NY Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez told us on Tuesday (yesterday) about
unbelievable vote-count spikes for 3rd party candidates in a bunch of African-American neighborhood precincts in Cleveland. The unexplained tallies were uncovered by Gonzalez and his colleague, reporter Larry Cohler-Esses. They found the 3rd-party-count vote surge for: Michael Peroutka (Precinct 4-F ) and Michael Badnarik (4-N ), and similarly for 12 other Cleveland precincts. Example- Kerry 318, Badnarik 163, Bush 21 (precinct 4N). Next example - Kerry 290 , Peroutka 215, Bush 21 (4F). Peroutka is an ultra-conservative.
"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman Kenneth Johnson (4th ward rep since 1980) "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."
The combined 3rd party votes last time around - in 2000 - including Nader was just 8 votes in all for the 2 precincts, F and N.
Look below, these figures are implausible. Gonzalez titles his column "Ohio tally fit for Ukraine" and he wonders if there are vote diversions that may be replicated in other parts of Ohio too. Are these counts symptomatic of something?
Here's the info from the 2nd half of Tuesday's
column by Gonzalez.
It's Cuyahoga County (a punch-card county).
Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located.
In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.
In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-immigrant Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes!
That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as all those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach County in 2000.
In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally was Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik 163.
Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting.
"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward since 1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."
But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51 votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27 ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent candidates received 9 votes from both precincts.
The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them.
In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.
If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. So far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by Thursday all official results are due.
On Monday, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell will certify Ohio's results and then a manual recount will be requested by the Green and Libertarian parties. . . .