OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: New Ohio evidence exposes apparently illegal 2004 recount activity by Hocking Co. GOP Election Director

In confirmation of that, the memo goes on to say: "WE CAN HAVE A TEAM OF FOUR, WHICH MEANS THAT EACH BOARD MEMBER CAN COUNT THE BALLOTS ONCE BEFORE IT RUNS THROUGH THE TABULATOR, INCREASING OUR CHANCE OF SUCCESS, AVOIDING A HAND COUNT FOR ALL PRECINCTS."

This is precisely the type of behavior that led to felony convictions, and 18-month prison sentences, recently meted out to two lower-level poll workers in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). If this memo came from Schwartze, it indicates that at least one county executive director also broke the law during the Ohio 2004 presidential recount. In this case, she is known to have ties to then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. It is unlikely that Schwartze would have carried out these activities, or have put their blueprint in writing, without at least the tacit approval of her Republican cohort in Columbus.

Meanwhile, Brunner has accepted resignations from two of the four directors of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections which she has requested. The complaint for the summary removal of the two who are refusing to resign contains material from the report on the 2004 election issued by Conyers, and material first reported at freepress.org.

Brunner's action constitutes the first time since 1972 that an Ohio Secretary of State is attempting to remove BOE members for cause. In 2005, Blackwell asked the Lucas County (Toledo) BOE to resign after the botched 2004 election, but all four members did so voluntarily. In Cuyahoga, Republicans Sally Florkiewicz and Bob Bennett are refusing to resign. Bennett is chair of both the BOE and the Ohio Republican Party.

The first of Brunner's five counts is "Failure to Adopt Adequate Procedures for Election Recounts Resulting in the Felony Convictions of Two Board Employees." In this first count, Brunner cites the generally ignored Blackwell Directive 2004-58 that specifically mandated ". . . that the Board randomly select for the hand recount whole precincts whose votes cast equaled at least 3% of the total vote."

The complaint also alleges that Jacqueline Maiden, one of the convicted Cuyahoga County BOE officials, acknowledged at a public meeting that the randomly selected precincts may have been secretly viewed by Board employees. This viewing actually was exposed as a "pre-count" of ballots with the June 28, 2006 indictment of Maiden, Kathleen Dreamer and Rosie Grier. Maiden and Dreamer were convicted of a felony and misdemeanor each; Grier was found not guilty.

Count Two against the BOE is for misfeasance and nonfeasance, specifically "Failure to Manage Competently the Board's Financial Affairs." Brunner charges that the Cuyahoga BOE initially estimated its 2006 budget needs as $11,460,174. But it then filed an additional request for another $12,900,000 because of its mishandling of the 2006 primary and general election.

Count Three is an additional charge of misfeasance and nonfeasance alleging "Failure to Ensure the Efficient Administration of Elections in 2004, 2005 and 2006." A key and explosive charge is the Board's failure to maintain "Ballot Security and Voted Absentee Ballot Storage."

According to Brunner, ballots were not properly sealed, and during the November 2006 election, "keys to allegedly-secured ballot storage areas were kept in unsecured locations potentially allowing unauthorized and unsupervised access to the ballots."

Also, ". . . the Board distributed approximately 1500 absentee ballots that listed the wrong party affiliations of candidates, including two candidates for an Ohio House of Representatives district."

Brunner also charges that 5100 voters received ballots "containing material errors in the November 2006 election."

For the first time, an Ohio Secretary of State has also taken on the "unintended and illegal purging of voter registration lists." The Free Press originally broke the story about nearly 10,000 Cleveland voters who were supposedly thrown off the Cuyahoga County voter rolls because of a Diebold computer glitch prior to the 2004 presidential election. The following charge is included in Brunner's complaint: "In 2004 the Board installed a new voter registration system that has resulted in the unintended cancellation of the registrations of large numbers of voters due, in part, to software deficiencies in the Board's new system."

Furthermore, Brunner alleges, "The Board failed to timely address the deficiencies in the new voter registration system and failed to establish a formal process for identifying, tracking and resolving the improper purging of voter registration lists." [For a detailed account of this incident, see the book What Happened in Ohio? from the New Press.] Overall, more than 170,000 voters were purged from voting lists in Cuyahoga County, most from heavily Democratic Cleveland wards, according to public records between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2004 presidential election was decided in Ohio by fewer than 119,000 votes.

Count Four is still another charge of misfeasance and nonfeasance, specifically "Failure to Ensure an Acceptable Level of Performance of Voting Equipment." Brunner's complaint states "Due to a defect in ballot layout, the optical scan voting machines used by the Board in the May 2006 primary election failed to read all absentee ballots on the day of the election." The BOE was forced to delay the reporting and spend an additional $400,000 to correct the problem.

Count Five outlines "Good and Sufficient Cause for Removal," which is summed up as follows: "Administration of elections in Cuyahoga County has resulted in a lack of public confidence in the integrity of the election process in Cuyahoga County." Brunner's complaint cites the Conyers Report "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" issued on January 5, 2005 as well as the Final Report by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel dated July 20, 2006 and the Cleveland State University Center for Election Integrity Monitor Report issued on January 8, 2007.

The aggressive nature of Brunner's complaints against the Cuyahoga BOE indicate Ohio's Secretary of State seems set on guaranteeing that what has happened in Ohio's recent elections will not happen again in 2008. Given the mountain of evidence surrounding the chaos that has recently defined the electoral process in Cleveland, these hearings promise to be explosive � especially with the surfacing of a memo in yet another Ohio county where the law may have been knowingly broken during the 2004 presidential recount.

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