Ohio Attorney General Seeks to Sanction Election Protection Attorneys
FreePress Ohio
Attorney-General's attack on election protection attorneys draws
mountain of documentation on state's stolen election, including new
study on exit polls
by Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
Legal
sanctions sought by Ohio's Republican Attorney General James Petro
against four attorneys who have questioned the results of the 2004
presidential balloting has produced an unintended consequence – a
massive counter-filing that has put on the official record a mountain
of contentions by those who argue the election was stolen.
The
attorney general's action was officially requested by Secretary of
State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who administered the Ohio presidential
balloting while serving as co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney
campaign. Petro and Blackwell have labeled as “frivolous” the election
challenge filing. Their demand for sanctions will be reviewed by the
Republican justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.
Petro's suit is widely viewed as an attempt at revenge and intimidation
against the grassroots movement that led to the first Congressional
challenge to a state's Electoral College delegation since 1876.
Ohio law, an original action to contest an election allows only deposition
testimony. It was impossible during the ten days of discovery to take
the depositions of tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters, the
majority African-American. But, as a result of Petro’s sanctions
motion, the attorneys were able to enter into evidence explosive first-hand sworn testimony from the November 13 and 15
public hearings in Columbus about voting irregularities.
In
filings that include over 1,000 pages of documentation, the attorneys’
defense motions include renewed assertions that widespread
irregularities threw the outcome of the November vote count into
serious doubt.
That assertion has now been lent important backing by a
major academic study on the exit polls that showed John Kerry winning
the November vote count. [USCountVotes].
Steve
Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Bob Fitrakis, of
Ohio's Stolen Election: Voices of the Disenfranchised, 2004, a
book/film project from freepress.org. Contributions are welcome and via the Columbus Institute for Contemporary
Journalism, 1240 Bryden Road, Columbus, OH 43205.
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