Let's look at a couple of the many personal reports:
Janine Smith-White, Youngstown: I went to my polling place approximately about 9:45 to vote. I waited, I would say, 30 minutes in a line. When I did get to my machine, I pushed John Kerry and my vote immediately jumped up to George Bush. After I started screaming about them cheating again, the aide hurried up and came over and said, oh, that's been happening a lot. Just go ahead and push John Kerry again and I'm saying, you say that's been happening a lot and it hasn't been corrected? Yes, but we can't do anything about it. So I did push John Kerry again and the vote did stay on John Kerry. Even though I completed my voting and after I went over my ballot and I pushed the vote button, I'm still not sure that I voted for John Kerry because, I mean, did my first vote that went to George Bush count or did John Kerry count.And Richard Lugar has the audacity to complain about the Ukraine!
Tom Kessel, Bexley: ...One time I went outside, I came back in, she [a Republican campaign worker] was actively going over some sort of computerized list she had with the precinct judge in precinct 4A in Bexley. One of the three machines went down and they were not able to get the tape out of it and the cartridge at the end of the day. Later on, when I got the poll -- data from Franklin County poll workers, that machine which had the lowest numbers of votes had the highest percentage of Bush votes. The other two machines were coming back 30 percent for Bush. This one came back 40 percent for Bush. I don't know. Also, they sealed up their provisional ballots before I had a chance to count them and let them know how much provisional ballots were there. Also, she signed off as an official witness at the end of the day, even though she was a Republican worker.
Wayne Madsen: A few of you seem mildly annoyed with the attention I have paid to his stories. However, I like many of the pieces this man has written in the past; in my eyes, a good resume justifies much. And he may be on to something.
Has he been misled? Anything is possible. Even if (as some readers believe) Rovian forces have made Madsen the target of a crafty deception operation, we should not ignore the story. Cover-up obviates conspiracy. Last I heard, creating a fake check is a crime. No-one would go to such lengths to mislead an investigator if the overall "vote fraud" allegation had no foundation.
Speaking of deception operations: Do you remember the mysterious e-mailer who tried to raise money on behalf of Madsen and Greg Palast? (The idea was to put a PayPal link on this blog.) This "fundraiser" turns out to be unknown to Madsen. He confirmed that neither he nor Palast operates in this fashion -- therefore, "this guy is up to something."
Hacking sites? Reports keep surfacing of interference with sites looking into the e-vote controversy -- for example, one reader claims that the Green party's donation page stopped working. Paranoia? Maybe. Probably. But these days, who knows?
Suing Mr. Blackwell: People for the American Way has sued Ken Blackwell over the 8000 provisional ballots consigned to the round file in Cuyahoga county. "The suit is a mandamus action, which asks a court to compel a public official to perform a duty."
The suit also says that any vote cast in the wrong precinct should be counted, if the voter did not receive instruction as to the correct precinct. The suit also says that votes should not be discarded if they were cast in the right building but at the wrong table. Sounds sensible to me. I'll be amused to hear Republicans spin this effort as an attempt to "steal" the election.
Ukraine: Previously, we've noted that an institute conducting the exit polls in the Ukraine had received funding from organizations linked to American and British intelligence. Keep that factor in mind as you read the Guardian's take on the elections in the former Soviet republic:
There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.Once again, we must note the outlandish hypocrisy: Exit polls are the only bulwark against vote rigging in other lands -- but in America, such polls are inaccurate and deserving of being banned.
Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.
The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.
Speaking of exits: The other conspiracy theory (still bandied about by right-wing bloggers) holds that our polls were deliberately skewed to favor Kerry, in order to depress the Bush turn-out. This, despite the fact that we have yet to see one anecdotal report of a potential Bush voter who stayed home because of the exits. If the "liberal" mainstream media, which paid for those polls, were engaged in such a conspiracy, they would have reported the exit numbers -- after all, they had paid for the data. And they would not have "conformed" the data to the official tallies as the night progressed.
Most telling of all -- if Mitofsky were a pro-Democratic conspirator, wouldn't his be the first, loudest voice speaking of a rigged vote tally?
Church and state. A reader tells me that many voting places in Polk County, Florida were in churches. Maybe that practice is legal -- but it shouldn't be.
North Carolina had some of the worst election-day "problems," according to this story, which notes some juicy details:
Lost: 4,500 votes in Carteret County -- paper ballots verified by voters and retained by the election officials would have saved these votes.More to come...
Omitted: an entire precinct of 1,209 votes in Gaston County.
Missing: 12,000 more votes in Gaston County not reported. The election director hired a voting machine technician to upload the county vote totals and did not oversee the process.
Bamboozled: Guilford County bought vote-tabulating software that used outdated technology and with insufficient vote storage. As a result, Guilford County's public vote totals for president were off by 22,000 votes.
More votes than cast: Craven County reported 11,283 more votes for president than cast, voting with the same software as in Guilford County.
9 comments:
More on voting in churches in Florida: So far, I've checked 9 counties (it's tedious) and the percent of voting places within a precinct that are religious institutions ranges from 27% in Monroe County to 65.9% in Escambia. (Polk Co. 58%.) Where I come from (a Blue state) we vote in elementary schools and such. Do other people vote in Churches or is this a Florida thing?
As an aside, the supervisor of elections in Pasco County held some big registration drives in Churches. They made sure to mention that this was "part" of a larger drive to make sure as many people voted as possible but I didn't the same "spirited" ads for those other drives. But read for yourself at: http://www.pascovotes.com/pasnews.htm
I don't mean to be picky but this voting in Church thing really doesn't sit right with me.
Have you seen Keith Olbermann's rebuttal to Madsen? He put it up yesterday afternoon I guess. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Thanks for keeping up on this. Now that I joined the site to post this, I guess I'll have to start putting up some articles too.
There are more problems in the Ukraine than just a few exit poll discrepancies.
It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks arrived armed with rubber truncheons.
Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine's Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.
"They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes," he told The Telegraph.
"People's faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over."
...
Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. "The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn't understand why they were wet," she said.
...
The most common trick was "carousel" voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.
So much content to comment on: to be brief, 1) it's cleat to me that touch-screen voting ought to be dead in the water after 2004; and 2) nationwide and swing state voter suppression efforts (starting with registration and up to and including provisional and spoiled ballots) could be enough to account for the election result, especially popular vote. ,,BUT NOT THE EXIT POLLS (unless that's all in the latter, which votes thrown out).
Best site I've found so far (besides this one) is www.vote2004.eriposte.com/
Currently 146 articles linked on home page and much deeper, and organized by topic and state. Nationwide dirty tricks. Some confirmed as linked to official GOP. It could be that it was these efforts that cost the $29 million. I find it hard to believe that computer hacking is that expensive.
You don't have to be a resident in a county to obtain (purchase) copy of registered voters, GOP can buy list of Dems and call them up, which apparently they did, also doorstep in some cases, with wrong info etc.
I did a break down, 3 million margin for Bush, 50 states, avg. 50 counties with 20 precincts (or 20 counties with 50 precincts) -- that margin is an AVERAGE of 60 votes per precinct.
If you are unconvinced that voter suppression was significant, check this site out, it's a heck of a lot faster than google news which gives a lot of false results.
Ukraine election is not as good v evil as portayed in US media, there was some strong-arming by both sides, though I'm currently of opinion that it might have been worse on "orange" pro-western side with US backing/money but unsavory ties to racist skinheads and the like.
Speaking of hacked sites, etc. apparently the Pentagon tried to shut down the site registering Americans living abroad, 6 million of whom wanted to vote in 2004, predominantly to kick Bush out. We'll probably never learn how many of them got to vote, or in which state. (Too bad they don't have their own "virtual state" with something like 15-20 electoral votes.)
Posted by Dem in Chatham NC
I live in a relatively rural NC county and quite a few of our polling locations are at churches, but not in the worshipping area ("sanctuary" is the term I think) but in the "fellowship" hall, some of which are used for a variety of local secular meetings. There are only a handful of "community centers" available. Other locations are volunteer fire departments, a Ruiran Club, a Moose Lodge, one Elementary School gym, one Community College auditorium, and two clubhouses at planned retiree developments.
No-one has ever complained about the use of church halls. (Of course I'm the only person who has balked at being prayed over and forced to say the pledge of allegiance at the start of county meetings, but that's another story.) I think that convenience is key, at least here.
Regarding the post of "Anonymous" above, I seem to remember reading a post by Bev Harris on her (dying of neglect these days) website Black Box Voting that precinct manager after precinct manager went on video and declared that the poll tapes they sent to the county elections board did not correspond with the official tapes produced in BBV's FOIA request. In many cases, the difference was estimated to be "about 60 votes."
If Professor Tokaji is concerned, I'm alarmed~~~
11/28/2004
Counting Provisional Ballots in Ohio
In Ohio, approximately 78% of the 155,000 provisional ballots cast have been validated and will therefore be counted, according to this report http://www.channelcincinnati.com/news/3946716/detail.html . In Hamilton County (Cincinnati area), about 80% of provisional ballots were counted http://www.wcpo.com/news/2004/local/11/27/hamco_ballots.html . A lower percentage were validated in Ohio's largest county, Cuyahoga, where Cleveland is located. According to this report http://www.newsnet5.com/politics/3943648/detail.html , only 16,373 of Cuyahoga County's 24,472 provisional ballots (68%) were actually counted. Of those not counted, about 70% were disqualifed because the county could find no registration record on file. As voting rights activist Norm Robbins states, it's difficult to imagine that so many people would take the trouble to go out and vote -- many of them braving lengthy lines -- if they really weren't registered. The L.A. Times reports here http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-briefs27.3nov27,1,2619389.story?coll=la-headlines-nation that People for the American Way has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the manner in which Cuyahoga County has determined whether provisional ballots should count.
- posted by Dan Tokaji @ 4:30 PM
http://equalvote.blogspot.com/
I'm in the Twin Cities area and many of the polling places are in churches, although my own is in a military facility. I'm atheistic, but I'm not really sure why polling should not take place in churches. A church is a building.
I'm more concerned about the Ohio story of a funeral home as a polling place, with the owner of the facility scheduling a funeral during voting. That's like having services at the church during voting. It's a design for disruption.
Sorry I'm several hours late getting this out. Ohio's Secretary of State is being sued on state and federal levels for his general incompetence to a fair and just election here. He also appeared on Keith Olbermann's program for interview. Whether any of this hubbub will result in reversal of our nation's election results I don't know. Here are the posts~~~
New Lawsuit on Provisional Voting in Ohio
The People for the American Way Foundation and individual voters have filed a state court action against Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The complaint, which can be found here http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/MackeyMandamus.pdf , challenges the way in which provisional voting was implemented in Cuyahoga County -- the state's largest county, which includes Cleveland.
The complaint alleges that election officials and poll workers were confused about the circumstances in which a voter should be given a provisional ballot rather than a regular ballot, causing them to give inconsistent and sometimes erroneous instructions to voters. It also challenges the state's failure to set "clear, uniform, and legally valid standards" for handling provisional ballots, a claim that sounds very much like the equal protection claim made in the Schering v. Blackwell complaint http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102-Schering-complaint.pdf pending in U.S. District Court.
---posted by Dan Tokaji @ 5:50 PM November 29th
Please see the rest of the message at http://equalvote.blogspot.com/
• November 29, 2004 | 11:25 p.m. ET
Recount SI, Jesse No (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - We have been inviting Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to appear on Countdown since we began to cover the voting irregularities story on November 8th.
It struck me as not quite coincidental that he finally joined us the same day the Ohio GOP issued what might be the first Republican recognition of any kind that there are questions about the vote - a news release with the gaudy headline “Democrats Struggle to Justify Unnecessary Recount / (Jesse) Jackson swoops in to fuel conspiracy theories even Kerry lawyers admit are baseless.”
While it was the Greens and Libertarians filing for the recount, the Republicans seemed to prefer silence. But after Jackson spoke in Columbus Sunday and Cincinnati Monday http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6459866/ , suddenly Mr. Blackwell was available. “I think what happened,” he said, “is that Jesse Jackson ran around the block and tried to get out in front of a parade that was already on the march.”
That’s an odd phrase. Show of hands, please! Who out of the 20% who believe the election is illegitimate would have believed that a Republican state official would ever compare an Ohio recount to “a parade that was already on the march”? Sounds like a campaign phrase---for Democrats.
Suddenly the recount itself seems like an old pal to Ohio’s top election official. Last week, the incoming president of the association of county election officials mused out loud about a suit to stop the Glibs, so I asked Blackwell if he was saying that his office would take no step to try to prevent the recount. “Once they ask for a recount, we will provide them with a recount… we will regard this as yet another audit of the voting process.”
As to the audit of the perception of conflict of interest in Blackwell’s other role as Honorary Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Ohio Campaign, he seemed less definitive. “We have a bi-partisan system in Ohio where the Hamilton County Chairman of the board of elections, Tim Burke, is also the Democrat chairman of the Democrat party in that county.” I’ll pause the quote here to note that said party does business as the Democratic Party and the Republicans’ obsession with that little ‘ic’ has always seemed peevish to me, even when it’s coming out of John McCain’s mouth. Blackwell continued: “The same for Dayton. The Democrat Chairman is the Chairman of the Board of Elections in Montgomery County.”
This is interesting, and this is troubling (why should you be able to be both Chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party and Chairman of the Montgomery County Board of Elections?). But it also seemed to be self-evidently irrelevant - something akin to the political version of “They started it,” whether the ‘they’ are Republicans or Democrats.
The Democrats, of course, didn’t start the recount push in Ohio, the Glibs did, and the distinction seems vitally important to Blackwell. Messrs. Badnarik and Cobb “have a standing, not Jesse Jackson, and because Senator Kerry has conceded and has not asked for a recount he has no standing, and so I would anticipate that the Electoral College will be held on the 13th of December and 20 votes will go to the certified winner.”
Email at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
Jesse was to be on Keith's show last night! The rest of the post http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
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