While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the
research on what really happened here in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second
term.
Pundits throughout the state and nation -- many of them
alleged Democrats -- continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second
coming that we should "get over it," that the election is old news.
But things get curiouser and curiouser.
In our 2005 compendium HOW
THE GOP STOLE OHIO'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, we list more than
a hundred different ways the Republican Party denied the democratic process in
the Buckeye State. For a book of documents to be published September 11 by the
New Press, entitled WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, we are continuing to dig.
It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks
Karl Rove, Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years.
In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go
very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are verified.
One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of
175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional
stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered
to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical
error."
As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters
were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and
Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and
28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged margin of victory -- just under
119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J.
Kenneth Blackwell, deemed worth counting.
Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday
morning, November 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2 percent of the
popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate
reflection of what really happened here.
But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency,
claiming a 2.5 percent Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In
conjunction with other exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a
virtual statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than
250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly ahead
only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000 in the
official vote count.
At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000
voters that had been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and
Toledo. County election boards purged the voting registration lists. Though all
Ohio election boards are allegedly bipartisan, in fact they are all controlled
by the Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled by law with two Democrats
and two Republicans.
But all tie votes are decided by the secretary of state, in
this case Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for
governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of the state's
vote count, but also a co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign. Many
independent observers have deemed this to be a conflict of interest. On
election day, Blackwell met personally with Bush, Karl Rove and Matt
Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections,
formerly the chair of the county's Republican Party.
The Board of Elections in Toledo was chaired by Bernadette
Noe, wife of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio's "Mr. Republican." A close
personal confidante of the Bush family, Noe raised more than $100,000 for the
GOP presidential campaign in 2004. He is currently under indictment for three
felony violations of federal election law, and 53 counts of fraud, theft and
other felonies in the "disappearance" of more than $13 million in
state funds. Noe was entrusted with investing those funds by Republican Gov.
Robert Taft, who recently pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor charges, making
him the only convicted criminal ever to serve as governor of Ohio.
The rationale given by Noe and by the Republican-controlled
BOE in Lucas and Hamilton Counties was that the voters should be eliminated from
the rolls because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two federal
elections.
There is no law that requires such voters be eliminated. And
there is no public verification that has been offered to confirm that these
people had not, in fact, voted in those elections.
Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly
Democratic wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been
mysteriously removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn testimony and
affidavits given at hearings after the election confirmed that many of these
citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal elections and had not
moved from where they were registered. In some cases, their stability at those
addresses stretched back for decades.
The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of
provisional ballots cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number
cast in 2000. Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a
stopgap for people whose voting procedures are somehow compromised at the
polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants.
Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of
unilateral pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into
chaos. Among other things, he demanded voters casting provisional ballots
provide their birth dates, a requirement that was often not mentioned by poll
workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many provisional ballots were merely tossed
in the trash at Ohio polling stations.
To this day, more than 16,000 provisional ballots (along
with more than 90,000 machine-spoiled ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted.
The secretary of state refuses to explain why. A third attempt by the Green and
Libertarian Parties to obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio presidential
vote has again been denied by the courts, though the parties are appealing.
Soon after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that
Franklin County would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls
in Columbus. Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the GOP-dominated
legislature, has imposed a series of restrictions that will make it much harder
for citizens to restore themselves to the voter rolls, or to register in the
first place.
All this, however, pales before a new revelation just released
by the Board of Elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county
surrounding Cleveland.
Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga
Board of Elections, and the chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed
that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated -- with no public notice --
a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has
not explained why the revelation of this massive registration purge has been
kept secret for so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media have bothered to
report on this story.
Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went 90
percent and more for John Kerry. The county overall went more than 60 percent
for Kerry.
The eliminations have been given credence by repeated sworn
testimony and affidavits from long-time Cleveland voters that they came to
their usual polling stations only to be told that they were not registered.
When they could get them, many were forced to cast provisional ballots which
were highly likely to be pitched in the trash, or which remain uncounted.
Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of
175,000 voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell doom
for any statewide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-2004 election
eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from Cincinnati and the 28,000
from Toledo.
Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most
of them likely Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to
an election allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 106,000
votes still remain uncounted, and where the Republican secretary of state
continues to successfully fight off a meaningful recount.
There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional
pre-November 2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of election may
have occurred. Further "anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 vote count
continue to surface.
In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will
now enter Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and US Senate races, and its 2008
presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been
eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from
traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers
having been erected against new voter registration drives.
Stay tuned.
Bob
Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S
2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via www.freepress.org.
They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, coming in
September from The New Press. Important research for this piece has been
conducted by Dr. Richard Hayes Philips, Dr. Norm Robbins and Dr. Victoria
Lovegren.