Blackwell's perfidy, and more on vote fraud

I should have commented on this article yesterday, but better late than never. Today's must-read piece is by the reliable Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, who continue to look into the outrageous Ohio pseudo-election overseen by GOP insider Ken Blackwell.

You may recall Sherole Eaton, the Hocking County election board staffer who discovered that a Triad computer "repairman" had swapped out a hard drive on a machine that allegedly suffered from a dead battery. Even worse,

According to a December 3, 2004 affidavit sworn by Eaton, the Triad technician "advised" the Hocking County Board of Elections' Republican Director Lisa Schwartze on how to "post a 'cheat sheet'" to make the recount match the officially reported election total.

Eaton's affidavit figured in a lawsuit against the Ohio results filed by the Libertarian, Green and Democratic candidates.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, Eaton now stands in danger of losing her job.

In an exclusive May 23 interview, Schwartze told Freepress.org that "Sherole is on vacation." When asked if Eaton had been fired, Schwartze commented that Eaton has until June 30 to resign or be fired, and "that decision came from the Board."

At the Ohio Democratic Party's annual dinner, Eaton told the Free Press that she is not at liberty to discuss the situation, but that she is "a federal whistleblower" who sees the Board's action against her as "retaliation" for her affidavit revealing Triad's critical intrusion.

Yes, the election board consists of both Democrats and Republicans. The time has come to ignore those apologists who claim that a bipartisan board makeup insures fairness. The major voting machine manfucaturers have a long, documented history of bribery and corruption -- indeed, bribery (in all its varied and subtle forms) is the only way these companies could get their obviously-rigged products into our voting booths.

Never underestimate Blackwell's own lawlessness and rancid partisanship:

Under Ohio law, all election board members serve at Secretary of State Blackwell's pleasure. Cuyahoga Bureau of Elections director Michael Vu mentioned the letter at a Congressional hearing staged at the Ohio statehouse by Republican Congressman Bob Ney. Ney brought the hearing to Columbus in part because Blackwell refused to testify in Washington. The hearing was highlighted by angry, bitter exchanges between Blackwell and US Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who co-introduced (with Senator Barbara Boxer of California) the historic Congressional resolution challenging the seating of the Ohio Electoral College delegation for Bush.

In his October letter Blackwell made it clear that any Election Board official, Republican or Democrat, who challenged Blackwell's decrees would be summarily removed. Election Board positions are well paid, and Blackwell's threat erased widespread claims the presence of Democrats on Election Boards guaranteed that the election was administered in a neutral, bi-partisan manner.

In fact, with the club of a loss of substantial salaries, this leaked letter makes it clear Blackwell was running the election with an iron partisan hand, and that claims of true bi-partisanship were strictly for show.

When -- if -- justice returns to this land, Blackwell will be led from his offices in handcuffs. The man is a criminal.

Baiman responds to "Febble": Quite a few of you must be feeling the same frustration I have felt. Elizabeth "Febble" Liddle has criticized the all-important US Count Votes study of the exit poll disparity. While she maintains, persuasively, that she is not a Mitofski (or Bush) apologist, her work has been helpful to those apologists. Unfortunately (and here is where the frustration sets in) the controversy has become one difficult or impossible to follow, if you are unversed in high-level mathematics.

Today, statistician Rob Baiman has offered a convincing response to Liddle -- and you can find his work on Democratic Underground. I believe that Baiman's work will prove useful and (more or less) comprehensible both to those who progressed beyond Alegebra 2 and to those who did not.

One DU responder offers this summary of his view of the situation:

This is in fact what I had suspected all along...

"Liddle unfortunately does not point out that the USCV analysis was based on these very same K and B partisan response rates patterns that she investigates in her paper."

Unfortunately is an understatement, she barely even moves off her theory that there is in fact an unprecedented precinct mean bias. In this case, the uniform precinct bias should be far more divergant. It should be completely random, and in every way it is not.

It goes from one side of the country in the other, and shows the same result in up to 4 previous elections where Mitofsky first made the idea. The very concept of the reluctant responder was used as a covert "guess" in order to hide the real truth of what happened there.....And I bet being on the corporate payroll has alot to do with that.

Rest in pieces reluctant responder, we hardly knew ye uniform invisible guess.

I, for one, never have and never will accept the idea that Bush supporters were reluctant to discuss their views. I do not base my feelings on statistics. The notion is simply too counterintuitive.