Anyone know whether a media consortium is considering counting in Ohio?

[gauguin57]

Remember how the group of newspaper representatives got together in Florida in 2000 and looked into what went on there -- "recounting the recount"?

(Not that it did much good ... the newspaper reporters basically said Bush won under some scenarios and Gore won under others).

Couldn't there be a similar consortium to HAND-COUNT those Opti-Scan ballots in Ohio, and compare them with the "official" totals? And I'm talking more than the obligatory 3 percent of the precincts.

If some group doesn't do that, we may never know what really happened. And they need to do it soon, before Ken Blackwell reports a mysterious fire, flood or other Act of God destroying all of Ohio's 2004 ballots!

[tinanator]

1. wouldnt hold my breath.

But I believe under all scenarios Gore won. Whatever stupidity motivated them to ask for particular county recounts lingers as this air of possible defeat. Gore won. We lost.

[LiberalHeart]

6. I think Bush won under 1 scenario; Gore won under the rest. N/T

[tinanator]

9. that scenario required NOT recounting every vote, correct?

not a very likely one, but due to Gore counsel incompetence they gave the Bush "victory" some plausibility in the minds of the mindless.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Cowardly, complicit media wouldn't dare to taint Dubya's "legitimacy"

[Freddie Stubbs]

5. Why did they dare last time?

Cound it be that a lot more people had doubts about the election last time?

[Lurker321]

3. This recount would cost them at least 2M - maybe more

they would have to be pretty sure that they find something in order to throw that kind of $ at it.

You can "prime" that recount - recount a county or two yourself. If you find serious discrepancies, that could persuade the MSM that there is something there to look at.

[m.standridge]

7. well, it's an interesting thought, but this is different than FL

in that a lot of the OH data is going to be IRREGULARITIES--statistical anomaly and voter disenfranchisement incidents, and also incidents involving possible computer rigging by computer techs.

There's also the Warren County lockdown and the Toldeo/Lucas County burglary.
Also, Ohio this time, officially, wasn't as close as it was in 2000. It was a Plurality--barely--for Bush in 2000: 49.96%, by the final official tally.
This time, it's--what--51%? A recount per se may not be the full answer in Ohio, but the sum total of all the data is what you look at there--there are "active" incidents, not just the "passive" data like erroneous felons list and butterfly ballot, as in Florida. On the other hand, the number of ballots per se may not be sufficient to turn it around when done in a recount. It's a separate situation, almost a unique situation--just as FL last time was unique in its own way.
The situation actually demanded in Florida in 2000 was for the vote count to continue, statewide, regardless of deadlines. That didn't happen.
The solution actually demanded in Ohio was a revote, based on all the irregularities. But that didn't happen, either.

Ohio really does have a lot of the same quality as the Ukraine election had--evidence of election fraud. In Florida in 2000, there was some evidence of that (again, the erroneous felons lists, the butterfly ballot), but the media was able to focus everyone's attention almost exclusively on just counting the ballots. Then, when Gore fell in line and started court actions--or reponded to Bush's court actions, and focussed on just counting ballots, not on challenging election irregularities--it all fell to whether enough ballots could be counted. The Court said to stop counting.

In Ohio, the Secretary of State and the Congress are the sticking points.

In 2000, the Electoral College was Bush's angle to get a foot in the door. In 2004, the Electoral College is the slender thread that the Democrats have to hang on, in hopes to keep attention on how more could be out there.

[adolfo]

4. We are working on it

.. :donut: possible county recount.

[IndyPriest]

11. Adolfo: this is good news! Who's "we?" n/t

[RaulVB]

8. Do we have media on this country? (n/t)

[NationalEnquirer]

10. Florida was MUCH closer than ohio.

So it made sense.
I severely doubt any recount is going to change the results in Ohio.
Therefore, its not worth anyones cost.
Sorry, thats just how it is, so I doubt anyone is going to do it.

[berniew1]

12. Actually the Media Consortium agreed Gore won under any scenario.

As long as you do a hand count that counts votes that are legal under Florida law. The hanging chad were immaterial and a distraction. Gore had thousands of legal votes under Florida law in several counties that had butterfly type ballots, where Gore could be voted for on 2 pages. But thought voting for Gore twice is clearly a legal vote under Florida law since the intent of the voter is clear, the votes were rejected by the rules used for machine counting. Machine count is just terribly unreliable. No matter what type system you use. Counties where Gore had enough legal votes to win without counting chad include Palm Beach, Duval, Hillsboro, and Gadsden.
Gore would have won by a lot in a fair count, and if the 90,000 eligible minority voters who were purged under a scam by the Sec. of State, K. Harris, had been allowed to vote, the margin would have been much over 100,000 votes.

[berniew1]

13. The biggest problems in Ohio were vote machine fraud, ballot stuffing, sup

pression of minority voters by malfeasance and dirty tricks to prevent registration and prevent counting their votes. This isn't something thats just a matter of counting- as in Florida.


What the Media determined in Florida was that all of the talk about hanging chad was a distraction. Gore had thousands of legal votes among the "overvotes" where due to ballot design the voters were allowed, and encouraged in one county to vote for Gore twice. But though these were clearly legal votes in Florida since voter intent were clear, the machines rejected them. The problem is that machine counts are inherently unreliable. Especially if those in charge don't want to count all the votes.

[berniew1]

14. A normal recount doesn't deal with the main problems in Ohio which were vo

vote machine fraud, ballot stuffing, supression of minority voters by malfeasance and dirty tricks to prevent registration and prevent counting their votes. This isn't something thats just a matter of counting- as in Florida.


What the Media determined in Florida was that all of the talk about hanging chad was a distraction. Gore had thousands of legal votes among the "overvotes" where due to ballot design the voters were allowed, and encouraged in one county to vote for Gore twice. But though these were clearly legal votes in Florida since voter intent were clear, the machines rejected them. The problem is that machine counts are inherently unreliable. Especially if those in charge don't want to count all the votes.

[tandem5]

15. You've met the MSM... right? nt

[TheWholeTruth]

16. Florida recount study: Bush still wins

Florida recount study: Bush still wins

Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory


A county employee shows a ballot to a National Opinion Research Center coding team. The coders marked their observations on specially designed, triplicate coding forms. They were not allowed to confer.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.

NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.

As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.

In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.

Florida Supreme Court recount ruling

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.

Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.

Gore's four-county strategy

Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.

[kath]

18. Link please?? BTW, this is total bullshit. The NORC study showed

that under all scenarios that counted all legal votes, GORE won.
Please tell us where you found the crap that you quoted in your post.

[gauguin57]

22. I found the CNN link TheWholeTruth used ...

re: the 2000 consortium-sponsored recount ...

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html

I remember reading a lot of articles in major newspapers at the time, and a lot of them said that, depending on which standard was used in counting those punchcard ballots statewide, either Gore or Bush might have won. I've also read and heard many places that Gore won under any scenario. There's your problem right there ... we know in our hearts that Gore really won, but the waters were certainly muddied, even by the media recount.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2058638

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12623-2001Nov11?language=printer

[eomer]

23. Here are the results for the nine scenarios examined in the NORC study:

3. Florida Supreme Court Complex: Bush +493
2. Florida Supreme Court Simple: Bush +430
8. Gore Request: Bush +225
4. 65 County Custom: Gore +171
7. Most Restrictive: Gore +115
6. Most Inclusive: Gore +107
5. Bush Standard: Gore +105
1. Prevailing Statewide: Gore +60
9. Palm Beach Rules: Gore +42

The last 5 scenarios (7, 6, 5, 1 & 9) are the ones that recounted all Florida counties using a consistent standard. Gore won in all of these.

These results are from Table 11 in the article from the NORC website:
http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl/articles.asp

[bobbieinok]

24. see Paul Lukasiak's work on FL2000

he's the one now doing so much on W being AWOL from the national guard

[RaulVB]

20. False (n/t)

[MadisonProgressive]

17. Count what???

[gauguin57]

19. Hand-count the opti-scan ballots, for one thing

... the actual marked ballots -- not the results tabulated by the machines.

[MadisonProgressive]

26. I think we need to have Blackwell in jail before that will happen...

[garybeck]

21. what law provides for the media to do a recount?

if we could check out the law we could figure out how to make it happen.

after all, we are the media.

[vlad]

25. Ohio pulls plug on electronic voting

Sorry everyone..can't post yet. I do believe media should at least buy these for historical accuracy..

I found this and wondered if it was already up...

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Touch-Screen Voting Is Dead In Ohio
http://techdirt.com/articles/20050113/1440238_F.shtml

Contributed by Mike on Thursday, January 13th, 2005 @ 02:40PM
from the so-much-for-that-plan dept.
Beck writes "The Ohio Secretary of State has announced that all counties will standardize on optical scan machines with paper ballots. The key factor in the decision was the requirement that a paper trail must exist, and optical scan machines provide an inexpensive solution. Earlier the state had mandated touch-screen voting machines, but a state-sponsored security review uncovered numerous issues, and then the state legislature passed a law requiring a voter-verifiable paper trail, which would have been expensive to implement on the DRE machines." Of course, optical scan machines don't have the greatest reputation either, though, at least there is a way to recount the vote to make sure it's accurate.

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