First criminal convictions from Ohio’s stolen 2004 election confirm recount was rigged
First criminal convictions from Ohio’s stolen 2004 election confirm
recount was rigged
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
January 27, 2007
The first felony convictions of two Cleveland poll workers stemming from
Ohio’s stolen 2004 election confirm that the official recount in that
contested vote was, in the words of county prosecutors, “rigged.” The
question now is whether further prosecutions will reach higher up in the
ranks of officials who may have been involved in illegalities throughout
the rest of the state.
The convictions have come down in Cuyahoga County, where Democratic
candidates traditionally run up huge majorities. Suspicious vote counts
and other irregularities cut deeply into John Kerry’s margins in 2004.
Official vote counts gave the state—and thus the presidency—to
George W. Bush by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted.
A statewide recount, paid for by the Green and Libertarian Parties, was
marred in 87 of the state’s 88 counties by the types of illegalities
that led to this week’s convictions. Only in Coshocton County was a
full, manual recount performed.
Throughout the rest of the state, under the direction of Republican
Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, mandatory random sampling was
not done, as prescribed by law. Instead, poll workers illegally chose
sample precincts for recounting where they knew there would be no
problems, and then routinely recounted the rest of the ballots by
machine, rendering the recount meaningless.
Blackwell simultaneously served as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney
campaign. This fall he was defeated in his campaign for governor by
Democrat Ted Strickland.
County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the Cuyahoga trial by charging
that “the evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for
political reasons, but rigged nonetheless.” Baxter said three election
workers “did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months”
on the recount. “This was a very hush operation.”
Jacqueline Maiden, the county election board’s third-ranking employee,
and Kathleen Dreamer, an assistant manager, have each been convicted of
a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of
failing to perform their duties. Rosie Grier, the board’s ballot
department manager, was acquitted on all seven counts raised against the
three. Sentencing is scheduled for late February. Defense attorneys have
indicated they will appeal. The felony conviction carries a possible
sentence of six to 18 months.
The county prosecutors have not yet alleged vote fraud. No do they say
mishandling the recount affected the election’s outcome. Dreamer’s
defense attorney, Roger Synenberg, said the defendants “were just doing
[the recount] the way they were always doing it.”
But Cuyahoga’s precinct-by-precinct vote counts and turnout numbers
varied wildly and improbably. Several predominantly black precincts
showed turnouts of less than 30% in a county where overall turnout was
around 60%. One ward showed a 7% turnout as compared to surrounding
precincts with turnouts nearly ten times as high.
Further prosecutions may now hinge on what Maiden and Dreamer might tell
prosecutors about the role played by higher-ups. The assumption is
widespread that the decision to consciously designate test precincts,
rather than choose them at random, must have been at least tacitly
approved by Secretary of State Blackwell.
In Cleveland, Robert Bennett, chair of the state’s Republican Party,
also served as chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Cuyahoga
BOE Executive Director Michael Vu was chosen by the county Democratic
Party. Under Vu’s direction, the county’s elections have been rife with
chaos, irregularities and apparent fraud. When the Democrats recently
tried to remove him from his post, Vu was supported by Bennett and the
Republican Party. He kept his job when Blackwell strategically abstained
from a key removal vote.
There is growing evidence that what happened in Cleveland was the rule,
rather than the exception, in Ohio’s 2004 presidential recount. Sworn
testimony at a public hearing in Toledo indicates Diebold technicians
were involved in picking “random” precincts to be recounted there. A
memory card was apparently lacking from at least one optiscan machines.
Miami County election officials admit they merely ran the optiscan
ballots through the ES 550 counter, rather than doing the prescribed
random recounts. Free Press reporters have found recount results varied
signficantly from official results, which should have triggered a hand
recount of all the ballots in the county. This was never done in Miami
or in any other Ohio County except Coshocton.
Handwritten field notes from Paddy Shaffer, the Green/Libertarian
Recount Coordinator in Delaware County in 2004, call into question the
role played by ES&S technician Sam Hogsett. On December 15, 2004,
Shaffer recorded at 2:42pm that Hogsett was “…tapping tabulator
machine on left. There are two machines in the room. Kim [Spangler] says
he is doing this because the light/the switch keeps going out. He has
now handled the machines multiple times.”
At 4:25pm, Shaffer recorded “ES&S tech Sam Hogsett back on the machine
and touching the ballots. They are working on Genoa precincts. My
intuition is screaming get him away from the ballots and machines. …
He continued moving around the machines, stacking in the ballots.”
At 5:05pm Shaffer noted “Sam is back loading and stacking. Throughout
much of this time, Sam is the one to call out the precinct total and the
name.”
Sam Hogsett is more than an ES&S technician according to Shaffer and
others who investigated him, who have found his letters to the editor
quite alarming. Voting rights activists troubled by Hogsett’s role in
the recount found letters posted under the name Sam Hogsett, Crown City,
at the southeatern Ohio newspaper website www.herald-dispatch.com. One
of the letters begins as follows: “I recently read in this pitifully
left-leaning editorial section that the spineless, thoughtless, moral
less useless left-wing liberal America hater Robert Sheer is
unsuccessfully attempting to use an apples-to-oranges comparison to
wrongfully attack our Second Amendment rights.” Hogsett goes on to
write: “… He [Sheer] believes that if I were to take a Smith and
Wesson and blast his little pea brain to bits, that his family should be
able to sue the manufacturer and the gun dealer who sold it to me.”
Initially, Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost obtained a temporary
restraining order stopping the recount in Delaware County on November
23, 2004.
The Delaware Gazette noted a complaint from Shaffer about the role
Hogsett played in the recount as a private voting machine company
technician, and in a report dated January 1, 2005, Shaffer wrote the
Delaware County Board of Elections that John Myers of the Delaware
County Democratic Party said that, “He was very pleased that unlike many
counties that are at the mercy of computer technicians, Delaware is not.
He [Myers] said during both conversations, even repeated over and over,
that they do their own programming. So why was Sam Hogsett needed? Why
involve the technician in the process of the recount?”
Board of Elections records in Fairfield County document that when the
recount was not matching thus mandating a full handcount under Ohio law,
the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell’s office recommended that Sam
Hogsett be brought in to deal with the discrepancies between the
official count and the recount. After Hogsett arrived and took charge of
the recount as a private ES&S technician, the vote matched perfectly for
the first time.
In Athens and Auglaize Counties, BOE workers who attempted to blow the
whistle on apparent election irregularities were forced out of their jobs.
Overall, the illegalities prompting these initial convictions in
Cuyahoga County appear to be the rule rather than the exception in the
handling of the Ohio 2004 recount statewide. The question now is whether
parallel prosecutions will follow in other counties. And whether such
prosecutions might include those who are likely to have ordered or
approved the illegalities that marred the recount in Cleveland, and
throughout the rest of the state.
–
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE
AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 http://www.freepress.org/
, and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT
HAPPENED IN OHIO?, published by the New Press.