent in the southern part of the state, the challenge complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has obstructed most efforts to examine ballots and poll records, it has been almost impossible to investigate and explain anomalies like Connally’s strong showing in the southern part of the state.

“What are they hiding?” asked Rev. Jackson. One after the other, witnesses argued that by making a recount virtually impossible, Blackwell has offered firm indication that the Republicans have something to hide.

“The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the secrecy of the vote count,” added Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Now based in Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is founder of the Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard complaints that voting machines could be corrupted, “they knew that had found what they were looking for.” Voting machines, he said, are the “most anti-democratic technology ever employed.”

Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University of Illinois, Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote counts diverting from exit polls as they did the night of November 2 were on the order of magnitude of millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio alone were “155,000,000 to one.”

Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County alone were disenfranchised by various means, and that nearly all were “youth, poor and minorities.”

In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the provisional votes cast were thrown in the trash, virtually all of them from African-Americans.

Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa Rosa, California, testified that while working as observer at precinct 354 in Wilberforce, home of Central State University, she witnessed conscious fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry. Election officials used an inconsistent, discriminatory set of demands for Wilberforce students to register as opposed to those used in white precincts in Greene County.

Roberson and others also testified that after the election they discovered ballots sitting open, on unguarded tables where manipulation and random disposal could easily have occurred. It was, she said “a serious breech” of election security.

Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the hearing he had been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House, to write a program that would conceal the theft of an election. Curtis said Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer company as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted a program that could use voting machines to “flip an election” without being detected. Curtis said he wrote a prototype program, then quit.

Under questioning Curtis said a program could be written that would protect the security of voting machines, but that it had not been deployed in Ohio. He said it would be a simple matter, involving perhaps 100 lines of code and some simple switches, to turn an entire election.

“One person in a simple tab machine can affect thousands of votes,” Curtis testified. “There is absolutely no assurance of anything on those machines.”

Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election was “probably hacked.”

The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled with testimony from local voters who were harassed, intimidated and made to stand in long lines to cast votes that may well have been pitched in the trash.

Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a citizens’ hearing in Toledo. Among other things eye witnesses confirmed that a Diebold programming team entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections to “reprogram” the opti-scan voting machines on the day the recount began.

Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer, testified that one of the sample precincts chosen as a control for the recount—Sylvania Precinct 3—had the programming card reprogrammed prior to the ballot testing. While the observers watched, nearly seven out of fifteen test ballots were rejected at least three times before the machine would read them.

Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been voting at the same Lucas County polling place for fourteen years but that the polling place was changed this year without notification to a station farther away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned in tests through the week prior to the election, and on election day. Thousands of Ohioans—primarily in Democratic precincts–thus lost their right to vote.

During the Lucas County reprogramming, election observers were shocked when they were denied the right to look at sheets that had target test results on them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan machines used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and software malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the election.

That echoed similar testimony from Green Party candidate David Cobb in the Columbus hearing. Witnesses said an unauthorized programmer from the Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to the incident as “pretty outrageous” and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a county prosecutor, to investigate “inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering” in Hocking and perhaps several other Ohio counties.

Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the New York Times it might be unusual to do what was done in Hocking County, but that Triad was involved in voting machines in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties.

The Hocking County investigation was spurred in particular by testimony Sherole Eaton, the deputy elections director. Such testimony will be transcribed and presented at www.freepress.org as it becomes available. But in the interim the battle of Ohio rages on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because the recount process has been so severely tainted, the call for a revote is growing.

On January 6, Congress is scheduled to vote on whether or not to approve the tally of electors, including Ohio’s tainted 20 votes. Conyers and the other US Representatives present made it clear more public hearings will be held before then.

In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the Black Caucus, asked that the tainted Bush electors be challenged. This year at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will demand an immediate “investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines and new technologies used in 2004 election, how election officials responded to the difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our elections systems and administration.”

Their action requires the consent of a single Senator, which did not come in 2001. As the battle to save democracy rages in Ohio and elsewhere, January, 2005, could be very different.

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Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the upcoming “Ohio’s Stolen Election: Voices of the Disenfranchised,” 2004 (http://freepress.org).

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

How Democrats Enabled Republicans To Steal the 2004 Presidential Election
By J. F. Miglio
Online Review of Books and Current Affairs

Since the presidential election, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stories on the Internet (and even a few in the mainstream news media) about voter fraud and how easily the 2004 presidential election could have been rigged by the Bush Administration and their corporate allies, Diebold and ES & S, the companies in charge of counting a majority of all the votes in America today.
What isn’t being discussed, however, is the Democratic Party’s complicity in this year’s presidential election farce. If you recall, after the 2000 presidential election, Democrats claimed they were madder than hell about voter fraud, reiterating ad infinitum how the Supreme Court “stole” the election from Al Gore and vowed it would never happen again.

Given their level of anger and righteous indignation, most Americans who voted against George W. Bush assumed that as soon as he slithered into the oval office, the leaders of the Democratic Party would rush to their desks to write legislation that would remedy the problem of voter fraud– once and for all.

In addition, the anti-Bush crowd believed that once Democratic leaders wrote the legislation, that if the Republicans in Congress tried to block it, the Democratic leaders would immediately call press conferences, make the rounds on all the news shows, and proclaim to the American public in the boldest way possible how the Bush Administration was trying to block legislation that mandated open and honest elections with fail safe back up systems and paper trails to verify each vote.

Unfortunately, this never happened. Instead, most Democrats (including John Kerry) got sidetracked by 9/11 and the war in Iraq, allowed two years to pass, and then let the Republicans seize the initiative. How? By allowing the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a lobbying group representing technology firms like Diebold and ES & S, to push legislation through Congress favorable to their interests. As a result, a bill was written called the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

Ostensibly, the bill was a bipartisan piece of legislation that was supposed to ameliorate the punch card voting problems that had plagued the 2000 presidential election by using touch screen vote counting machines. In addition, it was supposed to make the entire voting process fairer and more transparent.

The bill was written by two Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Robert W. Ney (of Ohio– surprise, surprise!), and two Democrats, Steny Hoyer and Chris Dodd (a “Golden Leash” award-winner for taking special interest money), and it passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress, receiving praise from Democrats and Republicans alike. Steny Hoyer even went as far as to refer to HAVA as “the first Civil Rights Act of the 21st Century.”

Incredible as it seems, the legislation did nothing to restrict the pervasive control and partisan influence that Diebold and ES & S lorded over the election process, nor did it use language precise enough to mandate that any company that manufactured electronic vote counting machines had to produce a paper trail to verify the authenticity of voter selections.

In essence, HAVA was a complete sham, an extraordinary giveaway to the Republicans, and Diebold and ES & S got exactly they wanted: carte blanche to sell their paperless, touch screen voting machines all over the country. And as soon the Congress shelled out $3.8 billion to state governments for the acquisition of new touch screen voting machines that replaced the old punch card ballots, Diebold and ES & S were there to cash in– big time!

Once the Democrats realized what a monumental mistake they had made with HAVA, they tried to rectify it. Bob Graham and Rush Holt wrote the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, which would have mandated a paper trail for all electronic voting machines. In addition, Hillary Clinton wrote her own bill (although weaker than the Graham-Holt bill) asking for better vote counting procedures. Naturally, both bills were stalled out in committee, and they had no chance of passage before the 2004 election.

And here’s the kicker: After the aforementioned bills were presented to Congress, both Chris Dodd and Steny Hoyer, the Democrats who co-wrote the HAVA legislation, opposed the two pieces of legislation introduced by their fellow Democrats that would have given it more teeth.

Now let’s do a little critical thinking and ask some obvious questions:

1) Why did Chris Dodd and Steny Hoyer go against their fellow Democrats who proposed legislation that would have strengthened the bill and made it more difficult for companies like Diebold and ES & S to do business? Could it be that they received campaign contributions from ITAA?

2) Why did so many Democrats sign on to the bill in the first place, knowing it did nothing to diminish the pervasive influence of Diebold and ES & S? Didn’t they know that both these companies received financial backing from billionaire Howard Ahmanson, an ultra right-wing financier who, over the past several years, has contributed millions of dollars to fundamentalist Christian organizations, the Heritage Foundation, and other right-wing groups in tight with George W. Bush?

3) Is it possible that many Democrats were simply unaware of Diebold, ES & S and Ahmanson? Possible, but if they weren’t aware, they should have been, because ever since the 1990s, there were numerous reports about their influence on elections, including a nice little piece in 1996 when Republican Chuck Hagel, who at the time had a major financial interest in ES &S, ran for the U.S. Senate and won “stunning upsets” in both the primaries and the general election.

4) In case Democrats missed that news item, were they also dozing through the 2002 mid-term elections when fellow Democrats, including the enormously popular Max Cleland of Georgia, were losing Congressional elections across the country in which Democrats were ahead by wide margins in the polls, only to lose in “amazing upsets” at the end of the race?

5) Were Democrats also unaware that the word was out that the mid-term Congressional elections were a “trial run” for the upcoming presidential election? And if Diebold and ES & S machines were successful at “counting the votes” to assure Republican victories during the mid-term elections, wouldn’t it be logical to assume they would also be successful at counting the votes for Bush in the presidential election?

Finally, if the Democrats knew the answers to these questions, or at least to some of them, then it follows that the DNC and John Kerry knew all along they were entering an election that would be decided not by American voters, but by individuals in charge of counting the votes and individuals in charge of reporting the results of the votes, i.e., Diebold, ES & S, and the corporate-controlled mainstream news media.

Which explains why Kerry threw in the towel so quickly after the election, and why mainstream Democrats didn’t challenge the results. The $64,000 question is, if Kerry knew the election was stacked against him from the beginning, why did he bother to run?

This is where it gets really dark and depressing. Go back to the Democratic primary when Howard Dean, the man who said, “I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” was ascending faster than a Roman candle at a Fourth of July celebration. Then ask yourself this question: Who torpedoed his candidacy?

Not the Republicans. No, it was the DNC and their friends in the media. And why did the DNC and their friends in the media destroy Howard Dean? Because Dean was portraying himself as a populist who was trying to change the system and make it more equitable for average Americans, an anathema to the financial backers of the Democratic Party, i.e., all the large corporations and special interests that also donate millions to the Republican Party.

And once Dean was destroyed, the Democratic Party power brokers knew they couldn’t lose. They knew Kucinich and Sharpton, two other populists, had no chance to win, and the rest of the candidates were all mainstream Democrats who knew their place and would be loyal to the Big Business interests of the party.

But getting back to the question of why Kerry bothered to run if he knew the deck was stacked against him. This is where its gets even darker and more depressing.

Given the pervasive power of Diebold and ES & S over vote counting procedures, Hillary Clinton knew she couldn’t win, so she passed on running for president in 2004, perhaps positioning herself for 2008– if she can do something about the voting counting process in the meantime, that is!

This left the field wide open for everyone else, namely, all the second shelf candidates who were at best long shots. With Dean gone, Kerry emerged as the presumptive candidate, but he knew, given the vote counting situation, there was only one way for him to win the general election: He had to prove to the financial backers of both political parties, as well as the mega-corporations that own the mainstream media, that he would not change the system; he would only fine tune it and do a better job than their boy Bush.

Of course he knew it was a long shot, since Bush was already the consummate stooge for Big Business and the poster boy for the unholy alliance between born-again Christians and conservative Jews. But, if he could show that Bush was just too damn incompetent and dangerous to run the country in an age of terrorism, maybe, just maybe, they would shift their allegiance to him.

But, to quote the right-wing pundits, “Kerry never made his case.” In other words, the power brokers decided to stick with Bush, and they tweaked the election in his favor rather than Kerry’s.

This explains why the mainstream news media is doing their best to ignore the election fraud story while at the same time underscoring the Republican proposal to get rid of exit polls, traditionally the most accurate polls, and the best deterrent against election fraud caused by easily hacked computerized vote counting machines. It also explains why Kerry accepted his defeat with humility– the same way Al Gore did– and didn’t bother to put up a fight.

As it turns out, Ralph Nader was right all along: A vote for Kerry was just a vote for the same corrupt corporate system that supports both parties. And listen up, all you Democrats and Progressives who derided Ralph Nader. You owe him a public apology! He stuck to his principles and never caved in to all his friends and admirers who begged him to drop out. He was too wise for that. He had been fighting the system for too long to be suckered by Democratic Party propaganda.

In fact, he tried to tell everyone that the Democrats and Republicans were part of the same hypocrisy; part of the same corrupt system, but no one was listening. “Anyone but Bush!” was the clarion call from Democrats and Progressives alike. “Please, Ralph, don’t spoil it for us like you did in the last election! Step aside!”

But Nader knew in his heart that he wasn’t the one who caused Al Gore to lose the last election, any more than he would be the one to cause John Kerry to lose this one. Indeed, St. Ralph knew the truth: the fix for the presidential election was in from the very beginning.

The Democratic insiders knew it too; so did the Republicans. The only ones who didn’t know it were all the well-intentioned chumps who stood in line on Election Day, idealistically believing their votes really did make a difference.

For their sake, I hope I’m wrong about all this. I hope John Kerry surprises me and comes charging into the news arena on a white horse, kicking up dust, exposing the election as a fraud, and demanding Bush’s head on a spear. It would make a great end to a movie or a novel. As Hemingway said in the last line of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Electors Call For National Voting Reforms
By Greg Guma
The Vermont Guardian

December 23rd, 2004

Breaking with tradition, electors in at least five states have called for a congressional investigation of voting violations during the Nov. 2 election for president. Electors in Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, California, and North Carolina registered their concerns as they cast their votes last week.
The following day, the Berkeley City Council adopted a resolution “supporting the request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of voting irregularities in the 2004 elections.” Drafted by Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission, the resolution also lists 17 measures to improve elections.

After hearing citizens speak, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said, “Nothing is more fundamental than a free, fair election. When you start tinkering with that, it throws the whole system into disarray. I am pleased that we are taking this stand.”

In Massachusetts, elector Cathleen Ashton of Wayland demanded that “every vote be counted and every vote count,” while Maine’s electors called for national voting reforms. Their statement pointed to Maine initiatives such as same-day registration, allowing felons to vote, and clean election reforms.

“Our four electoral votes are held meaningless if our sister states cannot hold elections that are fair, accurate, and verifiable,” said elector Lu Bauer after the ceremony at the Maine State House.

Massachusetts electors passed a motion urging members of Congress to object to the vote. It also requested an investigation of “all voting complaints that might have any validity” and remedies for “any voting rights violations or electoral fraud verified by its own agents or through the courts.”

Massachusetts elector Tom Barbera said his life was threatened during get-out-the-vote efforts.

Another elector spoke of being targeted for intimidation. Noting that many whose voting rights were violated were African American, Barbera, who presented the Massachusetts’ motion, said, “we believe that as electors, we have a unique opportunity and obligation to ensure that justice does not again become so delayed as to be denied.”

Vermont electors expressed concerns about a reported 57,000 complaints received by a congressional Judiciary Committee and called on Congress and Vermont’s congressional delegation to investigate.

In California, one elector cast his ballot provisional upon “all votes being counted - provisional, absentee, under- and over-votes, computerized without paper ballots, even getting valid votes from those turned away illegally, intimidated, discouraged by incredibly long waits, etc.”

This is an attempt to get the message read on the floor of Congress prior to certification on Jan. 6, when the ballots are opened.

“Never has such a vote been cast by an elector,” said Grace Ross, an organizer of the national effort to support electors to take action, and a member of Truth in Elections. “And without a parliamentarian to rule it in or out at the Electoral College level, we await whether Congress will acknowledge this type of provisional vote and address the issues this elector sought to raise, or whether they, too, will ignore provisional votes.”

In North Carolina, Democratic electors and activists talked about local problems while Republicans voted inside. Elector Mary Roe mentioned problems she witnessed as an election observer in her own county. State officials admit that 4,500 votes disappeared in a computerized voting machine crash.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Investigating Ohio
By Tim Grieve
Salon.com

December 21st, 2004

Rep. John Conyers isn’t ready to declare the election stolen, but he’ll continue to dig into the droves of complaints - and fight to fix the broken U.S. election system.

For those who believe that the 2004 election was stolen by George W. Bush, Karl Rove and an unholy alliance of party operatives and voting-machine impresarios, a 75-year-old Democratic congressman from Detroit has emerged as the last best hope for American democracy. Almost alone in official Washington, Rep. John Conyers has insisted that the nation understand - and then correct - the problems that plagued the 2004 vote.
With little attention from the media and little support even from members of his own party, Conyers has launched his own probe of the 2004 election. His early conclusion: There may not have been an active conspiracy to suppress the vote and steal the election, but all those problems in Ohio - the long lines in Democratic precincts, the voting machines that may have switched votes, the suspicious actions of a voting-machine company representative, the trumped-up concerns about terrorism in Warren County, the Republican-friendly rulings by the state election official who also happened to chair the Bush-Cheney campaign - well, those things didn’t all happen by accident, either.

“You know, orchestrated attempts don’t always require a conspiracy,” Conyers told Salon on Monday. Conyers said that Bush’s supporters in Ohio may have worked to suppress the vote based on cues rather than orders from party officials. “People get the drift from other elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about how they’re going to win the election.”

Conyers isn’t looking to overturn the election, and he won’t say that the Republicans stole it; coming from a member of Congress, such an allegation would be “reckless,” he said. But neither is he willing to put the election of 2004 behind him yet. This is the second presidential election in a row in which Republicans have succeeded in suppressing the vote, Conyers said, and he wants to ensure that the system is changed so that it won’t happen again. He’ll continue his investigation, he’ll join the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a protest rally in Ohio on Jan. 3, and when the new Congress meets in January he’ll push for further investigation and reform.

Conyers spoke with Salon by phone from Detroit.

Your first public forum on the 2004 election was called “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?” Do you know the answer to that question yet?

Well, dozens and dozens of things went wrong. It depends on what part of the state we’re going to examine. In Hocking County, a private company accessed an election machine and altered and tampered with it in the absence of election observers. It disturbed a deputy chair of the election in the county so much that she has given a sworn affidavit that has been turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we’re in the process of running that down. But what about in Cleveland, Ohio? There, thousands of people claimed that their vote for Kerry was turned into a vote for Bush. Poll workers made mistakes that might have cost thousands of votes in Cleveland. And in Youngstown, machines turned an undetermined number of Kerry votes into Bush votes as well. Provisional ballots were thrown out. There were several conflicting rules. There was mass confusion. In Warren County, they talked about [the possibility that] terrorism might close down the election. I mean, please.

What we’re doing, understand, is we’re collecting the complaints, the grievances, the outrages, the indignities that people suffered, and then we’ve got to process them to find out what is valid and what needs to be further examined and what needs to be tossed out. It’s not like every complaint is one that has to be counted. What we’re trying to do is make the system better.

Do you believe that there was an orchestrated attempt to steal the election?

Well, you know, orchestrated attempts don’t always require a conspiracy. People get the drift from other elections and the way [campaign leaders] talk about how they’re going to win the election. When you have the exit-polling information discrepancies that occurred in 2004, where the odds of all the swing states coming in so much stronger for Bush than the exit polls indicated - they say that that is, statistically, almost an improbability.

[People] are saying, “No, no, no, that doesn’t mean much.” But it means a lot. It feeds this growing, [but] not provable feeling among millions of Americans that this was another unfair election.

Do you have that feeling?

Sure, I have a feeling that whenever we can come across ways to make elections fairer or work better or improve the process or simplify the regulations or make voting more available to people who have language problems or disabilities, we have a responsibility to do it. We’re trying to improve the system. I’m not trying to attack the outcome. What we need is a system where there are only a few of the kinds of the tens of thousands of complaints that we already have.

Do you believe the outcome of the election would have been different if it had been conducted more fairly?

I have no way of saying that because this gets into conjecture. I make one conjecture and somebody else makes a counter conjecture, and where are we? We’re all, “This is what I think.” I’m not as concerned about what I think as I am about what people told me went wrong on Election Day that we in Congress, especially the Judiciary Committee, have the responsibility to correct.

But is there any real chance that anything will be corrected? The entire nation was focused on the problems with the electoral system in 2000, yet very little seems to have changed. If meaningful reform didn’t come then, how can anyone expect it to come now?

I thought that the Help America Vote Act would improve things dramatically. And although it helped in places, the provisional ballot [process] was misinterpreted. We couldn’t get all these private companies to come up with a paper trail on their machines. And with the precinct machines, there was quite a disparity in the conservative counties in Ohio as opposed to the Democratic areas where there were only a few machines.

Republican precincts had plenty of machines, and people could vote quickly.

Instantly, yeah. And we had people waiting for hours only miles away.

So what comes of all of this?

First, we’ve got to collect the complaints. Second, we’ve got to investigate them and bring forward the ones we’re willing to stand by. And then we have to examine how we correct them. There needs to be, generally stated, more federal regulation over presidential elections. There are just way too many differences, from not only state to state but also county to county.

So far, which complaints are you willing to “stand by”?

It’s not a matter of my claiming ownership over the complaints. I’m just doing my job. If all of them are valid, that’s what I’m going to present. If half of them are valid, that’s what I’m going to present. I’m not going forward with complaints that don’t reach the level of believability or credibility.

The complaints you’ve described in this interview - do they meet that level of believability and credibility?

Oh yes, and plenty more reach that level. So we’ve got a problem. Many people in the media are saying, “Look, the election’s over, and yes, we had problems.” It’s like many people are just taking this. Then we have the hundreds of thousands of people who are outraged and supportive of me for carrying on and trying to make sure we get to the bottom of all these grievances that have been brought forward.

We’ve received e-mails from hundreds of those people, and many of them seem certain that the election was stolen, or at least that the outcome would have been different if the election had been more fair.

Sure.

But you’re not there yet.

Well, no, that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m not trying to get there. I’m trying to do the kind of job that people will say, “I think the congressman and those working with him are going about this in a fairly impartial, effective manner” - and not that they’re coming in as thieves trying to upset the election result. To me, that would not be what I’m in Congress to do. I mean, I would be doing this if it were just the reverse. A fair election process applies to everybody - Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike.

Four years ago, when it came time for Congress to certify the election results, a number of House members rose to protest the certification of the Bush electors from Florida. Not a single member of the Senate joined them. Do you expect the same thing to happen this time around?

No, I think the Senate is going to go along with an inquiry this time. I don’t think they would embarrass themselves to let this happen two times in a row.

Has any senator said to you that he or she will call for an inquiry?

No, I haven’t talked with a single one. I’m not citing somebody who I know is going to do it. I’m not aware of anyone. I just don’t think the Senate would get caught in that position.

You haven’t exactly enjoyed a groundswell of support from other members of Congress. Are there Democrats in Congress who support what you’re doing but won’t come forward and say so publicly?

Well, there are Republicans who support what I’m doing who haven’t been willing to come forward. Look, calling for fair elections is not the most radical thing in the world. We’re not positing some revolutionary theory here. We’re asking that the people who complained be given a fair hearing.

Have any Republicans actually told you that they support your efforts?

I’d rather not comment on that.

Are you surprised that none of them have said so publicly?

No, not really. If you had a majority leader like theirs, you’d probably think twice about it yourself.

What about the Democratic leadership? Harry Reid, the new Senate minority leader, says he’d rather dance with Bush than fight him. Should the problems in Ohio change the way Democrats in Congress think about accommodating Bush in his second term?

Well, I’m not sure how much accommodation is going to happen. I listen to Bush talking about “reaching out,” which he talked about the first time, and we had the most divided federal system in memory. And now those kinds of phrases are being tossed about during the Christmas holiday again. Please. I don’t put much stock in it.

Bush billed himself as a “uniter, not a divider.”

I keep reminding myself of what he said. He sure didn’t unite anybody I knew of.

And what about John Kerry? Have you spoken with him about your investigation?

His lawyer was in Columbus for our hearing there last week. And he has also, at the same time, asked for a full recount in Delaware County [Ohio].

Has the Kerry campaign done enough? A lot of Democrats think Kerry conceded too soon.

It’s easy to be in an armchair somewhere saying, “You’ve got to do this; you’ve got to do that.” He had more in his control. And besides, he’s the candidate. I wish he’d listened to me more, and everybody wishes that the guy they voted for would listen to them more. But he’s the master of his ship.

When you say that you wish Kerry had listened to you more, do you mean during the campaign or in the days after the election? During the campaign and after.

What do you wish he were doing now?

I don’t want to go into all of this “shoulda, coulda, woulda.” I think it takes our focus off the fact that we had far too many grievances and misfires in this election that have to be corrected.

But you don’t believe that those problems were the result of a concerted effort by the Republican Party or the Bush-Cheney campaign? You think people who wanted to see the president reelected just got the message somehow that they were supposed to do the things they did?

People didn’t have to get a message. If you use questionable tactics and generally attempt to suppress the vote - that’s what the Republicans’ strategies were all about: “How do we limit the vote?” Because the more people who voted, the more imperiled they felt they would be. And from that kind of an assumption, you can get a whole lot of activities that might not meet the smell test.

Because people on the ground understand the overall strategy and then take it upon themselves to engage in whatever conduct they think will help?

That’s what frequently happens, and usually does.

Do you believe that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell did that? Do you think he acted with the intent to suppress the vote?

I know that Kenneth Blackwell made some decisions that were blatant and outrageous for a secretary of state. How he felt that his head was big enough to be chairman of the “Re-elect Bush” committee and also head of the administration of the electoral vote for the president in that same state was beyond me.

Is that the sort of issue that you hope to address through legislative reform?

Oh, good night, yeah. There are very few people who did what he did.

Do you think you’ll ever be able to prove that there was a coordinated effort to steal the election?

We’re not trying to prove that. This is what we’re discussing: We’re trying to improve the situation wherever we can to make a better voting system in the states.

But a lot of the people who support your efforts desperately want you to prove that there was a conspiracy. If the e-mails we get are any indication, a lot of them believe that the existence of a conspiracy has already been proven.

Well, you know, a citizen’s point of view may be different from a federal lawmaker’s point of view. The citizens are entitled to form their own opinions. They can assert that easily. A member of Congress, the ranking member of Judiciary … I can’t make those assertions without proof. That would be reckless.

So you don’t make them.

No, I don’t.

What do you do?

We pass laws. We make laws and we try to correct the system through the legislative process.

And what conclusions have you reached about how the system can be fixed?

Everyone is beginning to reexamine the appropriateness of the Electoral College. We realize that provisional balloting needs to be streamlined and simplified. We know that there should be paper trails in computers. We’re beginning to wonder if we haven’t privatized the electoral system so that the computer tabulators can do more and know more than the electoral commissions of the counties themselves.

In the meantime, what do you say to all of the people who believe in their hearts that our democracy is broken and that the election was stolen?

I ask and invite everybody to turn in any evidence that they want that helps proves whatever position they believe, or even a position they don’t believe. But this isn’t a hunch and suspicion game. This is very serious business. Either there were defects so numerous and so plentiful that we had a faulty election, or we had an election that had these defects [but they didn’t alter the outcome of the election]. And as we go forward with trying to improve the process, my whole objective is not to change the election result but to try to improve the process itself.

Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San Francisco

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Voting Rights Groups ‘Block’ Talk of Machine-Free Elections
By Lynn Landes
The Free Press

December 20th, 2004

So much for a free and fair exchange of ideas. At conferences and hearings across the country, traditional voting rights organizations have successfully blocked any serious debate on machine-free, paper-only elections. It appears that our well-entrenched so-called ‘voting rights’ organizations, including the NAACP and ACLU, haven’t absorbed the lesson from America’s election debacles. They would rather invite the industry-funded National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) to speak at their conferences, than invite researchers and activists who will argue that the machines must go.
Tuesday’s Dec. 7th conference in Washington, D.C., Voting 2004: A Report to the Nation on America’s Election Process, sponsored by Common Cause, The Century Foundation, and LCCR (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights) was no exception. Instead of fighting for the peoples’ right to a paper ballot and a hand count, the conference adopted the VerifiedVoting.org and Congressman Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) prescription for voting integrity. It is beyond worthless.

It gives people false hope, instead of a sensible solution. Holt’s legislation calls for ballot printers and audits. First, that leaves the machines in the voting process - ready, willing, and able to malfunction, break down, or not show up - causing chaos and confusion. Ballot printers won’t fix that. Second, it proposes spot audits, which leaves the counting of ballots in the hands of the very election officials who prove with each new election how truly inept or completely evil they really are. And third, the only time paper ballots will be counted is in case of a “close” election, ensuring that perpetrators of vote fraud will steal a sufficient number of votes to avoid triggering a recount.

At Tuesday’s conference, I privately asked Rep. Holt about the shortcomings to his legislation. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights. When I asked what happens when the machines malfunction (ballot printers and all), Holt said something about “emergency ballots.” When I asked what “emergency ballots” were, he said that it’s up to the states. It was obvious that he is not accustomed to tough questions. That’s strange, I thought. I’ve been communicating with Michele Moulder of Holt’s staff for the past two years. So how could he be so unprepared to defend his legislation?

When I asked Ms. Moulder why the conference was not discussing the machine-free/paper-only election option, she said that people just weren’t “there” yet. I surmised she meant that people weren’t ready to consider that option. But judging from the reaction to my articles and speeches, I suggested to her that a growing number of people are already “there.” And more people might be “there” if the issue was allowed to be on the agenda at these conferences. She smiled and walked away.

The conference organizers did graciously allow members of the audience to ask questions. I was one of the first up. I, of course, questioned the effectiveness of ballot printers and audits. Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the LCCR, and with whom I have spoken personally, was ready for me. He neatly batted the birdie back across the net, responding that my questions would be addressed later on in the conference. That really never happened. So, just before the conference ended, I waited my turn again and then spoke into the microphone. I asked Mr. Henderson why the organizers were not debating the machine-free option. He said that machine-free elections were up for discussion in that I was there bringing it up. Welcome to the world of Wade.

One question does not a debate make. And the panelists who answered me included in their responses enough baloney to choke a horse. That’s par for the course. Voting rights organizations are misleading the pubic on several critical issues. At the “Claim Democracy” conference in Washington last year, speakers from several organizations, including DEMOS (whoever the heck they really are) were running around telling audiences that HAVA (Help America Vote Act) requires that each precinct have a touchscreen voting machine for the disabled. Actually, Rush Holt’s Ms. Moulder insisted on it. To her credit, she was open to be corrected. She had a copy of the Act in her hotel room, so we ran up and read it. I pointed out the pertinent passage and she accepted the fact that HAVA does not require voting machines for the disabled.

The alleged need for voting machines for the disabled often gets trotted out at these conferences. Forget the fact that the blind can vote privately and independently using tactile paper ballots and audio assistance; something that is used all over the world as well as in Vermont and other states. Forget the fact that voting machines can cheat the disabled as easily as the able-bodied. Forget the fact that voting machines are harder for the disabled to use; that it will take the blind significantly longer to vote on a machine than to be assisted by a person of their choice. Forget the fact that two leading associations for the blind have received over $1 million dollars from the voting machine industry to flog their wares. These things are never mentioned because conference organizers make sure that the debate is never allowed.

Discussion about the accuracy of voting machines is also fodder for disinformation. Take Dr. Ted Selker of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), please. At Tuesday’s conference, he once again blathered about “residual votes” (i.e., overvotes and undervotes), claiming that “new” machines are better than old machines. How wonderful for the industry. Selker avoids the real elephant in the closet - that voting machines can be easily rigged and impossible to safeguard. Selker claims that voting machines reduce undervotes and overvotes, when in fact, he can provide no evidence that the voting machines don’t add and subtract votes on command or willy-nilly.

But, the most shocking response to my question on Tuesday came from Dr. Avi Rubin. He said that Americans would not go back to paper ballots. He said that one day we’ll all be using our home computers to vote. So much for all Avi’s first-rate reports on voting machine insecurity. He just endorsed voting by electronic ether. Can an endorsement of VoteHere’s products and services, on whose technical advisory board Avi sat for two years, be far behind?

It’s time for a good hard look in the mirror. Voting machines have been around since 1892. Why have the voting rights groups failed for so long to recognized the tremendous threat to basic civil rights these machines pose? When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed why didn’t these groups question the use of voting machines? Why didn’t they stop and consider that all the good the Act would do, would be rendered moot by these technological Trojan Horses? Sure, a few minority congressmen have made it to Congress, but that doesn’t mean that elections haven’t been routinely rigged. The U.S. Congress does not remotely represent the diversity of people or opinions in the general population.

Didn’t these voting rights groups notice that Craig Donsanto, chief of the U.S. Department of Justice election crimes branch, has sat on his hands for the past thirty years. He has refused to seriously investigate complaints of vote fraud, particularly when it involved computerized voting machines. Actually, that guy doesn’t seem to investigate much of anything, ever. Why haven’t these groups made an issue of Donsanto?

Even if the voting rights groups weren’t sensitive before, the elections of 2000 should have concentrated their minds on the limitless problems and endless threats voting machines assure a democracy. So, why didn’t they say one word in public protest when the DNC (Democratic National Committee) allowed the use of Internet voting in Democratic primary in Michigan 2004?

It makes a person question everything about these organizations. Ever wondered why the voters who were unfairly purged from the rolls in Florida are still not back on the list? It seems that instead of getting a court order, the voting rights groups (including the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP), agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the state of Florida. Four years later, disenfranchised citizens are still not on the voter rolls.

Four years after the 2000 election, voting machines are causing more problems than ever. Someone needs to get a clue. At least let’s have a real debate, Wade.

Lynn Landes is one of the nation’s leading journalists on voting technology and democracy issues. Readers can find her articles at EcoTalk.org. Lynn is a former news reporter for DUTV and commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

GOP Strongholds Saw Increase In Voting Machines By Mark Niquette The Columbus Dispatch

December 12th, 2004

At first, Eric Davies didn’t mind waiting more than four hours to vote on Nov. 2. It was encouraging to see such strong voter turnout, he says.

But later, the Democrat was frustrated to learn that his Columbus precinct had one fewer voting machine than in 2000, while some precincts in the suburbs and elsewhere got more.
“I’m not someone who necessarily jumps on the conspiracy bandwagon, but it certainly shows some favoritism to one community over another,” said Davies, 37.

In fact, a Dispatch analysis shows that predominantly Democratic precincts in Franklin County - almost all of them in Columbus - had fewer machines on Nov. 2 compared with 2000, while heavy GOP areas had more.

Election officials say voter-registration totals and past turnout - not favoritism or politics - determined where machines went. Any differences between Democratic and GOP areas were an “unintended coincidence,” they say.

Ultimately, the differences aren’t as significant as the fact that Franklin County had roughly the same number of voting machines as 2000 but faced population shifts and a crush of 102,000 additional voters this year, officials said.

Still, even if the discrepancies weren’t intentional - and they almost certainly wouldn’t have changed the outcome - they are troubling and must be addressed before the next election, said Edward B. Foley, director of the election-law center at Ohio State University.

“There’s not an automatic correlation between fewer machines and longer lines,” he said. “But if there is evidence that urban precincts tended to have fewer machines (than in other areas), that is a disparity that is worrisome.”

The Dispatch analysis shows:

* Predominantly Democratic Franklin County precincts -those where Democrat Al Gore got at least 70 percent of the vote in 2000 - had 17 fewer machines used in 2004. At the same time, the strongest GOP precincts - where George W. Bush got at least 70 percent of the vote four years ago - received eight more machines.
* Based on the information available when officials placed machines, the Democratic precincts had 20 percent more “active” voters per machine used than the Republican areas. The GOP precincts had an 18 percent higher turnout in 2000, but the Columbus ballot this year was much longer than in the suburbs because of bond issues - which officials say was a major reason for long lines.
* The county average for active voters per machine was 229 per precinct, with a range from 388 in Columbus Precinct 73-J to 84 in Truro Township A. But nearly three-fourths of the Democratic precincts had a higher-than-average voter-permachine number, compared with 30 percent of the GOP precincts.
* Franklin County officials tried to put 29 additional machines into service on Election Day - all in the Democratic and minority precincts - but 17 weren’t used because they were delivered after the polls closed or because poll workers told those delivering the machines that they weren’t needed, officials said. The county didn’t use 22 other machines.

Those critical of the election results have pointed to the discrepancies and waits of several hours at some polling places as proof that votes were suppressed in Democratic or minority areas.

Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, defends the allocation of the machines as the best effort possible with the limited resources available.

He said it’s difficult to argue conspiracy theories or voter suppression when a Democratic election worker made the recommendations about where to place machines - and Republican areas also had long lines.

Republican Brad Jones, of New Albany, said he wasn’t able to cast his vote for Bush because after waiting an hour, he was told he’d still have a five-hour wait, and he had to leave.

His precinct had six machines, up from three in 2000.

“There should have been more machines,” said Jones, 26.

Election officials also noted that:

* Population shifts to areas outside the I-270 Outerbelt led to the creation of 29 new precincts since 2000 that received 129 machines. Since the county didn’t have that many additional machines, some had to be reassigned from other precincts.
* Despite the reduced number of machines and larger number of active voters per machine in the Democratic precincts, the busiest precincts - as measured by ballots cast per machine - overwhelmingly were in the suburbs (as The Dispatch reported last month). There were 161 ballots cast per machine in the Democratic areas versus 165 in the GOP areas.
* The average number of ballots cast per machine in Franklin County, which uses electronic equipment, was 169. Cuyahoga and Summit counties - which use punch-card machines - had 68 and 86 per machine, respectively.
* Franklin County’s average of 169 ballots cast per machine was one of the lowest among Ohio counties that use electronic equipment. The comparable number in Pickaway County was 186; in Knox County, 244; in Lake County, 291.

Damschroder said it wouldn’t have been practical to buy additional machines this year because of the cost - $5,000 per unit - plus the fact that all county machines are expected to be replaced in 2005 or 2006 with federal money.

“Hard decisions had to be made in order to spread even thinner our already thin resources,” he said.

County officials said they also considered using punch-card ballots to supplement electronic machines and establishing regional zones for provisional voting, but they were advised against it by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s office.

Blackwell’s office said it only was asked whether the county could use punch cards if a voter was uncomfortable with electronic machines, and that it doesn’t recall an inquiry about provisional zones.

Damschroder has called the process of allocating machines “a little bit of art versus math.”

It starts in June for a fall election; machines are assigned using a formula based on the number of active voters in each precinct. People who haven’t voted in recent elections or had mail that was sent them returned remain on the rolls but are considered “inactive.”

Also, if a precinct had an increase in turnout of 250 voters or more in previous comparable elections or a significant new housing development, it might get an additional machine.

The placements are re-evaluated once updated registration totals are available, about a month before the election.

Damschroder said the county keeps about 100 machines in reserve in case of accidents during deliveries.

The county initially thought it had 68 unused machines but learned this week that the number was 39 - 22 left at the warehouse and 17 that were sent to inner-city precincts but not used.

Ultimately, county commissioners must decide whether to spend the money for enough machines to handle a massive turnout or settle for fewer machines adequate for most other elections, said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a national nonprofit organization.

“Almost never do you have enough equipment to take care of 100 percent” of registered voters if they all turn out, he said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Apartheid Ballot Counting In America
Greg Palast on ‘Democracy Now!’
December 10, 2004

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/08/1520204

As Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certified President Bush’s reelection on Monday, we hear an address by investigative reporter Greg Palast about the disenfranchisement of black votes in the Nov. 2nd election.

President Bush secured his reelection Monday after Ohio’s Republican secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell certified the victory by a margin of 119,000 votes. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Monday that the presidential voting was widely perceived as “very free and fair.”
But questions remain over the fairness of the Nov. 2nd election. At a forum on Capitol Hill yesterday, voting rights advocates reminded attendees of the more than 414,000 calls made to national hotlines monitoring complaints about the election. Among those calls, according to a new report from the Common Cause Education Fund, were many accounts from Ohio.

Yesterday at the New York Society for Ethical Culture investigative reporter Greg Palast spoke about the fairness of the election. Greg Palast, investigative reporter speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on December 7, 2004.

AMY GOODMAN: At the same forum that Richard Clarke spoke at last night at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, investigative reporter Greg Palast also spoke, who has investigated the 2000 election for the BBC and continues to do that work in Ohio. He spoke about the fairness of the 2004 election.

GREG PALAST: I came here tonight to warn you that there are cooks and cranks and crazies out there on the internet who think that John Kerry won. Now, I know because one of those articles on the internet called John Kerry Won, on Tompaine.com … I wrote it.

Maybe you can explain this to me. See, I got the CNN exit polls, and it said that in Ohio, Kerry defeated Bush among women 53 to 47%, and among men, Kerry defeated Bush by 51 to 49%. So, who’s the third sex that put our president over the top? I thought I’d investigate, which is unusual. See, I’m a reporter. My reports appear on BBC Television. I’m a mainstream guy, as they say. And for the big newspaper of Britain, the Guardian/Observer.

I used to write George Orwell’s old column there, and he’d enjoy this. And so I wrote a story called, Kerry Won: Here’s the Facts. And I got a letter, an e-mail, from the New York Times. Here it is. They wanted to follow – they wanted to investigate! Cool! And they asked me, question 1: Are you a conspiracy nut? Question 2: Are you a sore loser? Question 3: there is no question three…that was the end of the interview.

And so they ran a story on the front page saying, Internet Theories of Bush Loss Easily Debunked. Okay, but remember the story Kerry Won.” The sub-title is, Here’s the Facts. And since they won’t tell you the facts, I thought maybe I’d share them tonight.

George Bush was declared victor today by the Secretary of State of Florida, who – uh, Mr. Blacksick — and of, excuse me, I said Florida. You know, Florida of the North. I was just in Columbus —you know, New Kiev, Ohio, two days ago, so I get confused. Mr. Blackwell, certified the election today. It’s very convenient for him because he’s both chairman of the republican campaign and the person in charge of the vote count, so he’s wearing two hats. That’s OK, because I hear he has two heads — I’ll have to investigate. He certified the vote, but not all the votes. 93,000 votes were tossed on the floor, never counted. We’re not talking ‘re-count’ here, we’re talking NEVER count. These 93,000 votes are called, “spoiled” in Ohio. Another 155,000 votes are called provisional. More absentee ballots were tossed. Yet, supposedly George Bush won by 119,000. Folks, now what’s going on here? Whose votes were not counted that were twice the Bush margin of victory?

Were the votes ’spoiled’ randomly? Well, not exactly. Overwhelmingly the votes not counted — NOT COUNTED –were cast in African American precincts. These are very Black votes. I use the term overwhelmingly, those votes cast into the machines but not counted for technical reasons. When I say overwhelmingly Black votes, that is not my phrase. That’s from Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University who’s been investigating this for the ACLU. The statisticians and demographers say it’s overwhelmingly Black votes which are not counted.

The technical term is spoiled votes. Okay, now, how do votes spoil? Do you leave them out of the fridge? What do you do? These are undervotes, overvotes – they use those technical terms, and in Ohio it’s hanging chads. We’re back to that. Dimpled chads, pregnant chads. Because Ohio is the last state in America to use the old punch card system for 75% of the vote.

You’ve heard a lot about the dangers of ‘blackbox’ computer voting. I want to talk to you about good old-fashioned punch card voting. 93,000 votes tossed in the garbage out of Black precincts. How? Just as Black neighborhoods get the bad schools, they get the bad hospitals, they also get the bum voting machines? And so their votes go in the garbage.

And they know it, the powers that be. You’re thinking, it should be against the law. And, in fact, it is. The ACLU sued the State of Ohio for having a racist ballot counting system. They sued five states — BEFORE the election. And before the election, four states said, Well, gee, we’re kind of embarrassed. Yeah, we’re losing thousands of Black votes. And they all agreed to fix the machines before the election, all but one state: Ohio. The Secretary of State of Ohio said, “Yes, I know that the machines we use in Ohio eliminate tens of thousands of Black votes on bad machines.” We’ll fix them, he said, after the inauguration.

Look at this chart. Those on radio are going to have to imagine it. There’s a big line, see? If you think Ohio is unusual, here’s the problem. This big bar there, that’s the number of Black votes which aren’t counted in America; and the little bar, that’s the number of white votes which are not counted in America. Where is this from? Yes, it’s true, you can get it on the internet, but it’s actually from Appendix 14 of a report, from the U.S Civil Rights Commission that found if you are a Black person in America, the chance of your vote being tossed in the garbage — you cast your vote and it’s thrown away — is 800% higher than if you are a white voter, okay?

It adds up with 2 million votes discarded in America, half of them by Black voters, 1 million Black votes not counted in America. We have an apartheid ballot counting system in America. And we ain’t talking about it. Okay? But now we’re going to talk about it, right? That’s not all. There are provisional ballots, see? So part of the fix this year is the provisional ballots. The republicans had a plan for that, too. There were 155,000 of them. 2 million votes were not counted in the 2000 election, now we’re pushing up maybe towards 3 million votes, because we have something called provisional ballots, back of the bus, bogus ballots.

Who gets those ballots? No points for guessing: the black vote. 30,000 provisional ballots were handed out in Ohio. Urban, as they say, in other words, Black voters, who supposedly voted in the wrong precinct, knowing that those ballots would never, ever be counted. Now, how did this happen? Someone had sent us lists called ‘caging’ lists containing thousands of names and addresses. If you analyze the caging lists you see something interesting. They were predominantly names of voters in African American precincts. This list was put together and handed to the chairman of the Republican National Campaigns, of the state campaigns, and the Republican National Committee. What are they doing with these names of the Black folk? We asked the Republican National Committee chiefs and State Committee chiefs on BBC Television: what are you doing with these lists of Black voters? We didn’t tell them they were Black voters. We just showed them the list of voters.

Oh, those are the lists of our donors. Oh, I said. Leni von Eckardt is one of our researchers, she went through the list, and golly gee, several of those addresses were homeless shelters. So you get a lot of money for the Bush-Cheney campaign from the homeless shelters? I asked. Then they said, Oh, no, no. We’ve checked again. We just wanted to check to see if people had changed their address.

Every expert told us there was just one reason. Because they had a plan, a secret plan, to challenge hundreds of thousands of voters nationwide. That’s what those lists were. They were target lists, challenge lists. Now, people that they were going to challenge, just because their address changed, that doesn’t remove your vote. I mean, Leni went through and found out there were several of them whose address had changed from Black districts because they had gone to Baghdad.

These were Black soldiers who had been shipped out. The republicans planned en masse to remover them from the voter — to prohibit their votes from being counted. So you had hundreds of thousands of votes thrown in the garbage by this plan. Now is that against the law? It’s not against the law to go to Baghdad at the commander-in-chief’s command. You don’t lose your vote. But you know what is against the law? Profiling Black voters for challenge.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, investigative journalist whose story on voter intimidation was broadcast by BBC television Newsnight. This is Democracy Now! Greg Palast, speaking last night at New York Society for Ethical Culture along with Richard Clarke.

Palast, author of ‘The Best Democracy Money Can Buy’, is reporter on the BBC film ‘Bush Family Fortunes’, now available on DVD.
www.GregPalast.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Hearings on Ohio Voting Put 2004 Election In Doubt
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
FreePress.org

November 18th, 2004

Highly-charged, jam-packed hearings held here in Columbus have cast serious doubt on the true outcome of the presidential election.

On Saturday, November 13, the Ohio Election Protection Coalition’s public hearings in Columbus solicited extensive sworn first-person testimony from 32 of Ohio voters, precinct judges, poll workers, legal observers, party challengers. An additional 66 people provided written affidavits of election irregularities. The unavoidable conclusion is that this year’s election in Ohio was deeply flawed, that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in doubt.
Most importantly, the testimony has revealed a widespread and concerted effort on the part of Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to deny primarily African-American and young voters the right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time. By depriving precincts of adequate numbers of functioning voting machines, Blackwell created waits of three to eleven hours, driving tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters away from the polls and very likely affecting the outcome of the Ohio vote count, which in turn decided the national election.

On November 17, Blackwell wrote an op-ed piece for Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, stating: “Every eligible voter who wanted to vote had the opportunity to vote. There was no widespread fraud, and there was no disenfranchisement. A half-million more Ohioans voted than ever before with fewer errors than four years ago, a sure sign on success by any measure,” Blackwell wrote. Moon’s extreme right wing Unification Church has long-standing ties to the Bush Family and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Additional testimony also called into question the validity of the actual vote counts. There are thus serious doubts that the final official tally in Ohio, due December 1 to Blackwell’s office, will have any validity. Blackwell will certify the vote count on December 3.

While Blackwell supervised the Ohio vote he also served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, a clear conflict of interest that casts further doubt on how the Ohio election and vote counts have been conducted.

At the Columbus hearings, witness after witness under oath gave testimony to an election riddled with discrimination and disarray. Among them:

Werner Lange, a pastor from Youngstown, Ohio, who said in part:

“In precincts 1 A and 5 G, voting as Hillman Elementary School, which is a predominantly African American community, there were woefully insufficient number of voting machines in three precincts. I was told that the standard was to have one voting machine per 100 registered voters. Precinct A had 750 registered voters. Precinct G had 690. There should have been 14 voting machines at this site. There were only 6, three per precinct, less than 50 percent of the standard. This caused an enormous bottleneck among voters who had to wait a very, very long time to vote, many of them giving up in frustration and leaving. . . . I estimate, by the way, that an estimated loss of over 8,000 votes from the African American community in the City of Youngstown alone, with its 84 precincts, were lost due to insufficient voting machines, and that would translate to some 7,000 votes lost for John Kerry for President in Youngstown alone. . . .”

“Just yesterday I went to the Trumbull Board of Elections in northeast Ohio, I wanted to review their precinct logs so I could continue my investigation. This was denied. I was told by the Board of Elections official that I could not see them until after the official vote was given.”

Marion Brown, Columbus:

“I am here on behalf of a friend. My friend came to my home very upset while she was away standing four hours in the voting, her husband passed away. The funeral was on yesterday, November 13th, at 2:00. Perhaps had she not stood so long in the line, she may have been able to save her husband.”

Victoria Parks:

“In Pickaway County, oh, my goodness, in Pickaway County, I entered there, I was shown a table, 53 poll books were plunked down in front of my. I noticed there were no signature on file in any of the poll books, in any of the poll books, and furthermore, a minute later the director of the Board of Elections of Pickaway County came into the room and snatched the books away from me and said you cannot look at these books. I said are you aware that what you are doing is against the law? She said I have been on the phone with the Secretary of State and he has instructed me to take these books away and you cannot see them. I paraphrase very slightly here. She took them away. I was persona non grata. I did not want to risk arrest, and I left. . . . There were no signatures, and furthermore, the writing in the book seemed to have been written in the same hand, because that is a requirement.”

Boyd Mitchell, Columbus:

“What I saw was voter intimidation in the form of city employees that were sent in to stop illegal parking. Now, in Driving Park Rec Center there are less than 50 legal parking spots, and there were literally hundreds and hundreds of voters there, and I estimated at least 70 percent of the people were illegally parked in the grass around the perimeter of the Driving Park Rec Center, and two city employees drove up in a city truck and said that they had been sent there to stop illegal parking, and they went so far as to harass at least a couple of voters that I saw, and when they were talking to us, they were kind. But when they didn’t realize we were overhearing them talking to voters, they were trying to keep people from parking where they were parking. They went so far as to set up some cones, trying to block people from getting into a grassy area…”

“I calculated that I maybe saw about 20 percent of the people that left Driving Park D and C, I personally saw and talked to about 20 percent of them as they left the poll between 12:30 and 8 p.m. And I saw 15 people who left because the line was too long. The lines inside were anywhere from 2 1/2 to 5 hours. Most everybody said 4 hours, and I saw at least 15 people who did not vote, and I heard a gentleman who was earlier making some mathematical calculations, well, if this is going on across town, and, you know, in a precinct where it was going so heavily for Kerry, and me only seeing 20 percent of the people coming out, I saw 15. We could just do the math and extrapolate that out into a huge number of people who might have voted had they had a chance.”

Joe Popich (entered into the record copies of the Perry County Board of Election poll book):

“There are a bunch of irregularities in this log book, but the most blatant irregularity would be the fact that there are 360 signatures in this book. There are 33 people who voted absentee ballot at this precinct, for a total of 393 votes that should be attributed to that precinct. However, the Board of Elections is attributing 96 more votes to that precinct than what this log book reflects.”

Derek Winsor, Columbus:

“Out of the six total voting machines that were at 14 C, three of them showed some type of malfunction that at one point or another during the three our so hours that we were waiting, and between my wife and me, we had asked poll workers individually if they could explain what was going on and what kind of reassurances they could give us that, for one machine in particular that the votes had already been posted on, that machine would be counted, and the response was just, oh, they will be counted. And how can you be sure of that? What storage mechanism do they use to ensure that the votes are stored, and, again, the response was just, well, they just are. And that was a bit of a concern here.”

Carol Shelton, presiding judge, precinct 25 B at the Linden Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library:

“The precinct is 95 to 99 percent black. . . . There were 1,500 persons on the precinct rolls. We received three machines. In my own precinct in Clintonville, 19E, we always received three machines for 700 to 730 voters. Voter turnout in my own precinct has reached as high as 70 percent while I worked there. I interviewed many voters in 25 B and asked how many machines they had had in the past. Everyone who had a recollection said five or six. I called to get more machines and ended up being connected with Matt Damschroder, the Director of the Board of Elections. After a real hassle — and someone here has it on videotape, he sent me a fourth machine which did not dent the length of the line. Fewer than 700 voted, although the turnout at the beginning of the day would cause anyone to predict a turnout of over 80 percent. This was a clear case of voter suppression by making voting an impossibility for anyone who had to go to work or anyone who was stuck at home caring for children or the elderly while another family member voted.”

Allesondra Hernandez, Toledo:

“What I witnessed when I had gotten there about 9 A.M. was a young African American woman who had come out nearly in tears. She was a new voter, very first registered, very excited to vote, and she had said that she had been bounced around to three different polling places, and this one had just turned her down again. People were there to help her out, and I was concerned. I started asking around to everyone else, and they had informed me earlier that day that she was not the only one, but there were at least three others who had been bounced around. Also earlier that day the polls had opened an hour late, did not open until about 7:30 A.M. The polling machines were locked in the principal’s office. Hundreds of people were turned away, were forced to leave the line because they needed to be at school, they needed to be at work, or they needed to take their children to school. The people there who were assisting did the best they could to take down numbers and take down names, but I am assuming that a majority of those people could not come back because of work and/or because of school, because they had shown up to vote, and that was the time that they could vote, and that is why they were there. Also along the same lines, they ran out of pencils for those ballots.”

Erin Deignan, Columbus:

“I was an official poll worker judge in precinct Columbus 25 F, at the East Linden School. We had between 1100 and 1200 people on the voter registry there. We had three voting machines. We did the math. I am sure lots of other people did too. With the five-minute limit, 13 hours the polls were open, three machines, that is 468 voters, that is less than half of the people we had on the registry. We stayed open three hours past 7:30 and got about 550 people through, but we had one Board of Elections worker come in the morning. We asked if he could bring more machines. He is said more machines had been delivered, but they didn’t have any more. We had another Board of Elections official come later in the day, and he said that in Upper Arlington he had seen 12 machines.”

Matthew Segal, Gambier:

“In this past election, Kenyon College students and the residents of Gambier, Ohio, had to endure some of the most extenuating voting circumstances in the entire country. As many of you may already know, because they had it on national media attention, Kenyon students and the residents of Gambier had to stand in line up to 10 to 12 hours in the rain, through a hot gym, and crowded narrow lines, making it extremely uncomfortable. As a result of this, voters were disenfranchised, having class to attend to, sports commitments, and midterms for the next day, which they had to study for. Obviously, it is a disgrace that kids who are being perpetually told the importance of voting, could not vote because they had other commitments and had to be put up with a 12-hour line.”

Blackwell characterized Ohio’s Election Day as “tremendously successful” in the Washington Times. Several people at Saturday’s hearing said they’d like to hear Mr. Blackwell testify under oath, preferably under a criminal indictment.

———————————————–

Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D, J.D., a legal advisor for the Election Protection Coalition, convened and moderated the public hearings. Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor of the Columbus Free Press and freepress.org. Audio from the hearings can be found at: www.theneighborhoodnetwork.org

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Greene County Elections Board Scrutinized
By Mehul Srivastava
Dayton Daily News

December 12th, 2004

Office containing ballots found unlocked overnight

XENIA | Election observers examining Greene County voter records were told Friday the records were to be sealed after Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ordered county boards of election to consider all election-related records as falling within a “canvassing period.”
This period usually lasts about 10 days after the election, but was being extended because an official recount is under way in the state, according to Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo.

LoParo said the records are to be treated with the “utmost care” until the recount is over.

The two election observers say they later found the Greene County Board of Elections office unlocked Saturday morning, fueling their suspicions they weren’t allowed to examine records that might have been tampered with.

“It is shocking that they would first deny us access, and then leave the records unlocked overnight,” said Joan Quinn, a retired lawyer from Sacramento, Calif., an election observer acting on behalf of the Green Party, which asked for a recount of the Ohio presidential vote.

Election board officials returned Saturday afternoon to lock up the building after they were told of the security lapse.

They said that while the building had been left unlocked by mistake, voter records are kept in a separate locked room, and had not been tampered with.

“The records are safe, the ballots are still locked and we can have our computers checked to see if they have been tampered with,” said Llyn McCoy, deputy director of the Greene County Board of Elections.

But Quinn and her colleagues say that when they entered the unlocked building, voting machines and voter records had been left in the open.

Quinn said that she and her fellow observer were looking into the low turnout recorded in minority precincts, especially precincts 354, 224, and 355, which recorded voter turnouts in the 50 percent range, while the average for Greene County was 74 percent. While examining those records, she said, they were informed of the “lockdown” order.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” said Fred Hall III, president of the Greene County elections board.

Contact Mehul Srivastava at (937) 225-2432. Staff writer Jim Bebbington contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds ‘Smoke Alarm’ For Florida E-Vote Count
By UC Berkeley
November 18th, 2004

Research team calls for investigation

Today the University of California’s Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a “smoke alarm.” Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.

“For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida,” says Professor Michael Hout. “We’re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.”

The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:

number of voters
median income
Hispanic/Latino population
change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
support for President Bush in the 2000 election
use of electronic voting or paper ballots

“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” said Hout. “The study shows, that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances.”

The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.”http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)