NYT: In Ohio Vote, Woes, Yes, Fraud, No

[DeepModem Mom]

In Ohio Vote, Woes, Yes, Fraud, No
By JAMES DAO
Published: June 23, 2005


WASHINGTON, June 22 - A five-month study for the Democratic National Committee found that more than one in four Ohio voters experienced problems at the polls last fall, , but the study did not find evidence of widespread election fraud that might have contributed to President Bush's narrow victory there.

The detailed report, released Wednesday, said that disproportionately high numbers of blacks and young people had complained about long lines, intimidation and malfunctioning machines. But Democratic officials said they could not conclude that Mr. Bush's Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, would have won in Ohio even if voting had gone smoothly.

"The purpose of this study was not to challenge the results of the election," Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters at the party's headquarters in Washington.

But Dr. Dean said the volume of problems reported by blacks and young people suggested that Republicans had tried to suppress the vote in heavily Democratic districts. The report called on state legislatures to enact rules that would improve voting; for example, by issuing clear standards for allocating voting machines, replacing punch-card and other voting machines with so-called precinct-tabulated optical scan systems and adopting more lenient standards for absentee voting.

"This is bad for America," Dr. Dean said. "We need to repair and restructure the way we conduct elections in America."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/politics/23voting.html

[Erika]

1. The GOP stole Ohio

Kerry should be our president. The majority of Americans are against Bush's policies.

[fooj]

2. What about Blackwell having access to the central tabulators?

Geez, it's the NYT!!! Get it right, you jackasses! Tell me they haven't heard about Coingate...

Grrrrrr......:spank:

[mom cat]

7. Welcome to Fantacyland! Oh, there is Cinderella's castle!

Orwell could learn a few things from the fantasy keepers in both parties.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

13. maybe not...

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/6/22/183230/208/26#26

[halobeam]

3. I'm at the point that I just find this insulting.

guess we'd better say that Kerry might not have won anyway to appease the repubs...(wouldn't want to sound too Demmie). Then maybe we will be heard about the voter "suppression" as if that's all there was. Gees.

Insulting, and that's it.

[LightningFlash]

4. NYTimes get it right: No widespread fraud does not= No fraud.

Please, stop taking things out of context until you read everything like a true reporter does.

"The right to vote is the bedrock on which our Democracy stands. If citizens cannot believe that their vote counts, and will actually be counted, they understandably lose interest in the basic work of citizenship, like voting and participating in public debate over relevant issues.

Our study addresses legitimate questions and concerns raised in Ohio, including questions about voting machines – How effective were they?

Why were there enough machines in some counties and not in others? Why were there so many more provisional ballots cast in Ohio than in other states of comparable size?
2.8% of all ballots cast in Ohio were provisional ballots, as contrasted with only 0.9% in PA and 0.3% in FLA.

Why were people standing in line for hours and why weren’t they showing up on the rolls after so many new voters registered? Why did young people have so many hassles voting?
...
Our report concludes that more than one-quarter of Ohio voters had problems at the polls. Far more troubling, twice as many African American voters reported problems at the polls than did white voters.
...
African American voters reported waiting an average of 52 minutes before voting while white voters overall reported waiting 18 minutes.
...
African American voters were far more likely to have their registration status challenged and to report experiencing intimidation at the polls than other voters. 16% of African Americans reported experiencing intimidation at the polls as opposed to 5% of whites.
...
Counties using touchscreen machines had far more problems than voters in other counties.
...
Nearly one-quarter of Ohio voters report that their experience in 2004 has made them less confident about the reliability of elections in Ohio. 71% of whites reported being very confident their vote was counted as opposed to 19% of African Americans.
...
Election reform is a bipartisan responsibility and a bipartisan concern. The Democratic Party will continue to work with Members of Congress, state lawmakers, local election officials and community leaders to make sure that all voters maintain confidence in our system of elections.
...
Among the recommendations made in our report, is the request for a commitment on the part of the Democratic Party to monitor election reform in all fifty states and the district of Columbia, including the codification into law of all election practices; the adoption of clear standards for the equitable distribution of voting equipment and the assignment of poll workers; the adoption of uniform standards for voter registration and the monitoring of same; the implementation of statewide voter lists; the adoption of uniform standards for the issuance of provisional ballots and enforceable rules for counting provisional ballots; to adopt legislation which limits identification requirements to first time voters at the time they apply for voter registration or the first time they vote, whichever should first occur, and to adopt and enforce procedures to guarantee that identification requirements are not abused as a voter suppression tactic; to encourage the adoption of precinct-tabulated optical scan voting machines; to abstain from using touchscreen voting machines unless or until they are perfected such that they are no longer vulnerable to fraud---and even then, to discontinue the use of touchscreen voting machines that do not have a reliable voter verifiable audit feature; to discontinue the use of punchcard systems; and to require voting equipment vendors to disclose source codes so that they may be examined by third parties and ensure that voting procedures are transparent at every level of the voting process; to push for legislation requiring that all equipment used by voters to tabulate votes must not be used for any other purpose; to encourage states to adopt “no excuse required” standards for absentee voting; to encourage states to make it easier for college students to vote in the jurisdiction where their school is located; to develop secure and effective voting procedures for registered voters living overseas; to make voter suppression a criminal offense in every jurisdiction; to improve the education of poll workers and to educate voters where, when and how to vote; and to prohibit partisan officials who volunteer to work for a candidate from overseeing or administering that candidate’s election."

http://www.bradblog.com
Just because their specific report didn't look and find widespread fraud doesn't mean it didn't find fraud. Clearly it did but nobody is going to out and say Kerry won by 1 million votes or something as crazy as that, since the republicans and nearly everyone else will call for the democrats to be locked up in a looney bin. We can't all say what we want to say in a controlled country such as this one.

Main points were addressed on electronic manipulation, vote disenfranchisement and serious security breaches. I'm dissapointed in they didn't focus in on Blackwell alot and find out what that man was up to. But I see that this report was not designed to get at somebody, but instead see how this mess called democracy can be fixed.

It did its job fairly well I'd say.

[freedom_to_read]

16. I'm with you

I'll probably get flamed for this, but I think that trying to overturn the election is not a very astute strategy. We need to look forward to the future; and this report, by addressing specific problems and making a commitment toward future reform, is a step in the right direction.

I absolutely believe that the GOP did what it could to put its thumb on the scale and make sure Bush won the election. They are shady, shady people. But it's a fait accompli at this point, we need to think about what we can do to win in the future.

That means not only pushing for electoral reform; it also means pushing harder on the battle for hearts and minds, and making sure that the next time we get above the 'margin of theft.'

[LightningFlash]

34. Not only that...

Ohio fraud may have been widespread, they don't have the experts to determine if it was or not.

Direct evidence:

[EFerrari]

5. The NYT wants to make sure you ALL know:

THE WAS NO FRAUD IN OHIO!

Whew! I feel so much better.

Now, show me the votes.

[deacon]

6. Then why did the republicans refuse press in certain polling stations? n/

[leesa]

9. Why did they shut down a polling station for a fake Homeland Security

scare?

[Igel]

23. I think the incident you have in mind was

removing observers from the room in which the ballot counting was occurring after the polls closed.

Hocking County, was it?

[mod mom]

25. Warren county was where the faux homeland security alert. Hocking county

was one of the counties triad employees re-calibrated machines to match count during re-count. It was also the site where whistle blower Sheole Eaton worked and was fired from.

[Igel]

31. Tx.

I can never keep the names of the Ohio counties properly correlated with the incidents.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

8. Excerpting from NYTimes magazine article last fall:

This article chronicled the efforts of Steve Bouchard, an 'America Coming Together' worker, on election day. It goes into gruesome detail of how we apparently did lose Ohio fair and square:

"....As night fell, we reached the city of Delaware and found a polling place at a recreation center. The only people in the parking lot were a drenched couple holding Kerry-Edwards signs. Inside, the polling place was empty. ''Look at this,'' Lindenfeld said to me triumphantly. ''Does this look like a busy polling place? Look around. There's no one here.'' He repeated this several times, making the point that turnout in the outlying areas was tailing off, while voters were lined up around the block back in Columbus. ''Do you see any Republicans?'' he asked me, motioning around the parking lot.
In fact, a quick investigation of the voter rolls, taped to the wall outside the voting area, indicated that the polling place was dead for a less encouraging reason: most of the voters in the two precincts assigned to the recreation center had already voted.
The officials in charge told me that 1,175 of the 1,730 registered voters on the rolls had cast their ballots. In other words, turnout in those precincts was up to an impressive 68 percent, and there were still two hours left before the polls closed. (When it was over, Delaware County as a whole would post an astounding turnout rate of 78 percent, with two out of three votes going to Bush.)

I was beginning to understand that the rules of the game were changing, confounding even the experts who seemed to have this business of voter turnout all figured out. For decades, Democratic operatives had been virtually unchallenged by Republicans when it came to mobilizing voters, and during that time, they had come to rely on a certain set of underlying assumptions, all of them based on experience in urban areas. One was that the volume of activity at a polling place was a reliable measure of turnout; long lines meant higher turnout, and no lines meant disaster. Another was that the strength of a get-out-the-vote program could be gauged by the number of people canvassing city streets, the people holding signs in the rain, vans carrying voters to the polls.

But Ohio, like much of the country, was undergoing a demographic shift of historic proportions, and Republicans were learning to exploit their advantage in rapidly expanding rural areas that organizers like Lindenfeld, for all their technological innovation, just didn't understand. In shiny new town-house communities, canvassing could be done quietly by neighbors; you didn't need vans and pagers. Polling places could accommodate all the voters in a precinct without ever giving the appearance of being overrun. In the old days, these towns and counties had been nothing but little pockets of voters, and Republicans hadn't bothered to expend the energy to organize them. But now the exurban populations had reached critical mass (Delaware County alone had grown by almost one-third since the 2000 election), and Republicans were building their own kind of quiet but ruthlessly efficient turnout machine.

Even on the outer edges of the cities, long lines were not necessarily the indicators of Democratic muscle that they used to be. Returning to the headquarters in Columbus, we passed a polling place at the local fish and wildlife office, where a line of voters stretched around the building, even though the polls were closing. ''You see that?'' Lindenfeld exclaimed admiringly. To him, it was another sign of Democratic enthusiasm. When I walked over to the line a little later, however, the man who was administering the site told me that, judging from his precinct lists, the majority of voters standing in line lived in new town-house developments across the highway, and they had stopped in to vote on their way home from work. Most of them, he said, were Republicans...."

I have the full article if anyone wants a copy.

[bettyellen]

18. i remember how when i read that, it seemed like a great theory to

explain how repubs won with no noticable street presence or groundswell of support.
a new way to win, when to all appearances you have no volunteers, no canvassers, only targeted mailing lists.
in my mind, it goes with the other urban myths they spread in order to lessen charges of election fraud:
polling is now useless.
black voters have switched over to the republican party.
nj is turning red.
funny none of these things are true where the votes themselves can be verified.
freak occurences?
wake up people!
of course they have prepared explainations.

[Mountainman]

10. It should be illegal for someone in charge of elections to work for a part

Both in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, the Sec of State was on the Bush election committee.

Why has this not been said? Now we have a repuke Sec of State in CA and they probably will pull the same shit here in 2006.

The time to do something is now before the elections and not after. The repukes won so why should they give a damn about how. They put themselves in charge of guarding the hen house and they are the wolves.

The repukes will never pass laws that takes away their ability to steal elections because there are not enough repuke voters to win a national election.

[bemildred]

11. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

The election is fraudulent if not conducted in a fair an open manner.
Period.

The fact that one cannot prove direct modification of the vote count, which is what the issues is carefully narrowed down to here, means zippo in the larger sense.

[DeepModem Mom]

12. Right! So the Kenyon College kids had "woes" -- not a deliberate...

attempt to keep the liberal students there, many voting for the first time, from voting by assigning them only two voting machines (while nearby conservative Mt. Vernon had more than needed), one of which quickly broke down, leaving them still on line to vote at 4 a.m. (a luxury minority voters in Ohio cities, who had to get to work, or care for children, could not afford). Only a supportive college administration and their own determination enabled these kids to vote. I believe, as you do, that Ohio was stolen in more ways than one.

[mod mom]

20. Note: Nearby Kenyon at Nazareth College, no long lines at a predominately

republican campus. Also note: college students at Central State (historically African American college in Greene County, OH) were not allowed same address requirement on voter registration as Nazareth College. Has anyone at the DNC ever heard of EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW?

[knitter4democracy]

24. It's Mount Vernon Nazarene College.

My hubby and I went there, unfortunately. I'm not suprised that they had no voting troubles. I just hope that the closet Dems got to vote, too. I was there in '92 and '96, and it was a scary place to be a liberal.

[mod mom]

21. Where was evidence compiled by CONYERS? nt

[bemildred]

22. A good question. nt

[Beetwasher]

14. Well, OK Then! It's In The NYT So It MUST BE TRUE!!!

:sarcasm:

Judith Miller anyone?

[msongs]

15. dems officially make fraud claims impossible to believe...grrrrr

kerry on, democratic party leaders. you have now made irrelevant and unbelievable all claims to election fraud.

the mantras of the national democrats are apologize, appease, and aid and abett the republicans.

thanks a lot.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

PS - interesting article in the LAT yesterday about young repubs group at berkley CA - those guys always refer to the dems as "the enemy"..hey that's us! How can they think dems are the enemy when we enable their worst.

[pox americana]

17. the title of the report is a little misleading...

The title is "The 2004 Election in Ohio," but the report is really about voter suppression and intimidation (voting rights), not the election results (counting votes). From what I've read of the report, they had no way of investigating the vote counting issue, and they did not attempt to.

[newyawker99]

32. Hi pox americana!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[pox americana]

33. why thank you!

What a delightful oasis of sanity you have here.

[mod mom]

19. A THOROUGH INVESTIGATION would have included evidence compiled by Conyers!

A TRUE investigation would have also required FULL SUBPOENA power!
Don't be fooled by this whitewash!
Where is info on the Faux homeland security lockdown? Where is the information regarding Lucas County BOE?

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/elections/lucas.htm

This report includes the fact that REPUBLICAN VOLUNTEERS were allowed UNSUPERVISED ACCESS to UNSECURED BALLOTS prior to the election, as well as this list:

*failure to maintain ballot security
*Inability to implement and maintain a trackable system for voter ballot reconciliation .
*failure to prepare and develop a plan for the processing of the voluminous amount of voter registration forms received.
*issuance and acceptance of incorrect absentee ballot forms.
*manipulation of the process involving the 3% recount.
*disjointed implementation of the Directive regarding the removal of Nader and Camejo from the ballot .
*failure to properly issue hospital ballots in accordance with statutory requirements.
*failure to maintain the security of poll books during the official canvass
*failure to examine campaign finance reports in a timely manner.
*failure to guard and protect public documents.
*failure to guard and protect public documents ....etc.

and one more question:

WHY IS THE DNC NOT REALLY INVESTIGATING?

[cyberpj]

27. I AGREE and just told them everything in your post.

http://www.democrats.org

Also said this is why I can't contribute until they actually follow through on something they say they will do.

THERE IS PROOF OF FRAUD.

[PATRICK]

30. Still going through old motions

with stats and generalities looking for issue refinement and OUR faults(but always mysteriously missing the issue of self defense and aggressive combat). This was new for Conyers and it is inexplicable for the party moderate establishment to come to grips with.

I think with the people and the DNC process we are very lucky to get this much. It should not be glorified in its fatal insufficiency but used as a brief stepping stone to action. After all, we aren't going to get an investigation or smoking gun facts to overturn the results or put people in jail. If we applaud the DNC too much it will kill the real issue. If we don't spring off their outrage and studies we will face the same repetitive hapless defeat cycle many in the establishment are mentally and procedurally locked into.

[PATRICK]

26. The NYT picks up eagerly

on the gift of acquiescence to blatant theft. There is NO need to preface one's remarks with conciliatory, mollifying gifts of gratuitous legitimacy- most with the aim of not offending the crooks and their blind followers.

Yes we have not enough evidence. Yes this consistent attitude kept the polite Dems from even attacking, investigating, pre-empting and acknowledging fraud at the source and on the spot. Fighting for law and order is not being a bad sport or crybaby, but unfortunately the lack of vital fraud and recount evidence was due to the weakness of the civilized approach right from the beginning.

NOW Edward ahas some of those scorched bands of lawyers delving into the realities. NOW we have a study and a call to principled action.

NOW if we could just find those dentures under the bed....

[NewYorkerfromMass]

28. But Bush got 62 million votes nationwide

Which, when compared to his 2000 performance, is a 24% increase.
And how does that square with the state by state results? Well, consider that Bush won Iowa and New Mexico, and we barely won Wisconsin. But those are battelground states, where we knew fraud was going to happen- let's look at some of the quieter states, like MA, RI, and Delaware:

These were 3 uncontested, non-battleground, non-swing, "safe" Kerry states. A simple comparison of 2000 to 2004 Bush totals shows the following:
.......................... 2004 .. 2000
Massachusetts 1,067,163 878,502 (21.5% Bush increase)
Rhode Island .... 161,654 130,555 (23.8%)
Delaware ......... 171,660 137,288 (25%)

These percentages agree with the Bush total nationally.
We must face the fact that depressingly, Bush somehow, actually, really got all of these new voters this time.

[PATRICK]

29. Of course as well

they had the dough and the gusto to try to pry Kerry away from the battleground and thereby create a blowout. NY paid a price for this inattention more than Bush popularity. Yes, far too many people smoked by the media and ineffective campaign strategy, voted for the incumbent.

An uphill battle by Kerry guaranteed the opportunity for theft EVEN were it to beef up the victory to a crushing mandate which Bush fell far short of obtaining. Perhaps with this careful scientific use of media and money it is impossible for the two giant parties to score a decisive victory fairly for different reasons. I have to go by secondary signs that the securing of the election process for the GOP was one of theft, not a contest. And the signs were legion and everywhere with all of Bush strengths- were he to run fairly-all dangerously leaky balloons.

The mystery whether the fraud was this or that or decisive is locked away in invisible ballots so I can't argue the point. The need to clean up the process and get big money completely out and regulate the media cannot be again put off while we fine tune our "message" and find some messianic moderate.

By the way whenever they get to a blowout situation what exactly is to keep them from pressing the tabulator key to go for the extra? Nothing.
Comfort margins conveniently exceeded 2000 in both conveniently planned pretexts and repressed recounts. Our side was hardly effective in refighting the last campaign because they barely think to themselves about the inevitability of GOP theft and publicly barely an indirect yip.