The Death of Democracy: End-game Ohio

by Michael Keefer




University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) Associate Professor of English
Michael Keefer writes: So who ever thought the 2004 US presidential
election had the remotest chance of being honest and democratic?


. . . . Ohio was the swing state of swing states on November 2nd, 2004,
the one whose twenty Electoral College votes decided the outcome of the
US presidential election. It is therefore a matter of some significance
that the testimonial evidence of corruption in the Ohio election is
corroborated by statistical evidence which shows the election in this
state – and nationwide – to have been not just corrupt, but stolen.


The evidence in both categories is massively complex. But thanks to the
no less massive analytical labors over the past two months of citizen
pro-democracy activists, of social scientists, of mathematicians and
statisticians, of computer programmers, and of alternative-media
investigative journalists, it can nonetheless be conveniently
summarized.


You want smoking guns? Here they are, starting with the evidence that
John F. Kerry, and not George W. Bush, won the state of Ohio.


1. Uncounted punch-card and provisional ballots.


Well over 13,000 Ohio provisional ballots were never counted, and
92,672 regular punch-card ballots were set aside by vote-counting
machines as indicating no choice for president. Thus, even after Ohio's
supposed recount, a total of over 106,000 ballots remained
uncounted–though there was  no legal reason for not inspecting
and counting each of these ballots.  But there seems to have been
a very good political reason for not doing so: the uncounted ballots
came disproportionately from places like the cities of Cincinnati,
Cleveland and Akron, all of which voted overwhelmingly for the
Democrats.


2. Fraud through default settings on touch-screen voting machines.


Some 15 percent of Ohio's votes were cast using the new touch-screen
voting machines. In the city of Youngstown, in Mahoning County, there
were repeated complaints about what election observers referred to
as  vote-flipping  by the ES&S Ivotronic touch-screen
machines used there. This flipping  phenomenon, also widely
observed in other states, typically appeared to poll watchers 
like a mere computer glitch, no different than a super market checkout
machine that records an incorrect price for lettuce.


But what was happening, in the vast majority of cases, was no 
glitch.  As Dom Stasi notes,  The laws of probability demand
that multiple random errors trend toward even distribution, but only if
they are truly errors.  Yet in all of the published accounts of
vote flipping, the  errors  consistently favored Bush: voters
who were trying to vote for Kerry found their votes being given to
Bush, transferred to third-party candidates, or simply erased. The
Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections is reported to have
stated that  20 to 30 machines […] needed to be re-calibrated
during the voting process.  He is not quoted as saying that any
action was taken, or could be taken, to compensate for the machines'
one-way errors – and there is evidence that many other machines were
left uncorrected.


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