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Vote Fraud 2004: How Ohio
was "Delivered" to Bush
IN mid-August [2003], Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of
Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and
politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of
Columbus, Ohio. ''I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,''
wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio. October 21, 2004: "The Bush campaign is confident it can win the state [Ohio]; as if to prove its comfort level, today marks 14 days since the Republican president last set foot in Ohio," Cleveland's Plain Dealer wrote this past Saturday [October 16]. By the time Bush arrives in Canton tomorrow, he'll have gone 19 days without campaigning in the Buckeye State. His last stop here was in Cuyahoga Falls on Oct. 2. [Slate MSN] Pre-election exit polls and Bush's ignorance of Ohio mattered little on election day... |
Nine percent of Ohio voters are African-American, and the following CNN exit poll taken at
How many votes did Kerry lose in Cuyahoga County?
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| The Washington Post reported "Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Control's
ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system." Franklin County's voting machine allocation report
shows that Damschroder deployed his Danaher (formerly Shooptronics) voting machines, which have been in use
since 1992, in a formula that favored Bush over Kerry. In precinct 55-B on Columbus' near east side, there were 1,338 registered voters and, according to Franklin County Board of Elections estimates, 956 active voters who had voted in the last two federal elections. Despite voter registration being up 17%, and by the BOE's own guidelines the polling place requiring ten machines (one per 100 voters), the polling site had only three machines, one less than for the 2000 elections. The Election Protection Coalition that visited the voting site between 7:30-8:30 a.m. documented a dozen people leaving the polls, six to go to work and six who were either elderly or handicapped. But things were worse in other areas of Columbus. |
Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her
city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line
snaking out of the precinct door. Fifteen minutes, her mother replied. [Washington Post] |
In precinct 1-B where there were 1,620 registered voters, a 27% increase in voter registration, the precinct had five voting machines in 2000 and only three in 2004. Where did they go? Out to Republican enclaves like Canal Winchester, where two machines were added since 2000, for a total of five to service 1,255 registered voters? Or were they re-routed to Dublin 2-G where 1,656 registered voters apparently needed six machines, twice the number of Columbus' 1-B? In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote buying, the lack of machines in African American neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new voter registration cards by a private company hired to process the forms. [Free Press] | |
New video suggests voting firm Triad sought to thwart recount of paper ballots "Triad pretty much admits that the purpose of the cheat sheet is to foreclose the possibility of the county finding a discrepancy between the hand count and machine count."
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| On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in
process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a
surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell's office. The Director Board of Elections stated that "all
voter records for the state of Ohio were "locked-down," and now they are not considered public records." Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26 that requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying. ORC Sec. 3599.161 makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to knowingly prevent or prohibit any person from inspecting the public records filed in the office of the Board of Elections. Finally, ORC Sec. 3599.42 clearly states: "A violation of any provision of Title XXXV (35) of the Revised Code constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud within the purview of such Title." |
Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell boasted
of helping "deliver" Ohio for President Bush and said he was "truly pleased" to announce Bush had won Ohio
even before all of the state's votes had been counted in his own fundraising letter, RAW STORY has discovered.
The letter, which was received by a Butler County resident Dec. 31, is a plea to support Blackwell's campaign
for governor. The resident has asked to remain anonymous. Further, Blackwell's use of the word "deliver" finds striking resonance with another controversial fundraising letter sent by the CEO of voting machine manufacturer Diebold Walden O'Dell in the summer of 2003 when he said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." [Full article]
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| Ohio's Secretary of State announced [on December 14, 2007] that a $1.9 million official study shows that
"critical security failures" are embedded throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004
election. Those failures, she says, "could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State." They have
rendered Ohio's vote counts "vulnerable" to manipulation and theft by "fairly simple techniques." Indeed, she says, "the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant." In other words, Ohio's top election official has finally confirmed that the 2004 election could have been easily stolen. [The Free Press] |
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See also: The 2004 US Elections: The Mother of all Vote Frauds
