2 election workers convicted of rigging '04 presidential recount

[gldstwmn]

http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjourna...e/16536269.htm

CLEVELAND - Two election workers in the state's most populous county were convicted Wednesday of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes.

A third employee who had been charged was acquitted on all counts.

Jacqueline Maiden, the elections' coordinator who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee.

Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty. Both were acquitted of five other charges.

Rosie Grier, assistant manager of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board's ballot department, was acquitted of all seven counts of various election misconduct or interference charges.

The felony conviction carries a possible sentence of six to 18 months.

There was a gasp in the courtroom gallery, which included some relatives and friends of the defendants, when a "not guilty" verdict was announced on the first charge. The courtroom went silent when a "guilty" verdict was returned.

The defendants sat near each other silently as the 21 verdicts were read.

Ohio gave Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.

Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter, who was brought in from Erie County to handle the case, did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election - Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.

But Baxter insisted the employees broke the law when they worked behind closed doors three days before the public Dec. 16, 2004, recount to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand so they could avoid a lengthier, more expensive hand recount of all votes.

Ohio law states that during a recount each county is supposed to randomly count at least 3 percent of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are not discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be recounted by machine. A full hand-count is ordered if two random samples result in differences.

Grier, the worker who was acquitted, was the only defendant who commented following the verdicts.

"It has all been very stressful," said Grier, 54. "Yes, I'm very relieved. But, none of us should have been in this courtroom today. These charges should not have been brought against any of us."

Defense lawyer Roger Synenberg said in his closing argument that the 2004 presidential election was the most publicly observed ever in Cuyahoga County and the workers were simply following procedures as they understood them.

Baxter said he intends to speak with Maiden and Dreamer before their scheduled sentencing on Feb. 26 to see if they wish to make any statements that might influence the sentence.

"We'd like to listen to them if they had anything to say, if anyone else was involved with this. We still haven't been able to determine that," he said.

A message was left Wednesday with elections board director Michael Vu.

The board released a statement saying the convictions highlight the importance of changes it has made since 2004 "and the critical need to aggressively pursue additional reforms."

"The board's goal is to fully restore the public's confidence in the election process in Cuyahoga County," the statement said.

Maiden's attorney, Robert Rotatori, said he expects appeals will be filed for his client and Dreamer.

The case comes as elections have fallen under greater scrutiny since the 2000 presidential election. That's when recounts of paper ballots in Florida dragged on for weeks and the U.S. Supreme Court became involved. Cuyahoga also has been under the microscope following numerous problems with elections in bellwether Ohio.

Cuyahoga County is a Democratic stronghold where about 600,000 ballots were cast in 2004.

Statewide, Bush won by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik sought the recount and complained about its procedure.

[amber]

And didn't we just know it all along.

[SuzeQuze]

Originally Posted by amber

And didn't we just know it all along.

Yeah, we "loons".

[strandinthewind]

Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter, who was brought in from Erie County to handle the case, did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election - Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.

I get that they broke the law, but how does this in anyway support that W gained anything?

In the end, Ohio had problems, but, I am still unsure if 118,000 were gained and W would have not gained more if the lines were not so long, etc.

Here is a cool take on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Un...oversies,_Ohio

Also - to be fair and balanced - though there are many "if's" in this and some of those spoiled votes there and around the country surely belonged to Kerry:


Kerry Won
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php

also

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pag.../00/index.html

edited to correct 118,000

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I get that they broke the law, but how does this in anyway support that W gained anything?

In the end, Ohio had problems, but, I am still unsure if 136,483 were gained and W would have not gained more if the lines were not so long, etc.

We'll never know because these people were guilty of cherry picking ballots in order to prevent a further, full on recount.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

We'll never know because these people were guilty of cherry picking ballots in order to prevent a further, full on recount.

and that cherry picking gained Kerry 17 votes and lost Bush 6 in this instance. That is hardly evidence that Bush gained by their crimes

In any event, I think the facts suggest that a recount would have not gained Kerry 118,000 votes and lost W 136,000 votes without gaining any. I think the larger problem was with the number of voting machines in D counties, etc. Even then though, the numbers of gained and lost votes to win are pretty large in that like something around 150,000 voters would have had to have been unable to vote and there is no evidence of that number.

Having said that, I think the GOP's actions here were despicable and they should be tried. In this instance they were and the result, though just and I am happy for it, gained Kerry nothing and failed to support the argument that they were giving votes to W.

edited to correct 118,000

[BlackWidow]

Originally Posted by SuzeQuze

Yeah, we "loons".

.....in Armageddon...isn't it stated that "The Village Idiot" will be running the country? Shocking that this happened TWICE in our lifetime with the same ASSHOLE! Hitler comes to mind...

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

and that cherry picking gained Kerry 17 votes and lost Bush 6 in this instance. That is hardly evidence that Bush gained by their crimes

In a random sampling of the votes, yes. Statistically then we could conclude from that it is highly probable that Kerry would have gained an average of 2.83 votes for Bush's 1 in a total recount. So using that theory, it does evidence that the outcome of the election would have changed. Whether or not Bush committed a crime is another matter.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

In a random sampling of the votes, yes. Statistically then we could conclude from that it is highly probable that Kerry would have gained an average of 2.83 votes for Bush's 1 in a total recount. So using that theory, it does evidence that the outcome of the election would have changed. Whether or not Bush committed a crime is another matter.

Where are you getting those numbers because the results of the recount in the article cited negate that

I would have liked for Kerry to have won, but I do not see the facts to support that.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Where are you getting those numbers because the results of the recount in the article cited negate that

I took the numbers from your very own post. I'll say it again because I know how fast your mind works. ALL of the votes were not recounted. These people were found guilty of cherry picking ballots in order to prevent a full recount.

[carrie721]

yep. love cuyahoga county. that's where i'm moving this summer, in all probability. i will not be voting there.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

I took the numbers from your very own post. I'll say it again because I know how fast your mind works. ALL of the votes were not recounted. These people were found guilty of cherry picking ballots in order to prevent a full recount.

I see that, but that number cannot be assumed for every county The rules of statistics do not allow that because not all variables are considered.

Again, I am all for Kerry winning, but I just do not see mathematically how it is possible. I would, however, like a full manual recount of Ohio. Sadly, Kerry refused to pursue that to any significant degree. So, he lost by his own admission. I think had he thought he had any chance, the D party would have insisted he pusue it.

[JazmenFlowers]

Originally Posted by carrie721

yep. love cuyahoga county. that's where i'm moving this summer, in all probability. i will not be voting there.

girl, you surround yoself with hoes, canadians AND idiots.

sheesh. I'm astounded you're making it.

[BlackWidow]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

I see that, but that number cannot be assumed for every county The rules of statistics do not allow that because not all variables are considered.

Again, I am all for Kerry winning, but I just do not see mathematically how it is possible. I would, however, like a full manual recount of Ohio. Sadly, Kerry refused to pursue that to any significant degree. So, he lost by his own admission. I think had he thought he had any chance, the D party would have insisted he pusue it.

I think you are secretly a 55 yr old straight married republican white male.

[carrie721]

Originally Posted by JazmenFlowers

girl, you surround yoself with hoes, canadians AND idiots.

sheesh. I'm astounded you're making it.

seriously! i'm a portrait in courage.

they should make a lifetime movie about me.

a moment of truth: the carrie story