Two Ohio election officials were convicted last week of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election results.
Cuyahoga County election officials Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer were each convicted of one count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee, a felony, and one count of failure of elections employees to perform their duty, a misdemeanor. The two still work for the county elections board.
Election procedure for a recount in Ohio called for counting three percent of the county’s ballots by hand and by machine, and if they matched, to recount all of the rest of the ballots by machine. But if they did not match, then the entire county’s ballots must be hand-counted.
Maiden and Dreamer decided to take an illegal shortcut, however, to avoid a recount of all the ballots.
Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.
Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them. — Associated Press
That’s right, instead of picking the ballots at random as they were supposed to, they picked specific ballots they knew wouldn’t cause any trouble and trigger a hand recount of every ballot.
The recount had been forced by the Libertarian candidate, Michael Badnarik, along with the Green Party candidate, David Cobb. Later, after it no longer mattered, Democratic candidate John Kerry would also join in calling for a recount of the state in the very close election which gave the race to Republican George W. Bush. Even so, the recount was delayed until after the electoral college had already voted, so even if it had shown the state going to Kerry, Bush would still have been President.
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Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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Q
Jan 31, 2007
this story hasn’t made any major news source yet, I wonder if it will, or if they’ll bury it.
The electoral college is no longer necessary. we needed it during a time when pony express was our fastest form of communication. it would have taken a year to get all count information out, that would have been chaos, but now we can show the progress nationally in real time, which makes the electoral college obsolete, and if you count the actual votes and not the electoral college didn’t bush lose? their only useful purpose I can see is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to pay off, blackmail or otherwise bribe 286 experienced politicians who have no actual obligation to vote the way their state is voting, than it is millions of real people living in the real world who need real support from their government.
Rob Davidson
Jan 31, 2007
Sorry, Q, but you misunderstand the purpose of the Electoral College. It has nothing to do with the speed of communication in the early days of the Republic, and everything to do with an intelligent mistrust of “democracy” and the fact that the Republic was originally a federation of independent states. (The Republicans put an end to that idea over 140 years ago.)
I fail to see how eliminating the Electoral College would stop election frauds like this one. It wasn’t the count in the College that was in dispute. It doesn’t really matter whether people were voting for a single individual or a slate of people – the so-called “election officials” committed deliberate fraud in recounting those votes.
Q
Jan 31, 2007
what I meant is that it’s just one extra layer we don’t need, and frankly isn’t fair.
Feb 01, 2007
Cafe Novo
Q
Feb 02, 2007
I haven’t found this story on any mainstream news source, isn’t that great?
anonymous
Feb 02, 2007
OHIO 2004: 6.15% Kerry-Bush vote-switch found in probability study
Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct
voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1 of
every 34 Ohio voters), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15%
when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of
wrong-precinct voting.
The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen
when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry
wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large
voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count
for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal
in both subsets.
Read the article with graphs of findings:
Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis
How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html