Revote? If Florida and Ohio go first

PAUL LOEB
GUEST COLUMNIST  24 January 2005   Seattle Post Intelligencer

After the most meticulous counting in Washington state history, Republicans are crying fraud. Yet compared with the abuses that happened elsewhere, but not in our state, we should feel proud.

We're told that Florida 2000 is old news but a quarter of the African American votes in Jacksonville were tossed without a second look. Gov. Jeb Bush's administration purged more than 80,000 largely poor and minority voters from the rolls for convictions that didn't apply under Florida law or never existed.

BBC reporter Greg Palast found that 90 percent of those scrubbed were legitimate voters. Even without the purged votes, a study of uncounted ballots commissioned by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times confirmed that a statewide recount would have given Al Gore the election.

Meanwhile, a mob of Republican congressional aides, flown in by the George W. Bush campaign, pounded on doors and windows to permanently stop a manual recount of 600,000 South Florida ballots. We saw nothing comparable here. Florida 2004 had problems; 58,000 absentee ballot forms almost didn't get mailed to largely Democratic Broward County.

But in Ohio, Republican Secretary of State and Bush campaign chairman Kenneth Blackwell spearheaded a parade of abuses that have gotten little national press. Blackwell, who has refused to testify under oath, began early. Between 2000 and 2002, his office purged 303,000 voters in key urban areas; even with massive registration drives, fewer people actually ended up eligible in Cleveland than in 2000.

Blackwell also tried to reject new Democratic registrations because they weren't on 80-pound paper stock, then backed off when official forms failed that standard. He went to court to reject provisional ballots cast outside of the correct precinct, while closing down largely Democratic voting stations. On Election Day, Democratic precincts were so short of machines that voters waited in lines up to 10 hours in the winter cold; thousands had no choice but to leave.

The Ohio abuses continue with no parallel here. Many Democrats were forced to use provisional ballots, even with registration cards in hand. (The 90,000 provisional ballots overwhelmingly came from Democratic neighborhoods.) Trumbull County voters received punch-card ballots with holes already punched for Bush. In Franklin County, a computer error tallied 3,000 extra votes for Bush. In Mahoning County, electronic machines kept registering Bush votes even when voters chose Sen. John Kerry; it took repeated attempts to correct them.

In Warren County, officials declared an Election Day homeland security emergency, barring reporters and others from watching while ballots were left unguarded and unprotected in a warehouse, then hastily moved after people complained. But the FBI said they gave no such warning and Warren County employees were told to prepare for a lockdown the previous Thursday. In one African American Cleveland precinct, the presidential candidate of the ultra-conservative Constitutional Party received 215 votes, only 65 fewer than Kerry; the local city councilman said this could have resulted only from malfunctioning machines.

Some of these examples may have been due to human error, but all favored Bush and none favored Kerry. When minor-party candidates requested a random-sample recount, Blackwell pre-ed precincts in which to conduct it.

In contrast, Washington state's bipartisan counters and observers looked at every questionable ballot, trying to validate voter intent. Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed has placed public service over partisanship, already suggesting ways to address the problems that did occur. I'd be delighted to revote Washington's governor's race. But only if we could also rerun Ohio and Florida. Otherwise we should feel grateful that our state really did its best to ensure that every voter could vote and every vote was counted.