Congress Must Investigate Ohio Vote, say House Judiciary Democrats

We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.

When Congress meets in joint session to certify the electoral college vote today, it appears "all but certain [as of early evening yesterday] that House Democrats had secured the support of up to half a dozen Senators to formally challenge the Electoral College slate from Ohio," reported Keith Olbermann at MSNBC.com yesterday. "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: A Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff" is available in (pdf form and with supporting documents at the Judiciary Democrats web site.  Buzzflash has the executive summary of the status report in browser-viewable HTML).  The summary states:

We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.

This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy.

A compilation of eyewitness reports (pdf document) at the House Judiciary Democrats web site repeatedly confirms the successful efforts to disenfranchise working, minority, and student voters in Democratic-leaning districts.  Just one example:

"I was a volunteer all day on Nov. 2 and noticed a big discrepancy in the number of voting machines.  Where I vote, in an affluent neighborhood, a voting machine had been added (total of five machines).  In the lower-income neighborhoods, there were two-three machines and people waiting over three hours to vote!" Julie Jacobson, affidavit, 11/13/04 (Columbus)

Included as Appendix A is "Video the Vote" ([Quicktime .mov file) by Linda Byrket, the video cited in this author's previous report.

The Judicial Democrats report presented an overview of the massive disenfranchisement and fraud on and before election day.  From the executive summary:

• The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, "27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry." (See Powell and Slevin, supra). Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to "provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election."


• Mr. Blackwell's decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell's decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states.

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• The Ohio Republican Party's decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges "can't help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration."


• Mr. Blackwell's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots 6 likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell's order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA.

[...]

• There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell's apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.

 
• We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.

 
• There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each - accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.

 
• There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known thirdparty candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.

The excellent executive summary also condemns Republican Secretary of State Blackwell's recount process:

We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.

On the VoteCobb.org recount report page the Green Party effort highlights some of the troubling reports:

 
• Hamilton County: Approximately 400 provisional ballots allegedly were rejected because they were cast in the wrong precinct, despite the fact that they were cast at the right polling station (i.e., at a polling station with more than one precinct).

 
• Fairfield County: When the hand recount of the 3% test sample did not match the official vote totals, a full recount should have been ordered for all county ballots. Instead, the recount was "suspended" by county officials who said that Secretary Blackwell recommended that the recount should begin again "from scratch." The Green recount observers then were told that it was 4:00 PM, the building was closed, and all had to leave. The Republican contingent, however was allowed to stay in a conference room for an additional ten minutes or so for a private discussion.

 
• Summit County: Recount witnesses were threatened with expulsion if they spoke to counting teams. In some instances, they were expected to "observe" from up to 20 feet away, despite Ohio Election Law allowing observers to be close enough to actually observe.

 
• Medina County: Election officials were aware of several "problem" districts, but instead chose to perform the manual 3% test recount on two precincts that had been part of a School Levy Recount the previous Monday. That meant that those ballots had been taken out of the standard "double lock" situation and had been handled several times since Monday.  more

 
• Cuyahoga County: Almost all of the witnesses felt that the ballots were not in random order, and that they had been previously sorted. As the ballots were fed into the counting machines, there were long runs of votes for only one candidate and then long runs for another, which seemed statistically improbable to most.

In its December 23 cover story, "No Holiday for Vote Thieves," Black Commentator wrote:

The Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus is confident that at least a few U.S. Senators will join House members on January 6 to question the fairness of the November 2 election. John Conyers, Jr., the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told Salon.com he doesn’t believe the Senate will repeat its performance of four years ago, when Black lawmakers sought in vain for one senatorial objection to “official misconduct, deliberate fraud, and an attempt to suppress voter turnout by unlawful means” in Florida, as Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) put it at the time.

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The “dozens of problems” of which Rep. Conyers speaks are actually hundreds of specific criminal offenses involving perhaps thousands of persons acting with large or small groups of others in Ohio and Florida, alone. Investigators should view the legions of co-conspirators in Republican election crimes – some casual or even unwilling, others purely mercenary and politically unreliable – as assets, potential witnesses in a constellation of criminal conspiracies, any one of which might lead to the Mother Lode: the Bush inner circle.