Ohio County Reports: Details of an Injustice
By David Cobb, CommonDreams   23 December 2004

The Ohio recount is uncovering serious problems in our electoral processes that must be addressed immediately, both in Ohio and other states.

The Green Party has posted a number of the Ohio County recount reports on its website at http://www.votecobb.org/recount/ohio_reports/index.php, and more are being posted every day.

Here are just a few of the problems we have uncovered:

Hamilton County: Approximately 400 provisional ballots allegedly were rejected because they were cast in the wrong precinct, despite the fact that they were cast at the right polling station (i.e., at a polling station with more than one precinct).

Fairfield County:: When the hand recount of the 3% test sample did not match the official vote totals, a full recount should have been ordered for all county ballots. Instead, the recount was "suspended" by county officials who said that Secretary Blackwell recommended that the recount should begin again "from scratch." The Green recount observers then were told that it was 4:00 PM, the building was closed, and all had to leave. The Republican contingent, however was allowed to stay in a conference room for an additional ten minutes or so for a private discussion.

Summit County: Recount witnesses were threatened with expulsion if they spoke to counting teams. In some instances, they were expected to "observe" from up to 20 feet away, despite Ohio Election Law allowing observers to be close enough to actually observe.

Medina County:: Election officials were aware of several "problem" districts, but instead chose to perform the manual 3% test recount on two precincts that had been part of a School Levy Recount the previous Monday. That meant that those ballots had been taken out of the standard "double lock" situation and had been handled several times since Monday.

Cuyahoga County:: Almost all of the witnesses felt that the ballots were not in random order, and that they had been previously sorted. As the ballots were fed into the counting machines, there were long runs of votes for only one candidate and then long runs for another, which seemed statistically improbable to most.
Huron County: The punchcard tabulator test was observed only by Republican witnesses. This test was conducted the day before the Green witness was invited to observe the recount.

Henry County and Fulton County: We found that the Triad Company can reprogram voting machines using remote connections. Is this the case for other counties as well? Don't voters have a right to know?

Samples Were Not Randomly Chosen

These and other irregularities are the subject of further investigation and action. Also, nearly all of the 88 Ohio counties may be in violation of the Ohio recount law because they did not choose the precincts to be manually recounted in a random manner. For example, in Vinton County, a unilateral decision was made to pick a county for the 3% manual recount test simply because its vote total was closest to 3% of the county total. In Morrow County, a decision as to what is ?random? was made without input from recount observers after a county election official called Secretary of State Blackwell?s office and was told that her interpretation of ?random? was the correct one, despite Green recount observer protests.

Ohio Election Law is very clear on this point. Section 3515 of the Ohio Revised Code says:

The board must randomly whole precincts whose total equals at least 3% of the total vote, and must conduct a manual count.

If the tabulator count does not match the hand count, and after rechecking the manual count the results are still not equal, all ballots must be hand counted. If the results of the tabulator count and the hand counted ballots are equal, the remainder of the ballots may be processed through the tabulator (for optical scan and punchcards).

Lack of random samples threatens to undermine the entire recount process, as it does in other situations where random sampling is critical. Would you, for example, be willing to play a hand of poker if the cards were already dealt when you got to the table?

Relating this back to the recount procedures, when you read in the newspapers that recounts were done and no discrepancies were found, it could be because the election officials chose to do test recounts on precincts where there were no problems. There may still be problems or there may not be, but no one can know for sure. What we do know is that lack of random recounts does not follow either the spirit or letter of the law, and may necessitate further action, including a second statewide recount.

Background on the Recount

While the nation has spent the last few weeks observing and talking about an activity called the ?Ohio Recount,? in reality there have been 88 different recounts taking place in Ohio?s 88 counties. The political maxim that ?all politics is local? is especially true as it relates to the process of registration, voting, and counting the ballots.

When David Cobb and the Green party teamed up with Michael Badnarik and the Libertarian Party to demand that each Ohio vote be counted, several steps had to be followed. First, the parties demanding the recount had to raise $10 per precinct for the recount costs. With 11,360 precincts in Ohio, the amount needed was $113,600. Thanks to over 6,000 donors giving small donations over the Internet, the money was raised in four days.

The candidates filed their formal demand for a recount, along with the necessary filing fees, in each of Ohio?s 88 counties on November 19. At that time, approximately half of the counties already had completed their initial canvass of the vote. Secretary of State Blackwell and the counties, however, did not start the recount at that time.

Next, the candidates went to court to try to expedite the recount process. Kenneth Blackwell, who served both as Ohio Secretary of State (the man in charge of Ohio?s vote-counting process) and the partisan co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign in Ohio, took six weeks to certify the Ohio vote count, the same time needed by Washington State to certify the vote, complete a state-wide recount, and start a second one. While the courts did not require the recount to be speeded up, they did order every county to participate.

Over 3,000 volunteers came to Ohio to help us with this recount, and each one deserves a big thanks from the rest of us for their faith in democracy and their willingness to participate in this historic process. Many of them served as official county recount witnesses or regional coordinators, and it is their reports you will be reading on the website at http://www.votecobb.org/recount/ohio_reports/index.php

The Next Step

Reports are still flowing in from the 88 counties. Once they all are completed, we will meet with our attorneys, state election officials, and the broad coalition of groups who have participated in this historic undertaking.

No matter what the outcome of the recount, these are but a few of the steps which must be taken to make our elections more open, accountable, and fair:

Demand that electronic voting machines produce voter-verified paper trails.
Demand public access to and scrutiny of the software used on electronic voting machines and tabulators (vote counters).
Establish Election Day as a holiday, and provide for voter registration right up to Election Day (already the law in Minnesota, Maine, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Idaho).
Establish uniform standards for the conduct of elections and recounts.
Ensure that sufficient voting machines are provided in all communities, not just affluent ones.
Aggressively investigate reports of voter suppression and intimidation, and voting machine tampering. Prosecute the individuals, companies, and organizations involved in any illegal activity.
Abolish the Electoral College, and use Instant Runoff Voting to elect the President.
Shorten the long lines seen at polling places such as the African American precincts in Cuyahoga County.
Fully fund and fairly deploy Election Day resources so that places such as Columbiana County will have more than four telephone lines available on Election Day and more poll workers will be able to get through to report problems.
Clear up the vagueness in Ohio Election Law that allows each county to interpret words such as ?random? recount in their own way.
Establish non-partisan election law arbiters in each county and on the statewide level so that the Secretary of State and other officials will not have a conflict between their official and campaign responsibilities.
Other Electoral Reforms: The Green Party has consistently called for other electoral reforms that will improve the voting process and bring us closer to a one-person-one-vote democracy, including Proportional Representation and Publicly Financing Campaigns. For more details, see http://www.votecobb.org/issues/democracy/

Conclusion

While many of the local election officials and staff members we have met in Ohio?s 88 counties are hard-working, well-meaning people, almost none of them have allowed the recount to proceed using ?random? recount processes. In addition, we have found election and recount procedures in several counties that do not appear to follow the spirit or letter of Ohio Election law. Finally, election laws appear to have been applied unevenly across Ohio in ways that produced unfairness against poor and minority voters.

We will continue to post the latest information and analysis on the www.votecobb.org website as it becomes available.

David Cobb was the Presidential candidate for the Green Party during Campaign 2004 (www.votecobb.org). He has joined with Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party to file an historic recount challenge to the 2004 presidential election results in Ohio.