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Explosive New Vote Fraud Developments Continue To Rock Ohio And Florida

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
March 23, 2007

Breaking news in vote fraud cases in both Ohio and Florida are feeding a firestorm of controversy that is likely to continue escalating, with major implications for the 2008 election and the future of e-voting machines.

In Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, the newly elected Secretary of State, has received two of the four resignations she requested from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE). The two Democrats on the Board, Edward Coaxum, Jr. and Loree Soggs, have complied with her call for their departures from Cleveland’s scandal-ridden election authority.

However, Robert Bennett, who chairs both the Cuyahoga BOE and the Ohio Republican Party, has thus far refused Brunner’s request. So has Sally Florkiewicz, Bennett’s fellow Republican on the BOE. Should they continue with their refusal to resign, Brunner has threatened to hold public hearings, in the wake of which she could force the resignations.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that a criminal investigation is underway which centers on the Cuyahoga BOE’s conduct of the November 2006 election. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason has turned again to Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter who recently won felony convictions of two BOE workers for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for another criminal investigation. Baxter will be investigating “possible criminal wrongdoings” related to ballot security and the scanning of absentee ballots.

A Cleveland State University Center for Election Integrity study has exposed various election irregularities in Cuyahoga County in the 2006 election. Among the most egregious were the BOE’s failure to secure the dual keys (one for the Dems and one for the Republicans) required for the vote counting rooms; that they allowed shared computer passwords; and that they allowed an unexplained cable connection to the county’s vote counting computer.

The Free Press also has viewed a video shot by Jeff Kirkby showing Cuyahoga County election workers downloading the county’s election data onto portable laptops that were allegedly allowed to go home with BOE employees. These practices raise serious concerns over election data security.

Massive computer failures during the May 2006 primary led in February 2007 to the resignation of Michael Vu, who was the executive director of the Cuyahoga BOE at the time. Both Bennett and Vu pushed for the $20 million purchase of Diebold voting machines over strenuous objections from election protection activists, whose concerns were cablecast in the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” shown nationwide just prior to the November 2006 election.

On March 21, the Dayton Daily News reported that “After two days of tests, the results are in: About 2,500 people cast ballots in November on 56 malfunctioning electronic touch-screen voting machines in Montgomery County, said Steve Harsman, county board of elections director.”

The Free Press has previously reported that there were nearly 30,000 undervotes in Montgomery County during the 2006 gubernatorial race, meaning an abnormally high 13.67% of all voters reportedly recorded no vote for the state’s highest office. (See chart posted with this article at the Freepress.org web site courtesy of Pete Johnson and CASE-Ohio) Similar undervote problems exist in Adams, Darke, Highland, Mercer and Perry counties.

Meanwhile, Jonathon Simon has informed the Free Press that the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) is analyzing data from Adams County as part of a project to compare exit polls to actual votes. In the 2004 election, the exit polls showed John Kerry winning, while the actual machine and computer tabulated results gave the state to Bush by 118,000 votes.

Meanwhile, in Florida, internal memos from the ES&S voting machine company indicate an e-voting machine created an undervote problem, according to Wired News. In Sarasota County, 18,000 ballots recorded no votes in a hotly contested congressional race.

“But the memo, which the company sent to Florida election officials before the state’s September primary, revealed that the iVotronic machines had a flaw that sometimes caused machines to respond slowly to a voter’s touch ‘beyond the normal time a voter would expect to have their selection highlighted.’ The memo stated that a software upgrade was required but couldn’t be certified before the September election. In its absence, ES&S sent election officials a warning sign to post at polls advising voters that they might need to press the screen for several seconds before their votes would register,” wrote Wired News.

Reginald Mitchell, lawyer for People for the American Way, told Wired News that “this memo is the smoking gun….”

The six counties under investigation in Ohio all used Diebold machines suggesting that both major suppliers of e-voting machines have similar flaws that create undervotes.

These waves of breaking news about serious problems in the conduct of the 2004 and 2006 elections, and in the performance of electronic voting machines in the two states that have decided the last two presidential elections, make it a virtual certainty that we have barely begun to see the full extent of what has really been done to the American democratic system.

—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of three books on the presidential election of 2004, and continue to cover breaking election protection issues at www.freepress.org.

Download the Excel spreadsheet.

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Forced Resignations And Stiff Prison Sentences Intensify The Escalating Blowback From Ohio’s 2004 Stolen Election

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
March 20, 2007

In a bold move “to restore trust to elections in Ohio,” Ohio’s newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has requested the resignation of all four members of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The two Democrats and two Republicans were formally asked to resign by the close of business on March 21. Cuyahoga County includes the heavily Democratic city of Cleveland. Brunner is a Democrat who was elected to be Ohio’s Secretary of State in November, 2006.

Felony convictions have also resulted in 18-month prison sentences for two employees of the Cuyahoga BOE as a result of what the county prosecutor in the case calls the “rigging” of the outcome in the recount following the 2004 presidential election. Further problems surfaced in the conduct of Cuyahoga County’s May, 2006 primary, in the wake of which Michel Vu, Executive Director of the county’s Board of Elections recently resigned.

In tandem, the shake-up in Ohio’s biggest county reflects a widening storm surrounding the outcome of the 2004 presidential election and the conduct of elections overall in the nation’s most pivotal state.

Among those Brunner has asked to resign is Cuyahoga County BOE Chair Robert Bennett, who chairs Ohio’s Republican Party. Voting rights attorney Cliff Arnebeck and others have long charged that Bennett worked closely with White House advisor Karl Rove and Ohio’s then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to secure Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio.

Bennett responded to Brunner by saying that he will refuse to resign. He has placed the blame for the May 2006 primary problems on private voting machine vendors, including Diebold. Bennett claims the rigging of the 2004 presidential recount was caused by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

If Bennett and other Board members refuse to resign by Wednesday, Brunner says they “will face a complaint and public hearing to be conducted in Cleveland…”

In the 2004 presidential election, Cuyahoga County suffered serious election irregularities that worked to the disadvantage of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Among them: the purging of 24.93% of all the voters in the city of Cleveland, where Kerry won 83% of the vote; mysterious and suspect vote totals for third party candidates in majority African American wards; unexplained “security” problems that caused the last-minute shift of voting locations in the inner city Cleveland Public School polling places; improbably low apparent turnouts in heavily Democratic inner city wards, and more.

Brunner’s request for the resignations comes a week after two Cuyahoga County election workers were each sentenced to 18 months in prison for rigging the recount of the 2004 election in Ohio’s biggest county. These are the first prison terms issued in the escalating scandal over the vote count that gave George W. Bush a second stay in the White House. The two women are out on bail pending appeal. But the substantial jail time demanded by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peter Corrigan indicates there may be more trials and convictions yet to come, especially in light of new evidence unearthed by the Free Press in other counties around the state.

Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct by an election board employee. Maiden, 60, was the Cuyahoga Board of Elections’ third-highest ranking employee.

Dreamer, 40, was ballot manager. Maiden and Dreamer were also convicted of a separate misdemeanor. A third defendant in the case was acquitted of all charges.

The Free Press has unearthed evidence indicating possible criminal misconduct by a wide range of election officials throughout the state, including Blackwell. Under the law, election boards are required to do recounts by choosing 3% of a county’s voters at random for sampling. But throughout the state, apparently with the explicit knowledge and approval of Blackwell, precincts were hand-counted for recounting, a criminal act. This non-random sampling in essence voided the recount, for which backers of the Green and Libertarian Parties paid more than $100,000.

According to the prosecution in the case against Maiden and Dreamer, this method of action led to the recount being illegally “rigged.” When investigators working with the Free Press attempted to audit the Cuyahoga County ballots from the 2004 election last summer, BOE officials were unable to find the ballots for four full days. The investigation team, led by Richard Hayes Phillips, had to find the ballots on their own. Under Ohio law, the ballots were to be locked in a known location, and secured by two keys, one controlled by each major party.

Brunner says she acted in part because she is concerned that many of the problems from 2004 and 2006 might resurface in the upcoming 2008 election. “With maximum 18-month prison sentences being handed down to two Cuyahoga County election workers last week, for their role in the 2004 presidential recount, the tremendous problems that surfaced in the May 2006 primary that delayed even the unofficial vote count for five days, and the uncertain future of this board as another Presidential election looms on the near horizon, it is incumbent on me as Secretary of State to provide the direction needed to get this troubled board on track,” she says. “The voters of Cuyahoga county deserve it, the citizens of Ohio expect it and the rest of the nation will be watching.”

In the 2006 primary, Cuyahoga County used the controversial Diebold touchscreen voting machines. These machines suffered a well-publicized meltdown, in which many malfunctioned. A report from the Election Science Institute (ESI) documented significant differences between votes actually cast on the machines as opposed to those officially counted.

Immediately following the election, 562,498 votes were reported cast in Cuyahoga County, with 30,791 listed as absentee or provisional ballots. But the official results show just 468,056 counted. This means that 94,442 ballots cast in the unofficial total disappeared in the official tallies, representing a shocking 16.8% of all the votes cast in Cuyahoga.

Michael Vu, who was the Cuyahoga BOE executive director, came under intense criticism for the bitter controversies surrounding both the 2004 and 2006 elections. Last month, he resigned “to pursue future career growth,” according to a Cuyahoga County Board of Elections release.

In an interesting and perhaps telling statement coming from a Republican who was commenting on an appointee supported by the Democratic Party, Bennett said “Michael Vu has worked hard and accomplished a great deal on behalf of Cuyahoga County votes and will, I am sure, continue to have success in his career of public service.

“Michael oversaw a difficult transition period at the Board including the implementation of a new electronic voting system county-wide in the May (2006) primary followed by a near flawless general election,” Bennett concluded.

Brunner’s action underscores a growing sentiment that the unraveling of what happened during and after the 2004 election has only just begun.

The Free Press has learned that Brunner’s office is also investigating an unexplained undercount in the 2006 general election in six Ohio counties which all used the Diebold TSX DRE voting machines. In Montgomery County, where the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland beat Blackwell, the Republican nominee, by 107,593 to 76,189, there was an abnormally high 13.76% of the machines registering no vote for the state’s highest office. Problems are also under investigation in Adams, Darke, Highland, Mercer and Perry Counties.

With stiff prison terms, forced resignations and widespread investigations underway, there is a well-founded sense in Ohio that much more is yet to surface about the disputed presidential election of 2004 and what has come after it.

—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? (New Press) and of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via www.freepress.org.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2503

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After Ohio’s Recount Rigging Convictions In Cuyahoga, Is Coshocton County Next?

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 6, 2007

After the recent convictions of two Cuyahoga County Board of Election workers for felony recount tampering, Republican County Prosecutor Robert Batchelor is stonewalling efforts to investigate similar well-documented charges in Coshocton County, Ohio.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE) third-ranking employee and an assistant manager were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of failing to perform their duties during the 2004 recount. The convictions stemmed from the secret pre-counting of precincts prior to the lawfully required open recount. The convicted election workers only allowed the pre-counted precincts that matched the official results to be used in the recount. This caused the special prosecutor to tell the jury that the election recount was “rigged” in Cuyahoga.

Testimony and eyewitness reports document similar activity in several Ohio counties regarding the illegal rigging of the 2004 recount.

The Green and Libertarian Parties brought the Ohio 2004 recount after Democratic hopeful John Kerry conceded with nearly a quarter of million votes uncounted in the state. Under Ohio law, county boards of elections must set a “time and place fixed for making a recount”” and “”in the presence of all witnesses [who may] may be in attendance, shall open the sealed containers containing the ballots to be recounted and shall recount them.” The sealed ballot containers are to be opened in front of BOE officials and recount candidates may “attend an witness the recount and may have any person whom the candidate designates attend and witness the recount,” under ORC 3515.03.

It is illegal to secretly pre-count recount ballots. The BOE can”t do a pre-count of ballots for whatever reason, secretly, after the certified vote goes to the state and after there has been a mandate for a statewide recount.

What happened in Coshocton County before the 2004 recount also appears to be a clear violation of Ohio law and could be damning for the Coshocton County BOE.

On December 8, 2004, Tim Kettler, the Coshocton County recount coordinator for Green presidential candidate David Cobb, was informed by a Coshocton County Board of Elections (BOE) employee that the county would officially recount on Tuesday, December 14.

In a follow up phone call to the BOE a few days later, Kettler learned that BOE Director Mary Fry was planning a full hand count on December 14. This was a surprise, since the Coshocton County BOE had certified its vote total to Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell on December 6 as required by law and the required recount only mandated a hand count of 3% of the county’s votes, not a full hand recount. The reasons for the hand count would prove even more shocking.

Documents obtained by the Free Press, from a criminal complaint filed by Kettler, show that despite fixing the legal time and place for the recount, the Coshocton County BOE ha begun to pre-count, just like Cuyahoga County, the ballots without notifying representatives of the Green and Libertarian Parties.

BOE records obtained by the Free Press, and filed by Kettler with Prosecutor Batchelor, indicate that a ‘special Meeting” was called on December 9 by the Coshocton County BOE to discuss the recount. At the BOE meeting, “a motion was made by David Burns to hand count Precinct 3-C . . . ” after the legal certification of the vote, and prior to the recount.

Records indicate that on December 10, 2004, a new certified vote total was sent to Blackwell’s office.

Fry informed Kettler in a December 27, 2004 letter that the unexplained December 10 filing contained “. . . amended totals.”

The December 27 letter to Kettler also documents that Director Fry knew that errors were being made by the ES&S 550 vote counting machines in tabulating the certified Election Day votes.

“Fry’s reason for the allegedly illegal pre-count calls into question the accuracy of ES&S scantron voting machines: “MANY OF THE ERRORS IN TOTALS WERE NOTED TO HAVE BEEN CONDUCTED ON THE 550 [ES&S] COUNTER, WHERE TOTALS ON THE 150 COUNTER WERE STILL REMAINING THE SAME AS ON ELECTION NIGHT AND DURING OUR RECOUNT OF THE BALLOTS FOR CERTIFICATION TOTALS.”

The Free Press found similar problems with ES&S 550 counting machines during the 2004 election in Miami County. In Miami County, the counter appeared to add phantom votes never cast to the 2004 presidential election totals. (See “Official States Electronic Voting System Added Votes Never Cast in 2004 Presidential Election; Audit Log Missing,” by Peter Peckarsky, Ron Baiman and Robert Fitrakis. Article)

Fry claims that she contacted the Secretary of State’s office and was told to pre-count the ballots prior to the recount, thus raising potential criminal conduct by Secretary of State Blackwell’s office.

“”I THEN CALLED PAT WOLFE WITH THE SECRETARY OF STATE’s OFFICE, TO SEE WHAT WE SHOULD DO. MRS. WOLFE WAS IN MEETING ALL DAY LONG, THIS TRANSPIRED ON DECEMBER 9, 2004. HAVING NOT REACHED HER OR GETTING A PHONE CALL BACK FROM MRS. WOLFE. WE THEN CALLED OUR REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE SECRETARY OF STATE’s OFFICE, MICHAEL HERNON, HAVING EXPLAINED WHAT WE HAD DISCOVERED, MICHAEL RECOMMENDED THAT WE RECOUNT ALL BALLOTS THAT WERE RAN ON THE [ES&S] 550 MACHINE, AND IMMEDIATELY GET AN AMENDED SET OF TOTALS TO THEIR OFFICE BEFORE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGES MET, WHICH WAS ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 13TH, 2004. WHILE TALKING WITH MICHAEL HERNON, PAT WOLFE RETURNED OUR PHONE CALL, EVERYTHING WAS EXPLAINED TO PAT WOLFE, SHE ALSO RECOMMENDED THAT WE RECOUNT ALL BALLOTS ON THE 550 COUNTER ALONG WITH ALL BALLOTS,” Fry wrote Kettler in the December 27, 2004 letter.

On December 14 as the recount began, the BOE distributed a document entitled “Official – Nov. 2, 2004” dated December 10, 2004, including lists of vote totals, indicating that the Board had secretly hand recounted the ballots prior to the official recount. Fry, in her December 27 letter to Kettler, admits to the secret recount: “DURING THE TIME OF HAND POSTING ELECTION CERTIFIED RESULTS ON OUR ABSTRACT MANY OF THE FIGURES WERE UNUSUAL LOOKING. THEREFORE KATHY [HENDRICKS] AND MYSELF PULLED SEVERAL PRECINCTS AND HAND COUNTED THE PRSSIDENTAL [sic] RACE ONLY, FINDING MANY ERRORS IN TOTALS THAT WERE CERTIFIED TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE’s OFFICE.”

Kettler contends that Fry’s statement is a “blatant lie” and that the minutes of the December 9 special meeting document that the discrepancies in presidential vote totals were discovered during the “cursory count” of Precinct 3-C. That precinct had been pre-selected for the recount, according to Kettler.

On December 14, Coshocton County conducted the only full hand recount of any of Ohio’s 88 counties. The hand recount produced a total vote discrepancy of 1079 presidential votes between the certified results of December 6 and the recount results of December 14. With only 17,321 votes cast in Coshocton County, this represented a discrepancy of 6.25% of all votes cast in the county.

In the 1079 vote discrepancy, Kerry received 49% of the vote. This is a stark contrast to the less than 43% he received of the original certified vote totals, before the amended totals.

Kettler further asserts that the “full hand recount” was meant not only to cover up the illegal unwitnessed pre-count but to also steer witnesses away from running a test deck of ballots through the malfunctioning machine.” He claims that a test deck of ballots was only run through one of the tabulators, probably the “150,” which did not experience problems.

Despite the known problems with the ES&S 550 machines, Fry stated in a Coshocton Tribune interview published on December 18 that the “optical scan technology worked remarkably well.”

Kettler asks “Why in the hell would you make a statement like that knowing that the tabulators lost over 6% of the vote?”

He also is “greatly concerned” with what he calls “the unmonitored handling of the ballots during the period of November 2 to December 14” 2004. “No one really knows what may have happened to the ballots given the cardboard box security and the Board’s willingness to act in a manner inconsistent with Ohio law,” said Kettler.

He noted that the December 9 minutes of the Coshocton BOE meeting recorded that similar events had occurred in another county an d that their Board had proceeded in the same manner as Coshocton.

According the Kettler, though, the Coschocton County BOE officials have not been indicted or convicted because they are being protected by Batchelor.

On August 16, 2006, Kettler filed a police report charging that the Coshocton County BOE had violated Ohio election laws and delivered a copy to prosecutor Batchelor. Three days later, the police assigned a complaint number 0106002634.

A letter was sent from the police investigator to the Coshocton prosecutor on October 10. On October 13 Batchelor refused to prosecute BOE officials in Coshocton County although he never denied that the alleged criminal events occurred. Following the Cuyahoga County convictions, Kettler has now asked that Batchelor be removed and that a special prosecutor be appointed in Coshocton County to investigate this case.

Kettler wrote the Free Press and stated, “My purpose in pursuing this to the bloody end is accountability, reform and [that] the people who perpetrated these misdeeds are still running our elections. Unacceptable!”

—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (https://freepress.org/), and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, published by the New Press.

Supporting Documentation

complaint_cover_letter.rtf
Complaint_page_one.rtf
complaint_page_2.rtf
complaint_page_three.rtf
complaint_page_four.rtf
exhibit_A_page_one.rtf
exhibit_A_page_2.rtf
exhibit_A_page_3.rtf
exhibit_B_minutes_12_8_04.rtf
exhibit_B_minutes_12_9_04.rtf
exhibit_C_redo.jpg
exhibit_C_redo_pg_2.jpg
Exhibit_E_pg_1.jpg
Exhibit_E_pg_2.jpg
Exhibit_E_pg_1.jpg
Exhibit_E_pg_2.jpg
letter_to_prosecutor.jpg
prosecutor’s_reply_pg_2.jpg
works_remarkably_well.jpg
Cosh_Sheriff_Report_pg_1.rtf
Cosh_Sheriff_Report_pg_2.rtf  

Original link at

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2462

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Authors Dr. Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman Book Signing Event

What_Happened_in_Ohio.JPG

March 3, 2007
Local Activists and Authors Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman book signing

Featured at Simply Living Bookstore. 12 noon until 2 p.m. Bob and Harvey are well known locally for their work with the Free Press, and their recent books addressing election issues in Ohio have received national attention. Mark your calendars now to meet them in person and purchase a signed copy of What Happened in Ohio? – a piece of living history that you will want to pass on to your children and grandchildren.

Location:Clintonville Community Market, 200 Crestview.

Email: Contact
Website: What Happened in Ohio?

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Molly And Me

MollyIvans                              I haven’t blogged since the election, although there have been a few postings of articles I’ve written for the Free Press. But I break this unofficial vow of silence to mourn Molly Ivins, the longtime Free Press columnist and Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer.

I can remember the first time I met Molly a decade or so ago. She was in Columbus speaking at a private prep school, the Columbus School for Girls. My good friend and Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman insisted that Molly would want to meet me. So, we went over to the School for Girls to say Hi.

Molly not only wanted to talk to me, she insisted on shooting hoops before the event. While the crowd gathered in the auditorium, Molly, Harvey and I played a little “21.” As a recall, Molly won, and she was a mean rebounder. She was a tall woman with a quick wit and equally quick elbows, who knew her way around a basketball court.

After her speech, we met back at the Wasserman home in Bexley where Molly was eager to share the longneck beers that she was drinking. Since Harvey is a healthy Green, the task fell to me to drink the longnecks with Molly – and exchange stories. While I hate to admit it, her stories were much funnier than mine, and her charm was incomparable, like her writing.

Molly’s Texas populist perspectives always sided with the poor and the oppressed over the wealthy drunken yay-hoos of her native state. She captured Texas politics and national politics in a way that made you proud to be an American. Molly’s last column entitled “Stand up Against the Surge” was also her last campaign to stop the criminally insane war in Iraq. Many now are calling her the conscience of America. But that’s what they wrote of Michael Harrington, Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs. Molly was more than that, she was not only the conscience, she was the comedic voice that defined the follies and the foibles of the Bush dynasty. As much conscience, as a jester speaking truth shrouded in humor.

We have lost one of the great voices in American journalism. I’m just happy she let me shoot hoops with her, and publish her columns at the Free Press.

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First Criminal Convictions From Ohio’s Stolen 2004 Election Confirm Recount Was Rigged

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
January 27, 2007

The first felony convictions of two Cleveland poll workers stemming from Ohio’s stolen 2004 election confirm that the official recount in that contested vote was, in the words of county prosecutors, “rigged.” The question now is whether further prosecutions will reach higher up in the ranks of officials who may have been involved in illegalities throughout the rest of the state.

The convictions have come down in Cuyahoga County, where Democratic candidates traditionally run up huge majorities. Suspicious vote counts and other irregularities cut deeply into John Kerry’s margins in 2004. Official vote counts gave the state—and thus the presidency—to George W. Bush by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted.

A statewide recount, paid for by the Green and Libertarian Parties, was marred in 87 of the state’s 88 counties by the types of illegalities that led to this week’s convictions. Only in Coshocton County was a full, manual recount performed.

Throughout the rest of the state, under the direction of Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, mandatory random sampling was not done, as prescribed by law. Instead, poll workers illegally chose sample precincts for recounting where they knew there would be no problems, and then routinely recounted the rest of the ballots by machine, rendering the recount meaningless.

Blackwell simultaneously served as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. This fall he was defeated in his campaign for governor by Democrat Ted Strickland.

County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the Cuyahoga trial by charging that “the evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless.” Baxter said three election workers “did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months” on the recount. “This was a very hush operation.”

Jacqueline Maiden, the county election board’s third-ranking employee, and Kathleen Dreamer, an assistant manager, have each been convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of failing to perform their duties. Rosie Grier, the board’s ballot department manager, was acquitted on all seven counts raised against the three. Sentencing is scheduled for late February. Defense attorneys have indicated they will appeal. The felony conviction carries a possible sentence of six to 18 months.

The county prosecutors have not yet alleged vote fraud. No do they say mishandling the recount affected the election’s outcome. Dreamer’s defense attorney, Roger Synenberg, said the defendants “were just doing [the recount] the way they were always doing it.”

But Cuyahoga’s precinct-by-precinct vote counts and turnout numbers varied wildly and improbably. Several predominantly black precincts showed turnouts of less than 30% in a county where overall turnout was around 60%. One ward showed a 7% turnout as compared to surrounding precincts with turnouts nearly ten times as high.

Further prosecutions may now hinge on what Maiden and Dreamer might tell prosecutors about the role played by higher-ups. The assumption is widespread that the decision to consciously designate test precincts, rather than choose them at random, must have been at least tacitly approved by Secretary of State Blackwell.

In Cleveland, Robert Bennett, chair of the state’s Republican Party, also served as chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Cuyahoga BOE Executive Director Michael Vu was chosen by the county Democratic Party. Under Vu’s direction, the county’s elections have been rife with chaos, irregularities and apparent fraud. When the Democrats recently tried to remove him from his post, Vu was supported by Bennett and the Republican Party. He kept his job when Blackwell strategically abstained from a key removal vote.

There is growing evidence that what happened in Cleveland was the rule, rather than the exception, in Ohio’s 2004 presidential recount. Sworn testimony at a public hearing in Toledo indicates Diebold technicians were involved in picking “random” precincts to be recounted there. A memory card was apparently lacking from at least one optiscan machines.

Miami County election officials admit they merely ran the optiscan ballots through the ES 550 counter, rather than doing the prescribed random recounts. Free Press reporters have found recount results varied signficantly from official results, which should have triggered a hand recount of all the ballots in the county. This was never done in Miami or in any other Ohio County except Coshocton.

Handwritten field notes from Paddy Shaffer, the Green/Libertarian Recount Coordinator in Delaware County in 2004, call into question the role played by ES&S technician Sam Hogsett. On December 15, 2004, Shaffer recorded at 2:42pm that Hogsett was “…tapping tabulator machine on left. There are two machines in the room. Kim [Spangler] says he is doing this because the light/the switch keeps going out. He has now handled the machines multiple times.”

At 4:25pm, Shaffer recorded “ES&S tech Sam Hogsett back on the machine and touching the ballots. They are working on Genoa precincts. My intuition is screaming get him away from the ballots and machines. … He continued moving around the machines, stacking in the ballots.”

At 5:05pm Shaffer noted “Sam is back loading and stacking. Throughout much of this time, Sam is the one to call out the precinct total and the name.”

Sam Hogsett is more than an ES&S technician according to Shaffer and others who investigated him, who have found his letters to the editor quite alarming. Voting rights activists troubled by Hogsett’s role in the recount found letters posted under the name Sam Hogsett, Crown City, at the southeatern Ohio newspaper website

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/ .

One of the letters begins as follows: “I recently read in this pitifully left-leaning editorial section that the spineless, thoughtless, moral less useless left-wing liberal America hater Robert Sheer is unsuccessfully attempting to use an apples-to-oranges comparison to wrongfully attack our Second Amendment rights.” Hogsett goes on to write: “… He [Sheer] believes that if I were to take a Smith and Wesson and blast his little pea brain to bits, that his family should be able to sue the manufacturer and the gun dealer who sold it to me.”

Initially, Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost obtained a temporary restraining order stopping the recount in Delaware County on November 23, 2004.

The Delaware Gazette noted a complaint from Shaffer about the role Hogsett played in the recount as a private voting machine company technician, and in a report dated January 1, 2005, Shaffer wrote the Delaware County Board of Elections that John Myers of the Delaware County Democratic Party said that, “He was very pleased that unlike many counties that are at the mercy of computer technicians, Delaware is not. He [Myers] said during both conversations, even repeated over and over, that they do their own programming. So why was Sam Hogsett needed? Why involve the technician in the process of the recount?”

Board of Elections records in Fairfield County document that when the recount was not matching thus mandating a full handcount under Ohio law, the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell’s office recommended that Sam Hogsett be brought in to deal with the discrepancies between the official count and the recount. After Hogsett arrived and took charge of the recount as a private ES&S technician, the vote matched perfectly for the first time.

In Athens and Auglaize Counties, BOE workers who attempted to blow the whistle on apparent election irregularities were forced out of their jobs.

Overall, the illegalities prompting these initial convictions in Cuyahoga County appear to be the rule rather than the exception in the handling of the Ohio 2004 recount statewide. The question now is whether parallel prosecutions will follow in other counties. And whether such prosecutions might include those who are likely to have ordered or approved the illegalities that marred the recount in Cleveland, and throughout the rest of the state.

—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (https://freepress.org/), and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, published by the New Press.

Original article @>https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2379>

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The Unraveling Of 2004 Election

Do new Ohio recount prosecutions indicate unraveling of 2004 election theft cover-up?
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman January 19, 2007

Three criminal prosecutions in Ohio’s biggest county have opened with strong indications that the cover-up of the theft of the 2004 presidential election is starting to unravel. Prosecutors say these cases involve “rigging” the recount in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), where tens of thousands of votes were shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush, or else never counted. Meanwhile, corroborating evidence continues to surface throughout Ohio illuminating the GOP’s theft of the presidency. According to the AP, County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the Cuyahoga trial by charging that “the evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless.” Baxter said the three election workers “did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months” on the recount.

Jacqueline Maiden, the county election board’s third-ranking employee, faces six counts of misconduct involving ballot review. Rosie Grier, the board’s ballot department manager, and Kathleen Dreamer, an assistant manager, are also charged. All three are on paid administrative leave, and are being supported by the county board of elections.

The county prosecutors do not allege vote fraud. No do they say mishandling the recount affected the election’s outcome.

But Cleveland, which usually gives Democrats an extremely heavy margin, was crucial to Bush’s alleged victory of roughly 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted. Some 600,000 votes were cast or counted in Cuyahoga County. But official turnout and vote counts varied wildly and improbably from precinct to precinct. Overall the county reported about a 60% turnout. But several predominantly black precincts, where voters went more than 80% for Kerry, reported turnouts of 30% or less. In one ward, only a 7% turnout was reported, while surrounding precincts were nearly ten times as high. Independent studies indicate Kerry thousands of votes in Cuyahoga County that rightfully should have been counted in his column.

In the Cuyahoga case, the poll workers are charged with circumventing state recount laws that require a random sampling of at least three percent of the votes cast in a given precinct, to be recounted by hand and by machine. The prosecution charges that the workers instead hand picked sample precincts to recount that they knew did not have questionable results. Once they were able to match those recounts with official results, they could then do the rest of the recount by machine, in effect rendering the entire process meaningless. “This was a very hush operation,” said prosecutor Baxter.

Similar allegations have been made in other counties. Indeed, such illegal non-random recounting procedures appear to have been common throughout the state, carried out by board of election employees with the tacit consent of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell was officially charged with administering the election that gave Bush a second term while simultaneously serving as the Ohio co-chair of his Bush’s re-election campaign. Blackwell has just been overwhelmingly defeated in his own attempt to become governor of Ohio.

Defense attorney Roger Synenberg, who represents Dreamer, told the jury that the recount was an open process, and that his client and the others “were just doing it the way they were always doing it.”

The Ohio recount was forced by the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, which raised over $100,000 to cover costs. They charge the recount was fraudulent due largely to the kinds of irregularities with which the Cuyahoga poll workers are now charged. Those charges carry sentences of up to 18 months in prison each, and include failure to perform duties imposed by law; misconduct; knowingly disobeying elections law; unlawfully obtaining possession of ballots/ballot boxes or pollbooks; and unlawfully opening or permitting the opening of a sealed package containing ballots.

But the trial in Cleveland represents just a small sampling of what happened during the Ohio recount. At a public hearing sponsored by the Free Press in Toledo in December, 2004, sworn testimony claimed that Diebold technicians were party to picking the “random” precincts to be recounted. At least one of the precincts lacked a memory card for the recount using the optiscan machine.

In Miami County, election officials admit that they did not recount to the official vote total, but merely ran the optiscan ballots through the ES 550 counter, and then counted them to see if they matched the machine count. In essence, what they did was a test of the counting machine, not a recount to the actual reported votes. Miami’s procedures were thus as illegal as those in Cuyahoga.

Indeed, when the Free Press audited all the recount ballots from Miami County, we found the so-called recount results differed noticeably from the official results. If these differences in results were discovered at the recount in 2004, Ohio law should have triggered a hand recount of all ballots in the county. That was never done.

In Fairfield County, when the recount totals wouldn’t match, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell recommended Sam Hogsett, an ES&S employee, to assist with the process. Despite complaints from a Democratic election officer, Hogsettt worked the central tabulator and counter. Hogsett somehow managed to make the recount match, thus avoiding a full manual recount.

Hogsettt is on record in a local newspaper saying that he would like to shoot a “liberal” so the liberal would learn that it wasn’t the gun that killed him, but the shooter, Hogsett. Green Party recount coordinator Paddy Shaffer complained to Delaware County election officials about Hogsett’s presence during the recount and his constant use of the computer. Her complaint has had no apparent impact.

In Hocking County, Board of Elections Deputy Director, Sherole Eaton was fired after she submitted an affidavit to U.S. Rep. John Conyers outlining how Hocking BOE officials pre-selected one precinct because it had the “right” number of voters (3%), thus illegally prescreening like Cuyahoga County. Eaton also complained that a Triad technician showed up unannounced on recount day and offered her a “cheat sheet” for the recount. He just happened to have a hard drive for a 12-year-old Dell computer that served as Hocking County’s central tabulator. The county’s official central tabulator went down mysteriously just prior to the recount. Eaton said the Triad technician installed his hard drive and told the election officials that the recount would match up perfectly if they didn’t turn off the computer. Eaton has not been restored to her BOE position, and there has been no full recount in Hocking County.

In Coshocton County, Green Party recount observer Tim Kettler acquired public records showing that election officials pre-counted in secrecy in clear violation of Ohio law. Coshocton BOE officials desperately begged Secretary of State Blackwell for advice when the recount did not match. Blackwell’s office urged the county to simply send in the results as official. But after being confronted by angry recount observers, Coshocton BOE officials became the only ones in Ohio to hand count every ballot. The recount resulted in a statistically significant vote pickup for John Kerry among previously uncounted ballots.

In part due to widespread public revulsion over his conduct of the 2004 election, Blackwell was soundly beaten in the 2006 gubernatorial race by Democrat Ted Strickland. Ohio also now has a Democratic Secretary of State and Attorney General. Whether they will conduct further investigations into what really happened in 2004 remains to be seen.

But a federal court decision has preserved the ballots from that election. Whether further legal charges come from the new administration in Columbus remains to be seen. But the Cuyahoga prosecutions provide more evidence that we still don’t have a reliable vote count for the election that gave George W. Bush a second term.

Original Article @

http://tinyurl.com/ytmwxs

—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org), and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, published by the New Press. 

 

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Consequences of 2006 Election On Audio And Questionable Results In Text

See Audio track at bottom. 

Bob Fitrakis

Missing votes in Ohio call races into question
January 2, 2007

While Democratic Party supporters celebrate their success in Ohio, where their statewide candidates won four out of five executive offices and they now control both the U.S. House and Senate, they are ignoring massive and verifiable irregularities in the 2006 election. Similar irregularities – including missing votes, undervotes and overvotes – may come back to haunt the Democrats in the 2008 general election.

The only statewide partisan loss for the Democrats was also the closest contest. Republican Mary Taylor defeated Democrat Barbara Sykes for State Auditor by an official vote of 50.64% to 49.36%. Taylor prevailed by 48,826 votes. The Columbus Dispatch’s final poll, usually the most accurate in the state for candidate races, predicted Sykes would win by 10%.

An analysis by the Free Press documents massive discrepancies between the unofficial turnout reported by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell immediately following the election and the official general election turnout numbers reported in December 2006. These discrepancies may help explain Sykes’ unexpected loss.

In Cuyahoga County which contains the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, immediately following the election 562,498 votes were reported cast with 30,791 listed as absentee or provisional ballots. The official results show 468,056 counted in Cuyahoga. This means that 94,442 ballots cast in the unofficial total disappeared in the official tallies. This represents a shocking 16.8% of all the votes cast in Cuyahoga.

Sykes won 62% of the vote in Cuyahoga County.

Cuyahoga County uses the controversial Diebold touchscreen voting machines. These machines suffered a notorious meltdown in the 2006 primary where many machines malfunctioned and an Election Science Institute (ESI) report documented significant differences between votes actually cast on the machines as opposed to counted.

Similarly in Lucas County, another Democratic stronghold, 17,351 votes disappeared (10.6% of the total vote) between the unofficial and official turnout numbers. An analysis by Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips indicates that Taylor, a first-time statewide office seeker, ran significantly ahead of Republican incumbent candidates Mike Dewine and Betty Montgomery, in the Senate and Attorney General races respectively.

Other counties with significant and unexplained loss of votes include: Auglaize (15.7%), Coshocton (14.1%), Jackson (11.3%), Licking (14.1%), Morrow (17.4%), and Tuscarawas (11.7%). In these less populated counties, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland won in five out of six and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod won in four out of the six.

Normally, the official total vote tally increases as provisional ballots are added to the unfficial total. For example, Franklin County had 342,958 votes unofficially with 46,458 provisionals and a few late overseas absentee ballots. The official Franklin County result was 385,863 votes cast, a pickup of 42,905 ballots once the provisionals were counted. Eleven of Ohio’s 88 counties reported this anomaly of fewer votes in the official total than the unofficial total.

Other election anomalies that bear further investigation are six counties with improbable undervote percentages in the U.S. Senate race. On average in Ohio, 3.9% of the ballots contained an “undervote,” meaning no vote was cast in the Senate race. But, in the Senate race there were significant undervote totals: Adams County had 14.1%; Darke County had 13.5%; Highland had 13.8%; Mercer had 11.2%; Montgomery had 13.8%; and Perry had 16.3%. The city of Dayton is in Montgomery County where more than 30,000 ballots recorded no vote for Senate. Brown won 53% of the vote in Montgomery County.

In comparison with the undervote in the well-known District 13 race in Sarasota, Florida, the undervote was 18,382.

In the Sykes race, the undervote for Auditor in Cuyahoga County was 10.7%. Undervotes were 8.3% of the total vote in Lucas County. Skyes’ undervote total in these Democratic havens should have been examined along with the bizarre unofficial vs. official vote totals in these counties.

The state auditor’s office in Ohio has enormous power to investigate and root out official corruption involving public funds. Many critics of Republican Party scandals in Ohio have pointed to the GOP’s control of the state auditor’s office as the key to delaying and minimizing public scrutiny.

Franklin County and the Squire challenge

Although the election numbers are stranger in Cuyahoga and Lucas counties for the Democrats, an election contest complaint filed in the Franklin County Court of Appeals by Judge Carol Squire documents in great detail the problem with electronic voting machines based on the results of her 2006 race. Incumbent Squire filed the action on December 22 after losing by 13,064 votes to Chris Geer for a seat on the County Court of Common Pleas.

The action seeks to “declare invalid and set aside” Squire’s loss. The complaint requests a full evidentiary hearing.

Squire hired Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, President and Chief Technical Officer of Notable Software, Inc. as an expert witness and investigator. The former Bryn Mawr computer science professor holds a Ph.D. in computer and informational science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Mercuri’s sworn affidavit contains detailed criticisms of the Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) and its conduct of the 2006 election. Her sworn statements include the following:

  • 35 precincts were unable to close “due to problems with printers, machine malfunctions, infrared readers, PEBs [personal electronic ballots] . . . .” Squire paid for a recount of these 35 precincts but the BOE used the real time audit log (RTAL) paper tapes to recount only 2 of the 35 precincts. The RTALs are the only way to accurately assess how people really voted on the Election Day.
  • In the BOE warehouse “hundreds of RTAL paper rolls were sitting out on various tables . . . It had been my understanding that sealed containers holding the rolls would be open only in the presence of observers, but this apparently had already been done, and the rolls extracted, prior to the observers’ arrival.”
  • “Many of the rolls” lacked “tamper-proof” tape, which seals the RTALs at the end of Election Day in case of a recount. Instead, they had stickers which could be easily tampered with.
  • “Some of the [RTAL] rolls did not have a sticker” leaving them open for tampering or accidental destruction.
  • “. . . Others [RTALs] had a sticker with handwritten initials on it” indicating that the roll “was replaced by a service person during the Election Day.” This raises questions concerning chain of custody of the rolls, the functionality of the machines, and identity and background of the technicians who initialed the stickers.
  • “. . . A considerable number of the rolls were incomplete, possibly because the paper roll had run out or been changed, although for some, it was evident that the end of the paper roll had been damaged or ripped.”
  • “. . . between five and ten percent of the machines had either not printed an end tally,” or “it was missing.”
  • In one case, when Mercuri requested the information at the beginning of the RTAL roll be read aloud during the recount, the phrases “password override” and “PEB failure” were read from the audit log. Mercuri concludes that “. . . this might have indicated a pre-election breach of security or protocol for that equipment.”
  • “It was observed that some of the equipment problem report pages had been previously removed from the pollbooks.”
  • “The warehouse facility appeared to be shared by other agencies, as there was a large SWAT team truck behind some of the rows of voting machines . . . .”

Mercuri’s 16-page affidavit concludes that Squire was denied “an appropriate recount” from a voter-verified paper trail using the RTAL rolls and also points out that the “voting system was inappropriately configured and improperly used during the election.” The Franklin County BOE used different versions of hardware that were not certified prior to the election.

“The use of mismatched components violates certification requirements and also runs the risk of exposure to programming errors (bugs) or security vulnerabilities that could compromise the integrity of the election and result in the loss or mistabulation of votes,” Mercuri states.

In late November the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), one of the federal government’s premier research centers, condemned electronic voting machines noting that as presently configured, they “cannot be made secure.”

In an audit of 25% of Franklin County’s precinct pollbooks and signature books, Squire’s elections investigator Rady Ananda found massive problems with over reporting of votes. Only 29 out of 216 precincts matched the number of signatures to the number of votes cast. Eight precincts reported more than 100 more votes cast than signatures in the pollbooks.

A similar problem of fewer votes being recorded than voter signatures also occurred with one precinct having 100 fewer votes on the machine than signatures. In all, 136 precincts fell into this category. Columbus Ward 66 Precinct G was missing 123 votes. An audit of Miami County by a Free Press investigation team following the 2004 presidential election found a similar problem of optiscan precinct totals not matching signature books. In the spring 2006 primary election, the ESI audit of Cuyahoga County found similar problems.

Cuyahoga’s problems reappeared in the 2006 general election. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that, “Nearly 12,000 people in Cuyahoga County cast votes illegally on Election Day without signing the election books, or likely, showing identification as required by a new state law.”

“An analysis showed that 533 of the 570 Cuyhoga County voting precincts reported more votes than voters signed in.” The Plain Dealer found that: “With some polling places, the numbers were off by more than 100.”

Beverly Campbell, a 2006 Democratic candidate for the Ohio Statehouse, lost by 368 votes in Franklin County. She told the Columbus Dispatch that “her campaign has questions similar to Squire’s about vote and signature totals.” In a meeting with the Free Press, she supplied a worksheet from her own investigation of 98 precincts where there were problems in 88 of them either with more votes cast than signatures or more signatures than votes cast. In all, she found 483 more votes than signatures and 300 missing votes.

Squire’s complaint also asserts that “over 2500 provisional ballots were discarded with no opportunity for observers to obtain the basis or justification for rejection.”

The voting irregularities in the 2006 election appear to be greater than in 2004, but many Ohio Democrats have chosen to ignore that reality. But one who hasn’t taken that position is newly-elected Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who has pledged a complete review of the electronic voting machines. The facts remain that not every vote is counted or accounted for in the Buckeye State and this could be the key factor in deciding the next president of the United States.

—
Bob Fitrakis is the co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A documentary record of theft and fraud in the 2004 election published by the New Press.
Find the Original Article @ https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2007/1481

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Ohio’s 2006 Vote Count Now Includes A Higher Percentage Of Uncounted ballots than in 2004, And A Statistically Impossible Swing To The Republicans

by Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Ron Baiman
November 14, 2006

Original Article @ https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2250

The percentage of uncounted votes in the allegedly “fraud free” 2006 Ohio election is actually higher than the fraud-ridden 2004 election, when the presidency was stolen here. A flawed voting process that allowed voters to be illegally turned away throughout the morning on Election Day may have cost the Dems at least two Congressional seats and a state auditor’s seat.

The evidence comes directly from the official website of GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell Blackwell website. But researchers wishing to verify the number of uncounted ballots from that web site should do so immediately, as Blackwell is known for quickly deleting embarrassing evidence. In 2004, Blackwell deleted the evidence of excessive uncounted votes after the final results were tallied.

Despite Democratic victories in five of six statewide partisan offices, an analysis by the Free Press shows a statistically implausible shift of votes away from the Democratic Party statewide candidates on Election Day, contrasted with the results of the Columbus Dispatch’s final poll. The Dispatch poll predicted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland winning with 67% of the vote. His actual percentage was 60%. The odds of this occurring are one in 604 million. 

(Freepress has numbers matrix/chart in this area)

The final Columbus Dispatch poll wrapped up on Friday before the Tuesday election. This poll was based on 1541 registered Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.2 percentage points and a 95% confidence interval. The Dispatch noted “The survey’s 7-point variance from Democrat Ted Strickland’s actual percentage total broke a string of five straight gubernatorial elections in which the poll exactly matched the victor’s share of the vote.” Read more

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