IPA: Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?

[Carolab]

TERESA FEDOR,
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment 'Issue 1,' and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."


BILL MOSS, [email protected]
Executive vice president of HBCU Connect, which works to connect historically black colleges and universities, Moss said today: "I stayed in line two and a half hours. I've never seen anything like this in my life. There were fewer voting machines in the highly concentrated black areas, creating the long lines so as to frustrate the voters. But we knew the Republicans -- many of whom became Republicans because they opposed equal rights for blacks -- would try to drive down black turnout. ... Blackwell was confusing things by raising issues like the paper weight of cards."


SUSAN TRUITT, [email protected], www.caseohio.org
Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."


DAN WALLACH, [email protected], www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR062104.htm
Wallach is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston specializing in building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Wallach co-authored a groundbreaking study that revealed significant flaws in electronic voting systems. He appeared on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release in June entitled "Electronic Voting -- Danger for Democracy."


BOB FITRAKIS, [email protected]
An attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, Fitrakis said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election -- like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."


HARVEY WASSERMAN, [email protected], www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810
Senior editor of FreePress.org, an Ohio-based web site, and co-author with Fitrakis of the recent article "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote," Wasserman said today: "There was a huge fight around ensuring that the electronic voting machines had paper trails and there was resistance by the secretary of state, so there is no paper trail. There were some victories to ensure a paper trial -- by 2006. There were limited numbers of voting machines in African-American districts. Some people had to wait up to eight hours, far more than in predominantly white areas."

(more) http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR110304.htm

[Generator]

1. Thank you for this

Thank you to every DU'er that questions and keeps questioning. You give me hope in my darkest moments!

I keep saying if the votes don't count/and or people can't vote-then Democracy doesn't exist. I don't know why this isn't the issue. If you spend years and millions to get someone to vote for you because of issues, then why do you not care that their vote is impossible to verify?

What's the point of voting if your vote doesn't count?

[LisaL]

3. Yep.

Nothing really matters if your vote doesn't count.
You can get people out to vote in record numbers, but that is not going to do anything unless all the votes are accurately counted.

[LisaL]

2. Sad but true.