>Ohio Governor Race - Fox Guarding Henhouse
>
>By Evelyn Pringle
>Created Nov 4 2006 - 5:02pm
>
>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.
>
>
>
>--
>NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
>always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
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>political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
>believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
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>Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
>
>"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
>spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
>government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
>suffering deeply in spirit,
>and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
>debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
>patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
>back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
>stake."
>-Thomas Jefferson
>
>
>