Bye bye to Cleveland GOP Election Chair Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman April 16, 2007
Ohio's Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett, an essential player in putting George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, is no long chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. His milestone resignation leaves a legacy of scandal, recrimination, massive voter purges, felony convictions and a pivotal role in a stolen presidential election.
Bennett has quit in a signature cloud of graceless accusations and cheap shots at Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's newly elected Secretary of State, who asked him to resign along with the rest of the Cleveland election authority. His forced departure marks the biggest landmark yet in the unraveling theft of the presidential elections in Ohio 2004.
Bennett remains chair of the Ohio Republican Party. In 2004 he was apparently asked by White House consigliere Karl Rove to stay on at the Cuyahoga BOE to help guarantee Bush's second term. Cleveland is Ohio's biggest and most Democratic urban center. A massive sweep there by John Kerry was widely expected to have given him the White House. It was Bennett's job to mute that margin, and apparently that's exactly what he did.
Leading up to the 2004 vote, Bennett oversaw the quiet purge of some 168,000 registered voters from the Cuyahoga rolls, including 24.93% of the entire city of Cleveland, which voted 83% for Kerry. In one inner city majority African American ward, 51% of the voters were purged. Centered on precincts that voted more than 80% for John Kerry, this purge may well have meant a net loss to the Democrats of tens of thousands of votes in an election that was officially decided statewide by less than 119,000.
In a report issued December 7, 2004, the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition (GCVRC) reported that in addition to the purge of registered voters, some 3.5% of those applying for new registrations were never even entered on the rolls by Bennett's BOE, or were entered incorrectly, which would result in disenfranchisement of those who had just tried to become new voters. Additionally, the GCVRC estimated that "over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County would be compromised because of these clerical errors."
Bennett refused to respond to the report's initial conclusions. When the study became public, BOE Executive Director Michael Vu accused the study coordinator of "inciting panic." Vu did not respond to GCVRC's request for the reinstatement of 303 voter registrations where there was direct evidence that they had been wrongly cancelled.
The GCVRC also documented that the Cuyahoga County BOE incorrectly classified 463 properly registered voters as not registered. This included 201 voters who were registered on BOE computers on August 17, but for some unexplained reason, were removed from the rolls by October 22. They then were forced to vote provisionally and their votes were rejected as not registered.
In Brunner's formal complaint against Bennett she cited the fact that Bennett's BOE did nothing when an estimated 10,000 voters were thrown off the voting roll by a Diebold voter registration computer glitch.
Also, Bennett's BOE rejected 262 properly registered voters included on its own list as of October 22. They incorrectly listed 183 as not registered and 79 as no signatures. "The Board did not contest our data," said the GCVRC, "but said again it was just a small percentage due to human error, and then proceeded to certify the entire Cuyahoga County vote even though they thereby knowingly possibly disenfranchised 463 individuals."
Parallel purges were conducted by Republican-controlled boards of election in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) where some 105,000 voters were purged from the rolls, and in Lucas County (Toledo), where some 28,000 were purged in an unprecedented move in late August 2004. These remain the only three counties in the state known to have conducted massive registration purges prior to the 2004 election. The three mass urban purges decimated the rolls in heavily Democratic areas. Since then, another 170,000 voters have been purged from the rolls in Franklin County, primarily in the heavily Democratic Columbus precincts. Many rural Republican counties, like Miami, practice a "no-purge" policy.
From his post at the helm of both the Ohio GOP and the Cuyahoga BOE, Bennett was at the center of the purges. Many of the 300,000-plus purged voters reported that they never received notice that their voting rights had been cancelled. Should the general 80% pro-Democratic inner city margins have prevailed for all three purged lists, the net loss to the Kerry camp could have been in the range of 100,000 votes.
In addition to the purges, Bennett was also at the center of the election challenges to college students in Democratic enclaves.
Bennett is infamous for far more than massive voter purges. Under his supervision, a legally mandated recount of the 2004 presidential vote was illegally manipulated. Ohio law says precincts must be chosen at random for hand counting as part of the recount process. But two Cuyahoga BOE employees have been convicted of a felony and a misdemeanor each, and have each been sentenced to eighteen months in prison for what prosecutors have called "rigging" the recount.
Bennett was also instrumental in the purchase of some $20 million in Diebold voting machines for 2006 statewide elections. Election protection activists vehemently opposed the purchase, as seen in a nationally televised HBO special, "Hacking Democracy." Under Bennett and Cuyahoga BOE Executive Director Michael Vu, the machines malfunctioned in Ohio's 2006 primary, with vote count reporting delayed for five days.
Long-time election activist Adele Eisner characterizes Bennett's reign at the Cuyahoga BOE as a "culture with fear." Among other things, Bennett chose to disregard long-standing laws requiring that election results be posted at the precinct level, a decision backed by Ohio's former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Yes, it's all starting to unravel and the long and winding road leads to Rove but we can't leave Bush off the hook either. The GOP's foul cry of 'voter fraud' needs to start falling on empty ears. It's all connected. We need to reframe the language we use for this. See:
I'm going to assume that some purging of all voters goes on prior to every election everywhere. Purging is actually essential, as long as it is being done ethically and accurately. What I would like to know is how do the 2004 Presidential election purge numbers in Ohio compare with those from prior Ohio presidential elections, both in total numbers and in percentages.
Also, how many voters were purged in the Republican leaning districts in Ohio in the last presidential election, in both total numbers and percentage of the total voting population, and how do those numbers compare with previous elections and the democratic leaning districts.
I hope you can do a follow up Purging article and strictly deal with comparing and constrasting purge numbers from the 2004 Presidential selection er election, with previous elections, and also between Republican districts and Democratic districts.
by
Alessandro Machi (13 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 174 comments)
on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 12:56:04 PM
Hi: On the face of what you wrote regarding Bob Bennett's voter purges in Ohio is there any basis for a civil rights suit at the federal level using the Voting Rights Act?
I would imagine the people who can show they were purged without notice would constitute a fairly cohesive class although I don't know how far they would get in that venue.
Isn't this enough for the Justice Department to be forced into action? I know that's asking a lot and I really am serious here, but shouldn't people in Congress be addressing this? At the very least, shouldn't the governor of Ohio be initiating some sort of action on behalf of the citizens who were disenfranchised regardless of standing issues?
I cannot tell you how pissed I am that all of this has happened since 2000 and no one is raising their voices in congress. You guys have been great on this issue but you'd think someone is congress would want to adopt this issue, like Conyers and Feingold.
Keep up the fight!
Matt Carmody
Cornwall, NY
by
matt (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments)
on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 1:21:16 PM
Where was Kerry? Lessons learned from shitty grin promises.
We should all remember the nightmare of Election night 2004 to regain any lessons learned. Election night 2004 and the first reports of voter suppression were rolling in, purposeful purges of new voters, thousands of provisional ballots that were never to be counted, purported terrorist threats so that vote counts could be crafted in secret, and an unknown amount of electronic vote flipping never to be disclosed because of selective recount rigging made to prevent a full recount.
And where was John Kerry, who had promised that he would use all of his resources to ensure that every vote would be counted? Like a stab in the back with a twist, he conceded electoral defeat at his earliest convenient media window. According to a radio interview with Mike Papantonio, who filed a Qui Tam lawsuit against elections software makers, John Kerry briefly admitted to knowing about the widespread voter disenfranchisement and fresh allegations of election fraud BEFORE conceding defeat.
The lesson learned: Democracy is too fragile and easily broken by those who would pretend to be our champion and protect it for us. We can not trust any smiling faces and seemingly earnest promises. The vote count must be a PUBLIC, transparently simple process. Paper ballots counted in a public manner by precinct workers and friendly neighbors posted and reported for all those present to verify and see.
Currently the Holt Bill HR 811, like the HAVA (Help America Vote Act) is another smiling face that on the surface seems like a reform helping to reinforce democracy, but in the particulars, the fine print entrenches poisonous secrecy into the vote counting. Electronic vote counting allows the voter to verify a paper printout of their votes, then buries that receipt in a lockbox, that never sees the light of day again. Your vote can be flipped, changed, and lost forever in a secret tabulating system that not so miraculously, narrowly avoids any mandatory recount triggers by just a single percentage point.
The HOLT bill HR 811 is another trojan horse. We have seen that shitty grin coupled with slimy promises once before. Our Constitutional Democracy is not perfect, but we must protect what little we have from layer upon layer of bad legislation. Follow this link to the Election Defense Alliance for a breakdown of the bad legislation that must be rebuked for further revision.
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