Kerry Wins Ohio and the Presidency, Counting Uncounted and Prevented Votes

People stand in place in a line turning a corner from the Shepard Branch Library, into the rain and the dark, down a hill and then a path in the woods.  "Oh my goodness," said the volunteer from Election Protection, four times, as she walked up the line and videotaped the citizens of this part of Columbus, Ohio.  Another volunteer who has monitored the situation all day at this precinct, 6C, explained that there were just three voting machines for more than 1,100 registered voters.  Waits have ranged from one to two-and-a-half hours, which is where it stood at 6 o'clock with at least 150 people in the line.  "Are you going to pass out food?" someone jokes to the Election Protection volunteer.  "We're waiting in line to vote.  We're waiting in line to vote," a Black woman's voice calls from the darkness. Digitized versions of this immediate documentary are available at various mirrors on the Internet, such as this one.

At five minutes per person, only 36 voters an hour can vote here, an Election Protection volunteer monitor had said in the video.  In fact, at that precinct, it would have taken more than 18 hours for sixty percent of the registered voters to vote— making the average turnout a physical impossibility for that precinct.

The video shows case after heartbreaking case of voters, largely African American, standing in corridors, standing in the rain outdoors, standing, standing, not moving, waiting for a chance to vote in precincts throughout Columbus.  One man declares that nothing will stop them from voting.  But clearly, many had no choice but to give up and go— to work, to take care of kids, or, for many elderly people, to take their medication.

"Some people are just walking away 'cause they're saying they have to get home, and intending to come back but... it's hard," said one woman volunteer.  "A three or four hour wait is long time for a working family."

Official Recount Ends With More Problems Than Resolutions— But Indicates Kerry Might Win With A Full Recount

Republican Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell officially ended the recount on Tuesday, December 28, reported Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus Free Press.

Blackwell, who was co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, announced that his recount awarded 734 additional votes to Kerry and 449 additional votes to Bush.  Meanwhile, more than 92,672 machine-rejected ballots remain unchecked and uncounted, as do at least 14,000 provisional ballots.  Conservative estimates of Kerry’s net gain among those ballots are another 36,000 to 40,000 votes.  No accounting in the count or recount has been made for voters turned away at the polls due to insufficient voting machines, computer malfunction, tampering with registration data, mishandling of absentee ballots, misinformation and intimidation, or a wide range of other problems.

Blackwell's certified statewide returns now give Bush a margin of 118,775 votes.

But Blackwell's recount only counted about three percent of the ballots, Free Press reported.  The net gain Blackwell certified for Kerry, if it held and all ballots were recounted, would put Kerry another nearly 10,000 votes closer to Bush.  But a full and fair recount would probably gain Kerry far more.

That Thursday the Green and Libertarian candidates submitted a request to a federal court to force a second recount of the Ohio vote, alleging county election boards altered votes and didn't follow proper procedures, reported the Associated Press December 30.  During the recount, negligent and improper procedure had prompted Cobb to ask the Ohio court system to oversee the recount.

Stuart Comstock-Gay, executive director of the National Voting Rights Institute, wrote about some of the problems:

With the recount underway, we learn that counties are handling the process in different ways, depending on the whims of county officials.   Every county was instructed by the Secretary of State to do a recount of 3 percent of the votes, followed by a hand recount of every vote if there any discrepancy appears.  Some counties, however, have said they would do their recounts by machine only, and not by hand.  [...]  Some counties have kept observers—whether from the Green Party, Libertarian Party, DNC or Republican Party—out of the counting rooms entirely.

A full, fairly done hand recount that also included rejected votes might give Kerry the lead.  But voter suppression is an even larger problem.

Extremely long lines at the polls in poor areas was reported by establishment media on and soon after November 2, including by the Associated Press that day and News 5 of Cleveland and Akron on November 4.  Bob Fitrakis reported later that this was a result of providing heavily Democratic areas with fewer voting machines than could be predicted as necessary given past turnout and new registration.  A December 13 article by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman on testimony given to the Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee details some of the tactics to suppress the Democratic vote.

Without considering the circumstantial evidence for vote fraud - which begins with the exit polls indicating a clear Kerry victory and includes heavily Republican precincts certified with more than one hundred percent of registered voters turning out - the uncounted ballots and widespread, successful voter suppression suggest that the majority of eligible Ohioans who went to vote on November 2 chose certified second place candidate Democrat John F. Kerry for president.  Not all of their votes were counted.  Not all of them got a chance to vote.  Many are black.

"It is these rights that are at issue, Black human and citizenship rights.  The outcome of the presidential election is secondary," declared the Black Commentator, calling for criminal prosecution of vote suppressors under the National Voting Rights Act and other laws making it illegal to conspire to deny people the vote.  These include individuals threatening criminal investigations of blacks who voted or spreading lies in minority areas about voting procedures, and it also includes the officials deciding how many machines would be where.

A non-Republican Guliani would have a field day with all the Republican-connected efforts to suppress the vote, the Black Commentator wrote:

District attorneys in big cities across the nation love conspiracy law, designed to connect the seemingly random depredations of criminal gangs. Conspirators can be convicted even if they don’t know all the other players or the whole scope of the criminal enterprise. They need only be shown to have acted in the furtherance of the larger scheme.

Kos diarist jmknapp notes the high percentage of accepted provisional ballots in minority areas, which must mean that Republican challengers made needless challenges— adding further to the long lines that turned away unknown numbers of voters.  The same writer has further presentation of precincts in Cuyahoga County with odd results (high percentage of "no votes" or third party votes) and registered complaints that may explain them.

Some of the organized and deliberate voter suppression efforts, found in reports to Election Information Reporting System and listed by a Daily Kos diarist called Hunter, include phone calls, flyers, and in-person telling voters that their polling places had changed; intimidation efforts implying that minority voters would be scrutinized for illegal activities if they were to vote; precinct "observers" challenging mostly minority voters for unnecessary identification and other pretexts; longtime voters purged from the rolls.

Indeed, Fitrakis and Wasserman chronicled many efforts to suppress the Democratic vote on October 28, four days before the election.

For many, the moral imperative to challenge the election is increased because these actions to suppress the Democractic vote were premeditated and mostly racially based.

Protests

Although no groups are on record plannig civil disobedience or direct action, many are planning pro-democracy demonstrations.

Today, January 3 in Columbus, Ohio a 1:30 p.m. pro-democracy rally at Capitol Theatre, 77 South High Street, was announced by David Swanson of the International Labor Communications Association.  It has been endorsed by a number of groups, including Rainbow/PUSH and the Progressive Democrats of America.

A rally at 10:00 a.m., Thursday January 6, in Lafayette Park across from the White House, called for by United Progressives for Democracy, the Cobb/LaMarche campaign, Code Pink, D.C. Anti-War Network, Independent Progressive Politics Network, No Stolen Elections!, Progressive Democrats of America, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Truth in Elections, will then proceed to Capitol Hill to join with others at the U.S. Capitol at noon.

On January 6 at noon, a group variously known as ReDefeatBush and PatrioticOutrage calls for a massive presence to make Congress challenge the seating of Ohio's electors-- in 2000, not a single senator signed on to such a challenge regarding Florida.

51 Capital March is organizing a march to this protest, starting January 4 near Baltimore.  The same group also has ongoing pickets of the four major broadcast networks every day in New York.

And a Counter-Inaugural week of actions around Bush's presumed January 20 inauguration is also planned.

Correction: Columbus, Ohio, was repeatedly misspelled "Colombus" in this article. Apparently once I started spelling Colombia the country right, I started misspelling everything else. The facts, as far as I know, still stand.