[Mb-civic] American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio

[Michael Butler]

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

  December 15, 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).

 

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