[Mb-civic] The Ohio Vote Debacle

Sat Mar 4 21:40:31 PST 2006

AlterNet
The Ohio Vote Debacle
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet
Posted on March 3, 2006,
http://www.alternet.org/story/33006/

While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research 
on what really happened in Ohio in 2004 to give George W. Bush a 
second term.

Pundits throughout the state and nation -- many of them alleged 
Democrats -- continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second 
coming that we should "get over it," that the election is old news.

But things get curiouser and curiouser.

In our 2005 compendium "How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election 
& Is Rigging 2008," we list more than a hundred different ways the 
Republican Party denied the democratic process in the Buckeye State. 
For a book of documents to be published Sept. 11 by the New Press 
entitled "What Happened in Ohio," we are continuing to dig.

It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, 
Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. 
In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still 
hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they 
are verified.

One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 
purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional 
stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that 
registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical 
error."

As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were 
purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 
Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from 
Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged 
margin of victory -- just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million 
the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell deemed worth 
counting.

Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, 
Nov. 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2 percent of the popular 
vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate 
reflection of what really happened here.

But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5 
percent Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with 
other exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual 
statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than 
250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly 
ahead only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000 
in the official vote count.

At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000 voters that 
had been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and 
Toledo. County election boards purged the voting registration lists. 
Though all Ohio election boards are allegedly bipartisan, in fact they 
are all controlled by the Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled 
by law with two Democrats and two Republicans.

But all tie votes are decided by the secretary of state, in this case 
Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for 
governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of 
the state's vote count, but also as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney 
campaign. Many independent observers have deemed this to be a 
conflict of interest. On election day, Blackwell met personally with 
Bush, Karl Rove and Matt Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County 
(Columbus) Board of Elections, formerly the chair of the county's 
Republican Party.

The Board of Elections in Toledo was chaired by Bernadette Noe, wife 
of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio's "Mr. Republican." A close personal 
confidante of the Bush family, Noe raised more than $100,000 for the 
GOP presidential campaign in 2004. He is currently under indictment 
for three felony violations of federal election law, and 53 counts of 
fraud, theft and other felonies in the "disappearance" of more than $13 
million in state funds. Noe was entrusted with investing those funds by 
Republican Gov. Robert Taft, who recently pled guilty to four 
misdemeanor charges, making him the only convicted criminal ever to 
serve as governor of Ohio.

The rationale given by Noe and the Republican-controlled BOE in 
Lucas and Hamilton counties was that the voters should be eliminated 
from the rolls because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two 
federal elections.

There is no law that requires such voters be eliminated. And there is 
no public verification that has been offered to confirm that these people 
had not, in fact, voted in those elections.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly 
Democratic wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been 
mysteriously removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn 
testimony and affidavits given at hearings after the election confirmed 
that many of these citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal 
elections and had not moved from where they were registered. In 
some cases, their stability at those addresses stretched back for 
decades.

The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional 
ballots cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 
2000. Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a 
stopgap for people whose voting procedures are somehow 
compromised at the polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants.

Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral 
pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into 
chaos. Among other things, he demanded that voters casting 
provisional ballots provide their birth dates, a requirement that was 
often not mentioned by poll workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many 
provisional ballots were merely tossed in the trash at Ohio polling 
stations.

To this day, more than 16,000 provisional ballots (along with more than 
90,000 machine-spoiled ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted. The 
secretary of state refuses to explain why. A third attempt by the Green 
and Libertarian parties to obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio 
presidential vote has again been denied by the courts, though the 
parties are appealing.

Soon after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that Franklin 
County would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls in 
Columbus. Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the GOP-
dominated legislature, has imposed a series of restrictions that will 
make it much harder for citizens to restore their names to the voter 
rolls, or to register in the first place.

All this, however, pales before a new revelation just released by the 
board of elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county 
surrounding Cleveland.

Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of 
Elections, and the chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed 
that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated -- with no public 
notice -- a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area 
registration rolls. He has not explained why the revelation of this 
massive registration purge has been kept secret for so long. Virtually 
no Ohio or national media has bothered to report on this story.

Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went 90 percent 
and more for John Kerry. The county overall went more than 60 
percent for Kerry.

The eliminations have been given credence by repeated sworn 
testimony and affidavits from long-time Cleveland voters that they 
came to their usual polling stations only to be told that they were not 
registered. When they could get them, many were forced to cast 
provisional ballots which were highly likely to be pitched in the trash, or 
which remain uncounted.

Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 
voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell 
doom for any state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-
2004 election eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from 
Cincinnati and the 28,000 from Toledo.

Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most of them likely 
Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to an 
election allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 
106,000 votes still remain uncounted, and where the GOP secretary of 
state continues to successfully fight off a meaningful recount.

There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional pre-
November 2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of 
elections may have occurred. Further "anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 
vote count continue to surface.

In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter 
Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, and its 2008 
presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been 
eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from 
traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers 
having been erected against new voter registration drives.

Stay tuned.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of "How the GOP 
Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008," available via Free 
Press. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of "What Happened 
in Ohio?

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