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Brunner Moves In The Right Direction

6/16/08

by Bob Fitrakis

Ohio Secretary of State recently released a report that seeks to safeguard Ohio’s 2008 presidential election. A tall task after the open theft of the 2004 election by her predecessor.

The Brunner report as usual is a mixed bag. She’s responding to the Everest Study of electronic voting machines which showed the Ohio election system vulnerable to fraud and error. She was in a showdown with the Republican-controlled Statehouse who refused to give her the
$64 million she wanted primarily for precinct-based Optiscan machines.
In the game of chicken, Brunner was afraid to decertify the machines because she feared the Republicans wouldn’t give her the money to replace them.

Some of her recommendations seem to come directly from the consent decree that I authored in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case pending in the State of Ohio. The case charges former Secretary of State Blackwell with manipulating the 2004 election as the agent of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, but also included 50 proposals for election reform to ensure free and fair elections in Ohio.

To her credit, she’s attempting to improve the county voter registration databases as well as fixing and promoting the polling sites. These were both problems in the inner cities in 2004. She’s also promoting more use of absentee ballots and early voting and is now requiring security plans from each county, particularly in regards to ballot access including the memory cards. This concern for chain of custody issues is long overdue. She’ll also be requiring an audit and has the ability to order every county to do a post election audit. I’m hoping she has the courage to demand a true random post-election audit.

So she’s moving in the right direction. But the result will depend upon how the final directives look.

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Obama Must Learn From Kucinich’s Election Theft Impeachment

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
June 11, 2008

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush.  Two of the articles deal with the fact that Bush was never elected, and in fact stole the election of 2004 in Ohio.  They should serve as a cautionary notice to the Obama campaign that this year’s election could also be stolen. 

Kucinich’s courage in introducing these articles is underscored by the fact that the Congress should have removed Bush from office years ago.  From lying to the world to perpetrate the war in Iraq, to violating the Constitution on scores of basic civil rights and liberties issues, to fostering a regime based on unprecedented corruption and robbery, George W. Bush would be known as the worst president in the history of the United States if in fact he had been elected president.

But these articles of impeachment contain charges that come directly from the independent reportage on the stolen 2004 election that appeared first at www.freepress.org and in other non-corporate and internet-based media throughout the United States.  Ironically, though these facts have finally penetrated to a proposed Congressional indictment of the nation’s chief executive, they have yet to be reported in the “mainstream” corporate-owned media.

Kucinich’s Article 28 charges Bush with “tampering with free and fair elections,” along with “corruption of the administration of justice.” Article 29 charges him and his staff and political cronies and underlings with “conspiracy to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1965” (co-author Bob Fitrakis, attorney-at-law, helped draft these Articles 28 and 29 based in part on information that was first posted at www.freepress.org).

Many of the specific charges leveled in the bill of impeachment can be traced directly to conflict of interest charged raised in Ohio by grassroots election protection activists before, during and after the 2004 voting.  Bush deserves impeachment, Kucinich writes, for “willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to ensure that uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election would be disproportionately concentrated in urban African-American districts.”

The impeachment document also notes that “in Ohio’s Lucas County, which includes Toledo, 3,122 or 41.13% of the provisional ballots went uncounted under the direction of George W. Bush’s agent, the Secretary of State of Ohio, John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Committee to Re-Elect Bush/Cheney in Ohio….In Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, 8,559 or 32.82% of the provisional ballots went uncounted….In Ohio’s Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, 3,529 or 24.23% of the provisional ballots went uncounted.”

In our numerous conversations with Rep. Kucinich since the Ohio-centered theft of the 2004 election, he has made it clear that he fully understands the depth of planning and coordination that went into the hijacking of the presidency.  Based on sophisticated coordination between Blackwell and White House consiglieri Karl Rove, the GOP launched a high-tech blitzkrieg on the electoral process.  Their tactics ranged from removing more than 300,000 registered Ohio citizens from the voter rolls, to short-changing inner city precincts of needed voting machines, to rigging electronic vote counts, to calling a phony Homeland Security alert to several score other tactics, many of which continue to surface.

The tragedy of this impeachment is that it did not occur in 2004, when the independent media filled with the first revelations of what really happened in Ohio.  Two new election protection documentaries, David Earnhardt’s UNCOUNTED and a new release coming from Emmy-award winner Dorothy Fadiman, make the experience even more indelible.   

The Bush catastrophe is now winding down, having exceeded all expectations in its destruction of the fabric of American law, economy and ecology. But if Barack Obama allows history to repeat itself yet again in 2008, this nation will plunge even deeper into the depths.  The only way to avoid that is to proceed with this impeachment  in all its potential force.  At very least, this Congress must thoroughly expose and act on what was done to our sacred democratic process in 2004.  As we have since learned, the world cannot afford to have this happen again. 

Full text of the resolution can be found at: Articles of Impeachment

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They also co-wrote, with Steve Rosenfeld, WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, from The New Press.

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June 14, Richard Hayes Phillips At Free Press/Green Education Fund Second Saturday Salon

June 14
Free Press/Green Education Fund Second Saturday Salon

Join other progressives for an evening of socializing, food, drink, Bob and Harvey radio show recorded live!
and “Witness to a Crime” presentation/book signing by Richard Hayes Phillips.

6:30pm-midnight
Free Press office, 1000 E. Main St., Columbus, Ohio
parking in rear or next door at the Salvation Army
 253-2571, truth@freepress.org

Below link to further info about Richard and And RFK Jr. and Mark Crispin Miller video on 2008 elections mentioning him.

http://neocon-panic-attacks.blogspot.com/2008/05/witness-to-crime-richard-hayes-phillips.html 

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Bob and Harvey Show With Cliff Arnebeck, May 26, 2007

Hemp, Stolen elections, nuclear power, Batchelder, Ohio SOS Brunner’s proposals, death penalty, Iraq war…

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On Point, Dr. Fitrakis Live Feb 16th, 2008 Vic’s Cafe

Live audience chat with music from Andrew Davis and Rob Jones.

 

 

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Democracy In The Balance: Indiana Goes Jim Crow

by Bob Fitrakis

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in favor of the Hoosier state’s Jim Crow voter identification law sanctions the continual racist assault upon black voters and institutionalizes the disenfranchisement of the poor.

Not surprisingly, the axis of evil — Justices Anton Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — claim that “the law should be upheld because its overall burden is minimal and justified.”

In a real democracy, the burden should be on the state to enfranchise voters, not on the state to think of ways to keep poor people and minorities from the polls. At the age of 18, all eligible voters should be routinely registered to vote with a unique identifier, similar to a social security number. Scalia, Thomas and Alito love “state’s rights” and “Jim Crow.” As partisan Republican appointees, their judicial opinions are blatantly partisan and their approach to democracy, as it has been through most of American history, is to shrink the electorate.

The Supreme Court should have mandated that the state provide, free of charge, voter IDs for every eligible citizen in Indiana beginning with all graduating high school seniors. We increasingly live in a police state, where the Patriot Act monitors you day and night, and the NSA spies on you through the Echelon system. But Big Brother can’t figure out who’s eligible to vote?

Voting must become a constitutional right, and for that matter, so should privacy. That way, backward Hoosiers kissing the ass of right-wing Republicans would be prevented from ushering in another Jim Crow era.

The other three justices, John Paul Stevens,John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy, argued that the Indiana voter ID law, the way it is written, does not appear to be unconstitutional or to violate voter rights, therefore they voted it could stand.

So democracy remains in the balance. The problem is those facial challenges won’t come until the middle of the 2008 election, as once again Karl Rove and his racist pals objectively disenfranchise millions of black voters. The problem is any actual challenge to the voter ID law from a voter probably won’t come until Election Day 2008, as once again and his racist pals objectively disenfranchise millions of black voters.

I’m with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on this. God, our concept and name for the force and principles for universal justice will damn this law.

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Dr. Fitrakis With Greg Palast about the 2004 Election

Video is gone/depricated (style=”width:400px; height:326px;” id=”VideoPlayback” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5224156256767455986&hl=en” flashvars=””)

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Uncounted – A Film About Ohio’s Stolen Elections, Thursday, March 27, 2008

Free Press FOURTH Thursday Theater Night at the Drexel East. 7:00 PM. “Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections.” Admission is $7 regular and $5 student/senior! Emmy-award-winning producer David Earnhardt will be featured for discussion.

Location:Drexel EastTheater, 2254 E. Main St. Bexley
Phone:253-2571
Email:Email
Website:Uncounted the movie

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Ohio’s Voting Machines Are Now An Official Crime Scene

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 17, 2008

At least 15 touch-screen voting machines that produced improbable numbers in Ohio’s 2006 statewide election are now under double-lock in an official crime scene. And the phony “Homeland Security Alert” used by Republicans to build up George W. Bush’s 2004 vote count in a key southwestern Ohio county has come under new scrutiny.

The touch-screen machines were locked up after Ohio’s new Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, tried to vote last fall. On November 6, she spotted a gray bar with the words “candidate withdrawn” in a slot where the name of Democrat Jay Perez should have appeared. Her husband, voting nearby, told her Perez’s name did appear, as it was supposed to, on his machine.

Perez had been a candidate in the race for Franklin County Municipal Judge. He withdrew his name after the county had finalized its ballots. But it now appears the ES&S machines left his name on some machines but not on others. Perez, a Democrat, wanted to avoid playing a spoiler in the race. But the appearance of his name on some machines may have helped Republican David Tyack win.

Brunner now worries that the state will never find out what happened. County election officials ordered the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to seize the machines. Ohio Attorney General Mark Dann is conducting an investigation that may cost the state $48,000. Brunner recently told WVKO 1580AM radio: “When you’re talking about democracy, it’s priceless.” In another interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Brunner noted “This is a huge problem. There is great concern that not every voter has the same ballot.”

Ironically, Brunner requested a paper ballot in the March 4, 2008, primary, but a poorly trained poll worker gave her a provisional ballot instead. Two other staffers from her office were also given the wrong ballots. Brunner has since pledged to upgrade the training for Buckeye State poll workers.

Brunner further announced that she’s banning the practice of so-called “sleepovers” where poll workers take the programmable and easily hackable voting machines home with them overnight prior to an election day.

Brunner succeeded Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell as Ohio’s Secretary of State. She has vowed to make sure the Buckeye State does not repeat the experience of 2004, when Blackwell choreographed the theft of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes for George W. Bush, giving him a second term in the White House. Since taking office Brunner has vowed to shift the entire state to voting on paper ballots, a move being fiercely resisted by numerous Republican-controlled Boards of Elections throughout the state. Thus far Brunner has forced the resignations of BOE chairs in two of Ohio’s most populous cities, Cleveland and Columbus.

Matt Damschroder was removed as Franklin County Board of Elections Director on the Sunday prior to Ohio’s 2008 primary election. Damschroder was previously suspended for a month without pay for accepting a $10,000 check from a voting machine salesman at the BOE building. The check, made out to the Republican Party, was delivered on the day the state’s contracts for electronic voting machines were open for bidding. Damschroder was former chair of the Franklin County Republican Party and the state’s leading foe of paper ballots. “Damschroder was very opposed to paper ballots and was stoking the fire against them,” Brunner told WVKO.

Dennis White, the new director of the Franklin County BOE was skeptical of the masking problem, but says if it happened, “it’s huge. We have a federal election coming up this November,” according to the Dispatch. White, who admits to having little knowledge of computers, is the former Ohio Democratic Party Chair.

That election may once again hinge on Ohio’s vote count. In 2006, Franklin County officials failed to conduct mandated tests on each machine, instead testing only one machine per precinct on a random bases. A report by SysTest Labs, a Colorado consulting firm, confirmed that what Brunner saw on her machine was “exactly what you’d see if someone masked a name,” the Dispatch reported.

Investigators also found that the “audit logs” on the voting machines were turned off by a board programmer in April, 2007, which has hindered investigators from reconstructing software changes. White says the vendor told a board employee how to disable the auditing system, allegedly to speed programming. Brunner said other vendors told her that “You’re never supposed to tell a (client) how to do that.”

In the primary this past March, the BOE allegedly did test all Franklin County’s machines. But some counties ran out of Democratic paper ballots as an influx of apparently Republican and Republican-leaning independents flooded the polls, apparently to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Enquirer has reported that a “casual conversation” between a “friendly” FBI agent and the county emergency services director in a parking lot may have contributed to the phony Homeland Security alert that prompted the Warren County BOE to lockdown the vote count in the 2004 election. The BOE declared the emergency and then moved the ballots from the publicly designated vote center to a nearby unauthorized warehouse. They also barred the public and media from witnessing the counting. Warren County, which is outside Cincinnati, then gave Bush 72% of the official vote count, far exceeding expectations. With neighboring Butler and Clermont Counties, Warren gave Bush a margin of 140,000 votes, which exceeded the 119,000 margin by which he allegedly won the election.

The Enquirer reports that “hundreds” of e-mailed complaints poured into the county BOE after the election, including one from an angry voter in the United Kingdom. “Stop destroying our democracy,” said one voter from South Carolina.

The Free Press has previously reported that Warren County BOE employees were told on the Thursday prior to the 2004 election day, that there would be a Homeland Security threat on election day. An examination of the ballots by a Free Press investigation team uncovered numerous irregularities in the Warren County vote that helped give Bush the presidency again.

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-authored HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org) and, with Steve Rosenfeld, WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO from New Press.

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Did Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory In Ohio?

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
March 8, 2008

Hilary Clinton’s larger-than-expected victory in Ohio may have been won with votes from Republicans, and from independents who usually vote Republican.

Much has been made of Rush Limbaugh’s other far-right commentators’ pleas to Republicans to cast their ballots for her in open primary states like Ohio and Texas. Part of the strategy is to slow down Barack Obama, who analysts argue will be harder for John McCain to beat this fall. Others, like Ann Coulter, have gone so far as to say they actually PREFER Clinton to McCain. Such voters would certainly also prefer the former first lady to Obama.

Whatever the case, there is concrete evidence in Ohio that Republican cross-over voters did, in fact, play a significant role in delivering the Buckeye primary votes to the Senator from New York.

Ohio has a classic open primary. Party affiliation can be whatever a voter states upon entering the polls. Both of this article’s writers, who usually vote Democratic or independent, chose to vote Republican in the 2006 primary, essentially because of a desire to oppose J. Kenneth Blackwell, the sitting Secretary of State, because of his role in his voter suppression during the 2004 election. In 2006, though our previous party affiliations were Democratic, each writer merely informed poll workers that we wished to cast a Republican ballot. Raised eyebrows notwithstanding, there were no problems getting them. The same opportunity allowed voters to cross-over last week.

There is clear statistical evidence that many Republican voters did cross-over. The Democratic Party “won at least 141,785 new voters in the four-county region” of Warren, Clermont, Hamilton, and Butler counties according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner told the New York Times that in Clermont and Summit Counties, paper ballots ran out mostly due to a large number of independent and Republican voters crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary.

In Warren and Clermont counties, in southwestern Ohio, the number of votes cast in the Democratic primary are telling. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that in Warren County, for example, there were 12,440 registered Democrats (9.49%) and 41,377 registered Republicans (31.57%) and 77,237 nonpartisan voters (58.94%). In Tuesday’s primary, 27,855 voters (48.53%) asked for Democratic ballots, representing 223.91% of the registered Democrats in that county.

Warren County is notorious for a “homeland security” alert called by county officials on Election Day 2004, causing the ballots to be diverted to and counted in a restricted unauthorized warehouse.

In Clermont County, there were 14,496 are registered Democrats and 37,714 registered Republicans, as reported by the Enquirer. In the primary, 26,279 people voted Democratic. One Clermont County presiding judge reported running out of Democratic ballots and turning away at least 30 people, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Election observers on 2004 claimed that 100 or so ballots in Clermont County has stickers over John Kerry’s name, that would have caused the vote scanner not to register a marked Kerry vote.

In 2004, Warren, Clermont and nearby Butler County gave Bush some 140,000 more votes than Kerry. Bush’s entire margin of victory in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.

Dr. Richard Gunther, professor of political science at Ohio State University suggests that other factors are in play in Ohio. He sees a likely shift of independent voters, similar to the elections of 1930, 1932 and 1934. In those elections, spurred by the Great Depression, independent and Republican voters shifted their loyalties to the Democratic Party and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, causing a fundamental realignment in politics that lasted for fifty or so years.

There were some technical issues with voting machines in Tuesday’s election. The Enquirer reported on power outages in Darke and Hamilton counties and reports of electronic touch-screen voting machines problems in Montgomery County. Voters at one precinct in Lucas County (Toledo) voted on paper ballots after the electronic voting machines failed, according to the Toledo Blade.

Secretary of State Brunner has made significant strides toward guaranteeing freer, fairer and more transparent elections. In the wake of massive irregularities under Former Secretary of State Blackwell in the 2004 election, Brunner has committed the state to paper ballots. In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), she forced the resignation of Republican Board of Elections (BOE) Chair Bob Bennett, along with the rest of the board. Bennett forced the county to spend $20 million on electronic touch-screen voting machines, which proceeded to crash in the 2005 primary. Among other things, they registered a 14% vote count error, according to a BOE study.

This spring Brunner ditched the machines in Cuyahoga County in favor of paper ballots. Ironically, the county ran out of the Democratic ballots, indicating a higher than expected turnout of voters for the Democratic primary. In response, a federal judge ordered several Cleveland polling stations to stay open until 9pm so everyone could vote.

In Franklin County (Columbus) a survey by the 16-member election protection team from the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism showed that it took an average of 15 minutes to vote in inner city precincts such as ward #5 and #55. These two precincts had lines between three to seven hours long in 2004.

Restrictions on absentee and early voting were not present in this year’s voting as they had been in 2004. Co-author Harvey Wasserman got his absentee ballot in the mail without incident this year, whereas it took four phone calls in 2004. The Franklin County Board of Elections opened with extended hours on the Monday before the primary to give voters greater flexibility.

Two days before primary election day, Brunner forced the resignation of Franklin County BOE Chair Matt Damschroder. Election officials told the Free Press that Damschroder met with Bush, Blackwell and Karl Rove on election day 2004. Misallocation of voting machines and other irregularities caused inner city residents to wait up to five hours to vote in his bailiwick. Prior to that election, in his BOE office, Damschroder accepted a $10,000 check for the Franklin County Republican Party from a representative of the Diebold voting machine company. Inexplicably, after Damschroder resigned, the Franklin County BOE, including two Democrats, voted to retain him as a “consultant” at over $11,000 per month salary.

Anecdotal evidence from Texas, where Clinton won the popular vote in the Democratic primary, also indicates Republican and Republican-leaning independent cross-over voting may have had an impact. While losing the popular vote by a narrow margin, Obama won that state’s caucuses, and emerged from Texas with more Democratic delegates than did Clinton.

Evidence in general would suggest that the intrusion of normally Republican voters into the Democratic primary may signify what statisticians call an “asymmetrical entrance” of new voters. Such a phenomenon could signal malicious cross-over voters or signs of a Democratic realignment, or both. This would also cause errors in pre-election polls. The post-election exit polls may have been affected by the so-called “Bradley Effect,” in which white voters casting ballots in an election where a white candidate is running against a black one tend to mislead exit pollsters about how they cast their actual vote.

This fall it is virtually certain that Ohio will once again play a key role in choosing the next president. Except for John Kennedy in 1960, no candidate has won the presidency without carrying the Buckeye State since the 1840s.

This spring, the Buckeye State has also played a critical part in the race for the Democratic nomination. And it would appear that Ohio Republicans and independents who generally vote Republican were key in handing the state to Hillary Clinton.

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org). With Steve Rosenfeld they co-wrote WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? from the New Press. This article was originally published by freepress.org.

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