2004 Election
Election Stolen?
My
Investigation
In
the fall of 2012, during my last year as chair of the Florence
[Oregon]Area Democratic Club, fearing that presidential returns of
2012 might be flipped to elect Mitt Romney, I researched extensively
articles that concluded that John Kerry had been deprived of victory
in Ohio in 2004. What follows is my summation of what I discovered,
information that I reported at a club meeting shortly before the 2012
election.
There
are strong indications that enough votes were taken away from John
Kerry to give George W. Bush Ohio’s electoral votes and victory in
the 2004 presidential election. Officially, Kerry lost Ohio by just
118,000 votes out of some 5.5 million votes cast. Exit polls had
Kerry winning. Getting to the official result from the exit polls
result was a 6.7% flip.
Michigan
Rep. John Conyers’ report, Preserving
Democracy, What Went Wrong in Ohio,
presented on
January
5, 2005, was
the
result of a five-week investigation conducted
by
the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Party members, their
staffers, and volunteers
pursuant
to thousands
of complaints of fraud, malfeasance, and incompetence. More
than 200 witnesses had been questioned at public
hearings in Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Republican
congressmen and their staff members did
not join in the inquiry.
The
Conyers committee reported three phases of Republican chicanery.
The first
phase was the
run-up to the election. There
was a
wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more
minority, Democratic, and urban areas than
in more
Republican, suburban. and exurban areas. Few
machines allocated for use in Democratic-majority precinct polls
caused
long
lines of
voters, who
had to wait 3
to 5 hours to express
officially their preference.
Many people quit and went home. This
tactic negated
the Ohio
Democratic
Party’s
considerable
success
that
year of registering
new voters.
Additionally,
Secretary
of State Kenneth Blackwell sent
a directive
to
county election officials to
ignore voter registration cards not printed on
80-pound stock paper. There
was no substantive
reason for requiring the heavy paper other
than to exclude as many newly
registered voters as he could
from voting. Public
pressure forced Blackwell three
weeks later to rescind his
directive. During the interum
an unknown
number of Ohioans were
disenfranchised.
Blackwell attempted also
to limit voter
access to provisional ballots.
He allowed election
officials at the polls to decide who would be permitted to cast them,
a contradiction of The Help America Vote Act of 2002. A
federal
judge did
order
him to revise his directive; he refused; a federal court revised the
directive.
Under Blackwell
the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more
Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The
Republican
Party sent registered letters to 35,000
new
voters requesting
that they sign and return them.
Those citizens who did not comply
were removed from the voting rolls.
Altogether,
approximately 300,000 voters were purged from voting rolls.
Thousands
of eligible voters were kicked off the voting rolls simply because
they hadn't voted in the previous election. In Cleveland, which
broke 5-to-1 for John Kerry, 1-in-4 voters were purged from voting
lists. In one specific precinct in Cleveland, the turnout was only
7% - the lowest in the state – thanks to this voter purge. 28,000
voters were "erased" from the Lucas County voter
registration rolls.
The
second
phase
of Republican chicanery occurred during the election.
Blackwell barred reporters from the
polls. Ohio law forbade “loitering” near voting places. Media
representatives conducting exit polls had
to
remain 100
feet away from the polls
– to
protect voters from intense media scrutiny was the given
excuse. This
directive was
struck down by a federal court based on First
Amendment rights. Foreign
observers in Ohio were also prevented from watching the opening of
the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases,
the election itself.
Secondly, a
significant number of statistical anomalies occurred – all
taking votes away from Kerry.
In
Butler County the Democratic candidate for the
State
Supreme Court received
5,347
more votes than Kerry did.
In Cuyahoga
County ten Cleveland precincts reported an incredibly high number of
votes for third party candidates. In past elections third party
candidates had received only a handful of votes. These increased
votes would logically have gone to Kerry.
In Franklin
County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer.
In
Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column
after
all
precincts had reported
In Cuyahoga
County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the
arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their
respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast.
In Mercer County
some 4,000 votes for president—representing nearly 7 percent of the
electorate — mysteriously dropped out of the final count
The machines in
heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting the
county’s election director to admit that prior tests of the
machines had failed.
One polling
place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines were
locked up somewhere and no one had the key.
In Hamilton
County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for
president because county workers, in taking Ralph Nader’s name off
many ballots, also removed John Kerry’s name.
The Washington
Post reported
that in Mahoning County “25 electronic machines transferred an
unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column.
In
Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, on
their
touch-screen
machines, people
pushed
“Kerry” and “Bush” lit up.
A county in southeaster Ohio
proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. They locked down the building
and kept out the media. The ballots that had been casted suddenly
disappeared.
In
Lucas Count precincts unsuspecting voters were issued faulty markers,
which ruined the ballots they marked.
Inner city voters left thinking they had voted. Instead,
their ballots were trashed.
Dirty tricks were
employed. “Literally
thousands upon thousands” of such incidents occurred,
the Conyers report noted.
Voters were
told, falsely, that their polling place had changed, the news
conveyed by phone calls, “door-hangers,” and party workers going
door to door.
Phone
calls and fake “voter bulletins” instrucied
Democrats that they were not to cast their votes until Wednesday,
November 3, the day after Election Day.
At
several polling places, election personnel or bused
in hired
goons “challenged” voters — black voters in particular — to
produce documents confirming their eligibility to vote.
The
third
phase
of Republican chicanery was the massive post-election coverup of
what had occurred,
in particular the prevention
of countywide hand recounts.
Here was the
procedure to be used for recounting votes.
Each of the
state’s eighty-eight counties had
to select
randomly
precincts
in its county whose ballots added up collectively to
approximately
3
percent of the county’s total vote. Those ballots had
to be
hand counted and machine counted simultaneously.
If the hand count and the new machine count matched,
the remaining 97 percent of the selected ballots would
be
counted by machine. If,
however, the totals varied by as little as a single vote, all the
other votes had to be hand counted, and the results, once
reconfirmed, had to be accepted as the new official total.
In certain
precincts of several counties hand counts and machine counts had been
deliberately adjusted to correspond.
After the
election Sherole
Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, filed an
affidavit stating that the computer that operated the tabulating
machine in
her county had
been “modified” by Michael
Barbian Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of
the county’s voting machinery. Barbian, upon the announcement that
the Hocking County precinct was planned to be a
subject of the initial Ohio test recount, made further alterations.
Barbian advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery
to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine
count. Barbian
said that he had examined machines not only in Hocking County but
also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.
It strongly
appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior
to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots.
Some 1,300
Libertarian and Green Party volunteers monitored the vote count in
Ohio.
In
Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and
Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were
preselected, not picked at random. In Fairfield County the
3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the machine
count. In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or
altered. In
Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly
unsealed or stored. Belmont
County “hired an independent programmer (‘at great expense’) to
reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count votes
for President during the recount.
Democratic
and/or Green Party observers were denied access to absentee, and/or
provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount
process in numerous counties.
Fifty-six of
eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots,
destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure
recount impossible.
What was done
about such blatant election fraud?
The
Congressional challenge of the Ohio election results by Rep.
Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio and Senator Barbara Boxer of California
was defeated 267 to 31 in the House and
74
to 1 in the Senate.
The election
chicanery, the Conyers Report, and the defeat of the Congressional
challenge gained little traction with the public. Kerry
and national Democrats conceded defeat without protest.
Republicans
attacked stridently
the allegations
made
against
them. Democrats were troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning
“fantasies” and “conspiracy theories” to “distract” the
people. Tom
DeLay asserted that Democratic allegations were “an
assault against the institutions of our representative democracy.”
There
was no
evidence of
electoral fraud, Republicans maintained.
The press had
little to say about most of the strange details of the
election—except to ridicule all efforts to discuss them.
“Election
paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,”
chuckled the Baltimore
Sun on
November 5.
“Internet Buzz
on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed,” proclaimed the Boston
Globe on
November 10. “Latest
Conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” the Washington
Post chortled
on November 11.
Mitofsky
International,
the company responsible for exit polling for the National
Election Pool
and
its member news organizations, released a report detailing the
2004 election's exit polling. They concluded that discrepancies
between the exit polls and the official results were "most
likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a
higher rate than Bush voters." The NEP report further stated
that "Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due
to rigging of voting equipment.”
When, on March
31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study
demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made
news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.
Most
sinister of all is the fact that Blackwell’s
electronic reporting operation was designed by a highly partisan
Republican tech firm, GovTech, and linked directly to servers at
the premier Republican tech company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga,
Tennessee. The
programmers who worked for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary
of State and the
co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney,
were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. The
widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of
Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to flip
electronically a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory – critics of
the election result assert.
The
shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 a.m. election night was
a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael
Connell, an IT (Information
Technology)
specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. The
Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for
Karl Rove and the national Republican Party.
Diebold's
founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes
-- -and thus the presidency --- to his friend George W. Bush.
Michael
Connell
died in a mysterious plane crash on December 19, 2008, after being
subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused
on how the 2004 election was decided.
A
group of academic researchers functioning under the rubric of
ePluribus Media discovered and reported, shortly after the 2006
election, that a partisan Republican company, SmarTech, had
hosted
the Ohio Secretary of State's vote count for both the 2004/2006
elections. New
filings in the King Lincoln Bronzeville case show that SmarTech was
not hired to be a back-up but as a "man in the middle"
operation, meaning they were set up to intentionally hack
Blackwell's operation to alter the vote count. Important
affidavit testimony of IT expert and whistleblower Stephen
Spoonamore was used by attorneys in the King Lincoln Bronzeville
case. He had spoken to IT expert MIke Connell, who had worked for
twenty years for the Bush family, had done the IT work for Ken
Blackwell, and had set up the Ohio election reporting system
including the link to SmarTech.
Spoonamore
testified: “The
SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in
criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the
needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of
State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to
decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."
"...the
architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The
computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement,
connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election
in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Connell
told Spoonamore that SmarTech had complete access to the results and
had the capability to change the vote count.
The
media used the numbers reported on SMARTech's servers as the actual
results of the election. The actual ballots
in most of the Buckeye State were never
allowed to be reviewed by the citizenry. Whatever the private
Republican company reported, accurately or inaccurately, to be the
results that night were generally regarded as the official results
of the election.
Jennifer
Brunner, a Democrat, Ohio’s Secretary of State from 2007 to 2011,
authorized an investigation that reported Dec. 14, 2007, that all
the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio
in 2004 were easily flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic
machine could have turned the election.
Sources
used to produce my
report:
Collier,
Victoria, “America’s Media Just Made Vote-Rigging Easier,”
truthout,
October 19, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey,
“Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?”
The Free Press,
October 16, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey,
“Ohio Governor’s Ethics Violations Expose Money Trail to Stolen
2004 Election,” The Free
Press, August 30, 2005.
Freidman, Brad, “About That Voting
Machine Company Tied to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, “Bradblog.com,
October 12, 2012.
Hartmann, Thom and Sacks, Sam,
“Election 2012: They Will Steal It!” The
Daily Take, November 1,
2012.
Karoli, “New Evidence of Vote
Hacking Emerges in Ohio 2004 General Election Lawsuit,”
CrooksandLiars.com,
July 24, 2011.
McCowan,
Tim, “Shocking New Evidence Republicans Have Been Stealing
Elections,” www.examiner.com,
November 7, 2011.
Miller, Mark Crispin, “None Dare
Call It Stolen,” Harper’s
Magazine, August 2005.
“Mysterious Death of Mike Connell –
Karl Rove’s Election Thief,” projectcensored.org,
May 8, 2010.
Wasserman,
Harvey, “Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report “The 2004
Election Was Stolen … Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation,”
DemocracyNow.Org,
December 17, 2007.
I
checked recently on the internet what several journalists had to say
about whether or not voter fraud in Ohio had determined the outcome
of the 2004 presdiential election. Here are excerpts of what two of
them wrote.
Certainly
the election had its share of irregularities, especially in Ohio,
the battleground state each side had to win. In the days after the
election, newspapers nationwide carried accounts of how voters in
and around Columbus, the state capital, had to stand in line for
hours before casting ballots. It turns out the Franklin County Board
of Elections had reduced the number of voting machines in urban
precincts—which held more African American voters and were likely
to favor John Kerry—and increased the number of machines in white
suburban precincts, which tended to favor the president. As a
result, as many as 15,000 voters in Franklin County left without
casting ballots, the Washington Post
estimated—a significant amount in an election that
Bush won by only 118,775 votes (out of 5.6 million cast). But except
for one-day stories in the Washington
Post
and New York Times, these revelations
triggered no broader investigations, or if they did, the results
went unpublished.
It
didn’t help that Kerry conceded immediately, despite questions
about Ohio. The American press is less an independent truth seeker
than a transmission belt for the opinions of movers and shakers in
Washington. If the Democratic candidate wasn’t going to cry foul,
the press certainly wasn’t going to do it for him. Thus the job of
raising questions was largely left to mavericks—most of them from
the left wing of the Democratic Party and beyond. For a year now,
they have been probing, analyzing, and agitating on the Internet,
and several books based on their research are being published in
time for the election’s first anniversary this November.
...
...
According to the Free
Press,
15 percent of Ohio’s ballots—a number seven times greater than
Bush’s victory margin—were cast on electronic machines provided
or programmed by companies with ties to the Republican Party,
including Triad. True, a limited hand recount was held afterward,
but it was a sham, the skeptics argue. They point to the indictment
this past September of two Cuyahoga County election officials for
offenses that include failing to randomly select the recount
precincts. [Sherole]
Eaton
made a similar accusation in her [Hocking]
county—and, as if to clinch the case, was later fired. When her
affidavit was posted at one of the websites claiming that Bush stole
Ohio, one blogger commented, “This speaks for itself.”
Except
it doesn’t. Talk with Eaton and she is quick to volunteer that
Barbian never used the phrase “cheat sheet”—those were her own
words, dashed down in a rush after a lawyer advised her she had
witnessed illegal activity and should testify at the Conyers
hearings. Eaton says that no one took Barbian’s cheat sheet advice
seriously and adds that “I still don’t know if there was fraud,”
though she does find his visit suspicious. …
…
The
discrepancy between exit polls and the official results is a key
part of the skeptics’ argument: Kerry was projected to win
nationwide by a close but comfortable 3 percent, and in Ohio by 6.5
percent. But the skeptics betray a poor grasp of exit polling,
starting with their claim that exit polls are invariably accurate
within tenths of a percentage point. In truth, the exit polls were
wrong by much more than that in the 1988 and 1992 presidential
elections.
Warren
Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, the pollsters who oversaw the 2004 exit
polls, concluded that one source of their incorrect forecast was an
apparent tendency for some pro-Bush voters to shun exit pollsters’
questions. “Preposterous,” claims Mark Crispin Miller, who also
sees trickery in the adjusting of exit polls after the election,
though that is utterly routine. And is it really so strange to
imagine that Bush supporters—who tend to distrust the supposedly
liberal news media—might not answer questions from pollsters
bearing the logos of CBS, CNN, and the other news organizations
financing the polling operation?
…
But
the skeptics have plenty of solid claims as well—starting with the
long lines that plagued voters in Franklin County and elsewhere. As
the Post
reported,
voting-machine shortages were the exception in strongly pro-Bush
areas but the rule in strongly pro-Kerry districts. The Conyers
report calls that an apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act and
the Constitution’s equal protection safeguards.
...
Blackwell’s
two most potent acts of disenfranchisement, skeptics say, were the
purging of 133,000 mostly Democratic voters from the rolls and the
non-counting of 92,000 ballots rejected by voting machines as
unreadable. “It’s clear to me that somebody thought long and
hard back in 2001 about how to win this thing,” says Fitrakis.
“Somebody had the foresight to check an obscure statute that
allows you to cancel people’s voter registrations if they haven’t
voted in two presidential elections.” Fitrakis notes that
newspapers reported the purging of 105,000 voters in Cincinnati and
another 28,000 in Toledo. But because the purging was conducted
gradually between 2001 and 2004, no one saw the big picture until
the Free
Press connected
the dots.
…
In
the end, reasonable people may differ about the strength of the
skeptics’ case. Personally I came away persuaded there was indeed
something rotten in the state of Ohio in 2004. Whether by intent or
negligence, authorities took actions that prevented many thousands
of citizens from casting votes and having them counted. The
irregularities were sufficiently widespread to call into question
Bush’s margin of victory. This was not a fair election, and it
deserves the scrutiny skeptics have brought to it. They shouldered a
task that mainstream media and the government should have
assumed—and still should take on, especially since some key
questions can only be settled by invoking subpoena power.
Yet
it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say
that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the
White House in 2000 (and who—full disclosure—is friendly with
skeptics Miller and Wasserman). First, some of the most far-reaching
acts of potential disenfranchisement, such as the purging of voter
rolls, were legal—which is why one lesson of Ohio 2004 is that
voting systems throughout the nation need fundamental reform. Second,
even if Kerry had won Ohio, the national vote went to Bush by 3
million votes. Ohio would have given Kerry the presidency by the same
unholy route that Bush traveled in 2000 and that led so many
Democrats to urge, rightly, the abolishment of the Electoral College.
Third, the skeptics’ position is weakened by the one-sidedness of
their arguments and their know-it-all tone. They have a plausible
case to make, but they act like it’s a slam dunk and imply that
anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, bought, or on
the other side—not the best way to win people over (Hertsgaard
1-5).
Machines
are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no
doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and
without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in
practically every case where
lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a
Democratic county or precinct, and in
practically every case where
machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the
challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters
who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic
undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.
This
might argue in itself against
any
conspiracy or organized rigging, since surely anyone clever enough to
pre-fix a vote would make sure, just for the look of the thing, that
the discrepancies and obstructions were more evenly distributed. I
called all my smartest conservative friends to ask them about this.
Back came their answer: Look at what happened in Warren County.
On
Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and
homeland security, officials "locked down" the Warren
County administration building and prevented any reporters from
monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what
"scale," that on a scale of 1 to 10 the terrorist threat
was a 10. It was also claimed that the information came from an
F.B.I. agent, even though the F.B.I. denies that.
Warren
County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went
only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this
time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the G.O.P.
would have felt the need to engage in any voter "suppression."
A point for the anti-conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact-same
voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running
television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He
also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did
not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same
proportion of the Warren County votes.
Whichever
way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about
the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of
irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in
late December and which came out much the same as the original one,
with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless
exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking,
for example, how many "vote hops" the computerized machines
might have performed unnoticed.
… there
is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often
said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had
to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously
large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves
laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had
to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one
defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to
jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in
fraud.
I
had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well
recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been
demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the
machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done,
she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be "in
on it." This is because of the small number of firms engaged in
the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as
they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the
technology. "Machines were put in place with no sampling to make
sure they were 'in control' and no comparison studies," she
explained. "The code of the machines is not public knowledge,
and none of these machines has since been impounded." In these
circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the
count and the proportions of votes.
… had
there been a biased "setting" on the new machines it could
be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts
are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting
machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It's not
clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the
meanwhile …
I
asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing
that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well, I understand
from what I have read," she said, "that the early exit
polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was
able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it
wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the
anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were
distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they
kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was
hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she
replied at once: "Then that would be quite serious"
(Hitchens
1-6).
Works
cited:
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