Ohio Voter Suppression News

Christopher Hitchens is a well-known supporter of the Chimp and of the Mess in Mesopotamia. Guess what: he thinks the election in Ohio was stolen and writes about it in April's issue of Vanity Fair:

Here’s what happened in Gambier, Ohio, on decision day 2004.

The polls opened at 6:30 AM. There were only two voting machines (push-button direct-recording electronic systems) for the entire town of 2,200 (with students). The mayor, Kirk Emmert, had called the Board of Elections 10 days earlier, saying that the number of registered voters would require more than that. (He knew, as did many others, that hundreds of students had asked to register in Ohio because it was a critical “swing” state.) The mayor’s request was denied. Indeed, instead of there being extra capacity on Election Day, one of the only two machines chose to break down before lunchtime.

By the time the polls officially closed, at 7:30 that evening, the line of those waiting to vote was still way outside the Community Center and well into the parking lot. A federal judge thereupon ordered Knox County, in which Gambier is located, to comply with Ohio law, which grants the right to vote to those who have shown up in time. “Authority to Vote” cards were kindly distributed to those on line (voting is a right, not a privilege), but those on line needed more than that. By the time the 1,175 voters in the precinct had all cast their ballots, it was almost four in the morning, and many had had to wait for up to 11 hours.
...
Across the rest of Ohio, the Capra theme was not so noticeable. Reporters and eyewitnesses told of voters who had given up after humiliating or frustrating waits, and who often cited the unwillingness of their employers to accept voting as an excuse for lateness or absence. In some way or another, these bottlenecks had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts. So did many disputes about “provisional” ballots, the sort that are handed out when a voter can prove his or her identity but not his or her registration at that polling place. These glitches might all be attributable to inefficiency or incompetence (though Gambier had higher turnouts and much shorter lines in 1992 and 1996). Inefficiency and incompetence could also explain the other oddities of the Ohio process—from machines that redirected votes from one column to the other to machines that recorded amazing tallies for unknown fringe candidates, to machines that apparently showed that voters who waited for a long time still somehow failed to register a vote at the top of the ticket for any candidate for the presidency of these United States.

However, for any of that last category of anomaly to be explained, one would need either a voter-verified paper trail of ballots that could be tested against the performance of the machines or a court order that would allow inspection of the machines themselves. The first of these does not exist, and the second has not yet been granted.
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I am not any sort of statistician or technologist, and (like many Democrats in private) I did not think that John Kerry should have been president of any country at any time. But I have been reviewing books on history and politics all my life, making notes in the margin when I come across a wrong date, or any other factual blunder, or a missing point in the evidence. No book is ever free from this. But if all the mistakes and omissions occur in such a way as to be consistent, to support or attack only one position, then you give the author a lousy review. The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.

It's a long and detailed article by a Bush supporter, and you need to read it (via).

Why, we may ask, were exit polls telling the truth in the recent election in the Ukraine, and just a statistical piece of fluff here in the US? It's well known that since the rise of electronic voting machines, exit polling, once a reliable way of figuring out the trend of an election, just stopped working. A particularly egregious case was visible in Georgia in 2002, when the Democratic candidates for governor and the senate - leading in the polls and leading in the exit polls - were suddenly revealed the day after to have lost.

Bushies, arguing that we should all shut up and learn to love fascism, have argued that the Ohio exit polls were just not accurate. A new study by statisticians says, crap.

Their paper titled "Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report" notes that the Edison/Mitofsky report offers no evidence to support their conclusion that Kerry voters “participated in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters”. In fact, the data provided in the Edison/Mitofsky report suggests that the opposite may have been true: Bush strongholds had slightly higher response rates than Kerry strongholds.

The statisticians' study is available online at: http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes_Re_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf

The statisticians go on to note that precincts with hand-counted paper ballots showed no statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, but for other voting technologies, the overall discrepancy was far larger than the polls’ margin of error. (my emphasis) The pollsters at Edison/Mitofsky agreed that their 2004 exit polls, for whatever reason, had the poorest accuracy in at least twenty years.

Shut up and get with the program? I think not. (via)

Don't know how accurate this is at this late date, but here it is, for what it's worth:

Several volunteer workers in the Ohio recount in Clermont County, Ohio have prepared affidavits alleging serious tampering, violations of state and federal law and possible fraud. They name the Republican chief of Clermont's Board of Elections Daniel Bare and the head of the Clermont Democratic Party Priscilla O'Donnell as complicit in these acts.

These volunteers, observing the recount on behalf of the Greens, Libertarians and Democrats, assert that during the Dec. 14, 2004 hand recount they noticed stickers covering the Kerry/Edwards oval, whereas the Bush/Cheney oval seemed to be "colored in."

Some witnesses state that beneath the stickers, the Kerry/Edwards oval was selected. The opti-scan ballots were then fed into the machines after the hand recount.

Allegations of ballot tampering in Ohio - which decided the outcome of the presidential election by some 100,000 votes - find particular resonance in Clermont, one of three Ohio counties which saw the biggest increases in votes for Bush from 2000 to 2004. The other counties were Butler and Warren; Warren County had a lockdown after an alleged terror threat that the FBI later denied.

(via)

Amazing. Someone in the Senate has a backbone!

"I have concluded that objecting to the electoral votes from Ohio is the only immediate way to bring these issues to light by allowing you to have a two-hour debate to let the American people know the facts surrounding Ohio's election," Boxer wrote to U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio.

"I will therefore join you in your objection to the certification of Ohio's electoral votes."

It won't change anything but at least this time, unlike last time, someone is standing up.

After two months of listening to smug cretins sneer "Get over it!" it's almost refreshing to watch Washington Repugs whine "We wanna new election!"

In a letter to Gregoire yesterday, Rossi said controversies surrounding their record-close election have left voter confidence badly shaken. He also said if she agreed to a revote, it would head off what could be months of bitter legal fighting that might ensue if he and the Republican Party decide to contest the latest of three ballot counts.

Whoever is sworn in as the next governor would be "shrouded in suspicion," Rossi said in his letter. He urged Gregoire to join him in asking the Legislature to call for a new election.

"A revote would be the best solution for the people of our state and would give us a legitimate governorship," he said.

Gregoire's spokesman Morton Brilliant said she would not be joining Rossi's call. "This ain't golf," he said. "No mulligans allowed here, folks."

It's just not fair! A Democrat won! Wahhhhhhh!

Just a faint taste of what would have happened had the election gone the other way here.

We want to refer readers to Georgia10 who is doing a bang-up job of tracking the various legal and political threads. Please check her diary often.

Avedon Carol comes to the same conclusion I have. After listing a number of election, uh, "discrepencies," she says:

Forget these machines, people. Don't even waste breath on paper receipts. Paper ballots, hand-counted on the night in full public view. Nothing less will do.

If Australia can use paper ballots, hand-counted, there's no reason we can't.