Cobb and Badnarik :yourock:
Posted on Sat, Apr. 09, 2005
Prosecutor to probe Cuyahoga County recount 2 written complaints allege problems in '04 presidential election
By Stephen Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
CLEVELAND - Erie County Prosecutor Kevin J. Baxter is investigating whether the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections broke the law in its recount of ballots from the November presidential election. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason appointed Baxter as a special prosecutor in the case because the board of elections is Mason's client, which could pose a conflict of interest, said Mason spokeswoman Jamie Dalton. Baxter said he didn't know yet whether the allegations have any validity. He said his investigators will begin interviewing people in the next several weeks. ``If it goes nowhere, it goes nowhere,'' Baxter said. ``We'll just start from the beginning... This is rather preliminary.''
The probe stems from two requests written to Mason: one from minor-party presidential candidates David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, and another from entrepreneurial consultant Edward Michael Caner. Dalton said Mason turned over the papers March 2. The complaints allege that the board violated state law because the precincts it recounted were neither randomly selected nor was the opening of ballots properly witnessed. In addition, Cobb and Badnarik allege that there were problems with the board's ballot-transfer cases, which can reveal whether the precinct used the ballots assigned to it or whether ballots from other precincts were used.
<snip>
The procedure Maiden cited included picking 3 percent of the precincts for a hand count, but the meeting minutes didn't indicate whether the board picked the 3 percent at random. According to the complaint filed by both the candidates and their lawyer, Richard Kerger of Toledo, the board did not randomly select 3 percent of the county's precincts to recount, as required by state law. Instead, the county selected recount precincts only from among those with 550 voters or more, which eliminated 90 percent of the county's precincts, according to the letter. As Caner put it in his shorter e-mail: ``This is similar to randomly drawing a card out of a deck, but before doing so, eliminating all suits but hearts.'' In addition, the candidates' letter contends that the way the precincts were chosen seems ``to be of a special sort: those in which (U.S. Sen. John) Kerry received either his largest or second largest number of votes in the ward. This meant that precincts in which (President) Bush received an unusually high number of votes could not be examined, nor could the precincts in which the third-party candidates received unusually high vote totals.'' The letter said there is no way this phenomenon happened at random.
<snip>
The letter suggested that
``the (election) staff had been assigned to clean-up the tell-tale evidence of election irregularities within the cases.'' Kerger said Thursday that Cuyahoga County was the only county to receive a letter like the one he referred to Mason's office. He said generally he understands that county boards of elections, mostly made up of volunteers, aren't going to run perfect elections. ``If we hold the Super Bowl every four years, we wouldn't expect the referees to be perfect,'' he said. However, what he found in Cuyahoga County was different.
There ``it seemed to be more than just a mistake,'' he said.
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Stephen Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3523 or
[email protected] 
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