* Also in Clermont County, Phillips found an opti-scan ballot with a white sticker over the Kerry-Edwards spot which would prevent the counter from recording a Kerry vote. During the December 2004 recount in Clermont County, witnesses swore out official affidavits that they saw several ballots with stickers over the Kerry-Edwards spot. The county prosecutor claimed there were "less than one hundred" of these, but was unable to explain why any stickers were there at all.
* In Miami County on Monday, June 19, 2006, Director Steve Quillan handed co-author Bob Fitrakis a print-out of what he called "freely amended results." Director Quillan said "You guys were right" regarding the voter turnout in Concord South West Precinct, which had been listed as 98.55% in the certified election results in 2004. Quillan also disavowed the alleged 94.3% voter turnout certified election results in Concord South. The Free Press has questioned those results, which would have meant that 679 out of 689 people successfully voted in Concord South West. Using a computer databank of voter history, Quillan now admits that the voter turnout was just 82.1% in Concord South West and 79.5% in Concord, discrepancies of more than 15%.
* In Miami County, BOE Director Quillan also says Boy Scouts who volunteered to help on Election Day mistakenly took Concord South West ballots to the Concord East precinct. Baiman found that the pollbooks and absentee ballots in Miami County "have little to no relationship to the voters who voted in the county." He also discovered that "At least 8% of precincts in Miami County have at least a 5% discrepancy between the number of voters who voted and the official certified number of votes." He also noted that there were two precincts that were off by more than 100 votes.
* Also in Miami County, Diane L. Miley, the BOE's former Deputy Director said the Director allowed "Republican friends" and "high school students to take ballots out to the polls on Election Day." Miley also says ten or more Republicans were allowed into the BOE on the evening of Election Day, when votes were being counted, which she says made her "incredibly uncomfortable." But in going public with her assertions, Miley says she was "abandoned by the Dems . . . when I stood up [to the Republicans] at the Board of Elections."
* In Warren County, punch card ballots were also shifted from precinct to precinct, which again, due to ballot rotations, could have reversed the intent of thousands of voters. Warren County was also key to the Bush margin of victory. Its BOE declared an unexplained Homeland Security alert when the polls closed, and the county's ballots were diverted to an unauthorized warehouse, amidst a media blackout. Bush emerged from the county with a very large margin over John Kerry. Warren County also used a chad scraping crew.
Dubious outcomes and marginal behavior by Republican election officials has set off a trickle of legal prosecutions that may become a tidal wave if the preserved ballots continue to tell such tales, and if the assertions in the King Lincoln suit are proven out. Three Cleveland-area poll workers have already been indicated for their actions in the 2004 election, all of which were perpetrated in ways that benefited the Bush vote count.
Meanwhile, the architect of the national imposition of electronic voting machines is on his way to jail. Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, who authored the federal Help America Vote Act, pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges on September 15. Ney's HAVA legislation has been central to foisting electronic voting machines on much of the nation. Central to Ney's conviction has been a flow of "contributions" from the manufacturers of those machines, which have yielded millions in profits for companies with deep Republican roots.
Ney will join Tom Noe, northern Ohio's "Mr. Republican," a major GOP contributor and close cohort of Blackwell, Bush and Ohio Governor Robert Taft. Noe served as chair of the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections for many years. His wife held the post in 2004, and ultimately resigned in disgrace. The entire Lucas County BOE was later fired by Blackwell. Independent researchers have shown at least 7,000 Toledo citizens were stripped from the voter rolls, and have substantiated widespread allegations of vote theft and fraud. Noe has been convicted of federal election funding violations and of mishandling millions of dollars in funds from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation.
As researchers dive deeper into the vast body of ballots, huge legal battles loom over what they may and may not tell us about the true outcome of the 2004 presidential election. But the tip of the iceberg indicates very serious problems, with a wide range of dubious vote counts and illegal recounts all favoring George W. Bush. Diebold opti-scan machines alone are known to have cost Kerry at least 7,000 votes.
Thus far only a fraction of Ohio's 88 counties have received even passing scrutiny. But the early indicators are that Ohio 2004, which decided the presidency, may ultimately prove out to have been the dirtiest and most obviously stolen election in all U.S. history.
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Bob Fitrakis is of counsel, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff, in the King Lincoln lawsuit. They are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of What Happened in Ohio: A documentary record of theft and fraud, just published by The New Press. The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes the Free Press.
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