Saturday, January 20, 2007

Vote fraud: Not just a conspiracy theory anymore

This country still has not washed off the stink from the filthy Ohio recount process. Now, according to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, criminal prosecutions have arisen from that morass:
Prosecutors say these cases involve "rigging" the recount in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), where tens of thousands of votes were shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush, or else never counted. Meanwhile, corroborating evidence continues to surface throughout Ohio illuminating the GOP's theft of the presidency. According to the AP, County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the Cuyahoga trial by charging that "the evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless." Baxter said the three election workers "did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months" on the recount.
That's going to be the fallback position, methinks: "We didn't want to toss it to Dubya -- we just wanted to save time."
But Cleveland, which usually gives Democrats an extremely heavy margin, was crucial to Bush's alleged victory of roughly 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted. Some 600,000 votes were cast or counted in Cuyahoga County. But official turnout and vote counts varied wildly and improbably from precinct to precinct. Overall the county reported about a 60% turnout. But several predominantly black precincts, where voters went more than 80% for Kerry, reported turnouts of 30% or less. In one ward, only a 7% turnout was reported, while surrounding precincts were nearly ten times as high. Independent studies indicate Kerry thousands of votes in Cuyahoga County that rightfully should have been counted in his column.
The story goes on to describe what we already knew: During the recount, Ohio law required a random sampling of precincts; instead, the choice was anything but random.

Meanwhile, Daniel Hopsicker has a new story on Sarasota County and the questionable Florida 13 race. More on that soon (probably on Monday)...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This story really burns my butt!
I live in the Ft. Lauderdale area acroos the state but our newspaper has been reporting on this story and the fact that the election people and local politicians have decided that 18,000 people decided not to vote for their representative in the House. Their answer for the next election is to offer a choice of "none of the above" to the selection of candidates. Our newspaper thinks this is a great idea since everybody knows that the voting machines are "HIGHLY ACCURATE". This was stated in their editorial pages on Thursady, Jan. 18th. I've fired off a letter to the editor asking them who told them that the machines are accurate and they are participating in the cover-up of a stolen election, an election, I may add that was the costliest in US history! They've called me with the usual, "may we print your letter", phone call. We'll see if they do.

Peter of Lone Tree said...

Joe,
You gotta link for the "Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman--Ohio" story?

Joseph Cannon said...

I have fixed the link.

Anonymous said...

I have taken the liberty to quote you at length on my own blog because I think I have a different audience. If you object, let me know and I will withdraw it.
See http://terrycraig.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

What I've never understood is that these tales of vote-rigging for Republicans always seem to take place in jurisdictions where Democrats control the local government and, in effect, the voting apparatus.

Anonymous said...

A week ago this was reported online:

OHIO 2004: 6.15% Kerry-Bush vote-switch found in probability study

Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1/34th of the Ohio vote), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15% when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.

The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal in both subsets.

Read the revised article with graphs of new findings:

The 2004 Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis
How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes

http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html

A small spreadsheet too:

http://jqjacobs.net/politics/xls/cuyahoga_t_tests.xls