Democracy Week

News Reports - Ohio Recount

Published on Wednesday, December 15, 2004 by MSNBC

Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio by Michael Powell and Peter Slevin

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door.

She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?

Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.

"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.

In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.

In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.

"There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year that demand reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election law program at the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor. "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want to minimize that."

Franklin County election officials -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats -- say they allocated machines based on past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But they acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters.

Ohio is not particularly unusual. After the 2000 election debacle, which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an election decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. The intent was to help states upgrade aging voting machines and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. To a point, it has had the desired effect.

"Viewed dispassionately, the national elections ran much more smoothly than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in voting behavior and methodology. Because of improved technology "nationwide, we counted perhaps 1 million votes that we would have lost four years ago."

But much work remains. Congress imposed only the minimal national standards and included too few dollars. Tens of thousands of machines -- including 70 percent of Ohio's machines -- still use punch-card ballots, which have a high error rate. A patchwork quilt of state rules governs voter registration and provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls -- studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. But in Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single provisional ballot in 2004.

In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election meltdown, professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley studied this year's voting results, contrasting counties that had electronic voting machines with those that used traditional voting methods. They concluded, based on voting and population trends and other indicators, that irregularities associated with machines in three traditionally Democratic counties in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000 excess votes for Bush in a state the president won by about 381,000 votes. The study prompted heated critiques from some polling experts.

Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too. But he ran the numbers and came up with the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," Stewart said. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."

Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout, who directed the study, said the problem in Florida probably lies with the technology. (Florida's touch-screen machines lack paper records.) "I've always viewed this as a software problem, not a corruption problem," he said. "We'd never tolerate this level of errors with an ATM. The problem is that we continue to do democracy on the cheap."

A Heated Run-Up

By October, the Bush and Kerry campaigns knew that this midwestern state was a crucial battleground. Each side assembled armies of 3,000 lawyers and paralegals, and unaffiliated organizations poured in thousands more volunteers. Both parties filed lawsuits challenging rules and registrations.

Two decisions proved pivotal.

Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct where they reside. For cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati, where officials long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the ruling promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take those ballots, but the alternative is disenfranchisement," said Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes Cleveland.

Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County boards are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type of machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County, officials decided to quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines.

Other counties decided to muddle through. At Kenyon College, a surge of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox County officials allocated two machines, just as in past elections. In voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus, election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines.

"Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."

On Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans voted, 900,000 more voters than in 2000.

In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers, and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse their lateness.

"It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it being this bad."

Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations had been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election," Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept telling me, 'You must be mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted. I felt like I'd been scrubbed off the rolls."

Aftermath of Nov. 2

After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.

Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and turnout was lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote.

Franklin County officials say they allocated machines according to instinct and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the need to examine the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles, we'll have to look more closely at this," he said.

In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to vote. "They had to skip classes and skip work," said Matthew Segal, a 19-year-old student.

In northeastern Ohio, in the fading industrial city of Youngstown, Jeanne White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, an African American newspaper, stepped into the booth, pushed the button for Kerry -- and watched her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what happened; I started screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting early!' "

It was not her imagination. Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." "It happens every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. "It's something we have to live with, and we can fix it."

As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and officials disqualified about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati and its Ohio suburbs, 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them to the wrong table.

In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the provisional ballots. Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for conservative third-party candidates.

Still, state officials saw little to apologize for, particularly in the case of provisional ballots. A recent count of provisional ballots sliced 18,000 votes off Bush's margin in Ohio. "In Washington, D.C., a voter who casts a ballot in the wrong precinct cannot have that ballot counted," said Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell. "Yet in Ohio, it was 'voter suppression' and 'voter disenfranchisement.' "

In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and talk of Republican conspiracies mounted. "A lot of folks who, having put an enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed in the righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County election board.

Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to play down the anger. National Democrats -- including the chief counsel for Kerry's campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm Bush's victory.

But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.'

"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"

Slevin reported from Cincinnati. Special correspondents Michelle Garcia in New York and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.

Published on Wednesday, December 15, 2004 by The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio

by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman

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.

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).

Ann Harrison: 'The Ohio recount: Reluctant officials and few rules'

Posted on Thursday, December 09 @ 09:59:10 EST By Ann Harrison, CounterPunch

Thousands of protesting Ukrainians successfully forced their Supreme Court to order a new presidential run-off election and are still agitating for anti-fraud legislation. But their counterparts in the U.S. - which holds itself up as a model of Democracy - are plunging into a tough fight to recount and dispute the election in Ohio which handed President Bush twenty decisive electoral votes.

On December 6th, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell certified the vote in the critical swing state declaring that President George Bush beat out John Kerry by 118,775 votes. The President's 136,000 vote lead on election night was narrowed to two percent after the absentee and provision votes were counted. But the election was not close enough to trigger an automatic recount and Blackwell, who co-chaired Bush's campaign, declared on NPR that there was "no widespread proof of fraud or intimidation or shenanigans."

Not so, say Ohio election activists who have spent the past month gathering what they say is evidence of voting irregularities, voter intimidation and suppression.

Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik plan to file a request for a recount in all 88 Ohio counties. Having raised the required $113,600 and landed a favorable federal ruling against a county that tried to stop the recount, the candidates also want to review all 155,000 provisional ballots. A recount must begin within ten days of the formal request, but it is unlikely that it will be completed when Ohio's presidential electors are set to meet on December 13th.

There's an urgency to postpone the electors meeting, but the pressure's not coming from the Democrats. The third party recount is supported by John Kerry's presidential campaign which also wants to count votes, but not dispute the results. "The Kerry Edwards campaign does not expect the outcome to change," said Don McTigue, a Columbus lawyer who filed suit for the campaign in U.S. District Court seeking to impose uniform standards for counting provisional ballots.

The Democratic National Committee announced December 6th that it would appoint a panel of experts to look at voting problems in Ohio. Outgoing Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, vowed that Democrats will spend "whatever it takes" to examine voting flaws and "make sure every vote is counted." But they're not seeking to overturn the race either, focusing instead on issuing a report on how to improve future elections - due out next spring.

The main effort to actually channel election investigations into a win for Kerry is being led by a fair election group called the Alliance for Democracy. The organization says it will press the Ohio Supreme Court to review what it says is abundant evidence of election irregularities and ask the court for a declaratory judgment which names Kerry the winner.

"We are basically going to make allegations that the votes, if properly counted, would reveal a different result then that which was certified by the Secretary of State not in the change in number, but a change in the outcome by which candidate won," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus lawyer who represents the group. He says that for this to happen, the December 13 meeting of the state electors should be postponed. "The Supreme Court has the power to order that the election outcome be determined differently than what was presented by the Secretary of State by a standard of proof and by clear and convincing evidence," said Arnebeck.

Gathering The Evidence and Making It Count

As an example of the type of evidence that might overturn the Ohio election, Arnebeck points to a computer error on election night which recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in the Columbus suburb of Gahanna where the precinct recorded only 638 people casting votes on Danaher electronic voting machines. He said concerns about "inadvertent migration of votes from one candidate to the other" has been raised in a number of Ohio counties with different types of voting systems. According to Arnebeck, they include Clermont County's optical scan machines and punch card ballot readers used in Warren, Butler and Hamilton County.

About 70% of Ohio voters cast their ballots via punch cards. Arnebeck notes that the certification of votes on December 6th did not address the 92,000 spoiled punch card ballots with no valid presidential choice which he says will be addressed in the recount process. The Alliance for Democracy also plans to use sworn testimony gathered in public hearings in Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland where witnesses charged that election officials disenfranchised voters by withholding voting machines in African American and Democratic precincts - while dispersing them generously to Republican leaning suburbs.

But the Alliance for Democracy is particularly concerned about voting machines. According to Arnebeck, statistical anomalies in vote totals are evident in both a statewide county by county macro analysis of the vote, and a micro analysis on the precinct level. He says his group seeks to break the vote analysis down by county and determine if the anomalies are a result of error, inadvertence or fraud. "We want to clearly establish what happened and that can include having all the machines and all the documents subjected to analysis by the top experts in the country," said Arnebeck.

Getting election officials to agree to an analysis of voting machines has proved difficult. On November 22, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) announced that they had sent letters to voting officials in eight counties around the country urging them to allow independent testing of their electronic voting machines. The two groups were among the 60 organizations in the Election Protection Coalition which ran an election day hotline and the web-based Election Incident Reporting System. The Coalition received 37,862 reports of election irregularities, including 2,112 incidents concerning voting machines.

The two major machine errors involved voters who selected Kerry on an electronic touch screen and saw their vote change to Bush on a summary screen. The second was a specific problem with the Sequoia AVC Edge machine where voters saw preselected default choices presented to them. According to EFF and VFF, counties where the most serious problems were reported include Mahoning and Franklin County in Ohio, Broward and Palm Beach Counties Broward and Palm Beach in Florida, in Florida, Mercer and Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania, Harris County in Texas and Bernalillo County in New Mexico.

The response so far from these counties? "Pretty much zilch," says EFF staff attorney Matt Zimmerman who notes that many county officials are under heavy pressure to certify the vote. Matt Damschroder, directer of Ohio's Franklin County Board of Elections, said officials there have received the request. But he insisted that the county had "no problems" with it's Danaher e-voting machines - the same machines that malfunctioned in Gahanna. "They functioned as they were intended to on election night," said Damschroder.

Even when election activists appeal to the courts, Zimmerman says judges often give local election officials broad authority on how to conduct machine audits. Former Riverside, California County Board of Supervisors candidate Linda Soubirous learned this lesson when she challenged Riverside County and its Registrar of Voters earlier this year. The county refused to conduct a proper recount of a race that Soubirous lost by 45 votes. Soubirous requested examination of the audit logs and redundant memory stored in the machines. But the Registrar refused to grant her access to any of this material arguing it was not "relevant" to a recount. According to Zimmerman, a state court ruled that local election officials could decide what recount data is relevant and the case is now on appeal.

"If we wanted to get close to voter intent, that would mean going to machines individually to look at data," said Zimmerman. "But a judge is mostly going to defer to election officials and the law does not require them to look at individual machines and undergo the labor intensive task to get the vote counts - the judge will not require them to do that."

Even if activists turn up evidence of tampering with punch card readers or optical scan machines, Zimmerman says there are few clear guidelines or laws that would force officials to act on the information. "To the extent that there is some kind of paper record, that is good thing," said Zimmerman. "But unless the laws and regulations force you to do something with it, they are almost worthless."

Will recount activists be able to look inside each voting machine in Ohio to conduct a post election analysis? If they get the right judge with the right disposition who lets them look at the logs, it's possible, says Zimmerman. But if the judge simply requires that the election tallies be recounted, he says the counties may just look at the votes after they have been filtered through a central tabulation system.

EFF is trying to use the Open Records Act to get access to voting data, but Zimmerman said it cannot be used effectively to impound voting machines. "It underscores the notion that election laws have not caught up to technology," said Zimmerman. "Right now we are up against a ticking clock and time is running out to uncover problems and malfeasance that might have been examined."

Ann Harrison covers politics for CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and other publications. She can be reached at ah@well.com .

Reprinted from CounterPunch:

http://counterpunch.org/harrison12082004.html

Theodore D. Graves: 'Election fraud or just suspicions?'

Posted on Thursday, December 09 @ 09:51:20 EST By Theodore D. Graves, San Francisco Chronicle

If the United States were a Third World country, our Nov. 2 election would not pass certification by international monitors. As former President Carter has explained on National Public Radio, we lack a central, nonpartisan election commission to guarantee fair and equal treatment of all voters nationwide, our candidates do not receive free and equal access to the media to deliver their message, voting procedures are not uniform throughout the county, and there is not a "paper trail" available in all cases to guarantee an honest recount where called for.

To insure against fraud in the counting and reporting of election results, international monitors depend on the same kind of election-day exit polls as were conducted in the United States. Unlike earlier polls that attempt to predict a future election outcome, which are therefore subject to all manner of potential errors, exit polls estimate the characteristics of a population which has already voted.

It is as if you had a huge jar of M&Ms and you took out several handfuls at random, counted the proportion of each color in your sample, and knowing the total number of M&Ms in the jar, used these results to estimate how many were red, brown, green or yellow in the jar as a whole. If your sample was reasonably large and randomly drawn from the jar, it would estimate these totals with a high degree of accuracy.

In our own recent presidential election, exit polls were conducted nationwide for the media by two of the world's most respected professional exit-polling firms: Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. Pollsters were sent to carefully selected, representative polling locations throughout each state. They then interviewed about every fifth voter emerging from the polling place during random periods throughout the day. Total samples from each state were large -- about 2,000 or more voters -- and the error of estimate was small -- plus or minus less than half of 1 percent in 99 cases out of 100.

By agreement among the networks, the results of these exit polls were not reported to the public on election day, so as not to influence the ongoing voting process or lead to embarrassing "premature" calling of outcomes by the networks, as happened for Florida in 2000. But they were shared with -- and believed by -- campaign officials and by the candidates themselves, and they were widely reported over the Internet.

As we now know, on the basis of these exit polls, Kerry was expected to win. Then the "actual" tallies began to pour in. This was the "November surprise." In state after state, Kerry saw his expected lead shrink or vanish. And when he lost Ohio -- which exit polls estimated he would win by 4.5 percent -- he "lost" the election.

According to Steven Freeman, who teaches research methods at the University of Pennsylvania, for 10 exit polls among the 11 battleground states he analyzed to be this far off as a result of random error, particularly when all discrepancies favored Bush, is essentially impossible.

As officials testified this week at a forum called by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and for an investigation by Congress' General Accounting Office, electronic voting theft is incredibly easy. There have also been widespread reports of election irregularities -- more than 38,000 nationwide at last count, according to Verified Voting Foundation's election-incident reporting system. Most of those irregularities appear to favor Republicans.

If this were an election taking place in a Third World dictatorship, or a former part of the Soviet Union (Georgia and Ukraine, for recent examples) people would be in the streets screaming "fraud" and demanding the president's resignation. Democratic pundits have been wringing their hands, trying to figure out the best tactics for future victory. The answer is simple: Make sure every eligible voter gets a chance to vote, and that every vote gets recorded, counted and accurately reported -- and that a secure paper trail exists to ensure the validity of any required recount.

Suspicions of election fraud undermine the very foundation of our democracy and need to be addressed. Theodore D. Graves ( tgraves@monitor.net ) a retired professor of anthropology and social psychology, has taught research methods at the University of Colorado, UCLA and the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Reprinted from The San Francisco Chronicle: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/09/EDGSVA88P51.DTL