Ohio 2004 Case Study

In March 2004, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman published the article Diebold, Electronic Voting, and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on freepress.org and onmotherjones.compredicting that Ohio would be the new Florida in the 2004 presidential election because of the partisan connections of George W. Bush to the private owners of the electronic voting machines and vote tabulation software. The key source for the article, Athan Gibbs, was an African American entrepreneur who had invented a voting machine that gave each voter a verified voting receipt. Approximately one week after the article ran, Gibbs was killed when his car was hit by a truck on an interstate highway.

·       Due in part to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), like most of the rest of the country, the majority of Ohio’s 2004 registration records were managed electronically, and votes were cast and counted electronically.

·       In Auglaize County, the whistle-blowing Deputy Director of the Board of Elections resigned after complaining that a former employee of ES&S was given “inappropriate” access to voting machines prior to Election Day.

·       On Election Day 2004, virtually all Ohio’s votes were tabulated on electronic machines owned by companies with strong Republican ties, including Diebold, ES&S (with ties to Chuck Hagel), and Triad.

·       In 2002, Tom Noe, Chair of the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections, had brought in Sequoia touchscreen machines. But the county used O’Dell’s Diebold machines during the 2004 election. Neither offers an independently monitored paper trail for verifying election outcomes.

·       Noe was later convicted of laundering money into the Bush re-election campaign in a scandal involving ties with Republican Governor Bob Taft, who allowed the state to make fraudulent investments in Noe’s coin business.

·       Tom Noe was succeeded as Chair of the Lucas County Board of Elections by his wife Bernadette. During the 2004 election process, she allowed GOP election officials access to unsecured ballots into an area designated as requiring both a Democrat and Republican to be present together.

·       Under Bernadette Noe’s leadership, the County’s Diebold electronic voting machines broke down before Election Day and remained in disrepair throughout the November 7 election, disenfranchising thousands of voters.

·       In 2003, Ohio businessman Walden “Wally” O’Dell, promised in a fund raising letter to wealthy GOP supporters that he would deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. O’Dell ran Diebold, which owned and operated the bulk of Ohio’s electronic voting machines. Diebold also controlled the software that would count the votes that decided the 2004 presidential election.

·       O’Dell had visited the president’s ranchette – a converted pig farm – in Crawford, Texas, and was a “Bush Ranger” responsible for delivering more than $100,000 to the Bush/Cheney/Rove campaign for a second term. O’Dell hosted at least one Bush fundraiser with an admission price of $1,000 per guest. Except for the Columbus Free Press, no national or Ohio media found this conflict of interest worth noting.

·       Ohio’s Secretary of State in 2004 was J. Kenneth Blackwell, who played a role parallel to that played by Kathleen Harris in Florida 2000. The central part of Blackwell’s job was to administer the state’s elections. He simultaneously co-chaired Ohio’s GOP committee to give Bush and Cheney a second term, a re-run of Katherine Harris’s dual role in Florida 2000.

·       Blackwell was a far-right Republican known for his outspoken contempt for those who disagreed with him. He administered Ohio’s election using an “all the above” barrage of tactics pioneered throughout the Third World by the CIA and other covert operatives since the beginning of the Cold War.

·       To count the votes, Blackwell awarded a no-bid contract to GovTech, an Akron-based IT firm owned by Michael Connell, a long-time Bush family operative. Connell had created the Bush-Cheney website for the 2000 presidential campaign. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various statements Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party and his strong desire to see candidates who supported legal abortion be defeated.

·       Connell's company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell's clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove's emails. Some of Rove's email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated Congressional and court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

·       In 2001, Michael Connell's GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR (House Information Resources) to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

·       Prior to the election, Blackwell established a wide range of measures aimed at systematically disenfranchising potential Democratic voters, and for electronically shifting the vote count to guarantee a Bush-Cheney victory.

• Ohio’s system of elections provided that each county board of elections have two Democrats and two Republicans, with the Secretary of State’s vote as the tie-breaker, meaning all 88 counties in 2004 were controlled by Blackwell.
• In the lead up to the vote, Blackwell eliminated numerous precincts from inner city Democrat-leaning areas. He consolidated them into larger precincts, causing procedures on Election Day to be more difficult and suppression of the black vote became much easier. Few precincts were eliminated in the state’s rural Republican areas. Similar maneuvers have become commonplace throughout our elections, including the infamous Arizona primary in 2016, where voters in largely Hispanic areas waited five hours and more to cast their ballots.
• As precincts were shifted, the Ohio Secretary of State’s website had out-of-date inaccurate information, frequently directing citizens to places where they would not be able vote, or where provisional ballots would be required.
• A Hocking County, Ohio board official leaked information to the Free Press that Lisa Schwartze, GOP-appointed Director of the Hocking County Board of Elections, shredded voter registration documents prior to the 2004 election.
• The Lucas County (Toledo) Democratic Party Headquarters was burglarized, with loss of crucial voter lists, internal correspondence and other campaign documents just prior to election.
• More than 30,000 letters on official boards of elections stationery throughout southern Ohio were sent to alleged ex-felons threatening them with arrest if they attempted to vote, even though there was no law in Ohio preventing ex-felons from voting.
• Eleven months before the 2004 election, Matt Damschroder, the GOP Director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections, accepted a $10,000 donation from Diebold contractor Pasquale "Patsy" Gallina on behalf of the county’s Republican Party. Damschroder was suspended without pay for a month.
• Blackwell demanded Ohio’s 88 counties print all voter registration forms on 80 bond paper or they would be rejected, but the ones distributed from his own office were on 60 bond paper and would have been rejected under his decree.
• Operatives of unknown origin went door-to-door “registering” potential inner city voters, then trashing the forms, rendering the signees ineligible to vote. They also picked up absentee ballots from nursing homes that never made it to the boards of elections. Such “caging” tactics were illegal, but were rampant throughout the state during the 2004 election.
• Prior to the 2004 election, more than 300,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls, virtually all of them in heavily Democratic urban areas such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. (Bush’s official margin of victory was less than 118,775). They were purged without explanation in a presidential election year, when voter purges did not normally occur in Ohio.
• In Lucas County, Board Chair Bernadette Noe purged some 28,000 voters from registration rolls, including some who’d voted in the same precinct, without changing residence, for four decades.
• Throughout the state, duly registered voters (including co-author Harvey Wasserman) were denied absentee ballots.
• On Election Day, President Bush and Rove personally visited Blackwell at Republican headquarters in Columbus. The meeting was secret. Bush gave no public speeches in Ohio that day, but did make a “get out the vote” call.
• Blackwell banned international election observers from coming within 100 feet of Ohio’s polling places. He threatened to arrest a distinguished United Nations team if they tried to do any monitoring inside any Ohio precinct. Such actions would have been roundly condemned by US democracy advocates monitoring election rights in other countries.
• However, Blackwell did allow Republican “challengers” into primarily African-American precincts to threaten potential voters with Jim Crow-style retribution if their voter registrations were not “in order.”
• For the first time in Ohio’s history, Blackwell imposed a wide range of very restrictive management policies, including a refusal to count ballots for president cast by a voter in a precinct other than the one in which s/he was registered. This included denying voting rights to citizens who came to the right building to vote, but mistakenly lined up at the wrong table in a crowded general voting area, even if the right table was next to it, less than a three feet away.

• Blackwell refused to provide paper ballots as requested even by Republican officials in the event machines broke down.
• Registration books at numerous precincts were out-of-date, disenfranchising thousands of Ohioans, especially in Franklin County.
• The Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections requested 5,000 new machines for Election Day. But, Blackwell vetoed the purchase of the new machines. Thus, the election was conducted with a roughly half the number needed. The shortages were primarily in Democratic precincts. The resulting long lines made it impossible for many working citizens to vote.

• In Franklin County, 76 wards had fewer voting machines available on November 2nd than they had during the spring primary election. All 76 wards that were shorted on machines were in the city of Columbus, rather than in the suburbs; 42 of the short-changed precincts were in predominantly African-American districts. Statewide shortages and misallocation of voting machines and other impediments led to long delays, that, when combined with an atmosphere of intimidation and other problems, may have prompted 3% of the state’s electorate to be disenfranchised, representing a vote total well in excess of Bush’s official margin of victory.
• The machine shortages caused long lines in numerous precincts, most of them predominantly African-American. In the inner city of Columbus, wait times for voting were 3-7 hours.
• Some absentee ballots were delivered pre-punched for George W. Bush.
• Thousands of absentee ballots did not arrive for Ohio citizens (as in Florida) until after Election Day.
• In Hamilton County (Cincinnati) some absentee ballots were delivered lacking an option to vote for John Kerry.
• As with butterfly ballots used in Florida 2000, absentee ballots in Ohio 2004 were often impossible to understand or deliberately confusing.
• The Republican Party sent thousands of letters to college students challenging their right to vote based on their residency.
• Republican Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, Matt Damschroder sent letters to ex-felons, felons, and those charged with felonies or misdemeanors, and to many citizens who turned out to have no criminal record whatsoever. The letters wrongly warned the recipients that they had lost their right to vote and that they would be arrested if they tried to do so.
• Ex-felons, people behind on their child support and people traffic tickets were targeted with threatening phone calls by a Republican “Mighty Texas Task Force” made up of GOP operatives who flew into the state for the election, warning these Ohio citizens not to vote or they would be arrested.
• Disinformational flyers were circulated in inner-city precincts on official-looking stationary threatening civil rights and voter registration groups with legal prosecution if they helped citizens register to vote.
• Flyers on official-looking stationary were circulated in inner cities advising Democrats to vote the day after the election. They read: “Due to increased voter registration, Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats will vote on Wednesday.”
• Voters in crowded inner city voting precincts were forced to use provisional ballots if they came to the “wrong” table, even if the “right” table was two feet away, or they had to go back to the end of the “right” line.
• Cars legally parked at inner city precincts were illegally towed while their owners attempted to vote in very long lines caused by shortages of machines and time-consuming harassment by GOP challengers.
• Citizens waiting in line to vote when their precincts closed at 7:30pm were illegally ordered to leave without voting; the law provided that those in line when the precincts closed were entitled to vote even after closing time.
• In Knox County, students at Kenyon College and local citizens were forced to wait up to 12 hours to vote due to a shortage of working machines and a lack of paper ballots, while students at a nearby fundamentalist Bible college waited just five minutes to vote.
• Students at Oberlin College and citizens of Oberlin, a liberal bastion, waited eight hours to vote due to an “unavoidable” shortage of machines and Blackwell’s refusal to provide paper ballots.
• At Wilberforce College, mostly African-American students were illegally challenged during the registration process.
• In Lucas County, the wrong ballot marking pens were issued for opti-scan voting cards which did not register on the machines designated to read them, thus creating thousands of “spoiled ballots” that were never counted.
• Blackwell failed to provide Spanish-speaking poll workers as required by law in heavily Hispanic precincts, especially in Cleveland.
• The implausibility of the vote count was confirmed in part by official vote tallies in key southwestern Ohio counties showing Kerry being credited with far fewer votes than those counted for C. Ellen Connelly, a black Democrat running for the Ohio Supreme Court. Connelly never campaigned in the heavily white rural area and was virtually unknown there. The idea that she would receive more votes than Kerry is highly improbable.
• In Mahoning County (Youngstown), voting machines were recalibrated in the middle of Election Day, creating long lines and casting doubt on the vote count. Between twenty and thirty ES&S iVotronic machines broke down in the middle of the voting process and had to be re-calibrated because voters were complaining that they tried to vote for one candidate but the machine indicated that a vote for a different candidate was being recorded. The Mahoning County Board of Elections admitted that 31 of their voting machines were flipping votes.
• In sworn testimony taken after the election, voters in Mahoning County reported pushing John Kerry’s name on their touchscreen voting machines and having George W. Bush’s name light up. In sworn testimony after the election, one voter said this “vote hopping” happened repeatedly on his machine, and that an election official confirmed that it had been doing that “all day.” The poll worker suggested he just keep pushing Kerry’s name until it stuck.
• Voters in Franklin County reported seeing their vote for Kerry disappear from the voting machine screen. This became known as the “Franklin County Fade.”
• On election night, immediately after the polls closed, Warren County GOP officials inexplicably declared a Level 10 Homeland Security alert and excluded all media observers from the vote count. All materials relating to the vote count were confiscated by GOP officials, who ordered media representatives out of the process, in contradiction to long-standing practice. They moved the ballots from an officially sanctioned site to an unsanctioned warehouse, raising suspicions about the validity of the chain of command. Later investigations indicate that before Election Day, discussions had occurred in Warren County election circles about the possibility of a Homeland Security alert during the vote count. But no confirmation of any authorization of such an alert ever came from the FBI or any other federal agency that might have been authorized to call one. To this day, Warren County officials have issued no documented explanation for the origin of the Homeland Security alert. Despite exit polls indicating he received fewer votes, Bush was credited with 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000.
• The “Loaves and Fishes” vote count in Gahanna, a Columbus suburb inside Franklin County, gave Bush an impossible tally. At the Ward 1B precinct in Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, 4,258 votes were tallied for George W. Bush where only 638 people were registered. The precinct was housed at the New Life Church, a fundamentalist congregation led by cohorts of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a close associate of George W. Bush. The glitch was blamed on a faulty electronic transmission, but was later dubbed the “loaves and fishes” vote count, in Falwell’s honor.
• Two strongly pro-Bush precincts in Perry County initially reported official voter turnouts in excess of 100%. They reported turnouts of 124.4% and 124.0% respectively. The vote count was heavily in favor of George W. Bush.
• The vote count in two strongly pro-Bush Miami County precincts reported impossibly high results. The tallies in the Concord South and Southwest precincts of Miami County reported official turnouts of 94.27% and 98.6% respectively. The vote counts were strongly in favor of Bush. County election officials later admitted that there were approximately 2500 phantom cyber-votes added to their vote tally by the central tabulators.
• On Election night, GOP-controlled Miami County announced a total turnout of 31,620 votes, with a majority of about 66% favoring George W. Bush. Later, the Board of Elections added nearly 19,000 votes to the total, about 13,000 of which went to Bush. The second tabulation gave John Kerry precisely the same percentage of the vote as the first one, another virtual statistical impossibility.
• A faulty electronic voting machine in Mahoning County (Youngstown) showed John Kerry receiving a negative 25,000,000 votes. The “glitch” was apparently “corrected.”
• Republican-controlled Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties gave Bush a total margin of victory over Kerry in excess of his entire margin in the state of Ohio and in excess of what he got in 2000 over Al Gore. Official tallies showed Bush beating John Kerry by a collective margin of 132,685 votes in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. Bush’s margin in these three counties alone substantially exceeded his 118,775-vote margin of victory in the entire state.
• In Trumbull County, which went heavily for Bush, 650 more absentee ballots were counted than there were absentee voters. (In Broward and Palm Beach Counties, Florida, problems with absentee ballots had also cost tens of thousands of citizens their right to vote.)
• After the election, Blackwell illegally ordered all poll records to be kept secret from the public, with at least one volunteer election monitor being physically ejected in Pickaway County.
• Minor, obscure third-party candidates got unexplained, improbable high vote counts in a few Cuyahoga County precincts that vote heavily Democratic, denying those votes to Kerry. Results showed that Black neighborhoods voted inexplicably for the far right-wing Constitutional Law Party.
• At least seven heavily Democratic precincts in Cleveland showed voter turnouts 30% lower than the average in the rest of the state for no apparent reason, costing Kerry thousands of votes.
• In Democratic-rich northern Ohio including Toledo and Cleveland, the ratio of machine-rejected ballots versus those successfully counted was eight times higher in Democratic precincts than in Republican precincts.
• In some areas, underfunded and little-known “down-ballot” Democratic candidates received more votes than the presidential candidate John Kerry, a highly unlikely outcome. Kerry also received, in certain Republican-controlled areas, fewer votes in the November election than he got in the spring primary that had a much lighter voter turnout
• In Greene County, bags of official ballots were left unguarded on folding tables in an open building, breaking the chain of command and compromising any recount.
• In one Lucas County (Toledo) precinct, zero voting machines were available to the public at the beginning of the day, depriving many citizens of their ability to vote.
• In Lucas County down-ballot Congressional Democratic candidate Marcy Kaptur was credited with 13,461 more votes than Kerry.
• In Mahoning County (Youngstown) voting machines were re-calibrated in the middle of Election Day, creating long lines and eradicating the reliability of the vote count.
• Voters in Mahoning and Franklin Counties using touch-screen machines repeatedly reported pushing Kerry’s name on the screen while having Bush light up. In some cases pushing Kerry’s name would bring on a light that would then fade away, apparently leaving no vote being cast.
• Mike Connell set up the vote-counting apparatus for Ohio’s election results in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
• At 12:20am on the night of the 2004 presidential election, when election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner, the Ohio computers went down and the state’s vote counting was moved to Tennessee. Blackwell had dismissed state IT workers for the night, leaving the vote count in this historically critical period under the supervision of Michael Connell.
• At 12:30am, CNN reported that John Kerry was carrying Ohio with a margin of 4.2% (more than 200,000 votes) and would almost certainly become the next President.
• Around 2am the computers came back up and the vote count had shifted, giving Bush the presidency. Kerry’s 4.2% margin of victory shifted to a 2.5% margin of victory for Bush.
• This shift of 6.7% (more than 300,000 votes) has been termed a “virtual statistical impossibility” by Dr. Ron Baiman, professor and statistician, and others.
• About 15% of the 5.6 million votes cast in the Ohio election were recorded by electronic voting machines that had no paper trails and could not be reliably monitored or recounted. This represented about 700,000 votes in an election whose official margin for George W. Bush was 118,775 votes. The reversal of a small percentage of the votes cast on electronic machines could have changed the outcome of the election. A shift of a mere six votes in each of Ohio’s 11,000-plus precincts would have given Kerry the White House.

Post-2004 Ohio Case Study

• The source code for electronic machines has been ruled proprietary by the courts. There is still no way to cross-check or verify the electronic vote count from the disputed 2004 election or any other election held in Ohio or any other state where electronic voting has dominated.
• On a state-by-state basis, the Edison/Mitofsky and other major polling reports showed a strong correspondence between the exit polls and the official vote counts in 38 states plus the District of Columbia, with significant statistical variations concentrated in four key swing states: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
• On election night 2004, Jonathan Simon, a lawyer and chiropractor, became the man who captured the screenshots of the national presidential election exit polls. Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research under contract to six major news organizations had conducted the exit polls. The screenshots captured by Simon documented an unexplained “Red Shift” in 10 out of the 11 swing states. The unexpected and improbable shifts all went toward George W. Bush. Simon would later write an important book on the topic, Code Red.
• Of America’s eleven key swing states, ten experienced similar shifts from Kerry to Bush from 12:30am to the morning after the election. Wisconsin stayed steady for Kerry at 0.4%. Colorado and Florida started with slight leads for Bush and ended with large ones. Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania started with large leads for Kerry and ended with smaller ones. Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio, all showed significant leads for Kerry at 12:30am; they all ended in the morning in the Bush column, giving him a second term. Those four “purple states,” which shifted from blue to red, experienced shifts of 2.2%, 3.9%, 3.7% and, in Ohio, 6.7%.
• On November 13, 2004, the Ohio Election Protection coalition chaired by Bob Fitrakis, Free Press Editor and attorney, held the largest known public hearings about election and voting irregularities in Ohio history putting 32 Ohio precinct judges, pollworkers, legal observers, party challengers, voters and observers under oath. Additionally, 66 others provided written affidavits that day. Other hearings followed in Cincinnati, Toledo, Youngstown and another in Columbus. More than 500 people provided sworn testimony under oath on election irregularities. Their testimony provided the basis for the lawsuit Moss v. Bush.
• After the election, the presidential candidates from the national Green and Libertarian Parties filed for a recount of the vote in Ohio. Despite paying for the recount, they were denied the right to inspect poll books.
• Under Ohio law, recounts involve randomly counting 3% of the ballots in a county by hand and if they don’t match, then all ballots are hand-counted. During the Ohio recount, precincts to be examined were specifically designated by Blackwell rather than being chosen at random.
• During the recount, Shelby and other Ohio counties discarded key equipment and data prior to being independently examined.
• In Hocking County during the recount, a representative of Triad, a conservative-owned voting machine company, replaced the county board of elections’ central tabulator’s hard drive and gave Deputy Director Sherole Eaton, a “cheat sheet” to use if the votes didn’t match up. When Eaton made this information public, she was fired.
• In Ohio, Kerry carried 54.46% of the votes that were counted by hand during the recount.
• In the aftermath of the massive irregularities in the Ohio 2004 presidential election, Bill Moss, long-time black activist and former Columbus School Board member, contested the election results by filing an action before the Supreme Court of Ohio, Moss v. Bush. Due to the delays caused primarily by Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, there was never a full hearing granted on the case. However, more than 20,000 pages documenting Ohio election irregularities and fraud were placed in the court record.
• US Congressman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee received so many complaints about election irregularities in Ohio that he held hearings in both Washington DC and Columbus, Ohio in December 2004. The information gathered at the hearings and through investigation by the Judiciary staff was published as a book entitled, “What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election.” Noted literary figure Gore Vidal wrote the introduction.

• On December 13, 2004 before a hearing organized by US Rep John Conyers (D-MI) in Columbus, Ohio, computer programmer Clint Curtis testified that he was asked by US Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) to write a program for a touchscreen voting machine that would make it possible to flip votes without being detected.
• For the first time in US history, the entire electoral delegation of a state, Ohio, was challenged before the US Congress January 5, 2005. US Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) of Cleveland, the first black female to serve as a House representative in Ohio, brought a formal complaint before the US Senate. US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) provided the required support to allow it to be debated for two hours in both the House and the Senate. The challenge failed.
• Kerry conceded the 2004 election at 1pm the day after Election Day, despite the fact that 250,000 votes remain uncounted in Ohio, far in excess of the then-predicted Bush victory of 130,000 (it came in finally at 118,775). In Ohio overall, more than 106,000 provisional ballots were left uncounted, and to this day have never been tallied or accounted for.
• Irregularities in New Mexico paralleled those in Ohio. In a conference call, Kerry later complained that he lost every precinct in New Mexico where ballots were counted by machine rather than by hand. But he never made a public statement to that effect or demanded a recount.
• In Franklin County, where inner city precincts were shorted on voting machines, the turnout among African-Americans was officially 10% lower than in white precincts.
• A post-election study showed it took African-Americans 55 minutes to vote in Ohio 2004 but it took white citizens an average of just 5 minutes
• A door-to-door survey of the Concord Southwest precinct (Ohio) after the 2004 election confirmed that 25 citizens, who were listed as having voted, told the survey team that they actually never did vote in the presidential election. In that precinct, 679 out of the registered 689 voters allegedly cast ballots, according to the Board of Elections, but only 549 actually signed-in to vote. The Board of Elections admitted there had been 130 “phantom votes” and that the vast majority of them had been awarded to Bush.
• In Cuyahoga County at least 8,099 of 24,472 provisional ballots were thrown in the trash.
• In Montgomery County (Dayton) 2.8% of the ballots cast in pro-Kerry precincts showed no vote for president, versus 1.6% in pro-Bush precincts.
• Mathematician Richard Charnin analyzed the 2004 presidential election and found what he calls the “Bush Urban Legend.” To accept George W. Bush’s 2004 alleged victory, one must accept data that shows Bush’s votes declining in rural Republican areas but increasing in Democratic urban areas of the country.
• Michael Collins, writing for Scoop.com, questioned how Bush received 2.5 million fewer rural Republican votes in the 2004 election, compared to the 2000 election, but gained an unexpected 12 point jump from the urban Latino vote across the nation in that same election, according to the national exit polls.
• On September 25, 2006, as result of the King-Lincoln- Bronzeville lawsuit, the Free Press reported the following additional irregularities in the 2004 election:
• In Delaware County Precinct Genoa I, researcher Stuart Wright viewed and recounted three separate bundles of ballots. In the second bundle, there were 274 consecutive ballots allegedly cast for Bush. In the third bundle there were 359 consecutive ballots allegedly cast for Bush. Genoa I was not one of the four precincts recounted as part of a required official recount, conducted by Blackwell on December 15, 2004.
• In Delaware County, BOE officials told researcher Richard Hayes Phillips that after the votes were cast on Election Day, ballots were unloaded by a team of teenage volunteers including the Boy Scouts who carried them into the BOE building, where they were then given to a “mentally retarded man” who scraped the chads off the punch card ballots. Dr. Phillips estimates that the “mentally retarded man” would have had to scrape four or five ballots per second on election night in order to comply with the posting of the results at 12:40am for the nearly 80,000 ballots cast there.
• In Delaware County, Ross Township precinct, Philips discovered that the BOE certified that 70% of the ballots cast for C. Ellen Connally, an African-American woman from Cleveland running for the Ohio Supreme Court, were also counted for Bush. The implausibility of this outcome in a white, Republican suburb is underscored by the fact that Connally trailed both Bush and Kerry very substantially throughout the rest of the state. Some 60% of the Township’s ballots opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (which passed substantially) also were punched for Bush, an extremely implausible outcome given his opposition to gay marriage. This “anomaly” was widely branded as the “Gays for Bush” phenomenon.
• In Butler County, Phillips found that in Monroe City precinct 4CA, Bush received 52 consecutive votes near the start of voting, and then another run of 212 consecutive votes.
• Also in Butler Country, in Ross Township Precinct 4JB, Philips found that Bush was awarded 547 votes to Kerry’s 141 votes. In separate sequences, Bush received 41, 29 and 25 straight votes. Neither 4CA nor 4JB were involved in the official recount.
• In Clermont County, which contributed significantly to Bush’s margin of victory, statistical researcher Dr. Ronald Baiman discovered a suspicious use of replacement ballots, meant to be issued only if a regular ballot is somehow spoiled by a voter. In a random draw of ballots as he went through the 192 precincts, against huge odds, Baiman found a replacement ballot. Baiman asked that the next ballot from the precinct be drawn and it, too, was a replacement ballot. Continuing pulling ballots from that same precinct, Baiman witnessed 36 straight replacement ballots in a row, a virtual statistical impossibility. Dr. Philips recorded only five spoiled ballots in this same precinct, raising the question of where the other 31 replacement ballots came from. Both Dr. Philips and Baiman were expert witnesses in the Moss v. Bush challenge to the Ohio vote.
• Also in Clermont County, Phillips found an opti-scan ballot with a white sticker over the Kerry-Edwards spot which would prevent the counter from recording a Kerry vote. During the December 2004 recount in Clermont County, witnesses swore in official affidavits that they saw several ballots with stickers over the Kerry-Edwards spot. The county prosecutor claimed there were “less than one hundred” of these, but was unable to explain why any stickers were there at all.
• In Miami County on Monday, June 19, 2006, Director Steve Quillen handed co-author Bob Fitrakis a print out of what he called “freely amended results.” Director Quillen said “You guys were right” regarding the voter turnout in Concord South West Precinct, which had been listed as 98.55% in the certified election results in 2004. Quillen also disavowed the alleged 94.3% voter turnout certified election results in Concord South. The Free Press has questioned those results, which would have meant that 679 out of 689 people successfully voted in Concord South West. Using a computer databank of voter history, Quillen has since admitted that the voter turnout was just 82.1% in Concord South West and 79.5% in Concord, discrepancies of more than 15%.
• In Miami County, BOE Director Quillen also said Boy Scouts who volunteered to help on Election Day mistakenly took Concord South West ballots to the Concord East precinct. Dr. Ron Baiman, professor and statistician, found that the poll books and absentee ballots in Miami County “have little to no relationship to the voters who voted in the county.” He also discovered that “at least 8% of precincts in Miami County have at least a 5% discrepancy between the number of voters who voted and the official certified number of votes.” He also noted that there were two precincts that were off by more than 100 votes.
• In Miami County, both the Chair and the Director of the BOE admitted that the recount matched the official vote count only because they didn't use the certified results, but simply counted the ballots in the precinct and ran them through the tabulator. This is a valid tabulator test, but not a legally valid recount, since there's no benchmark.
• Also in Miami County, Diane L. Miley, the BOE’s former Deputy Director said the Director allowed “Republican friends” and “high school students to take ballots out to the polls on Election Day.” Miley also says ten or more Republicans were allowed into the BOE on the evening of Election Day, when votes were being counted, which she says made her “incredibly uncomfortable.” But in going public with her assertions, Miley says she was "abandoned by the Dems . . . when I stood up [to the Republicans] at the Board of Elections.”
• In Warren County, punch card ballots were also shifted from precinct to precinct, which again, due to ballot rotations, could have reversed the intent of thousands of voters. Warren County was also key to the Bush margin of victory.
• General disorganization and administrative problems led to the forced resignation of the entire GOP-dominated Board of Elections in Lucas County (Toledo) following the election.