Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
URL:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
from Rollingstone.com
Republicans prevented more
than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted
-- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk and read about it in our
National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents,
sources, charts and commentary.
Like
many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns
on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming
victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George
Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results,
Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's
victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few
exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election.
The
Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1)
and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote
theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
But
despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply
troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters
living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to
vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web
site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul
& Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to
register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding
Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988
votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a
presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the
federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1
million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for
every 100 cast.(10)
The
reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral
college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the
rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter
drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines
and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A
precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high
turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible
turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even
invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the
official vote count.(11)
Any
election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by
county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in
2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election
Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000
elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and
municipalities.''
But
what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly
partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited
George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that
the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the
will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials
and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to
fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at
least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were
prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) --
more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601
votes.(13) (See Ohio's
Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the
election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004
showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls,
thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to
cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling
evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for
Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000
votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
''It
was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002
that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line
for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote
because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who
was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''
Indeed,
the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most
experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the
father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and
votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those
counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a
sore thumb.''
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable
discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states
weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be
accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy
favored President Bush.(16)
Over
the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among
pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable.
Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own
behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting
booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely
accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed
the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost
never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both
Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so
reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of
elections in Third
World
countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to
step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush
administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the
presidency.(20)
But
that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media
organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an
embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting
investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites
and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted,
retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with
the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as
flawed.(21)
''The
people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients,
recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor
for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old
models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''
In
fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most
reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the
ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky
International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll
for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of
Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky
selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times
larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of
error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On
the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed
by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead
and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with
fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to
bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As
the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead
in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and
Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls
even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds
Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical
likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit
polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or
George Bush loses.''(32)
But
as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible
disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the
eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls
had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN
had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results
showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent
more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According
to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania
who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those
shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in
sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that
the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical
battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or
random error.'' (See The
Tale of the Exit Polls)
Puzzled
by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data
released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I
despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this
because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In
his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls,
Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical
analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.
In
its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky
was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in
essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans
were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) --
displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls
in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry
peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me
that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36)
Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his
theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general,
Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush
voters.''(37)
Now,
thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of
eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In
fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to
answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and
the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit
survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The
data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,''
observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''
What's
more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the
official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush
received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an
average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by
eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of
one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed
the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
''When
you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the
supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are
higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors,
higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and
higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these
are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly
ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
The
evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data
Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against
the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky.
In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they
discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again --
against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in
Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity
benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered
''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the
exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this
precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The
statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such
results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of
vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the
hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's
official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to
Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical
explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost
uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely
consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every
Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties
overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in
an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled
to Ohio a total of forty-nine times
during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)
But
in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge
of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's
re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad
powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting
standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the
conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he
had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in
fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the
2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand
the success of his counterpart Katherine
Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired
Bush's campaign there.(46)
Blackwell
-- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan
eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in
cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage
amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He
has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and
during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds
of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic
strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge
rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)
''The
secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,''
says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in
Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example
of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the
exercise of the right to vote.''
The
most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep.
John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52)
Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of
voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held
public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints
from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that
outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in
Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional
misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)
''Blackwell
made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,''
Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic
voters. We had hearings in Columbus
for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high.
Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to
them before.''
When
ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to
subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone
interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his
campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day.
Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the
campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and
Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the
names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the
previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for
Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and
2004.(56)
There
were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly
belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly
registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote --
often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to
the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than
half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59)
-- the lowest in the state.
According
to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of
thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged
voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to
election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the
opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history.
Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties
canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October
4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were
outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis
before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic
strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in
Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants
off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus
confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To
stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the
Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly
minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in
electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used
such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and
Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain
from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority
voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000
newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere
eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett --
who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to
invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the
letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the
challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There
were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings:
The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were
serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses
differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing
address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations
were fraudulent.
By
law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from
the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were
rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably
disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one
Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not
that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to
vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in
the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans
contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation,
sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of
challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)
Next
page
--
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest
Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
2)
The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About
Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.
3)
United States Department of Defense, <>August
6, 2004.
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004
Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.
5)
Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald
Tribune, September
20, 2004.
6)
Meg Landers, ''Librarian
Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.
7)
Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid
pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP
voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis,
MN), October 27, 2004.
8)
Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004:
Election Results for the U.S. President.
9)
Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary
Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2
James
W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New
Mexico Worst at
Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A
Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots &
Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election
Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.
11)
Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.
12)
See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''
13)
Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004:
Election Results for the U.S. President.
14)
Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, ''Democracy
at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June 22, 2005. Page 5
15)
See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''
16)
Evaluation
of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19,
2005, Page 3
17)
This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002,
previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18)
Dick Morris, ''Those
Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The Hill, November 4, 2004.
19)
Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New York Times,
October 17, 2004.
20)
Matt Kelley, ''U.S.
Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,'' Associated Press, December 11, 2004.
Daniel
Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine
Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.
21)
Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit
Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,'' Seven Stories Press,
July 2006, Page 102.
22)
Evaluation
of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19,
2005, Page 3.
23)
Mitofsky
International
24)
Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,'' The New
York Times, August
10, 1994.
25)
Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media
Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP),
January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26)
Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The
2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the
Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.'' FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9
27)
Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29)
Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New
York Times, November
5, 2004.
30)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31)
Analysis
of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count
Votes. Baiman R, et al. March
31, 2005. Page 3.
32)
Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34)
Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media
Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January
19, 2005, Page 4.
35)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36)
Interview with John Zogby
37)
Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media
Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP),
January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39)
Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40)
''The
Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable
Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data
Archive, January 23,
2006.
41)
''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.
42)
The Washington Post, ''Charting
the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.
43)
John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,'' Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
44)
Ohio
Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''
45)
Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46)
Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November
18, 2000.
47)
http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48)
Joe Hallett, ''Governor;
Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.
49)
Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage
Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland,
OH), October 29, 2004.
50)
Raw Story, ''Republican
Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.''
51)
In the United States District Court For the Northern
District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky
County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No.
3:04CV7582, Page 8.
52)
Preserving
Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary
Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.
53)
Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54)
Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55)
The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.
56)
Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57)
Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging
of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in
Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
58)
Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59)
Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60)
Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61)
Ford Fessenden, ''A
Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.
62)
Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go
'Under the Radar' in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.
63)
Jo Becker, ''GOP
Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
64)
Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65)
In the United States District Court for the Southern
District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy
Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.
66)
Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big
Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67)
Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George Washington Law
Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68)
Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big
Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69)
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting
Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.
70)
Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71)
Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of State, to All
County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26,
2004).
72)
Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges
Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October
27, 2004.
73)
In the United States District Court for the Southern
District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy
Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.
74)
LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News
Messenger, October
26, 2004.
''I'm
afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never
going to show up on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky
Board of Elections, told local reporters. ''Many of them are young people who
have registered for the first time. I've called some of these people, and they
are perfectly legitimate.''(75)
On
October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional
right to due process and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge
Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge(76) -- but not before tens of
thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly
registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's
ruling, stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged
registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.
On
October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the
court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail
does not implicate fraud,'' the court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement
effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority voters predominate,
interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79)
Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the
battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)
Republicans
in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to
citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated
prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off
before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message,
Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report,
a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike
Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around
the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for
their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones
to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts
with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84)
This
was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican
National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from
Texas who were deployed to battleground
states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal
defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the
efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the
recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers
Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in
from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters''
was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House,
where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)
IV. Barriers to Registration
To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard,
Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register
new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th --
less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would
process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed
white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to
ROLLING STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The
postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough
paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their
registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet Blackwell's order also
applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further
specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that
miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be
processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a
registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card.(90)
Blackwell's
directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one
may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that ''is not
material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to
vote.''(91) The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos.
Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their
efforts invalidated.(92) Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could
no longer accept its own registration forms.(93) Even Blackwell couldn't follow
the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff
distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under
his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his
order on September 28th -- six days before the registration deadline.(94)
But
by then, the damage was done. Election boards across the state, already
understaffed and backlogged with registration forms, were unable to process
them all in time. According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the
nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the
city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election
officials,(95) and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely
inconsequential omissions on their registration cards.(96) Statewide, the study
concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable
registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by
barely two percent.(97)
Despite
the widespread problems, Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration
errors after the election -- in Toledo -- but the report by his own inspectors
offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued
the entire state.(98) The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in
the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of
elections and the county Republican Party.(99) The GOP post was previously held
by her husband, Tom Noe,(100) who currently faces felony charges for embezzling
state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through
intermediaries to the Bush campaign.(101)
State
inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ''areas of grave
concern.''(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe
and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board
officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican
suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the
board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the
city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project
Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th
deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ''We may not get to
them.''(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an
entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual
card, as required by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of
confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline -- an error, state
inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised ''several thousand''
voters from Democratic strongholds.(107)
The
most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to
allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office
to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations(108) --
records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second
day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official
tampering with the documents.(109) Investigators slammed the elections board
for ''a series of egregious blunders'' that caused ''the destruction,
mutilation and damage of public records.''(110)
On
Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse
where blank ballots were kept out in the open, ''with no security measures in
place.''(111) The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to
be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives
refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.(112)
In
April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But
once again, the damage was done. At a ''Victory 2004'' rally held in Toledo four days before the election,
President Bush himself singled out a pair of ''grass-roots'' activists for
special praise: ''I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for
their leadership in Lucas County.''(113)
V. ''The Wrong Pew''
In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters
from receiving provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were
mandated in 2002, when Congress passed a package of reforms called the Help
America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of the most egregious injustice
in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of lawfully registered minority voters from the
polls because their names didn't appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under the
law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be
allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if
the voter's registration proves valid.(114)
''Provisional
ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea
Wang, an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald
Ford on the commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act.
''But then different states erected barriers, and this new right became totally
eviscerated.''
In
Ohio, Blackwell worked from the
beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are
most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move
often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.)
Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should
make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct,
and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible.(115) When the
ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain
his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make
provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were
ineligible: ''By not even mentioning this group -- the primary beneficiaries of
HAVA's provisional-voting provisions -- Blackwell apparently seeks to
accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in
2000.''(116)
But
instead of complying with the judge's order to expand provisional balloting,
Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and
made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther
King Jr. and the apostle Paul -- saying that he'd rather go to jail than follow
federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr's ruling on
October 23rd -- but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of
voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election
Day without being offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also
invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee
voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not
come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to
filter down to the precinct level at all -- denying the franchise to even more
eligible voters.(119)
We
will never know for certain how many voters in Ohio were denied ballots by Blackwell's two illegal orders.
But it is possible to put a fairly precise number on those turned away by his
most disastrous directive. Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station
in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to
toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct -- a move
guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with
multiple polling places. On October 14th, Judge Carr overruled the order, but Blackwell
appealed.(120) In court, he was supported by his friend and campaign
contributor Tom Noe, who joined the case as an intervenor on behalf of the
secretary of state.(121) He also enjoyed the backing of Attorney General John
Ashcroft, who filed an amicus brief in support of Blackwell's position --
marking the first time in American history that the Justice Department had gone
to court to block the right of voters to vote.(122) The Sixth Circuit, stacked
with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided with Blackwell.(123)
Blackwell
insists that his decision kept the election clean. ''If we had allowed this
notion of ?voters without borders' to exist,'' he says, ''it would have opened
the door to massive fraud.'' But even Republicans were shocked by the move. DeForest
Soaries, the GOP chairman of the Election Assistance Commission -- the federal
agency set up to implement the Help America Vote Act -- upbraided Blackwell,
saying that the commission disagreed with his decision to deny ballots to
voters who showed up at the wrong precinct. ''The purpose of provisional
ballots is to not turn anyone away from the polls,'' Soaries explained. ''We
want as many votes to count as possible.''(124)
The
decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic
counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose
boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further
compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the
secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election
Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no
longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that
they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead,
thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out
after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)
In
Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each
got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both
of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north
side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But
when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt
end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but
Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building.
If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to
choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those
of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct
-- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)
All
told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's registration barriers
did the trick. Black voters in the state -- who went overwhelmingly for Kerry
-- were twenty percent more likely than whites to be forced to cast a
provisional ballot.(129) In the end, nearly three percent of all voters in Ohio
were forced to vote provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots
were ultimately rejected.(131)
VI. Long Lines
When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who
had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell
discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the
voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever
making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati
routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo --
which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often
waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in
line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters
casting their ballots after three in the morning.(132)
A
five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National
Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters
who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a
ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost
vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and
Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average
of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for
whites.(135)
Next
page
--
75) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News
Messenger, October
26, 2004.
76)
Miller
v. Blackwell, (S.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004)
77)
James Drew and Steve Eder, ''Court
Rejects GOP Voter Challenge; Some Counties Hold Hearings Anyhow; 200 Voters
Turned Away,'' Toledo Blade, October 30, 2004.
78)
United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican
National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
79)
United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican
National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
80)
Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter
Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
Greg
Palast, ''New Florida Vote Scandal Feared,'' BBC News, October 26, 2004.
81)
Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter
Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
82)
Greg J. Borowski, ''GOP Demands
IDs of 37,000 in City,'' Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October
30, 2004.
83)
''The
Disenfranchisement of the Re-Enfranchised; How Confusion Over Felon Voter
Eligibility in Ohio Keeps Qualified Ex-Offender Voters From the Polls,'' Prison Reform Advocacy Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2004.
84)
Preserving Democracy, 64.
Note: Additional reporting contributed to this paragraph.
85)
Gardner Selby, ''Hundreds of Texans Ride Bandwagons Around U.S.; Volunteers Say
Election is Too Important Not to Hit the Campaign Trail,'' San Antonio
Express-News (Texas), October 15, 2004.
86)
''Down to the Wire,'' Newsweek, November 15, 2004.
87)
Lynda Gorov and Anne E. Kornblut, ''Gore
to Challenge Results; No Plans to Concede; top Fla. Court refuses to order
resumption of Miami-Dade County,'' The Boston Globe, November 24,
2000.
88)
Al Kamen, ''Miami
'Riot' Squad: Where are they Now?'' Washington Post, January
24, 2005.
89)
Al Kamen, ''Walking
the Talk,'' Washington Post, April 21, 2006.
90)
Secretary of State Directive, No. 2004-31, Section II, September 7, 2004.
91)
Tokaji, pg. 1227
and
Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1971(a)(2)(B) (2000).
92)
Jim Bebbington and Laura Bischoff, ''Blackwell Rulings Rile Voting Advocates,''
Dayton Daily News.
93)
Congress of the United States House of Representatives, Committee on the
Judiciary, letter
from Conyers to Blackwell
94)
Catherine Candisky, ''Secretary of State Lifts Order on Voting Forms; Lighter
Paper Now Deemed Acceptable for Registration,'' Columbus Dispatch, September 30, 2004.
95)
Analyses
of Voter Disqualification, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2004, Greater
Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition, updated May 9, 2006, page 14.
96)
Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page 5.
97)
Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page. 1.
98)
Lucas
County Board of Elections -- Results of Investigation Following November 2004
General Election, April
5, 2005, Richard Weghorst
and Faith Lyon.
99)
''Feds Confirm Investigation of GOP Campaign Contributor,'' The Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 28, 2005.
100)
Mark Naymik, ''Coin Dealer Raised Chunk of Change for Bush,'' Plain Dealer,
August 7, 2005.
101)
Christopher D. Kirkpatrick, ''Noe
Indicted for Laundering Money to Bush Campaign,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2005
Mike
Wilkinson and James Drew, ''Grand
Jury Charges Noe with 53 Felony Counts,'' Toledo Blade, February
13, 2006
102)
Lucas County Report, pg. 2.
103)
Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
104)
Lucas County Report, pg. 10.
105)
Lucas County Report, pages 9-10.
106)
Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
107)
Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
108)
Lucas County Report, pg. 18.
109)
Lucas County Report, pages 18-19.
110)
Lucas County Report, pg. 19.
111)
Lucas County Report, pages 4, 6.
112)
Lucas County Report, pg. 6.
113)
''Remarks
by the President at Victory 2004 Rally,'' Seagate Convention Centre, Toledo, Ohio, October
29, 2004, The White
House.
note:
Bernadette and Tom Noe's last name is incorrectly spelled ''Noy'' in the
official White House transcript.
114)
Help America Vote Act, Title
III, Uniform and Nondiscriminatory Election Technology and Administration
Requirements, Subtitle A Requirements, Section 302.
115)
Directive No. 2004-33 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of State, to All
County Boards of Elections 1 (Sept. 16, 2004.).
116)
In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western
Division, The
Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No.
3:04CV7582, Page 8.
117)
Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, ''Defiant
Blackwell Rips Judge; Secretary Says He'd go to Jail Before Rewriting Ballot
Memo,'' Cincinnati Enquirer, October 22, 2004.
118)
Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell, (N.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004).
And
Tokaji, pg. 1229
119)
Tokaji, pg. 1231
120)
''Judge, Blackwell, Spar Over Provisional Ballots,'' The Associated Press,
October 20, 2004.
121)
In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western
Division, The League
of Women Voters of Ohio, et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04 CV
7622
122)
David G. Savage, Richard B. Schmitt, ''Bush Seeks Limit
to Suits Over Voting Rights,'' Los Angeles Times, October
29, 2004.
123)
Judge
Julia Smith Gibbons August 2, 2002
Judge John M. Rogers November 27, 2002
Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton May 5, 2003
Judge Deborah L. Cook May 7, 2003
124)
Darrell Rowland and Lee Leonard, ''Federal Agency Distances Itself from Ohio
Official; Blackwell Says Their Provisional-Balloting Positions are the Same,'' Columbus
Dispatch (Ohio), October 20, 2004.
125)
David S. Bernstein, ''Questioning
Ohio,''
Providence Phoenix, November 12-18, 2004.
126)
Norma Robbins, ''Facts
to Ponder About the 2004 General Election,'' May 10, 2006.
127)
Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging
of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of November 2nd Provisional Ballots Axed
in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
128)
Interview with Stephanie Tubbs Jones
129)
Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, ''Democracy at Risk:
The 2004 Election in Ohio,'' June 22, 2005. Page 6.
130)
Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
131)
Ohio Secretary of State Web site, Provisional Ballots; Official
Tabulation, November
2, 2004.
132)
Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, ''Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters
in Ohio,'' Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
Christopher
Hitchens, ''Ohio's
Odd Numbers,'' Vanity Fair.
Additional
analysis by Bob Fitrakis, editor of the Columbus Free Press, and Richard Hayes Phillips.
133)
Democracy at Risk, pg. 3.
134)
Preserving Democracy, pg. 29.
135)
Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
The
long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP
efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting
machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards
to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that
didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of
them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least
twenty percent.(136)
Republican
officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting
machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such
problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help
America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in
federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable
systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why?
Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that
there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be
retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)
''No
one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep.
Kucinich. ''He's a rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute
details of his office. There's no doubt that he knew the effect of not having
enough voting machines in some areas.''
At
liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local
election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated
surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount
Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at
all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers report concluded that the
''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies to
specifically target Democratic areas.''(140)
In
Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters(141) -- more than half of
them black(142) -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000
machines to handle the huge surge.(143) ''On Election Day, the county
experienced an unprecedented turnout that could only be compared to a 500-year
flood,'' says Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of
Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.(145) But
instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder
decided to ''make do'' with 2,741 machines.(146) And to make matters worse, he
favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The
Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al
Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP
precincts received eight additional machines.(147) An analysis by voter advocates
found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine
ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios
were in Kerry country.(148)
The
result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free
Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines,
averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three
hours and fifteen minutes.(149) ''The allocation of voting machines in Franklin
County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of
African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at
Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and
around Columbus.(150)
By
midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather
than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper
ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an
invitation to fraud.(151) A lawsuit ensued, and the handwritten affidavits
submitted by voters and election officials offer a heart-rending snapshot of an
electoral catastrophe in the offing:(152)
From
Columbus Precinct 44D:
''There are three voting machines at this precinct. I have been informed
that in prior elections there were normally four voting machines. At 1:45 p.m.
there are approximately eighty-five voters in line. At this time, the line to
vote is approximately three hours long. This precinct is largely African-American.
I have personally witnessed voters leaving the polling place without voting due
to the length of the line.''
From
Precinct 40:
''I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+
years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the
longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect
the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I
have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been
offered.''
Precinct
65H:
''I observed a broken voting machine that was not in use for approximately
two hours. The precinct judge was very diligent but could not get through to
the BOE.''
Precinct
18A:
''At 4 p.m. the average wait time is about
4.5 hours and continuing to increase?. Voters are continuing to leave without
voting.''
As
day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a
temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper
ballots.(153) But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published
in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already
given up and gone home.(154) When closing time came at the polls, according to
the Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens who had
waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio law, which
stipulates that those in line at closing time are allowed to remain and
vote.(155)
The
voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly Democrats. Because of
the unequal distribution of voting equipment, the median turnout in Franklin County precincts won by Kerry was fifty-one percent, compared to
sixty-one percent in those won by Bush. Assuming sixty percent turnout under
more equitable conditions, Kerry would have gained an additional 17,000 votes
in the county.(156)
In
another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed
3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties --
most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was
billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by
fraud,''(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create
delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that
the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''(159)
The
day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling
that ''there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and
pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.'' Dlott was also
troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County,
fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls,
compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when
the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul
Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ''I have faith,'' he ruled,
''that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground
will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified
voters to cast their ballots.''(161)
In
fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling
stations, where they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic
precincts. By the end of the day, thanks to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the
GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list of 35,000 names from
its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to the
survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the
polls because of registration challenges -- even though federal law required
that they be provided with provisional ballots.(163)
VII. Faulty Machines
Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican
officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only
800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting
machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas
around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the
touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be
recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry
votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported
by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters
complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and
it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their
ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident,
an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna
recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that
precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed
up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was
corrected before the certified vote count.)
In
addition to problems with electronic machines, Ohio's vote was skewed by old-fashioned punch-card equipment
that posed what even Blackwell acknowledged was the risk of a ''Florida-like
calamity.''(170) All but twenty of the state's counties relied on antiquated
machines that were virtually guaranteed to destroy votes(171) -- many of which
were counted by automatic tabulators manufactured by Triad Governmental
Systems,(172) the same company that supplied Florida's notorious butterfly
ballot in 2000. In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for president at all -- most of them on
punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each
election who decide not to cast votes for president -- generally in the range
of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected
elections scholar Dan Tokaji -- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were
invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If counted by hand instead of by
automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been
discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county
hand-counted its ballots.(174)
Most
of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In Cleveland, where nearly 13,000 votes were ruined, a New
York Times analysis found that black precincts suffered more than twice the
rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-leaning
precincts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning
precincts.(176) Last April, a federal court ruled that Ohio's use of punch-card
balloting violated the equal-protection rights of the citizens who voted on
them.(177)
In
addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre
miscounts known as ''ballot crawl.'' In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily
African-American precinct, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka was
credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In Precinct 4N,
where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party
candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik
and Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across
Cleveland -- 11M, 3B, 8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ''It appears that hundreds, if not
thousands, of votes intended to be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as
being for a third-party candidate,'' the Conyers report concludes.(179)
But
it's not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to
Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was
credited with twenty percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush
recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004, compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)
VIII. Rural Counties
Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of
voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in
Ohio may have quietly taken place in
rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud --
and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely
populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect
Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the
presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this
measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve
counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.
Take
the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of
the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn
far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights
and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened
statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for
chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these
twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the
best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621
votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that
thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly
black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that
''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)
Kucinich,
a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket
candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says.
''That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry
go?''
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136) Bernstein, Providence Phoenix
137)
U.S. Election Assistance Comm'n, Funding