The headline reads: "Ohio Elections Officials Convicted of Tampering with 2004 Presidential Recount." But of course, most of America hasn't seen this headline because the mainstream media outlets have barely touched this story. Call me crazy, but this seems like too big of a story to only be running in the local Ohio press and alternative media sources on these here internets. Apparently, the mainstream media has forgotten that the state of Ohio is the state that handed Bush a second term on a silver platter. It seems to me that the fact that the recount of the presidential freaking election was rigged is a pretty big story. But then again, I'm not part of the mainstream media so what do I know about big stories?
Two election workers in one of Ohio's most densely populated areas and traditional Democratic stronghold, Cuyahoga County, were convicted of illegally rigging the county's recount. According to Erie County Special Proesecutor Kevin Baxter, the recount was fixed not necessarily for political reasons, but because the election employees were too damn lazy to do their jobs properly. Election coordinator Jacqueline Maiden and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer were both covicted of "negligent misconduct of an elections employee," a felony that carries a possible sentence of 6 to 18 months in prison. A third woman, Rosie Grier, the assistant manager of the board's ballot department was indicted but acquitted of the charges.
Under Ohio law, a county is supposed to randomly count 3% of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be counted by machine. If there are discrepancies between the two supposedly random samples, a full recount, by hand, is ordered. According to Special Prosecutor Baxter, what Dreamer and Maiden did, to avoid the labor intensive hand count, was to employ a method known as "hack and stack." The "hack and stack" method, according to blackboxvoting.org works like this:
Some recounts and audits rely on so-called "random" manual counts of a small percentage of the ballots, which are then compared against the voting computer counts for those precincts. The safeguard can be defeated by manipulating the precinct selection process, or by manipulating the ballots in the selected precincts to make sure they match before counting them. This "stacks" the recount or audit so that only subsets of data that match machine counts are examined.
In Cuyahoga County, citizens noticed that the ballots arrived for the public recount already sorted into sets for Bush and sets for Kerry. Kathleen Wynne videotaped the sorted piles and videotaped as she asked Kathleen Dreamer and Jacqui Maiden to explain the sorting and pre-selected piles. She captured them on videotape admitting that they had not chosen randomly.
http://java-fiend.livejournal.com/136997.html
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