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Weekend
Edition
November 4 / 5, 2006
Mr. Blackwell and the Henhouse
Ohio
Redux
By EVELYN PRINGLE
Ken Blackwell is ready to cash in on
the Republican promise of putting him in the Governor's mansion
in 2006 after he proved that he was indispensable in the successful
plot to rig the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio for George
W Bush.
As secretary of state in 2004,
Blackwell held broad powers for setting election standards in
everything from the processing of voter registration to overseeing
the distribution of voting machines and ballots. He was also
simultaneously serving as co-chairman in the Bush-Cheney campaign
in Ohio.
Which means, in 2006, with
Blackwell still in the position of secretary of state, once again
voters in Ohio have a fox guarding the voting henhouse. Only
this time the stakes are even higher for Blackwell because his
political future is on the line.
In 2004, long before election
day, a major voter suppression scheme was successful when Blackwell
issued an order saying voter registration forms would only be
accepted if they were on 80-pound, unwaxed, white paper, and
as many as 72,00 voters lost their right to vote due to an unavoidable
registration error.
Printed registration forms
in local newspapers provided to help citizens register to vote
were rendered useless and one Ohio County had to post a notice
online saying it could not accept its own registration forms.
Under the threat of court action,
on September 28, 2004, six days before the registration deadline,
Blackwell withdrew but the damage was done.
On election day itself, voters
in Democratic precincts encountered a wide variety of obstacles
in the path to the voter's booth. They faced Republican challengers
at the polls, the purging of names from voter rolls, and the
most obvious scarcity of voting machines, but only in Democratic
neighborhoods.
In Republican precincts there
were plenty of voting machines, but in urban precincts, where
many African-Americans voted, and in other Democratic strongholds,
such as polling stations around college campuses, there was a
conspicuous absence of enough machines.
For instance, at Kenyon College
where Democratic students had registered in record numbers, Blackwell
allotted only 2 machines even though there was a 1,300 surge
of voters, and the wait was up to eleven hours.
In contrast, Republican fundamentalist
students at nearby Nazarene University had one machine for 100
voters and students faced no waiting lines.
Democratic voters at inner-city
precincts in cities like Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo, who
were voting for Kerry by a margin of nine to one, had to wait
in line up to 7 hours.
Due to a deliberate and well
coordinated effort, at other polling station all over the state
there were not enough machines and Democrats had to stand in
line in the rain for as long as ten hours, and of course just
as intended, in many cases it was impossible for people to wait
that long so many left without casting a vote.
By midmorning on election day,
when it became clear that people were having to drop out of line
without voting due to the long wait, precincts asked Blackwell
for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed up the process
and Blackwell denied the requests, claiming it would invite fraud.
In a desperate attempt to stop
the madness, a lawsuit was filed, and the affidavits that were
filed by voters and election officials in support of a plea to
the courts for help, describe election fraud in motion. An affidavit
by an official from Precinct 40 stated:
''I am serving as a presiding
judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct
40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest
I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours.
"I expect the situation
to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches.
I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance
has been offered.''
By the time US District Judge
Algernon Marbley issued an order requiring that voters be given
paper ballots in early evening, it was too late. According to
estimates by the Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in
Columbus alone had given up and left without voting
When poll closing time came,
some precincts illegally dismissed voters who had waited for
hours in the rain, in violation of Ohio law, which requires that
people waiting in line at closing time be allowed to vote.
Critics say there is no way
to definitively estimate how many citizens lost their right to
vote in Ohio because they were forced to drop out of line to
go to work or take care of their children.
The plot to steal the election
involved other tactics as well. In the summer of 2004, the Toledo
Blade reported that 28,000 voters were erased from the Lucas
County voter registration rolls and that the purge included voters
like Barbara and Ralph George "who first registered to vote
for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and had lived in the same East Toledo
house for 44 years."
In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist
church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave
Bush nearly 4,000 votes when only 638 people voted at that polling
station.
Democratic Congressman, John
Conyers of Michigan, and the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary
Committee launched an investigation into the Ohio election and
received more than fifty thousand complaints from Democratic
voters. In stark contrast, there were no complaints filed by
Republican voters in Ohio in 2004 alleging a deprivation of the
right to vote in Republican precincts.
And make no mistake, the well
coordinated statewide effort to steal the election involved a
whole bag of dirty tricks. In Columbus, where 125,000 new voters
had registered, more than half of them black, the board of elections
predicted that it would need 5,000 machines to handle all the
voters.
But instead preparing for the
large turnout by lining up more equipment, the House Judiciary
investigation found that Matt Damschroder, the chairman of the
Franklin County Board of Elections, and former head of the Columbus
Republican party, decided to "make do" with 2,741 machines.
And even then, he distributing
the machines to favor Republicans. According to the Columbus
Dispatch, precincts that had voted 70% or more for Al Gore in
2000, received 17 fewer voter machines in 2004, while strong
GOP precincts received 8 more machines.
As a result, an investigation
by the Columbus Free Press, showed that white Republican suburbanites
had average waits of only twenty-two minutes, while black urban
Democrats waited on average three hours and fifteen minutes.
During the election, inner
city voting machines broke down and polls opened late. The Toledo
Blade reported that the sole machine at the Birmingham polling
site in east Toledo broke down at about 7 am, and that per order
of Blackwell, there were no paper ballots available for backup.
The first major indication
that serious voter fraud had been committed was when the wide
unexplainable discrepancies began to appear between the exit
polls and actual vote counts and they all favored Bush.
Experts say exit polling is
the most reliable polling because unlike pre-election polls,
in which voters are asked to predict future behavior, exit polls
interview people leaving the voting box about an act that they
just completed.
On the basis of exit polls
in 2004, CNN predicted that Kerry would defeat Bush in Ohio by
a margin of 4.2%, but in the end Bush supposedly won Ohio by
2.5%.
In fact, precincts where Bush
received at least 80% of the vote, the exit polls were off by
an average of 10%, a pattern that experts say indicates Republican
election officials stuffed the ballot box in those precincts.
Bush also tallied 6.5% more
votes than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9%
more in Florida. According to Steven F Freeman, a visiting scholar
at the University of Pennsylvania, who specializes in research
methodology, the odds against all 3 of those shifts occurring
in concert was one in 660,000.
"As much as we can say
in sound science that something is impossible," he says,
"it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted
and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states
of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random
error."
Mr Freeman made a point of
telling Robert Kennedy Jr in an interview for an article in Rolling
Stone Magazine that he's no Democrat lover. "I'm not even
political -- I despise the Democrats," he said. "I'm
a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about
how the exit polls could have been so wrong."
But Mr Freeman also said in
Rolling Stone, "When you look at the numbers, there is a
tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election
fraud."
"The discrepancies are
higher in battleground states," he points out, "higher
where there were Republican governors, higher in states with
greater proportions of African-American communities and higher
in states where there were the most Election Day complaints."
According to Mr Kennedy, the
exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the
most reliable in history. Six news organizations hired Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International, whose principal, Warren
Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967
Shortly before 8:00 pm, reporters
at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters and told
that Kerry had an insurmountable lead with at least 309 electoral
votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.
As the last polling stations
closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten
of 11 battleground states, including Ohio, winning by a million
and a half votes nationally overall. But to this day, the Bush
gang would have voters believe that every single poll was dead
wrong.
In January 2006, a group of
mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan
watchdog group, compared Ohio's exit polls to the certified vote
count in each of the 49 precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky and
found that in 22 of those precincts the results differed widely
from the official tally.
The wildest discrepancy came
from a precinct that Mitofsky numbered "27," in order
to protect the anonymity of people surveyed. According to the
exit poll, Kerry should have received 67% of the vote, yet the
certified tally gave him only 38%.
The statistical odds against
such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion, according to
"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.
Such results, the archive says,
provide "virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount."
The discrepancies the experts
add, "are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would
have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts
had accurately reflected voter intent."
According to Ron Baiman, vice
president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola
University, "No rigorous statistical explanation" can
explain the "completely nonrandom" disparities that
almost uniformly benefited Bush."
The final results he said in
Rolling Stone are "completely consistent with election fraud
-- specifically vote shifting."
After conducting an investigation
of Ohio ballots, on July 29, 2005, another expert, Richard Hayes
Phillips, PhD testified at an Election Assessment Hearing in
Texas and said, "I have investigated the Ohio election results,
precinct by precinct, and have found three categories of problems:
voter suppression, ballots cast but not counted, and alteration
of the vote count."
Statewide, he said, there were
35,000 provisional ballots and over 92,000 regular ballots that
were not counted as votes for president.
These uncounted ballots, he
reported, most of them punch cards, were highly concentrated
in precincts that voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry, by margins
of 12 to 1 in Cleveland, 7 to 1 in Dayton, 5 to 1 in Cincinnati,
4.5 to 1 in Akron, 3 to 1 in Lorain County, 2.7 to 1 in Stark
County, and 2.3 to 1 in Trumbull County.
In Lucas County, Mr Phillips
said, other means of voter suppression led directly to lower
voter turnout in Democratic precincts. The 88 precincts with
the lowest turnout were all in Toledo and all were won by John
Kerry and complaints were filed in 31 of these precincts.
Among the complaints he noted
were: long-time residents removed from the voting rolls, broken
voting machines, polling stations running out of ballots and
turning people away, voters sent back and forth between polling
places, and long lines not designated by precinct so that voters
waited in the wrong line.
One-third of provisional ballots
were not counted, he said, often because people voted at the
wrong table in the right polling place.
But it appears like the chickens
have come home to roost because Ohio politicians are now up to
their necks in scandals, making its current Republican led government
a poster child for the term "culture of corruption."
The largest corruption probe
in Ohio history has produced charges against Governor Bob Taft,
convicted of four misdemeanors for accepting unreported gifts;
and his side-kick, Tom Noe, co-chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 Ohio
reelection campaign.
On October 27, 2005, Tom Noe
was officially charged with illegally funneling $45,400 to the
2004 Bush-Cheney campaign at a $2,000-a-seat fund-raiser in Columbus,
in a scheme where Noe made contributions by passing the money
through 24 friends and associates, described as "conduits"
by investigators.
Some of the known "conduits,"
included 4 current or former Ohio elected officials, including
Toledo City Councilman Betty Shultz, Lucas County Commissioner
Maggie Thurber, former state Representative Sally Perz, and former
Toledo Mayor Donna Owens. Court records also show that 2 former
aides to Governor Taft also served as funnels.
All of the conduits signed
donor cards that stated they were the source of their donations
even though each knew that Noe made the contributions, prosecutors
said. Each politician faced state ethics charges for failing
to disclose the money they received from Noe.
On May 31, 2006, Noe entered
a guilty plea in the US District Court in Toledo to 3 felony
charges related to violating campaign finance laws.
On June 1, 2006, the Toledo
Blade reported that, "State and federal politicians from
Mr. Taft to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the Republican
nominee for governor, to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
- have returned tens of thousands of dollars in contributions
from Noe and his wife.
In the summer of 2005, Tom
Noe, was described by the Columbus Free Press, as a high-roller
crony of Governor Taft, Ohio Senator George Voinovich and President
Bush.
That said, at the time of Noe's
indictment, a senior Justice Department official called the case
the largest campaign money-laundering scheme prosecuted by the
DOJ since the new campaign finance laws were enacted in 2002.
For many years Noe was the
Chairman of the Board of Elections in Lucas County and he was
heavily involved in the procurement deals that brought Diebold
voting machines into inner city Toledo and many of those machines
suspiciously malfunctioned on election day in 2004. Sworn testimony
in hearings conducted by the Free Press after the election confirm
that thousands of inner city voters were disenfranchised due
to Noe's decisions.
In by now a widely publicized
2003 fundraising letter, Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell promised to
deliver Ohio's 2004 electoral votes to Bush, and Noe and O'Dell
were two of Ohio's nineteen Bush Pioneers or Rangers, a group
that includes only high money donors.
Before Noe got busted, Blackwell
and Noe were practically kissing cousins. In the months before
the 2004 election, when voting rights activists tried to challenge
Blackwell's partisan handling of provisional ballots in court,
Noe intervened on Blackwell's behalf.
While Tom handled the court
duties, his wife Bernadette worked on the Board of Election in
Lucas County to reverse the Ohio tradition of allowing provisional
ballots to be cast in precincts other than the one in which voters
were registered to help disenfranchise inner-city Toledo Democratic
voters.
And as a reward for their large
contribution to the theft of the 2004 election, in January 2005,
Noe and his wife co-sponsored Ohio,s inaugural ball in Washington,
and according to the Toledo Blade, "Mr. Bush and Mr. Noe
embraced. The President then hugged Mrs. Noe."
Noe had previously been appointed
chairman for a committee of the US Mint, that advises the US
Treasury secretary on designs and themes for coins and congressional
medals. According to a Treasury Department press release Noe
was recommended for the appointment by Speaker of the House Dennis
Hastert (R-Ill) and nominated by Treasury Secretary John Snowe.
For years Noe was called northwest
Ohio's "Mr. Republican." And his generosity to Ohio
politicians did not go unrewarded. He was appointed to the Ohio
Turnpike Commission, the Bowling Green State University board,
and the Ohio Board of Regents.
But the grand prize came in
1997, when Noe gained access to $50 million from the Ohio Bureau
of Workers' Compensation fund and was given authority to invest
in coins and other collectibles, and under the contract, 80%
of the profits were to go to the Worker's Compensation fund,
and the remainder to Noe.
On April 8, 2005, the election
theft celebration by the Noe couple came to an abrupt end, when
an investigation into the Lucas County election turned up so
much dirt that Blackwell was forced to fire the entire Lucas
County Board of Elections including Bernadette.
And then twenty days after
Blackwell fired Bernadette, on April 28, 2005, the Toledo Blade
reported that the US attorney for the Northern District of Ohio,
had confirmed that his office, in conjunction with the FBI, was
looking into Noe's fundraising activities, as chairman of the
Bush-Cheney campaign in northwest Ohio.
Parallel to the Federal probe,
the Blade noted, was the investigation of the Lucas County and
Franklin County Offices of the Prosecutor into Noe's inability
to account for $10-12 million from the Workmen's Compensation
fund.
Less than a month later, on
May 26, 2005, state law enforcement officials raided Noe's company
trying to find out what happened to the missing $10-12 million.
The distinct possibility has been raised numerous times, that
Noe may have funneled some of the mysteriously-missing money
to politicians.
According to the May 31, 2006
Toledo Blade, the Noes have given more than $200,000 to politicians
over the last 16 years and their "giving increased substantially,"
the Blade noted, "after the Bureau of Workers, Compensation
in 1998 gave him the first of two $25 million payments to invest
in his rare-coin funds."
In addition to Governor Taft,
the investigation has led 2 of Taft's former aides to plead no
contest to ethics charges. On July 29, 2005, Brian Hicks, Taft,s
former Chief of Staff, and Cherie Carroll, Hicks' executive assistant,
admitted that they took gifts from Noe.
On February 9, 2006, the Ohio
Elections Commission referred 2 other former Taft aides for prosecution.
H Douglas Talbott admitted that he funneled money from Noe to
3 Ohio Supreme Court Justices and accepted a $39,000 loan from
Noe, and J Douglas Moorman was referred because he failed to
report a $5,000 loan from Noe.
On February 13, 2006, Noe was
indicted on 53 felonies counts related to the Workmen's Compensation
fund after a grand jury charged him with 22 counts of forgery,
11 counts of money laundering, 8 counts of tampering with records,
5 counts of grand theft, 6 counts of aggravated theft, and one
count of engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity under the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Noe is currently right smack
in the middle of a jury trial on the above charges, the last
thing that Ohio Republicans wanted in the news in the weeks before
the mid-term elections.
The future does not look bright
for Blackwell. According to a poll reported on November 2, 2006,
in Columbus Business First, "a Democratic sweep brewing
in key state and federal political races."
"The survey," Business
First said, "found 55 percent of those questioned said they
would vote for Democrat Ted Strickland in the Ohio gubernatorial
election Nov. 7, and 39 percent said they planned to cast their
ballots for J. Kenneth Blackwell."
That said, if nothing else,
the results of the 2004 election demonstrate that polls mean
nothing in Ohio and critics say voters had better not underestimate
the possibility of another stolen election with Blackwell still
in charge of the process.
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