No truth to Ohio "purge" letters by anastasia p Thu Oct 19, 2006 at 05:26:27 PM PDT Yesterday, a diary posted here said that an "insider...very close to Ken Mehlman" had revealed a voter disenfranchisement plan engineered by Diebold (The Devil! The Devil!) that involved sending letters to voters that appeared merely informational but, in fact, required a response within 60 days or that voter's registration would be purged. The source asserted that this system had been "tested" in Ohio in late July and early August with 1.2 million voters, targeted at voters in high-transient areas such as universities and low-income neighborhoods. * anastasia p's diary :: :: * I'm a journalist in Cleveland, Ohio who has followed election issues closely. I hadn't heard about this so I started to make calls. By last night, I had talked to seven people: election protection activists, organizers and attorneys, and people with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones' office and the Ted Strickland gubernatorial campaign. I spoke with Vicki Lovegren, founder of Ohio Vigilance http://www.ohiovigilance.org/ and organizer of two big election conferences here, who is all over anything she perceives as an attempt to game the system. I spoke with the Cuyahoga County election protection coordinators, Chris Nance (also of the congresswoman's office) and attorney Lesley Huff. I spoke with the election observer coordinator in Strickland's Cleveland campaign office and with a spokesperson in his Columbus campaign office. None had seen such a letter or heard of anyone receving it. It seemed incredible to me that such a letter could go out and no one in the most urban, Democratic county (or anywhere else) in the state had heard about it. I would have posted this diary last night, except that in the evening, a piece from OpEdNews came to my attention, purporting that Columbus lawyer, investigative journalist, election activist and also our Green candidate for governor, Bob Fitrakis, was going to court over voter purging, the implication being (although it wasn't spelled out in the article) that it was over this particular letter. I wanted to speak to Bob before posting anything. I left a message for him this morning and didn't hear back, although I did speak in the meantime to Randy Borntrager, the communications director of the Ohio Democratic Party, who said the same thing as everyone else: "If there is such a letter, we haven't seen it." He also said it was his understanding that a voter purge could not happen this way under state law. This afternoon at 4:30 p.m., I went on the Ed Schultz Show to talk about this. (I wrote to the show an e-mail last night in response to a caller I heard on the way home and this morning I got a call from his producer asking me to go on). A few minutes later, I got an enraged phone call from Fitrakis's campaign manager, who insisted I speak to him immediately. I'm not sure what she was enraged about, because when I spoke to Bob, he simply reiterated what everyone else has said. He has seen no such letter, and the concerns he's legally pursuing (he's always going after some election travesty and you don't have to invent them to find them in Ohio) have nothing to do with any such letter. He mentioned a whole bunch of voter-purge attempts (the man is a fountain of elections-related information -- if you're interested, go to his website http://www.freepress.org/ and check out his articles and books), but none vaguely similar to this one or within the same time-frame. He also echoed what Borntrager said about this particular ploy not being valid. So to sum up: I have spoken to a large group of people in Ohio who are actively involved in the election, many specifically in voter protection, and none has heard anything about such a letter. I am NOT saying no purging has happened at any time or that no one's registration has been lost. I AM saying that no sinister Diebold program was activated to deliberately target certain demographic groups in time for this election. The way things are going, it won't be necessary to defeat Diebold investor/Secretary of State, chaos division/Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell. He was unendorsed today by a staunchly Republican paper in Findlay, Ohio, due to his disgraceful meltdown in Monday night's debate. Unendorsed! How often have you heard of that happening???? http://www.thecourier.com/... If you're in Ohio, we need you to be vigilant, we need you to volunteer to be an observer on election day (if you're in Cleveland, call Tom at the Cleveland Strickland office, 216.696.2006), and to work up until election day to make sure Blackwell and his cronies are looking for work outside politics on November 8, and most of all, we need you to vote! Don't let anything discourage you. Oh, and if you're in Northeast Ohio, come downtown to the Plain Dealer Pavilion in the Flats at 7 p.m. for the big Turnaround Ohio rally with the entire statewide ticket- and me! I will be singing with the "Singers for Strickland" Choir! It's free, and parking at the Powerhouse is discounted.

This is the single confusing article that has been cited repeatedly as some kind of verification for the untrue story about the purge letters, and that I waited to talk to Bob Fitrakis to clarify before posting this diary. What happened in that article, if you reread it, is that Fitrakis is talking about entirely other possible incidents of roll purging and voter suppression (voters being purged because they moved, for instance) while the writer then inserts the bogus claims, which Fitrakis did not make, about the specific purge letter the original diarist referred to. Fitrakis emphatically denied to me today that he had knowledge of such a letter. That OpEdNews piece is poorly put together aso that it connects things that aren't connected. The "reports indicate": paragraph has nothing to do with Fitrakis's claims but because of the way it's interjected, it appears that these nonexistent letters are what he's challenging. Not so.