Election Related Items

STATES
• Counties inconsistent in provisional-vote rules Tom Beal (Arizona Daily Star)

About 5 percent of Arizona's voters - 101,536 of them, to be exact - had some trouble voting in the 2004 election, and 27,878 of them had their "provisional" votes thrown out.

•Observations from Orlando Election Fraud Hearing 1/27 (Democratic Underground)

1) In Orange County, many voters in precinct 212 received telephone calls in the days leading up to the election from people who purported to be election employees. Those calls told voters that precinct 212 would be closed on election day and that they should report to precinct 214. In fact, precinct 212 was open and the people who believed the calls had to wait in line at 214 only to learn that 212 was open.

It also was noted that many election employees didn't understand how the new provisional balloting system would work. Various voters also left before voting because queues were excessively long.

2) The second witness was Ms. Marie Palmer, a volunteer with the Florida NAACP for more than forty years. She was an observer at Orange County's Mitchell Center, an early voting site, for twelve of the fourteen days when early voting took place. She noted excessively long queues and too few election employees. After the second day of observing long wait times, she asked the election staff on site why additional voting tables and staff were not allotted. The answer she received was that the office of the Orange County Supervisor of Elections did not anticipate a strong turn-out for the election and nothing could be done. . . .

•Wisconsin G.O.P. Chairman Says Wisconsin May Have Gone to Bush, Continues His Efforts to Distract Nation from Ohio (Nashua Advocate)

OHIO
•As mentioned previously, Ohio Republican Attorney General James Petro has sued the lawyers who filed suit on behalf of Ohio voters to contest the election. Petro is suing for sanctions, including hefty fines. The four lawyers—Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt, Cliff Arnebeck and Peter Peckarsky—are mounting a defense that will include presenting massive evidence of election fraud to the court. The lawyers are in urgent need of financial help.

Please go to http://freepress.org/store.php#donate and make a financial contribution to the "Ohio Sanctions Defense Fund".

•Representative John Conyers Asks FBI to Expand Investigation into Clermont, Union, Fulton, Hocking, Monroe, Henry, and Harrison Counties (pdf)
John Conyers asks the FBI to expand its investigation into further incidents in Ohio. Attached to Conyers letter is the FBI January 12 refusal to further investigate or seek prosecution of the Triad vote machine tampering incident in Hocking County. (via Ohio Election Fraud.)

•Ohio recount volunteers allege electoral tampering, legal violations and possible fraud (The Raw Story)

Several volunteer workers in the Ohio recount in Clermont County, Ohio have prepared affidavits alleging serious tampering, violations of state and federal law and possible fraud. They name the Republican chief of Clermont’s Board of Elections Daniel Bare and the head of the Clermont Democratic Party Priscilla O’Donnell as complicit in these acts.

These volunteers, observing the recount on behalf of the Greens, Libertarians and Democrats, assert that during the Dec. 14, 2004 hand recount they noticed stickers covering the Kerry/Edwards oval, whereas the Bush/Cheney oval seemed to be “colored in.”

Some witnesses state that beneath the stickers, the Kerry/Edwards oval was selected. The opti-scan ballots were then fed into the machines after the hand recount.

Allegations of ballot tampering in Ohio – which decided the outcome of the presidential election by some 100,000 votes – find particular resonance in Clermont, one of three Ohio counties which saw the biggest increases in votes for Bush from 2000 to 2004. The other counties were Butler and Warren; Warren County had a lockdown after an alleged terror threat that the FBI later denied.

These counties “increased their support of Bush by only a few percentage points each,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported Monday. “But in the raw numbers of votes, they made the difference.”

•The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio Michael Keefer
Good overview of election problems in Ohio with footnotes.

•Eye On Ohio: The Informed Citizen's Guide to the 2004 Election
A more detailed overview of election problems in Ohio. Also well footnoted.

NATION
•US Count Votes Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report (pdf)

Background
After last November’s presidential election, there were numerous reports of irregularities. Reported
problems included:

• voting machine shortages
• ballots counted and recounted in secret
• lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots
• touch-screen machines that registered “Bush” when voters pressed “Kerry”
• precincts in which there were more votes recorded than registered voters
• precincts in which the reported participation rate was less than 10%
• high rates of “spoiled” ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded
• a sworn affidavit by a Florida computer programmer who claims he was hired to develop a voting program with a “back door” mechanism to undetectably alter vote tallies

These problems arise in the context of election systems where un-auditable voting equipment cannot provide assurance that votes are counted as cast. The crucial question is whether these problems were part of a larger pattern. Were these issues collectively of sufficient magnitude to reverse the outcome of the election, or were they isolated incidents, procedurally disturbing but of little overall consequence?

Under such circumstances we must rely on indirect evidence, such as exit polls, to ascertain the overall integrity of the official election results. The 2004 exit poll was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International on contract with major national press and TV news services, operating collectively as the National Election Pool. Immediately following the election, these polls raised a red flag because they showed that Kerry had won the popular vote by a margin of 3%, while the official tally indicated a Bush victory by 2.5%.

Shortly after the exit poll disparity was noted, the Edison/Mitofsky group took the position that their own projections could not be taken as an indication of error in the official vote count. The theory they put forward to explain the disparity was that more of the Bush voters had declined to be interviewed for the exit polls, while more of the Kerry voters had completed the poll questionnaire. A full report was promised, and last week that report was released.

Introduction to the Edison/ Mitofsky Report
On January 19, 2005, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International released a 77-page report on their (p. 3) “analysis of the performance of the exit polls” in the 2004 election. The Edison/Mitofsky reportacknowledges widespread discrepancies between their exit polls and official counts, and admits that the differences were far greater than can be explained by sampling error. The report repeats the assertion (p. 3) that this disparity was “most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters”, but no evidence is offered to support this conclusion. In fact, data newly released in the report suggests that Bush supporters might have been overrepresented in the exit polls, widening the disparity to be explained. The report gives no consideration to alternative explanations involving election irregularities.

The position taken by the Edison/Mitofsky group is consistent with professional norms and practices. Election survey analysts ordinarily assume that official election results are the objective standard against which their own findings must be weighed, and perhaps found wanting. We admire Edison/Mitofsky’s willingness to find fault with their methods and interview results. However, nothing in their report
demonstrates that such errors could account for the gap between the exit polls and the election results. We consider here the three possible explanations for a discrepancy between the official vote count and exit polls:

1. Statistical sampling error – or chance
2. Inaccurate exit polls – Kerry supporters responded in greater numbers than Bush supporters.
3. Inaccurate election – the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted.

We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be ruled out. The second possible cause, that inaccurate exit polls were biased towards Kerry, is a hypothesis that is compelling only if one dismisses the third, that official election results may have been distorted.