Thanks to angry calls from activists around the country, Ken Blackwell backed off on discarding provisional ballots without birthdates.
counties that were confused about whether to validate provisional ballots that don't have voters' dates of birth on them were told Friday by the secretary of state's office in a conference call to allow those ballots.
Hooray!! But here is a new issue:
Spanish-speaking residents in Cuyahoga County said they encountered a number of problems on Election Day, including some that prevented votes from being cast.
A lack of Spanish-speaking poll workers, no Spanish ballots and names missing from voter lists were among the complaints.
And Cincinnati activist Carrie Davis shows what one determined person can accomplish:
a Cincinnati activist who's sued the NFL and her county prosecutor asked a state appeals court to order Blackwell to allow the public and reporters to watch the official vote counting at county elections boards.
There were 92,672 fewer votes for president than ballots cast statewide, and it is unlikely that so many people deliberately skipped that question, said Carrie Davis in a complaint filed with the state appeals court in Hamilton County.
State attorneys have not yet received the complaint, mailed on Tuesday, Lee said.
"As with any election, the secretary of state's office and county boards of election will comply fully with the law," Lee said.
Carrie Davis, please call Sandy Buchanan at Ohio Citizen Action, who's working on the same issue of the spoiled ballots.
Speaking of spoiled ballots, investigative reporter extraordinaire Greg Palast applies the important lessons of Florida to Ohio, but the results are mixed, imho.
KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.
By Greg Palast
The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots...
Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.
As I recall, Ohio Republican wanted to replace the state's punchcard machines with touchscreens - from the nation's leading Republican vendor, Diebold. But when Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell famously promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in August 2003, the backlash from Democrats scotched that plan.
Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.
When Plan A (touchscreen upgrade) was blocked, I don't know if there was a Plan B (precinct punchcard readers) was ever proposed. I think it was fairly late in the election cycle by that point.
Ohio was left with the voting machines it had in 2000. Here's the map:
(The original map at http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/map.php?&topic_string=5std&state=Ohio allows you to mouseover each county to display its name, a feature I can't reproduce here. Electionline.org also has nifty political maps. Perhaps a volunteer could take this version and type the names right on the counties, or find another map with the county names and "paint" it with the machine colors.)
Most of the state uses punchcards. That includes the most Democratic county (Cuyahoga, home of Cleveland), but also lots of rural Republican counties.
One Democratic county that used electronic machines instead of punchcards (Mahoning, home of Youngstown), had to deal with electronic problems instead.
So were Democrats disproportionately affected by punchcard problems? Without actual data on the number of Republican vs. Democratic votes cast on punchcards, and the spoilage rates, we cannot know.
JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.
But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied...
Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.
Ohio, like most states, had provisional ballots before they were imposed nationally by HAVA. In 2000 and 2002, they numbered around 100,000. So there was a jump in 2004, but there are several likely reasons for that, including:
- a surge of registrations that county election boards had trouble processing
- on Election Day, the presence of Democratic lawyers who helped voters cast provisional ballots instead of going home without voting
This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.
We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.
True, but that "caging" list was discovered in Florida. In Ohio, Republicans promised to deploy thousands of GOP pollwatchers to challenge Democratic voters, but even after winning a green light in Federal Court at 4 a.m. on Election Day, they never actually deployed those pollwatchers.
While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count.
Thanks to the Green/Libertarian Alliance, there will be a recount. Whether that includes spoiled punchcards is unclear. Someone check with an Ohio election lawyer!
Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.
In previous elections, 90% of provisional ballots were counted. But during initial counting in Cleveland this week, that figure dropped to 66%. There is definitely a problem, but it more likely involves different rules applied to the counting process. If those rules are questionable, the Green/Libertarian Alliance or the Kerry campaign can go to court to change those rules in one fell swoop. Some serious reporter needs to interview Cleveland officials to find out why so many more provisional ballots are being discarded this year.
Speaking of serious reporters, kudos to Jessica Azulay, co-founder of PeoplesNetWorks and an editor at The NewStandard, based in Syracuse, NY. Compare the excellent article below to the utter crap about election problems published this week in the NY Times, Washington Post, etc.
Amid Charges of Vote Suppression, Activists Look for Larger Fraud
There is little dispute that voters all over the country encountered problems before and while they cast their votes on November 2. Watchdog organizations across the US have compiled hundreds of thousands of complaints. But many are asking whether all the problems add up to a different electoral outcome and whether there were more systemic problems not yet uncovered
Azulay actually quotes the people who have been collecting and analyzing thousands of election problems from around the country, including Chellie Pingree of Common Cause, Will Doherty of Verified Voting Foundation, and Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - all of whom agree there are serious problems that need to be examined and fixed.
Azulay also examines the exit poll controversy, pursuing the demand by activists that raw exit poll data be released for further study.
However, that data is controlled by research companies Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, which conducted the exit polls, and by big media companies ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC, CNN and the Associated Press, who purchased the data. In an email interview with The NewStandard, Public Relations spokesperson for Edison/Mitofsky, Edie Emery, said the data would be publicly archived in early 2005 at the Roper Center for Public Research.
But the kind of detailed information necessary for a true comparison may not even exist. According to Emery, "precinct samples are picked to represent the entire state -- they are not selected in order to estimate the vote in each county -- in fact there are many counties throughout the country in which we do not have a single exit poll precinct."
When asked how her organization explains the apparent inaccuracy of the exit poll data, Emery said: "Based upon the evidence that we have now, our best hypothesis is that we saw a ‘differential non-response’ in the exit poll last Tuesday. That is, Kerry voters were more likely to accept our questionnaires than Bush voters." She went on to say that this has occasionally happened with previous exit polls "in races with high passion levels." She said, for instance, Howard Dean's vote was overstated in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary exit poll earlier this year.
So now we know the "official" position of Edison/Mitofsky. The next question to ask is if anyone in the polling profession buys it. Why would Bush voters refuse exit poll questionnaires in statistically significant numbers?
Actually, one possibility does come to mind: illiteracy. Bush gained 10% among the 4% of voters with no high school degree, according to those who did fill out an exit poll. Maybe Bush turned out a whole lot more voters who can't read. These are the stupid people who watch FOX and still think Iraq was involved in 9-11.
On the electronic voting front: Diebold agreed to pay a fine of $2.6 million to California, with more penalties to come.
E-voting maker to pay big fine
ATTORNEY GENERAL CLAIMS DIEBOLD LIED
By Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
A leading manufacturer of electronic voting machines has agreed to pay an unprecedented $2.6 million fine after the state attorney general found it had lied about equipment sold in California and violated state laws.
The settlement, announced Wednesday, would be the first such punishment of a touch-screen manufacturer. Other costs related to the agreement could force Diebold Election Systems of North Canton, Ohio, to pay out an additional $1.7 million.
The company would be required to beef up the security on its electronic voting machines and to provide the secretary of state with additional information about the development, testing, installation and operation of its equipment.
``This settlement holds Diebold accountable and helps ensure the future quality and security of its voting systems,'' Attorney General Bill Lockyer said in a statement.
Lockyer and Alameda County prosecutors had accused the company of making false statements about the security of its electronic voting systems and its compliance with federal and state certification requirements.
If approved by a judge, the settlement would end a lawsuit filed by two whistle-blowers and later pursued by Lockyer and the county prosecutors. A hearing in Alameda County Superior Court is tentatively scheduled for Dec. 10.
Diebold admitted no wrongdoing. In a statement, the company said that it believed it had ``strong responses'' to the charges but preferred to avoid prolonged litigation.
``This is a step we needed to take to move forward in California and hopefully work to rebuild trust in the state,'' said company spokesman Mike Jacobsen.
Jim March, a computer technician who filed the initial lawsuit, criticized the settlement for ignoring security flaws in vote-counting software that is used around the country. March is expected to ask the judge to postpone the deal at least six weeks until it is clear how Diebold's equipment performed in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
March and Bev Harris, a Seattle publicist who exposed the security risks of electronic voting through her book ``Black Box Voting'' and Web site, filed an initial false-claims suit against Diebold in November 2003. Lockyer and Alameda County prosecutors intervened in that lawsuit Sept. 7 and crafted the settlement with company attorneys.
Under the settlement, Diebold would pay $1.62 million to the state of California and $475,000 to Alameda County. Another $500,000 would go to the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California-Berkeley to fund research aimed at training poll workers to use new voting technology.
March and Harris are entitled to claim a portion of those fines and to recover attorneys fees and other costs.
Way to go, Jim and Bev!
