After reading the earlier updates from the Ohio Dems and trying to integrate what we know so far into the
2004 Ohio Irregularities wiki, I sent an email to the Ohio Democratic Party. I got a response today.
There is nothing really new here, but it has some good clarifications from questions that came up regarding their previous updates. My questions and their answers:
1) According to the sec of state's website, even civilian overseas absentee ballots should be counted if they arrive by Nov 12th. Your Ohio update said that only applied to military ballots. Will you also ensure that civilian absentee ballots that arrive by Nov 12th will also be counted? (Source:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos//pubAffairs/elections/voterGuide/absent.htm)
I have heard about the civilian absentee and have not yet received a clear cut answer from our legal counsel. I believe the Secretary of State's directive has to be followed on that, so if it is different from our understanding of the rules, his rule likely prevails.
2) Have the 3,893 extra Gahanna Bush votes already been subtracted from the Bush margin of 136,483 votes?
The overcounts have not yet been subtracted. That will be one of the first things done during the official canvass beginning tomorrow.
3) Did Blackwell really pass a rule that throws out provisional ballots that don't have birthdates, when the birthdates were not required at the time the ballots were cast? If so, are the Dems fighting that?
We are looking at the provisionsal ballot directive and getting an interpretation. It is not clear what boards will do with those.
4) Are the Dems joining Cobb and Badnarik in asking Blackwell to recuse himself from the tiebreaker role of provisional judging deadlocks?
We have made no official decision on a Blackwell recusal
5) Can you double-confirm that all voting machines in Ohio have paper trails? :-)
I can't double confirm all machines have a paper trail. I have been told they do, but have not verified each county's operation.
6) While no newer Diebold voting machines were used, are there concerns with the tabulation computers? (Referring to demonstrations of Microsoft Access-based systems allowing people to just change vote totals without it being logged.) Like, can we be certain that the county-level data matches up to the precinct-level returns for all counties? And if not, can we trust that the recount process will ensure that precinct-level counts don't get changed on the way up to the state level?
We will watch the process as closely as possibly to make sure the numbers add up.