Ohio
Governor Race -
Fox Guarding Henhouse
By Evelyn Pringle
05 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
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.
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an
investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government
and corporate America. Email [email protected])
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