[Dialogue] Has American Democracy Died an Electronic Death in Ohio 2005's Referenda Defeats?

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, here we go all over again? Peace, Harry 
  _____  




 

Published on Saturday, November 12, 2005 by the Free Press
<http://www.freepress.org> 

Has American Democracy Died an Electronic Death in Ohio 2005's Referenda
Defeats? 

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

 

While debate still rages over Ohio's stolen presidential election of 2004,
the impossible outcomes of key 2005 referendum issues may have put an
electronic nail through American democracy. 

Once again, the Buckeye state has hosted an astonishing display of
electronic manipulation that calls into question the sanctity of America's
right to vote, and to have those votes counted in this crucial swing state. 

The controversy has been vastly enhanced due to the simultaneous
installation of new electronic voting machines in nearly half the state's 88
counties, machines the General Accounting Office has now confirmed could be
easily hacked by a very small number of people. 

Last year, the US presidency was decided here. This year, a bond issue and
four hard-fought election reform propositions are in question. 

Issue One on Ohio's 2005 ballot was a controversial $2 billion "Third
Frontier" proposition for state programs ostensibly meant to create jobs and
promote high tech industry. Because some of the money may seem destined for
stem cell research, Issue One was bitterly opposed by the Christian Right,
which distributed leaflets against it. 

The Issue was pushed by a Taft Administration wallowing in corruption.
Governor Bob Taft recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanors stemming from golf
outings he took with Tom Noe, the infamous Toledo coin dealer who has taken
$4 million or more from the state. Taft entrusted Noe with some $50 million
in investments for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, from which some
$12 million is now missing. Noe has been charged with federal money
laundering violations on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Taft's public
approval ratings in Ohio are currently around 15%. 

Despite public fears the bond issue could become a glorified GOP slush fund,
Issue One was supported by organized labor. A poll run on the front page of
the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday, November 6, showed Issue One passing with
53% of the vote. Official tallies showed Issue One passing with 54% of the
vote. 

The polling used by the Dispatch had wrapped up the Thursday before the
Tuesday election. Its precision on Issue One was consistent with the
Dispatch's historic polling abilities, which have been uncannily accurate
for decades. This poll was based on 1872 registered Ohio voters, with a
margin of error at plus/minus 2.5 percentage points and a 95% confidence
interval. The Issue One outcome would appear to confirm the Dispatch polling
operation as the state's gold standard. 

But Issues 2-5 are another story. 

The Dispatch's Sunday headline showed "3 issues on way to passage." The
headline referred to Issues One, Two and Three. As mentioned, the poll was
dead-on accurate for Issue One. 

Issues Two-Five were meant to reform Ohio's electoral process, which has
been under intense fire since 2004. The issues were very heavily contested.
They were backed by Reform Ohio Now, a well-funded bi-partisan statewide
effort meant to bring some semblance of reliability back to the state's vote
count. Many of the state's best-known moderate public figures from both
sides of the aisle were prominent in the effort. Their effort came largely
in response to the stolen 2004 presidential vote count that gave George W.
Bush a second term and led to U.S. history's first Congressional challenge
to the seating of a state's delegation to the Electoral College. 

Issue Two was designed to make it easier for Ohioans to vote early, by mail
or in person. By election day, much of what it proposed was already put into
law by the state legislature. Like Issue One, it was opposed by the
Christian Right. But it had broad support from a wide range of Ohio citizen
groups. In a conversation the day before the vote, Bill Todd, a primary
official spokesperson for the opposition to Issues Two through Five, told
attorney Cliff Arnebeck that he believed Issues Two and Three would pass. 

The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing by a vote of 59% to
33%, with about 8% undecided, an even broader margin than that predicted for
Issue One. 

But on November 8, the official vote count showed Issue Two going down to
defeat by the astonishing margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor.
To say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility is to understate
the case. For the official vote count to square with the pre-vote Dispatch
poll, support for the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with virtually
all the undecideds apparently going into the "no" column. 

The numbers on Issue Three are even less likely. 

Issue Three involved campaign finance reform. In a lame duck session at the
end of 2004, Ohio's Republican legislature raised the limits for individual
donations to $10,000 per candidate per person for anyone over the age of
six. Thus a family of four could donate $40,000 to a single candidate. The
law also opened the door for direct campaign donations from corporations,
something banned by federal law since the administration of Theodore
Roosevelt. 

The GOP measure sparked howls of public outrage. Though again opposed by the
Christian Right, Issue Three drew an extremely broad range of support from
moderate bi-partisan citizen groups and newspapers throughout the state. The
Sunday Dispatch poll showed it winning in a landslide, with 61% in favor and
just 25% opposed. 

Tuesday's official results showed Issue Three going down to defeat in
perhaps the most astonishing reversal in Ohio history, claiming just 33% of
the vote, with 67% opposed. For this to have happened, Issue Three's polled
support had to drop 28 points, again with an apparent 100% opposition from
the previously undecideds. 

The reversals on both Issues Two and Three were statistically staggering, to
say the least. 

The outcomes on Issue Four and Five were slightly less dramatic. Issue Four
meant to end gerrymandering by establishing a non-partisan commission to set
Congressional and legislative districts. The Dispatch poll showed it with
31% support, 45% opposition, and 25% undecided. Issue Four's final margin of
defeat was 30% in favor to 70% against, placing virtually all undecideds in
the "no" column. 

Issue Five meant to take administration of Ohio's elections away from the
Secretary of State, giving control to a nine-member non-partisan commission.
Issue Five was prompted by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's
administration of the 2004 presidential vote, particularly in light of his
role as co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney campaign. The Dispatch poll showed a
virtual toss-up, at 41% yes, 43% no and 16% undecided. The official result
gave Issue Five just 30% of the vote, with allegedly 70% opposed. 

But the Sunday Dispatch also carried another headline: "44 counties will
break in new voting machines." Forty-one of those counties "will be using
new electronic touch screens from Diebold Election System," the Dispatch
added. 

Diebold's controversial CEO Walden O'Dell, a major GOP donor, made national
headlines in 2003 with a fundraising letter pledging to deliver Ohio's 2004
electoral votes to Bush. 

Every vote in Ohio 2004 was cast or counted on an electronic device. About
15%---some 800,000 votes---were cast on electronic touchscreen machines with
no paper trail. The number was about seven times higher than Bush's official
118,775-vote margin of victory. Nearly all the rest of the votes were cast
on punch cards or scantron ballots counted by opti-scan devices---some of
them made by Diebold---then tallied at central computer stations in each of
Ohio's 88 counties. 

According to a recent General Accounting Office report, all such
technologies are easily hacked. Vote skimming and tipping are readily
available to those who would manipulate the vote. Vote switching could be
especially easy for those with access to networks by which many of the
computers are linked. Such machines and networks, said the GAO, had
widespread problems with "security and reliability." Among them were "weak
security controls, system design flaws, inadequate security testing,
incorrect system configuration, poor security management and vague or
incomplete voting system standards, among other issues." 

With the 2005 expansion of paperless touch-screen machines into 41 more Ohio
counties, this year's election was more vulnerable than ever to centralized
manipulation. The outcomes on Issues 2-5 would indicate just that. 

The new touchscreen machines were brought in by Blackwell, who had vowed to
take the state to an entirely e-based voting regime. 

As in 2004, there were instances of chaos. In inner city, heavily Democratic
precincts in Montgomery County, the Dayton Daily News reported: "Vote count
goes on all night: Errors, unfamiliarity with computerized voting at heart
of problem." Among other things, 186 memory cards from the e-voting machines
went missing, prompting election workers in some cases to search for them
with flashlights before all were allegedly found. 

In Tom Noe's Lucas County, Election Director Jill Kelly explained that her
staff could not complete the vote count for 13.5 hours because poll workers
"were not adequately trained to run the new machines." 

But none of the on-the-ground glitches can begin to explain the impossible
numbers surrounding the alleged defeat of Issues Two through Five. The
Dispatch polling has long been a source of public pride for the powerful,
conservative newspaper, which endorsed Bush in 2004. 

The Dispatch was somehow dead accurate on Issue One, and then staggeringly
wrong on Issues Two through Five. Sadly, this impossible inconsistency
between Ohio's most prestigious polling operation and these final official
referendum vote counts have drawn virtually no public scrutiny. 

Though there were glitches, this year's voting lacked the massive
irregularities and open manipulations that poisoned Ohio 2004. The only
major difference would appear to be the new installation of touchscreen
machines in those additional 41 counties. 

And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two
through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate
for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of
error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of
the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change
the vote count. 

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget
forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every
Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln. 

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of
American democracy. 

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of How
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/097534028X/102-7909757-3401758?v=glance&n=
283155&s=books&v=glance&tagActionCode=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>  the GOP
Stole America's 2004 Election and is Rigging 2008 available at
http://www.freepress.org/ and http://www.harveywasserman.com/, and, with
Steve Rosenfeld, of What
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595580697/102-7909757-3401758?v=glance&n=
283155&camp=1789&link_code=xm2/ref=nosim>  Happened in Ohio, available from
The New Press in spring, 2006. 

C 1970-2005 The Columbus Free Press 

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