Using Ohio Like Florida:

The GOP is a Disgrace to America

by Hank Edson, published May 30, 2007

In my last post, I discussed events in Florida during the 2000 election. Friends in the intervening days have emailed me that revisiting these times brought back to life their anger at the Republican Party all over again. It is always surprising to find how few of the facts uncovered by investigative reporters have reached the general public. My friends’ responses spurred me to make my next post about Ohio 2004. Did you know this election was more blatantly fixed than the 2000 Florida election? Prepare to get angry. But what follows is only an introduction…

Investigative journalists, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, describe the strategy employed by the Republican Alliance to steal the 2004 election as “a brilliant, cynical and masterfully executed campaign of death by a thousand cuts.” [1] One commentator began an article on the election in Ohio by describing a few such sword strokes:

Pre-punched ballots; touch-screen vote switching; more absentee votes than absentee voters; unfair provisional voter deletions; change of voting sites on Election Day; voter suppression; voter intimidation; double voting; malfunctioning machines; recalibrated machines; evidently rigged machines; and even 25 million negative votes registered in some races in Mahoning County! These were among the problematic incidents at a 3-hour public hearing on vote irregularities in the Mahoning Valley held on December 21 at the Warrant-Trumbull Public Library. [2]

One American’s email read at the same hearing, explained the deeper significance of the Ohio election crime scene:

The election wasn’t fair, but trying to prove that any one method of fraud or ‘error’ has caused a false outcome will be nearly impossible. Instead I feel that a combination of frauds or ‘errors’ has given Bush the tiniest of advantages in our winner-take-all system. [3]

The Republican Alliance has raised unspoken cooperation to a lethal art-form, impervious to traditional methods of proof. At the end of election-day, however, we are still confronted by the dead body of our democracy. If the cause of death remains undetermined, the autopsy makes clear the injuries on the corpse are many, many times too numerous to be either accidental or of natural causes.

In large part, the media in 2004, as it was in 2000, was either complicit in, or a dupe to, the Republican plan. The Washington Post dismissed allegations of a stolen election as “conspiracy theories.” [4] The New York Times reported that “there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.” [5] Fitrakis and Wasserman pointed out, however, that with a little sophistication, the people had ample evidence before them:

[S]ome 500 sworn statements and signed affidavits taken by people of all political parties, including two Republican hearings officers, in the weeks after the election. Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened [in Ohio] needs to star with that huge body of evidence.” [6]

This death by a thousand cuts was not confined to Mahoning valley in Ohio, either. CNN reported that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received over 57,000 complaints about the 2004 election. [7] In their book, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, Fitrakis and Wasserman list not a dozen, but 180 bullet points identifying targets “the Bush-Cheney-Rove Blackwell GOP machine” attacked in overthrowing our democratic political process.

Who is Blackwell? Blackwell is Kathleen Harris. Blackwell in Ohio, like Harris in Florida, was simultaneously Secretary of State and co-chairman of Bush’s 2004 campaign in Ohio. Blackwell was also vice-chairman of Bush’s national 2004 fundraising committee. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, Blackwell had no interest in eye-witness testimony concerning the corruption in his state. [8] That’s why Blackwell in no uncertain terms refused to allow near the polls international observers from the United Nations and other international election observers even though in the months leading up to the election Ohio newspapers had published numerous reports raising the possibility of impropriety in the planning of the election. [9]

What was shocking about Kathleen Harris’ conflict of interest and abuse of power in Florida was doubly sickening with regard to Blackwell, who publicly promised to deliver Ohio to George W. Bush. Blackwell demonstrates a specific strategy—bullet point number one—being perfected by the Republican Alliance: brazenly establish a virulent partisan in the Secretary of State’s office and then give him or her a high profile personal interest in Republican campaign for the presidency. Harris was no convenient accident for the GOP; Blackwell proves it.

The amplification of corruption in the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign follows a similar trajectory. Where only a dozen or so major Republican strategies of attack on our democracy came to light in Florida, in Ohio the number of strategies employed by the Republican Alliance was easily ten times that number. Under every rock in Ohio, it seemed, a secret was to be found telling of a new way our democracy was being undermined. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could have been writing about Gore and Bush in Florida in 2000 when he wrote in Rolling Stone:

[W]hat is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people. [10]

Nationwide there were indications that the Republican Alliance was broadening the scope of its anti-democratic campaign operations. Fitrakis and Wasserman write:

Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry carrying Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning, well after balloting stopped even in Alaska and Hawaii. These four “purple states” gave the election to the “blue” Democrats, then miraculously switched to “red” for Bush, giving him the White House once again. Given all that’s known about exit polls—and it’s a lot—the odds of one state switching like that are about on in one hundred. For four, it’s a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that non one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm of, well, a stolen election. [11]

A report signed by twelve statisticians, including two Case-Western University professors concluded that the nationwide disparity between state to state exit polls that gave Kerry a 3% lead over Bush and the recorded vote that gave Bush a 2.5% lead over Kerry had a 1-in-959,000 chance of occurring. [12] Kennedy reports that polls in thirty states “deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error.” [13]

Famed political strategist Dick Morris has been widely quoted as saying “Exit polls are almost never wrong.” [14] In fact, like anything, exit polls are only as good as the safeguards protecting the integrity of the polling procedure. [15] Although exit polls themselves are not incorruptible, logically exit polls are not corrupted to deviate from the reported vote unless a serious challenge to the official election results is planned.

In Ohio 2004, no one accused the Democratic party of corrupting the exit polls and no challenge to the official election results was ever seriously pursued by the Kerry campaign. On the other hand, there were widespread reports of impropriety by Republican Party election officials and widespread claims that the recorded vote had been manipulated.

Additionally, exit polls do have an advantage over pre-election polls in that they are free of the element of uncertainty that arises when you ask people to tell you how they will behave in the future, as opposed to asking them how they behaved just minutes earlier. Although exit polls are not sufficient in themselves to establish fraud or to guarantee political process integrity, in Ohio in 2004, what we have learned about the hundreds of instances of impropriety by Republican election officials when viewed in conjunction with these statistical analyses of the exit polls definitively establishes that the recorded vote was fixed for George W. Bush.

Furthermore, the 2004 exit polls designed at the behest of six network television news outlets used a random sample “approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls—driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.” [16] Lou Harris, one of our nation’s most respected pollsters pulled no punches: “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen. You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.” [17]

Kennedy discussed several other equally disturbing national trends: “Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots—or received them too late to vote—after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.” [18] In six battleground states a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters was caught shredding Democratic registration forms. In New Mexico, machines failed to record any vote for president on over 20,000 ballots and Bush’s margin of victory in the state was only 5,988 votes. Machine malfunction was widespread across the country, resulting in “spoilage” or rejection of 1% of the nation’s vote. [19]

In Ohio, the exit polls were statistically way off the recorded vote counts which decided the election the election. After review of the exit polls, CNN estimated that Kerry would take Ohio with 4.2% more of the vote than Bush. The final result gave Bush 2.5% more votes than Kerry, a shift of 6.7%. Ultimately, the state was called for Bush by a margin of 118,601 votes.

Ohio size shifts in Bush’s favor also occurred in the key swing states of Pennsylvania (6.5%) and Florida (4.9%). [20] One analyst at the University of Pennsylvania put the odds of all three shifts taking place in the same election at 250 million to one. The analyst, Steven F. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania explained, “it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in three critical battleground states in the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.” [21]

In Ohio, precinct by precinct comparison of the exit poll data gathered for the network news channels with the reported election results revealed that, in nearly half of Ohio’s 49 precincts, discrepancies occurred that had a less than 5% chance of occurring. Bush won 20 of these 22 errant precincts. In six of those precincts, the discrepancy was a statistical impossibility. [22]

Although there is much more to tell about Ohio 2004, we know enough just from the above information to ask the obvious and pressing questions:

• Which state will the GOP use in 2008 to disgrace our nation?
• More importantly, will we ever again have a press willing to publish the disgrace, front page, across America, while there is still time to enforce the voter’s will in a democracy where the voter’s will is supposed to rule?
• Most important of all, will we, the people, make it a priority—will we put aside our jobs, our chores, and our entertainments—and do our real patriotic duty, which is to take charge to ensure the integrity of our political process?

Not knowing how to begin does not relieve us of this duty. In 2008, it is time for Americans to dig in. In the next post I will suggest one step we can take toward reclaiming the validity of our elections.

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[1] Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?”, The Free Press, October 18, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1018-22.htm.

[2] Werner Lange, “Kerry votes switched to Bush and ballots pre-punched for Bush,” FreePress, December 24, 2004, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1032.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, “Latest conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html.

[5] “About Those Election Results,” New York Times, November 14, 2004, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstrat.html?res+F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n=top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElections%20Results.

[6] Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?”, supra.

[7] Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings,” The Free Press, October 26, 2005, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display /19/2005/1529.

[8] Robert Lockwood Mills, “The greatest story never told,” The Free Press, December 20, 2004, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1006.

[9] Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?”, supra; Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Watergate-style money laundering indictments stoke Ohio’s stolen election fires,” October 28, 2005, The Free Press, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1534.

[10] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views06/0601-34.htm.

[11] Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?”, supra.

[12] Stephen Dyer, “Analysis Points to Election ‘Corruption,’” Akron Beacon Journal, April 1, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0401-06.htm.

[13] Steven Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” University of Pensylvania, November 10, 2004, p.3.

[14] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” supra.

[15] Lynn Landes, “Exit Poll Madness—Analyst Steve Freeman & Company Offer False Choice,” The Free Press, March 4, 2005, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1181.

[16] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” supra.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Steven Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” University of Pensylvania, November 10, 2004, p.2.

[21] Ibid., p.7.

[22] Ron Baiman, Kathy Dopp, “The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,” US Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006, http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf, p 6 and 8.