More from last Monday's fair elections panel. At
Howard-Empowered People (and crossposted at
Daily Kos,
My Left Wing,
Booman Tribune) I have posted what Bob Fitrakis had to say about the 2004 election. Here is what another speaker, Donita Judge of
The Advancement Project, said about the absentee ballot process:
We commend the state of Ohio on the no excuse absentee ballot process. However, once you request your absentee ballot, and you send off your absentee ballot, how many people really check to determine if their vote was counted. Thre is no process in Ohio for you to determine if your vote counted. And so we have sent a letter to the president of the Ohio Elections Association, but we have not received a response. We are now drafting a letter to the Secretary of State, and we are asking all groups to come together with us and ask, just like there is a system for provisional ballots, to determine whether your ballot was counted, it is essential in the absentee ballot process that everyone knows whether or not their vote was counted. Not 30 days later what the number of ballots were, but whether your individual ballot counted.
These are proactive measures that we're taking so that we don't end up looking like we did in 2004. We know the problems, and we are here to start to address them. That's really just the beginning of what we're starting to do and starting to address.
Jackson talked about wanting to get people networking during the lunch hour, to get a list for the statewide Rainbow Coalition. Specifically, he said, "We know some minister in every county. Some of whom are our friends, who have been entirely deceived by the situation. And we will get to them and their congregations, and they will know what their options are."
Cliff Arnebeck said that in a number of counties in southwestern Ohio, they "shuffled the decks". They took votes, cast in one precinct, in which the vote was for Kerry--they took it out of the deck, and they put it in the deck of another precinct, where that position would make it a vote for Bush. And this is estimated to constitute approximately 100,000 votes.
He went on to say that more recently, they have found another trick that was employed in the 2004 election. This trick was done in punch card counties, probably by a saboteur who was placed specifically for this purpose in the printing company. The punch card ballots have the president column on the left, with Bush and Kerry at the top, and the two independent candidates for president are at the bottom. In high performance Democratic precincts, some of the cards were pre-punched for one of the independent candidates. That way, when the voters, who in that precinct was statistically likely to vote for Kerry, did so, they would spoil their ballots.