Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in office????
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The Free Press: Speaking Truth to
Power Wed Mar 01 2006
Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White
House?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
February 28, 2006
While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research on what
really happened here in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second term.
Pundits throughout the state and nation—many of them alleged
Democrats—continue to tell those of us who question Bush’s second coming
that we should “get over it,” that the election is old news.
But things get curiouser and curiouser.
In our 2005 compendium HOW THE GOP STOLE OHIO’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING
2008 (www.freepress.org), we list more than a hundred different ways the
Republican Party denied the democratic process in the Buckeye State. For a
book of documents to be published September 11 by the New Press entitled
WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, we are continuing to dig.
It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken
Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an
election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go
very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are verified.
One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged
voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the
Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered to vote there
for the 2004 election were lost due to “clerical error.”
As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were purged from
the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County
(Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from
Toledo exceeded Bush’s official alleged margin of victory—just under
119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J.
Kenneth Blackwell, deemed worth counting.
Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, November
3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2% of the popular vote, probably
about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate reflection of what
really happened here.
But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5% Buckeye
victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with other exit polling,
the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual statistical impossibility.
Yet John Kerry conceded with more than 250,000 ballots still uncounted,
though Bush at the time was allegedly ahead only by 138,000, a margin that
later slipped to less than 119,000 in the official vote count.
At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000 voters that had
been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and Toledo. County
election boards purged the voting registration lists. Though all Ohio
election boards are allegedly bi-partisan, in fact they are all controlled
by the Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled by law with two
Democrats and two Republicans.
But all tie votes are decided by the Secretary of State, in this case
Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for Governor.
Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of the state’s vote
count, but also a co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign. Many
independent observers have deemed this to be a conflict of interest. On
election day, Blackwell met personally with Bush, Karl Rove and Matt
Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections,
formerly the chair of the county’s Republican Party.
The Board of Elections in Toledo was chaired by Bernadette Noe, wife of Tom
Noe, northwestern Ohio’s “Mr. Republican.” A close personal confidante of
the Bush family, Noe raised more than $100,000 for the GOP presidential
campaign in 2004. He is currently under indictment for three felony
violations of federal election law, and 53 counts of fraud, theft and other
felonies in the “disappearance” of more than $13 million in state funds. Noe
was entrusted with investing those funds by Republican Gov. Robert Taft, who
recently pled guilty to four misdemeanor charges, making him the only
convicted criminal ever to serve as governor of Ohio.
The rationale given by Noe and by the Republican-controlled BOE in Lucas and
Hamilton Counties was that the voters should be eliminated from the rolls
because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two federal elections.
There is no law that requires such voters be eliminated. And there is no
public verification that has been offered to confirm that these people had
not, in fact, voted in those elections.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly Democratic
wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been mysteriously
removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn testimony and affidavits
given at hearings after the election confirmed that many of these citizens
had in fact voted in the previous two federal elections and had not moved
from where they were registered. In some cases, their stability at those
addresses stretched back for decades.
The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional ballots
cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 2000.
Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a stopgap for
people whose voting procedures are somehow compromised at the polls, but who
are nonetheless valid registrants.
Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral
pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into chaos.
Among other things, he demanded voters casting provisional ballots provide
their birth dates, a requirement that was often not mentioned by poll
workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many provisional ballots were merely
tossed in the trash at Ohio polling stations.
To this day, more than 16,000 provisional ballots (along with more than
90,000 machine-spoiled ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted. The Secretary
of State refuses to explain why. A third attempt by the Green and
Libertarian Parties to obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio presidential
vote has again been denied by the courts, though the parties are appealing.
Soon after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that Franklin County
would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls in Columbus.
Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the GOP-dominated legislature,
has imposed a series of restrictions that will make it much harder for
citizens to restore themselves to the voter rolls, or to register in the
first place.
All this, however, pales before a new revelation just released by the Board
of Elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county surrounding
Cleveland.
Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of Elections,
and the Chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed that prior to the
2004 election, his BOE eliminated—with no public notice—a staggering
175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has not
explained why the revelation of this massive registration purge has been
kept secret for so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media has bothered to
report on this story.
Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went 90% and more for John
Kerry. The county overall went more than 60% for Kerry.
The eliminations have been given credence by repeated sworn testimony and
affidavits from long-time Cleveland voters that they came to their usual
polling stations only to be told that they were not registered. When they
could get them, many were forced to cast provisional ballots which were
highly likely to be pitched in the trash, or which remain uncounted.
Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 voters
in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell doom for any
state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-2004 election eliminations
must now be added to the 105,000 from Cincinnati and the 28,000 from Toledo.
Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most of them likely
Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to an election
allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 106,000 votes
still remain uncounted, and where the GOP Secretary of State continues to
successfully fight off a meaningful recount.
There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional pre-November,
2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of elections may have
occurred. Further “anomalies” in the Ohio 2004 vote count continue to
surface.
In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter
Ohio’s 2006 gubernatorial and US Senate races, and its 2008 presidential
contest, with close to a half-million voters having been eliminated from the
registration rolls, the vast majority of them from traditional Democratic
strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers having been erected
against new voter registration drives.
Stay tuned.
–
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE
AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via www.freepress.org.
They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, coming
in September from The New Press. Important research for this piece has been
conducted by Dr. Richard Hayes Philips, Dr. Norm Robbins and Dr. Victoria
Lovegren.