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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MARPRIL 2006
DID 308,000 CANCELED
OHIO VOTER
REGISTRATIONS
PUT BUSH BACK IN
THE WHITE HOUSE?
BY BOB FITRAKIS & HARVEY WASSERMAN
MONTE WOLVERTON
While life goes on during the Bush 2 nightmare, so does
the research on what really happened in Ohio 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
ways the Republican Party denied the democratic process in the
Buckeye State. For a book of documents to be published Sept
ember 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.
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 a.m.Wed-
nesday morning, November 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio
by 4.2% of the popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We
believe this is an accurate reflection of what really happened in
Ohio.
But by morning Bush was being handed the Presidency,
claiming a 2.5% 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
slipped to less than 119,000 in the official vote count.
At the time, very few people knew about those 133,000
voters who had been eliminated from the registration rolls in
Cincinnati and Toledo. County election boards purged the voting
registration lists. Though 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 rightwing Republican now
running for governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the
man in charge of the state’s vote count, but also as 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 Rover, and Matt Dam-
schroder, 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 Berna
dette Noe, wife of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio’s “Mr. Republi
can.” 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 Repub
lican Governor Robert Taft, who recently pled guilty to four
misdemeanor charges, making him the only convicted criminal
to serve as governor of Ohio.
The rationale given by Noe and by the Republican-
controlled Board of Elections in Lucas and Hamilton Counties
was 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 no public verification 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
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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 tradition
ally used in Ohio as a stopgap for people whose voting proced
ures are somehow compromised at the polls, but who are none
theless 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 birthdates, a requirement
that was not often 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 appeal
ing.
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 Board of Elect
ions 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 has bothered to report on this story.
Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went
90% and more for John Kerry The county overall went more than
60% 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 pooling 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 add
ed 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 GOP Secretary of State continues to successfully
fight off a meaningful recount.
There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where addi
tional 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 U S. Senate races,
and 2008 presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters
eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them
from traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legis
lative barriers having been erected against new voter registration
drives.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of
How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008
They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of What Happened
in Ohio? forthcoming in September from the New Press. They
wrote this article for The Columbus Free Press (Ohio), assisted
with research by Dr. Richard Hayes Philips, Dr. Norm Robbins
and Dr. Victoria Lovegren.
RAISING THE ISSUE OF IMPEACHMENT
BY JOHN NICHOLS
As President Bush and his aides scramble to explain
new revelations regarding Bush's authorization of spying on the
international telephone calls and e-mails of Americans, the
ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has begun
a process that could lead to the censure, and perhaps impeach
ment of the President and Vice President.
U S Representative John Conyers, the Michigan Demo
crat who was a critical player in the Watergate and Iran-Contra
investigations into Presidential wrongdoing, has introduced a
package of resolutions that would censure President Bush and
Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investi
gate the administration's possible crimes and make recommend
ations regarding grounds for impeachment.
The Conyers resolutions add a significant new twist
to the debate about how to hold the administration to account.
The first of the three resolutions introduced by Conyers,
House Resolution 635, asks that Congress establish a select
committee to investigate whether members of the administration
made moves to invade Iraq before receiving Congressional
authorization, manipulated pre-war intelligence, encouraged the
use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, and used their positions to
retaliate against critics of the war.
The select committee would be asked to make recom
mendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment of
Bush and Cheney.
The second resolution, H R 636, asks that Congress
censure the President “for failing to respond to requests for infor
mation concerning allegations that he and others of his adminis
tration misled Congress and the American people regarding the
decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated the
intelligence information regarding the justification for the war,
countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treat
ment of persons in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation
against critics of his administration, for failing to adequately
account for specific misstatements he made regarding the war,
and for failing to comply with Executive Order 12958.” (This
executive order, issued in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, seeks
to promote openness in government by prescribing a uniform
system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national
security information The administration has secretly classified
and reclassified thousands of government documents in flagrant
violation of E.0.12958.)
A third resolution, H R. 637, would censure Cheney for a
similar set of complaints.
It is unlikely the effort to censure Bush and Cheney, let
alone impeach them, will get far without significant organizing
around the country. After all, the House is controlled by allies of
the President who have displayed no inclination to hold him to
account. Indeed, only a few Democrats, such as Conyers, have
taken seriously the Constitutional issues raised by the adminstra-
tion’s misdeeds.
Members of Congress in both parties will need to feel a
lot of heat if these important measures are going to get much
traction in this Congress.
Progressive Democrats of America, a grassroots group
that has had a good deal of success organizing activists who
want the Party to take a more aggressive stance challenging the
administration, will play a critical role in the effort to mobilize
support for the Conyers resolutions, as part of a new Censure
Bush Coalition Campaign. (The campaign’s website can be
found at www censurebush.org)
Getting this Congress to get serious about maintaining
checks and balances on the Bush administration will be a daunt
ing task. But the recent revelations regarding domestic spying
will make it easier. There are a lot of Americans who share the
view of U S. Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin,
that Bush and Cheney have exceeded their authority As Fein
gold says of Bush, “He is the President, not a king."
The bitter experience of dealing with King George III led
the founders of this country to write a Constitution that empowers
Congress to hold Presidents and Vice Presidents accountable
for their actions
It is this power that John Conyers, the senior member
of the House committee charged with maintaining the system
of checks and balances established by those founders, is now
asking the Congress to employ in the service of the nation that
Constitution still governs.
This article is excerpted from The Nation. John Nichols
is author of The Rise & Rise o f Richard B Cheney Unlocking
the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American
History (The New Press, 2005)