Supervised by Blackwell, those results showed a substantial victory for John Kerry until about 12:20 at night, when reporting inexplicably stopped. When it resumed about 90 minutes later, Ohio’s margin – and the presidency – suddenly switched to Bush.
After the election, a citizen-based federal lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff) was filed, aimed at preserving all of Ohio’s 2004 election materials for further investigation. Those materials were protected by federal law until September 2, 2006, when Blackwell intended to destroy them. But a week prior, we won a federal court decision barring the counties from destroying any of these materials. Ohio’s new Secretary of State (SOS), Jennifer Brunner, then ordered the boards of election to deliver this evidence to her.
But in July 2007, 56 of Ohio’s 88 county BOEs admitted to illegally destroying all or some of their records. John M. Williams, Director of Elections in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) told Brunner he was "...unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled ballots" essential to an accurate audit because they "...were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."
Delaware County, where the last 359 votes cast in one precinct were all counted for Bush, informed Brunner that they had 29 boxes of ballots, but then delivered only 26. The Delaware BOE initially reported 1872 provisional ballots, but the official number is now 1462, feeding suspicions the boxes were stuffed.
Two election officials in Cleveland have thus far been convicted of felonies stemming from rigged recount procedures after 2004. Now a solid majority of Ohio’s election boards face potential federal criminal action. They have made a reliable reconstruction of the true 2004 outcome virtually impossible.
Brunner has pledged to preside over a fair election in Ohio 2008. Like Debra Bowen, California’s new Secretary of State, Brunner is running extensive tests on the state’s electronic voting machines. Most or all of California and Ohio’s DREs could be gone by 2008, possibly to be replaced by paper ballots counted by electronic scanners.
But even those are not immune to fraud. In 2004, Diebold technicians provided inner city precincts with malfunctioning opti-scan machines. Throughout the state, more than 90,000 ballots were never counted because of voting machine malfunctions. At a mostly Democratic precinct in Toledo, poll workers handed out pencils whose marks could not be read by the electronic counters, thus voiding the votes cast there.
Overall, our nation’s history has been filled with stolen elections. Most have been robbed with paper ballots and stuffed ballot boxes. But under Bush/Rove, electronics are at center stage.
High tech Tammany
Bush/Rove stole the 2000 and 2004 elections by intimidation, vote caging, rigged machines, rigged recounts, and much more. Bush’s firing of the eight federal attorneys only underscores the fraud perpetrated by those who weren’t fired.
Whether Congress gets to the bottom of those firings remains to be seen. But there is little doubt the Democrats were able to retake the House and Senate in 2006 only because of the increased vigilance of a national grassroots voter protection movement.
Though Democrats carried Ohio in the off-year elections of 2006, our research indicates that the GOP still stole as much as 12% of the vote, and is still intent on disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority, poor and young voters. In a single election in Franklin County in 2006, a magistrate found that more than 83% of all the precincts were miscounted on the DRE machines.
And though DRE machines are under intense attack, their presence in 2008 will still be substantial, and will still subject the election to GOP theft.
The lessons of 2000 and 2004 are in the terror imposed on the registration process and the error perpetrated in the vote count. Only by saying "never again" can Americans hope to see a return to actual democracy.
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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman co-wrote How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008.
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