t r u t h o u t - FOCUS: American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio

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Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:01:55 -0800

t r u t h o u t - FOCUS: American Democracy Hangs by a

Thread in Ohio

 

<http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121704Z.shtml>

 

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.

 

-------

 

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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