Many Kerry supporters suspect election fraud
November 15, 2004
PHILADELPHIA – Sen. John Kerry may have conceded the presidential election, but many of his… PHILADELPHIA – Sen. John Kerry may have conceded the presidential election, but many of his supporters haven’t.
Armed with thousands of reports of malfunctioning voting machines, lost ballots and suspicious vote counts, they are filling the Internet and the airwaves with arguments that George Bush’s victory was a fraud.
Web sites and blogs are streaming headlines such as “Votescam: The Stealing of America” and “Evidence Mounts That the Vote Was Hacked.” Organizations such as www.blackboxvoting.org and www.stolenelection2004.com contend that electronic voting machines were tampered with to tip the election in Bush’s favor.
In Ohio, legal challenges to the election are brewing. David Cobb, the Green Party candidate for president, and Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate, said this past week that they would demand a recount in that state. And a group of Democratic activists said they would contest the election, under a state provision that permits 25 voters to go to court if they believe there has been fraud in an election.
One of those activists, Juliet Stewart of Cincinnati, said “this is nothing but Katherine Harris all over again,” referring to the former Florida election chief blamed by many Democrats for Al Gore’s defeat in 2000. Stewart complained it was “disgraceful” for Kerry to have conceded so quickly – the afternoon after Election Day.
Much of the focus is on Ohio, where counting of provisional ballots is under way. Ohio’s 20 electoral votes provided the margin of victory for Bush. With all but 155,000 provisional and an unknown number of overseas absentee ballots tallied, Kerry trailed Bush in Ohio by 136,483 votes.
Attorneys for the Kerry campaign have said they did not believe the outcome of the Ohio vote could change, and they have discouraged speculation that voting irregularities caused Kerry’s loss.
Voting experts also say it is very unlikely that Kerry would win enough of the provisional and absentee ballots to change the Ohio outcome. Nationwide, they say, the election was marred by many errors, but probably not in sufficient numbers to erase Bush’s victory.
“From what we’ve seen so far, there is no evidence that would change the presidential outcome,” said Will Doherty, executive director of www.VerifiedVoting.org, a San Francisco-based organization that advocates for voter-verified ballots and that gathered more than 31,000 complaints from voters on Election Day.
“We lucked out this time,” said Doherty. “We’re fortunate that we didn’t see entire counties or states with massive problems.”
Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project, said voting error rates were cut in half in this election compared with 2000.
“I think things were much better this time,” he said. Citing problems in Ohio, North Carolina and other states, he said none appeared big enough to change the outcome.
Sean Greene, research director with the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project, said the 2004 election drew much more scrutiny because of the ballot problems in 2000. While reported errors did not appear to be enough to affect the presidential race, he said, “the question is, are there things they’re not catching?”
One of the biggest snafus of Election Day involved an electronic voting machine in Franklin County, Ohio, that recorded 4,258 votes for Bush in a precinct where only 638 people cast ballots. A second count showed Bush actually received 365 votes. The machine was a Danaher ELECTronic 1242, the same kind of touch-screen machine recently put into service in Philadelphia.
“We contacted Danaher, and they said they’re trying to figure it out,” said Robert Lee Jr., head of voter registration for Philadelphia. “We don’t know what happened. It’s the first time I’ve heard of that in 20 years. I have confidence in these machines.” No such problems were reported in Philadelphia’s voting.
Matthew Lilly, a vice president of Danaher, said that the company would examine the Ohio machine and the voting system after vote canvassing is complete in Ohio.
“We will take the time necessary to determine what happened, and if any corrective action is needed, we’ll take it,” Lilly said.
He said Danaher was satisfied that the problem, which apparently took place during transmission of vote data from the machine to the central counting computer, “is not a systemic issue.” Fail-safe problems worked properly, he said, and when the data were uploaded a second time, the count was correct.
Another significant machine failure occurred in Carteret County, N.C., where 4,532 votes were irretrievably lost. A touch-screen machine by UniLect Corp., of Dublin, Calif., could not store all the votes cast because of outdated software.
The problem could force a new statewide election in North Carolina if the official margin of victory in two close statewide races is less than the number of votes lost.
In Broward County, Fla., a central vote-counting computer began subtracting, rather than adding, votes because it received more votes than it had been programmed to expect. The miscount was not in the presidential race, but rather in four constitutional-amendment proposals, and was quickly fixed. The correct voting machine tallies were preserved.
Questions were raised on several Web sites about “irregularities” in several rural Florida counties that have Democratic majorities in registration but where Bush drew significant majorities of the vote. But several political analysts in Florida and elsewhere noted that the counties are home to conservative “Dixiecrats” who have long voted for Republican presidential candidates despite their Democratic registration.
Edward B. Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and election law expert, said there were significant problems in Ohio’s election that should be investigated – particularly the hours-long waits that voters endured and the way provisional ballots were used – but that didn’t mean the election results would change.
“We should scrutinize the process, not because we expect the result to change, but to reform the system where it needs to be changed,” he said.
Ohio county election officials have been examining 155,428 provisional ballots to determine which ones should be counted.
In previous Ohio elections, about 90 percent of provisional ballots have been deemed valid and counted. If that were true this time, Kerry would need to win 97 percent of the valid ones to overcome Bush’s lead.
The election won’t be official in Ohio until it is certified, which is expected by about Dec. 1.
Six Democratic congressmen have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate voting snafus around the country and to suggest improvements.
“The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures,” Rep. John Conyers Jr., D., Mich., wrote to the GAO. “In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004.”
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