Ohio Counts


<< November 2004 >>
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
 01 02 03 04 05 06
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30


If you want to be updated on this weblog Enter your email here:



rss feed



Friday, November 26, 2004
More rallies

Another upcoming rally in Columbus, as reported by We Do Not Concede.

Saturday, December 4th, Rally, Columbus, OH.
1:00 p.m. High & Broad Sts., Ohio Statehouse.
(Contact
www.caseohio.org)

Find out about rallies in other cities on the We Do Not Concede Community page.

Posted at 10:48 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

Sunday's rally

Details on the rally with Jesse Jackson in Columbus, Ohio, courtesy of the Cobb/LaMarche web site:

11/26 - Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb's demand for a recount of the Ohio presidential vote will gain a significant boost this Sunday, when Jesse Jackson visits Columbus, Ohio to publicly announce his support for the recount and other challenges to the controversial Ohio vote. Jackson will be speaking on Sunday at the Mt. Herman Baptist Church on 2283 Sunbury Road in Columbus at 3:30 p.m.

Posted at 10:41 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

Cuyahoga County provisional ballot suit

From Yahoo News:
Suit Seeks Provisional Ballots Re-Examined

A watchdog group sued Friday to try to stop Cuyahoga County's elections board from rejecting thousands of provisional ballots until they are hand checked against voter registration cards.

People for the American Way Foundation said the board wrongly relied only on computerized registration records, which are compiled from the cards and could contain errors such as misspellings.

The rest of the story can be found here

Posted at 02:40 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

Jesse Jackson planning rally with Ohio ministers

I was happy to discover this story. Should at least get more of the eyes of the nation on Ohio, hopefully even raising some questions they would like answers to...

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he plans a Sunday rally in Columbus with ministers from around Ohio to call for an investigation of election irregularities in the state.

Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition civil rights group want to call attention to the fact that votes in Ohio are still undergoing the official count, he said Thursday. Jackson also is questioning whether enough voting machines were provided in inner-city precincts and whether fraud could have occurred in counties that use electronic machines without paper records of ballots.
...
They say they will represent voters who cast ballots Nov. 2 and the challenge will be based on documented cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a pattern of problems in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Posted at 12:09 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

Thursday, November 25, 2004
New Ohio voter transcripts

New Free Press article...

New Ohio voter transcripts feed floodtide of doubt about Republican election manipulation
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

A floodtide of evidence of questionable practices in the 2004 election is mounting fast against Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Republican Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) Director Matt Damschroder. New transcriptions of sworn voter testimony, presented below for the first time, confirm growing suspicions of widespread use of rigged machines. Voters experienced hostility from poll workers, refusal of Republican election officials to follow the law, and discriminatory manipulation of voting machine placement, driving significant numbers of Democrats away from the polls.

The Columbus Dispatch, central Ohio's dominant conservative daily newspaper, which endorsed Bush for the presidency, says Damschroder “has faced criticism locally and across the country from groups that contend an already short supply of voting machines were shifted from Democratic precincts in Columbus to Republican areas outside the city.”


Posted at 08:05 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

More articles, courtesy of CLG

Two more articles about the 2004 election are now featured on the front page of the Citizens for Legitimate Government web site.

Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election By Wayne Madsen

According to informed sources in Washington and Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.

The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.

See also Election Company Has a Long Criminal History. It doesn't directly deal with Ohio, but the larger question of whether the election results can be trusted. On the same site,  you can go to the videos page and watch The Big Fix 2000 to learn about the companies involved in the 2000 presidential election.


Posted at 05:48 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

More Voting Questions Raised

This is from a Daily Kos diary by buckeye prof. It refers to an article in the Columbus Dispatch entitled More Voting Questions Raised. For anyone unfamiliar with the Dispatch, it is a site that requires registration, and it is not free registration like the New York Times and others. Registration to read articles online is $4.95 a month if you are not a subscriber to the Dispatch.

An Akron man filed a complaint with the Summit County Board of Elections saying he "witnessed election judges telling potential voters that they could cast a provisional ballot at any table or precinct and if they did so, it would be counted."

Neil F. Schoenwetter Jr. was a volunteer election challenger for the Democratic Party on Nov. 2 at Copley High School, where six precincts voted.

Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from Ohio and elsewhere, has begun to look into the vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.

The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations at the request of Congress, but the agency's head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of ballot-counting complaints.

The investigation was not triggered by several House Democrats who had written the agency this month, seeking an investigation. That effort was led by senior Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, of Michigan.

Conyers yesterday said he would like the investigation to include allegations that not enough voting machines were available in some Democratic areas, such as Franklin County.

Meanwhile, attorneys for various citizen action groups that plan to contest the results said they are puzzled that vote totals in the presidential race in Warren County far exceed totals in most other statewide and countywide races.


Click here to read the rest of the Kos diary, which details more voting irregularites. It is rather amusing (or upsetting, depending on my mood on a given day) to note the indignity with which some people are responding to the call for a recount...

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett issued a statement questioning the vote challenges:

"These groups have already acknowledged the outcome of the election will not change, and their actions represent a foolish attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency," he said. "I call on the leadership of the Ohio Democratic Party to immediately concede that this worthless recount request is an insult to the integrity of Ohio's election system."


Posted at 12:54 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Comment (1)  

Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Could the Associated Press rig the election?

Thank you Aimee in OKC for pointing out a piece by Lynn Landes entitled "Could the Associated Press Rig the Election?" I recall that independent journalist Lynnn Landes was one of the names listed on the IndyVoter.org page that announced the Ohio hearings. This is from October 22:

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night. However, AP spokesmen Jack Stokes and John Jones refused to explain to this journalist how the AP will receive that information. They refused to confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.

And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity. Computer scientists have long warned that computer voting is an invitation to vote fraud and system failure. An examination of Diebold election software by several computer scientists, including Dr. Avi Rubin and his staff, proved that secret backdoors can be built into computer programs that allow votes to be easily manipulated without detection.


ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company that will reportedly count 50% of all votes, describe on their webpage how "accessible" their results are, "At ES&S, we know election administrators and the public want fast and accurate election results. That is why we have developed several election management system software solutions to make the reporting process easier, more reliable, and more accessible." Diebold, the second largest voting machine company, advertises a similar service. Both ES&S and Diebold have close ties to the Republican Party.

But, can't the AP be trusted? Isn't it an objective non-partisan news organization? Some say no. The AP is batting for a Bush presidency.

In Online Journal, Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence, the hosts of Democratic Talk Radio, wrote, "...the Associated Press ran a story that was widely published in newspapers and on the Internet, headlined "Bush Leads Kerry In Electoral Votes," that could have been written by the Bush campaign. The assignment of states to candidates, the headline and the conclusions were all simply wrong. The Associated Press should print a retraction and work to see that it is widely published."

And on WBAY-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin ran an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. The AP reported, "At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting." According to reports, the AP is now saying the article was a "test article," a never-heard-before journalistic practice.



Posted at 07:50 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Comment (1)  

Richard Hayes Phillips on Ohio Recount

In a piece entitled OHIO TURNS WHITE, FALLS INTO UNDECIDED COLUMN, Phillips presents data and analysis from the Cuyahoga County results. 

Posted at 04:52 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Comment (1)  

Recount updates

In addition to the efforts of the Green and Libertarian parties (sometimes referred to as the "Glibs"--at least by Keith Olbermann), the Ohio Democratic party is planning to participate in the recount...

In Ohio, the state Democratic Party will recruit volunteers to help monitor the recount, along with volunteers organized by the other two parties.

"We are proud to stand up for Democrats all over the world who have asked us to make sure every vote gets counted," said Dennis White, Ohio Democratic Party chair, in making Tuesday's announcement.

Click here for the rest of the article, which also mentions the GAO's decision to investigate irregularities in the 2004 Presidential Election.

You may have heard about a judge denying a recount. Rest assured there will be a recount--
what the judge denied was a request to force a recount before the official count was finished.

And in the Augusta Free Press, there is a guest editorial about "J. Kathererine" (Blackwell)...

If you recall, J. Katherine (well, really, J. Kenneth Blackwell) had insisted, until the courts intervened, that voters register on 80-pound paper stock (even though few election boards had enough to go around) and vote in the precinct in which they had registered even if they still lived in the same county as last election.

Provisional ballots were provided to potentially fraudulent but insistent voters, and the post-election validation process has proven 81 percent were indeed entitled to vote. Damn those liberal judges! And so much for J. Katharine's dedication to open, free and fair elections.

The couple filing suit against J. Katherine in Cincinnati noted that largely black voting precincts were supplied with fewer voting machines per registered voter than other voting precincts, which guaranteed long lines and may have discouraged voters from waiting in line for hours, although many did just that.

Could this have been deliberate? Who will ever know, because this kind of thing doesn't show up in post-election recounts and statistical analyses. But when you realize that the voting machines in black precincts broke down more frequently than those elsewhere, something in Denmark starts to smell fishy. Did J. Katharine send an insufficiency of machines to black voters and then compensate by making sure they were older, less reliable machines to boot?

 

Posted at 02:28 pm by Renee_in_Ohio
Make a comment  

Next Page