Election Issues

Click on the below links to read the transcripts from public hearings on voter irregularities in Ohio:

New Faith Baptist Church Public Hearing, Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, November 13, 2004.

The Franklin County Courthouse Public Hearing, Columbus, Ohio, Monday, November 15, 2004.

I give my heartfelt thanks to Steven Elias for obtaining the precinct canvass data and producing the spread sheets that made it possible for me to write this report in a timely manner.

A 14-page letter dated December 2, 2004 from four Members of Congress to J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, and posted online at

http://www.spidel.net/ohblackwellltr12204.pdf

contains many disturbing allegations concerning the presidential election in Ohio. Here is an excerpt:

Revised December 24, 2004

I give my heartfelt thanks to Ellis Goldberg for obtaining and abstracting the data from the Lucas County canvass records, and to Coleen Christensen for producing the spreadsheets, which made it possible for me to write this report in a timely manner.

The very first thing we all noticed when examining the precinct canvass records for Lucas County was the distribution of turnout.  The range is striking, and turnout is distinctly higher in the Bush precincts than in the Kerry precincts.  In some precincts the reported turnout is too high to be credible.

PRECINCTS WITH HIGHEST TURNOUT, TOLEDO SUBURBS
 
Precinct                 Turnout  Bush  Kerry
 
MONCLOVA TOWNSHIP 10      92.67    217    161
MONCLOVA TOWNSHIP 11      92.46    424    298
SYLVANIA TOWNSHIP J       91.97     84     40

Racism is best known among white folks for the overt ways that bigotry chooses to abuse. This is what allows white liberals to excuse themselves from charges that they are racist, because (God bless 'em) they don't set out to hurt anybody. But Ralph Ellison titled his classic novel Invisible Man, because racism is a grim problem also of what white folks do not see. And this problem persists insufferably, right down to this morning's news.

On this day after the election-fraud hearings led by John Conyers and his Democratic colleagues at the Judiciary Committee, I am beginning to feel the effects of racism's one-two punch. On the overt side, we have the written testimony of Judith A. Browne, acting co-director of the Advancement Project in Washington, D.C.

For Browne, whose testimony to the Conyers committee is posted online, "voters of color" have been targets of Republican-led disenfranchisement in the elections of 2000 and 2004.

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/brownevotestmt12804.pdf target=brown

COLUMBUS -- The bitter battle over the stolen November 2 election in Ohio has turned into a rapidly escalating all-out multi-front war with the outcome of the real presidential vote count increasingly in doubt. 

In Columbus, major demonstrations on Saturday, December 4, have been followed by an angry confrontation between demonstrators and state police at the office of Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Bush-Cheney state chairman who is also officially in charge of certifying the election, at least for now.   Civil Rights leader Jesse Jackson has called on Blackwell to recuse himself from dealings with the election, saying his role as Bush-Cheney chairman has compromised his objectivity in delivering fair election results.   

In Philadelphia, the Republican Party hired local people including down-and-out addicts as neighborhood poll watchers, paid the poll watchers to challenge their neighbors' voting, and sent visiting teams of burly enforcers in window-tinted vans in a mixed strategy of intimidation, pay and misinformation to suppress voting on November 2, according to a Brooklyn law student who worked as a poll monitor. "I witnessed the difficulties of getting out the vote firsthand, exacerbated by the Republican Party's operations in urban, predominantly Democratic communities," she says.

Warren County, a traditional Republican stronghold northeast of Cincinnati, came to national attention on election night. While the nation awaited returns from Ohio, the state that would decide the election, county officials locked down the administrative building and prohibited all independent observers from watching the vote count.

An analyst who has all the vote data for 2000 and 2004 by precinct in several Ohio counties did a detailed analysis by precinct of the huge increase in Bush votes and margin in Warren county. This county first did a lockdown to count the votes, then apparently did another lockdown to recount the votes later- resulting in an even bigger Bush margin and very unusual new patterns.

Several very unusual patterns were evident in the history and the vote totals by precinct. The analyst concludes:

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided – known as “spoilage” in election jargon-because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. On November 5, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported there were a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television’s Newsnight. The documentary, “Bush Family Fortunes,” based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

Kerry won. Here’s the facts.

I know you don’t want to hear it. You can’t face one more hung chad. But I don’t have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it’s my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Moveonpac.org was responsible for bringing Michael Moore to the Palace Theatre on Saturday night, October 30. When I arrived to cover the event I was unexpectedly ushered to the basement for an impromptu press conference. When I entered the press room I was shocked to find that only one of the major media outlets in the biggest city in Ohio felt the need to send anyone to cover the event. With Cleveland polling very much toward Senator John Kerry and Cincinnati going for President George W. Bush, Columbus was believed by many to be the prize of the state.