Manjoo Errs In Fact, Knows Very Little About Ohio Election Law
In Farhad Manjoo’s “Was the 2004 Election Stolen? No” he claims Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s article in Rolling Stone contains “numerous errors of interpretation and his [Kennedy’s] deliberate omission of key bits of data.” As an Election Protection legal observer in Columbus and one of the four attorneys who challenged the Ohio election results, I was struck by Manjoo’s own numerous errors of fact and deliberate omissions of widely-known studies and data.
In his first claim about the Ellen Connally anomaly, where an under-funded retired municipal judge from Cleveland ran ahead of Kerry
in rural southwestern counties fails to indicate vote-shifting from
Kerry to Bush, Manjoo deliberately omits several well-known facts.The obvious fact on record is that Democratic nominee Al Gore pulled his
campaign out of the state six weeks prior to the 2000 election while
Kerry and his 527 organization supporters spent the largest amount of money in Ohio history. So to compare the non-Gore campaign in 2000 to the massive Democratic effort in 2004 seems disingenuous. Moreover, Manjoo conveniently ignores the fact that sample ballots were everywhere in the state of Ohio and voters in these rural counties were repeatedly mailed and handed both party’s sample ballots. There were large and active campaigns in the key counties in question – Butler, Clermont, and Warren – passing out Republican and Democratic sample ballots. This is a major omission. Also, Manjoo might actually want to do some research on the amount of money Eric Fingerhut spent vs. John Kerry. Fingerhut’s major effort was walking across the state of Ohio because he didn’t have any funds. Hardly Kerry’s problem.
By the way, it is easy to shift votes on punchcard machines due to the ballot rotation law in Ohio. For instance, the hole to punch for Kerry
would be “4” in one precinct and the hole to punch for Bush would be
“4” in the next precinct. Public records reveal that in key southwest
Ohio counties, ballots were counted at the county level, not the
precinct level, to save money on counting machines. Thus, all one has
to do is shift Kerry cards to a Bush tabulating machine to get a shift.
There was more than enough time to do this, when votes came in during the wee hours of the morning. In fact, when we finally got to look at the ballots from four precincts in Warren County, we were surprised to discover that two OF the pink “header” cards used to separate precinct ballots had holes punched for Bush.
It appears Manjoo knows very little about Ohio election law. As a
licensed attorney in the state and involved in the practice of election
law, I’m stunned by the obvious errors that Manjoo makes. The purges in Ohio were, in fact, deliberate, and they occurred in Democratic strongholds. Cuyahoga County records indicate 24.93% of all voters in Cleveland were purged between the 2000 and 2004 election. Census data indicates that most of the people who move in urban areas move within the county, which would make them still eligible to vote under Ohio law, and not be purged. What Manjoo leaves out is the standard practice by counties, which would have moved these individuals to “inactive” status before purging them. Additionally, numerous surveys as well as reports by the Toledo Blade and other newspapers reveal that many of these people had voted in local elections or had contacted their county board of elections, which under voting directives indicates activity. This activity would prevent them from being purged. But counter to the law and existing practice, they were purged anyway.
Yes, there was the deliberate purging in the Democratic strongholds
indeed. The Toledo Blade reports 28,000 voters purged from the
Democratic stronghold of Toledo in late August 2004. Perhaps Manjoo
should make it a practice to do a Lexus Nexus search prior to attacking people for omitting data. The key here is that it is standard for counties to purge in odd-number years, 2001, 2003, etc. Manjoo also ignores the fact that 95.12% of all the provisional voters in Hamilton County came from the Democratic city of Cincinnati, where only 32% of the county’s voters resided. Less than 5% of the provisional ballots were handed out in the lily-white suburbs. Perhaps Manjoo has a hard time imagining a man of Karl Rove’s high standards targeting black and poor voters.
Manjoo’s claim that the missing voting machines did not impact the
African American communities is bizarre and laughable. As an election
observer who witnessed lines at 9 inner-city African American
precincts, I counted an average of 80 voters leaving per hour without
voting in precinct after precinct. I have my logs from that day, if
Manjoo would care to see them. I find Manjoo’s comments both
preposterous and possibly racist. The reality is, Franklin County
needed 5000 machines. They went into the election with 2886, but they only put out 2741 on Election Day. I have in my possession a document that shows 125 machines that had been previously allocated, but were blackout out and held back on Election Day – all 125 from the Democratic stronghold of Columbus. Forty-two percent of the African American wards had machines held back at the last second. This constitutes 74% of all the majority African American wards in Franklin County. Perhaps if Manjoo had actually called and asked for the documents, he may have had a better perspective. Mark Crispin Miller, Rolling Stone and Bobby Kennedy all verified their facts before they wrote their pieces. Election Protection volunteers, attorneys and eyewitnesses have yet to hear from Mr. Manjoo. Perhaps this is a new style of investigative reporting. As an award-winning investigative reporter, I’m also quite interested in how salon.com fact checks their writers.
While Manjoo’s errors are legion and will clearly pass into infamy, one
of his most absurd is pretending that Bill Anthony, the Franklin County Board of Elections Chair, had anything to do with the actual allocation
of the machines. The allocation of voting machines was drawn up by Matt Damschroder, the Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. Manjoo actually, in a major error, refers to Damschroder, as the Chair of the Election Board. Manjoo incorrectly cites both Anthony and Damschroder as chairs of the Franklin County Board of Elections. Under Ohio law, there’s only one Chair and Damschroder has never been chair. I’m surprised that Manjoo would make an error of this magnitude. Anthony is the Chair. The Board he chairs deals with general policy matters. Damschroder is the Director who deals with the nuts and bolts of Election Day activity. For example, it was Damschroder who admitted going back to 1998 and purging 3500 felons in Franklin County at Blackwell’s request. In a given year, Damschroder told WVKO he only normally purges between 200-300 felons. In 2004, Damschroder admitted that he went back and purged people indicted, but not convicted of a felony. By the way, Damschroder is also the former Chair of the Franklin County Republican Party. It is Damschroder who admitted that when 356 people showed up to vote at the right polling site, the vast majority from the inner city, he refused to have their votes counted because his election workers gave them a provisional ballot in error. This is listed in his official voting log as “Voted on Paper, Should Have Voted on Machine.”
There is far more wrong with Manjoo’s silly, superficial attack. But in
conclusion, it appears that Manjoo, in his zest to be the great “de-bunker” of grassroots activists and progressive writers, simply creates his facts as needed. No surprise that he thinks Bush won. After all, he seems to adopt the same intelligence-gathering methods Bush used in Iraq which are favored by Fox News. His approach reminds me of that famous quote from Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.”
Where can we find a copy of Manjoo’s column?
Hey Bob,
Thanks for your comment on my article. As you might expect I disagree with much of it. I also think this sentence does not represent anything I said in my piece: “Manjoo’s claim that the missing voting machines did not impact the African American communities is bizarre and laughable.” I did not say a lack of voting machines did not impact African American communities. I wonder if you can cite the portion of my article where you found that?
Also, on Matt Damscrhoder being the “chair” or the director — in haste, I got my description of him from RFK’s article, which states “Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.” I will look into your claim that there’s a substantive difference between the two. But I wonder if you think that Kennedy made the same error?
See his reference on page three of his piece: http://tinyurl.com/p9tql
–FM
To “Retired in Ohio”:
Manjoo’s article is at http://tinyurl.com/jkdll
though I’m not sure if you can get to it if you’re not a Salon subscriber.
To Mr. Fitrakis:
The posts at Salon about Manjoo’s article are still flying fast and furious 🙂
I thought you might be interested to know that PART of my blistering response to his LAME article, which I posted at 3:42 a.m. on Sunday, went like this:
“If Ken Blackwell has nothing to hide, Mr. Manjoo, then why is he refusing to acknowledge or count the petitions submitted by Ohio’s Green Party candidate for governor, Bob Fitrakis, even though Fitrakis has obtained more than twice the number of signatures required to be included on our November ballot? I’ll tell you why, Mr. Manjoo. Because as a certified candidate with full legal standing, Fitrakis has pledged to escalate the Green campaign to unearth more of what really happened in Ohio 2004. Could it be that, as an attorney, Fitrakis’s ability to drag our Secretary of State into court could blow things wide open? Of course the Greens will first have to haul Blackwell into court to force official certification of their petitions. Presumably there will be another in a long line of rulings by the Ohio courts every time Blackwell tries to circumvent the electoral process here in Ohio. Meanwhile, of course, the Greens can’t do any campaigning, and that’s obviously exactly what Ken Blackwell wants.
Shame on Salon for continuing to allow you to “report” on this issue. We deserve a lot better!!! Although I’m not willing to give up on Salon just yet, as many others are, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I waste any more of my time reading anything you write.”
Please keep on fighting the good fight, Mr. Fitrakis … I live in northeastern Ohio and I’m appalled (and furious) at what the Republicans have been doing to our country and TO OUR STATE!
Bob –
Thank you VERY MUCH for responding so quickly to Manjoo, and thereby helping to back up Kennedy with the facts (as you obviously are one of the best-situated to do, thanks to all of your many efforts since 2004).
It does sound like you wrote this rebuttal in a bit of haste and maybe in the heat of the moment, so I wanted to try to help clarify a few points. Especially because, if you read the learning curve diaries at DailyKos and elsewhere, PARSING of the language is getting down into the nitty-gritty, and everyone speaking publicly on this issue now needs to state the facts with crystal clarity, to make their points resonate and stick. [One of the things Kennedy did so well is to absolutely pinpoint his language. The only iffy areas for skeptics to try to parse apart in his article seem to be places where he quoted or referred to the (in my opinion) pathetic DNC report which simply does not rise to the level of excellence of the work of the staffers of John Conyers or Dr. Freeman, etc. Also, clearly the word “voters” should not be used on its own. Either “registered voters” or “those who voted in 2004” needs to be spelled out to avoid falling into the disingenuous traps of the naysaying (and otherwise confused) “parsers.”]
So in that spirit, here are some suggestions:
You wrote:
“In his first claim that the Ellen Connally anomaly, where an under-funded retired municipal judge from Cleveland ran ahead of Kerry in rural southwestern counties fails to indicate vote-shifting from Kerry to Bush, Manjoo deliberately omits several well-known facts.”
Which would be more precisely and clearly stated this way:
‘In Manjoo’s first claim — about the Ellen Connally anomaly where this under-funded retired municipal judge from Cleveland received X% more votes than Kerry in rural southwestern counties (despite receiving X% FEWER votes than Kerry statewide) — Manjoo asserts that vote-shifting from Kerry to Bush failed to occur, but in so doing he deliberately omits several well-known facts.’
[The statewide versus southwest counties comparison is key to this vote-swing theory as well. Never mind the political affiliations — why would statewide proportions vary so dramatically between these two offices in the southwest compared to everywhere else in the state? Many people seem to be missing this important comparison. (I would like to see it spelled out even more plainly to say whether the comparison includes the southwest in the totals for the state – which I assume it does, meaning that WITHOUT the southwest counties included in the state totals, this swing between judge votes and President votes in all-of-Ohio-except-the-southwest vs. just southwest Ohio would be even more dramatic.]
You state:
“Moreover, Manjoo conveniently ignores the fact that sample ballots were everywhere in the state of Ohio and voters in these rural counties were repeatedly mailed and handed both parties’ sample ballots. There were large and active campaigns in the key counties in question – Butler, Clermont, and Warren – passing out Republican and Democratic sample ballots.”
What is the significance of mentioning these widespread party-issued “sample ballots”? Simply that they would identify and segregate the non-partisan judge races by political party, thus making such races less than “non-partisan” for the voters – and thereby undermining one of Majoo’s main premises? If so — such a summary sentence (or introductory sentence) would help to underline that point.
You state:
“By the way, it is easy to shift votes on punchcard machines due to the ballot rotation law in Ohio. For instance, the hole to punch for Kerry would be “4” in one precinct and the hole to punch for Bush would be “4” in the next precinct. Public records reveal that in key southwest Ohio counties, ballots were counted at the county level, not the precinct level, to save money on counting machines. Thus, all one has to do is shift Kerry cards to a Bush tabulating machine to get a shift. There was more than enough time to do this, when votes came in during the wee hours of the morning. In fact, when we finally got to look at the ballots from four precincts in Warren County, we were surprised to discover that two the pink “header” cards used to separate precinct ballots had holes punched for Bush.”
THIS is very valuable information to learn. I had not heard about this process before, for some reason. Is this what Kennedy was referring to when he referenced problems with “ballot crawl” miscounts? Or was he referencing a problem encountered during the process of casting a vote? I did not understand exactly what process he was referring to with that expression (didn’t follow up with his footnote). The last sentence of your paragraph puzzles me, also. What is the significance of a pink “header” card having had holes punched in it for Bush? What is a “header” card?
With regard to the election law ‘purges’ of registered voters: As I understand it, registered voters must be sent confirmation cards as a FIRST step in the process of purging a database, under the mid-1990s Ohio law [unless registered voters volunteer information that indicates they have moved outside the county]. To involuntarily purge a registered voter – THREE steps are required to transpire before the government can act to purge a registered voter, under the written state law: FIRST a confirmation card has to be sent to the registered voter by the government; SECOND the registered voter has to FAIL TO RESPOND to the confirmation card (by not returning/responding to it or by not updating their registration information if needed); THIRD the registered voter has to NOT VOTE for FOUR successive years which include two federal elections AFTER having received (and failed to reply to) the confirmation card.
IF my understanding of the law is correct (and even if it isn’t) — we need a careful explanation of how the involuntary purges of registered voters in Ohio transpired in relation to this law. Has anyone verified whether all the involuntarily-purged registered voters ever received confirmation cards in the first place, and then whether they responded or not? Had all or most of these involuntarily-purged registered voters neglected to vote since 1999 (meaning they skipped the Bush v. Gore presidential election)? Sounds like, from your reporting, multiple surveys and the Toledo Blade and other newspapers have collected EVIDENCE that the law was NOT followed for at least some of these involuntarily-purged registered voters (because they had in fact voted since 1999 and/or responded to confirmation cards). What is “inactive status” in relation to the law? Is that the category of registered voters that is created by the government for the purpose of sending out confirmation cards? Or is that the category of to-be-purged registered voters that is created by the government for registered voters who do NOT respond to confirmation cards and also subsequently cease voting for four successive years?
THANKS again, Bob. Maybe you could elaborate and flesh out your rebuttal for wider distribution, to keep this discussion proceeding on the straight and narrow. I very much appreciate all the hard and thankless work of those like you down in the Ohio trenches taking on the corrupt, secretive and undemocratic Ohio election bureaucracy. More power to you.
P.S. Since after this fall’s election all paper ballots left from the November, 2004 election may be (and since this is Ohio, will be) destroyed — may citizens access those documents before November while the ballots remain in the supervised custody of the government, in order for the citizens to count them, as was done in Florida after the 2000 election? If NOT, why are our votes considered “state secrets” long after the election has been certified and the results have passed well beyond any possibility of reversal? [Answers itself, of course — but a public outcry by the citizens should still be attempted should access to the ballots still be denied, as Kennedy seems to be urging.]
Hey Bob,
Thanks for your comment on my article. As you might expect I disagree with much of it. I also think this sentence does not represent anything I said in my piece: “Manjoo’s claim that the missing voting machines did not impact the African American communities is bizarre and laughable.” I did not say a lack of voting machines did not impact African American communities. I wonder if you can cite the portion of my article where you found that?
Also, on Matt Damscrhoder being the “chair” or the director — in haste, I got my description of him from RFK’s article, which states “Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.” I will look into your claim that there’s a substantive difference between the two. But I wonder if you think that Kennedy made the same error?
See his reference on page three of his piece: http://tinyurl.com/p9tql
–FM