Destruction of Evidence - Ohio's 2004 Presidential Ballots

On April 11, 2007, Clermont said that they didn’t know where the ballot evidence was but that “no one remembers specifically discarding the ballots.”

Like Clermont, Brown County couldn’t find all the ballots but they were sure that they “were not intentionally destroyed.”

Guernsey County says that unvoted ballots “were destroyed in error due to the county maintenance worker.” This is inadvertent destruction of evidence by proxy. The janitor did it. Several counties blamed retired elections officials without indicating any effort to contact those officials for an explanation.

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As you look at the examples of ballot evidence destruction, keep in mind that destruction of ballots is the one way to be 100% certain that the charges in KLBNA v. Blackwell are never verified. Ironically, that destruction of 2004 ballots seems to break the very same laws charged in the civil action.

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Allen County had a “migrating water” problem that flooded their vault holding the ballots. This caused them to be “compromised by water damage and subsequently destroyed.” The dry ballots were also lost when a contractor threw them out, inadvertently no doubt. The ballot wipe out in Allen combined both inadvertent destruction (of damaged ballots) and destruction by proxy (all the rest).

Let’s look at two of Ohio’s largest voting districts, those including Cincinnati and Cleveland.

Cincinnati is part of Hamilton County, population 823,000. Election board director John Williams had this to say:

In January of ’06, the staff was engaged in a sizable effort to make room for the Hart voting system. To the best of my knowledge, the above ballots (unvoted precinct ballots) were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ‘06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.

John M. Williams, Director of Elections, Hamilton County Board of Elections, May 16, 2007

So Hamilton had to make room for new voting machines but they shredded the ballots inadvertently; in which case the given reason for the destruction of evidence had nothing to do with the anticipation of new machines since it was inadvertent, “not focusing the mind on matter” or “unintentional,” meaning the absence of specific intent, i.e., moving them to make way for new machines.

Or possibly Hamilton destroyed the ballot for an unspecified reason and found that the shredding made room for the new voting machines; in which case they confused the unspecified reason with inadvertent shredding and used the new machine arrival as a convenient excuse.

Or possibly the staff of the board of elections was so concerned with clearing up storage space that they failed to notice the ballots, the key product of their role as election workers, and set them aside resulting in the shredding; only later rationalizing their negligence with the excuse of needing for extra space for e-voting machines.

Is there a fourth option? The statement by Hamilton as written makes no sense at all. What really happened in this huge voting district?

Hamilton County could produce a receipt for the inadvertent ballot shredding. That might provide clues that would make sense out of their nonsensical letter. But as we will see shortly, before even investigating, Secretary of State Brunner and Attorney General Dann applied a benign motive for what seem to be blatant violations of federal and state law.

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