As Election Day 2004 progressed, cold and rainy in Ohio, the exit polls were clear: Ohio had gone to John Kerry, and the presidency with it. Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., is one of a majority of political scientists the world over who consider the Mitofsky exit poll the single most reliable polling strategy in politics, which has been used since 1967 with uncanny accuracy. But when the vote came in early the next morning, the total differed from the poll by a statistically impossible amount, and George W. Bush was president once again.
Even before the tally, however, it was apparent what had happened: voter fraud on a scale that would indicate the American polity itself is in serious trouble. Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, coincidentally, co-chaired the Bush-Cheney campaign in the state of Ohio, withheld voting machines from heavily-Democratic areas of Columbus, where Fitrakis and others witnessed the largest voter turnout in history simply walk away, unable to vote. And that was just the beginning. Representative John Conyers (D-MI) and the Congressional Black Caucus opened an investigation that catalogued a morass of problems, causing Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Tubbs Jones (D-OH) to contest the electoral college for the first time since 1887.
Now Fitrakis and his colleagues at The Free Press, a Columbus newspaper and website published independently since 1970, have put all their findings, including the Conyers Report, in a new book: Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? He's in the L.A. area the next three days talking about it.
CityBeat: Are you alleging in your book that Blackwell threw the election to Bush?
Bob Fitrakis: I think that's what all the evidence points towards. This parallels Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000. It's as though Karl Rove, who's always pushed the edges of the political system and the law, realized that the key person to getting reelected is having the secretary of state in your corner. Blackwell really was engaged in activities that made papers like The Columbus Dispatch, which hasn't endorsed a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson, question his behavior.
Did Blackwell break the law?
Well, in an all-Republican state, where every state official, including the attorney general, is a Republican, I don't know what he would have had to do to break the law [chuckles]. His daily activities seemed to me to be violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and again, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It seemed that, routinely, he was violating due process and equal protection. The problem is, who was going to prosecute? Especially a secretary of state who is very close to the Bush family and to the president of the United States?
His office held back key voting machines from Democratic precincts?
You have to start with the number of machines. William Anthony, who is chair of the Franklin County Democratic Party, has admitted publicly that they needed about 5,000 machines in Franklin County, but had little more than half that: 2,866. State law dictates that there should be one machine per 100 voters. The city of Columbus, which is Democrat-rich, had 200, 300, 450 voters per machine.
Now, it gets even more curious. Of these machines, 77 of them malfunctioned on Election Day. Even more curious, 76 of them are never taken to the polls, and all 76 were from the city of Columbus, which has a Democratic mayor and every person on the city council are Democrats. Zero were from the heavily Republican suburban area in Franklin County. If it was done randomly, of course, there would have been some machines in the city missing, some in the suburbs missing.
Where were they missing in the city?
The areas that vote the highest for John Kerry, that is, the overwhelmingly African-American wards, 74 percent of them - 42 of those wards - were missing machines.
You've been covering elections since 1970. Have you ever seen anything like this?
No. It was so absolutely unprecedented. There's certain kinds of agreements in politics - and I say this as somebody who would naturally vote for the Greens rather than the Democratic Party - one is that elections are fair. You can't essentially mess with the fundamentals of the infrastructure. So, when the machines were shorted in Franklin County, I was thinking that we had crossed the Rubicon. It's really the type of 19th Century Tammany Hall politics that are really unheard of in the modern history of Columbus. That's what's ingenious! It has the mark of Rove on it.
You saw this firsthand?
I was the legal observer in two inner-city precincts, the 55th Ward and the 5th Ward. I thought: There's no way Kerry can lose. This is a record voter turnout. Then, within the first half-hour, when I realized that the lines weren't moving, and half a dozen people had left, and there were less machines inside than there were in the primary.
Were there problems with the electronic machines, as well?
In the city of Gahanna, Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes, the president got 4,258 votes, which was easy enough to catch. But it was caught after Kerry had pretty much conceded. There's no paper trails on these machines. It's faith-based voting. And these machines have a long history of breaking down, and in at least two cases, shifting significant percentages of votes, either in a precinct or overall.
You had machines recording minus-25,000,000 votes for Kerry that were reported in the Youngstown Vindicator. So later, they had to go in and try to find out the vote. When we consulted computer experts, as part of the legal challenge, they said that they believed it was a default problem. You can set the machines to "default." So it will have pre-picked Bush, in this instance, and even though you've pushed for Kerry, the machine will vote for Bush for you.
Was there a recount?
Yes, there was. And it was more obviously corrupt than the election. Under Ohio state law, they "randomly select" a three percent precinct count. If that "random" three percent matches the tally on the central tabulators, you don't then have to look at the actual paper ballots.
Now, here's the problem: "Random" has a very specific meaning. It means votes from any precinct all have an equal chance of inclusion. What they did is the exact opposite of random. Here's the two methods: the executive director cherry-picked what might be counted. Or, even more disturbing, private companies came in and picked the three percent of the precincts to be recounted. Companies whose CEOs and top-level officials are Bush partisans, like Triad.
Sherole Eaton, in the middle of the recount - she was the deputy director of the Hocking County board of elections - a Triad technician showed up, unscheduled, and replaced the hard drive on the county central tabulator. And then he offered a "cheat sheet" so the three percent hand count would come out directly with the numbers in the central tabulator, which had just been installed. She signed an affidavit, and of course she was recently fired by the board of elections.
Have exit polls always been considered accurate?
Up until the Bush family began running for office.
Exit polls were something that you, as a political scientist -
Considered the single most accurate polls in American politics. Have never varied by more than two-tenths of one percent in recent elections. The poll that was conducted on Election Day, the actual error was 4.6 percent. Which is 3.6 standard deviations, which is unprecedented. It would mean that Warren Mitofsky, who is the father of the modern exit polls, suddenly became the world's most incompetent pollster. He did the polls in the Ukraine, which the State Department used to call for a re-vote. But the argument is that, magically, the universal laws of statistics don't apply in the U.S.
Rep. John Conyers conducted an investigation, but where did that go?
Gore Vidal has argued, and so has Mark Crispin Miller, [that this is] the single most important congressional investigation in the history of the country. It clearly spells out how easy it is to manipulate votes in the United States, and the real threat of the privatization of votes to partisan corporations with proprietary secret software
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Bob Fitrakis book tour: 7 p.m. Friday, June 17, Topanga Peace Alliance general meeting, Topanga Christian Fellowship Church, 269 Old Topanga Canyon Rd., (310) 455-1048, free; Sunday, June 19, Venice United Methodist Church, 1020 Victoria Ave., Venice, signing at 6 p.m., movie Electile Dysfunction at 8:30, (310) 390-8141, $10 (fathers in free, no one turned away).