[Mb-civic] Ohio tally fit for Ukraine

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/jgonzalez/
Ohio tally fit for Ukraine 
Voter fraud in the Ukraine? Give me a break. 
It has been a month now and we still don't have a clear count 
of the votes for our own presidential race from the state of 
Ohio. 
For those who may have forgotten, Ohio supposedly assured 
George W. Bush a second term in the White House - only the 
most important job on the planet. 
The morning after the election, we were told Bush was ahead 
of John Kerry in that state's unofficial count by 139,000 votes, 
or 2.5%. 
At the time there were 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots 
and an unknown number of overseas ballots, but Kerry 
concluded they would not produce enough of a margin to 
erase his deficit, so he promptly conceded. 
At the same time, given the bitter Democratic memories of the 
2000 Florida fiasco, he assured his supporters he would fight 
to have every vote properly counted this time. 
Within a few days, other problems began to show up in Ohio's 
preliminary tally. 
We learned, for example, that an additional 93,000 voters had 
gone to the polls yet machines had registered no preference of 
theirs for President. Only a manual recount can tell us for sure 
what happened to those 93,000 ballots. 
Then, red-faced election officials in Franklin County admitted 
a computer error on Election Night had tallied 4,258 votes for 
Bush in a precinct where only 638 people voted. That 
correction alone will drop Bush's margin by 3,620. 
And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have 
uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black 
neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the 
precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County 
Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located. 
In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two 
fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well. 
In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin 
Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and 
Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-
immigrant Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes! 
That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as all 
those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach 
County in 2000. 
In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally was 
Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael 
Badnarik 163. 
Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two 
precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like 
most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting. 
"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman 
Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward since 
1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines." 
But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few 
other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory 
United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51 
votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I 
precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27 
ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent 
candidates received 9 votes from both precincts. 
The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in 
which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes 
between them. 
In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al 
Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the 
black community this time, and even though blacks voted 
overwhelmingly for Kerry. 
If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then 
quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow 
ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. So 
far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been 
posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by 
Thursday all official results are due. 
On Monday, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell will certify 
Ohio's results and then a manual recount will be requested by 
the Green and Libertarian parties. 
The Badnarik and Peroutka surge was not the only unusual 
occurrence in Cleveland. 
Also unusual was the drop in the Democratic vote in scores of 
precincts compared to 2000. But more on that next time. 

Originally published on November 30, 2004 

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