Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
I have always been averse to conspiracy theories, though Lord knows I’ve been proven wrong in some cases. I remember back in the ’60s when people were accusing the CIA of all kinds of crazy things, and lo and behold, almost all the accusations turned out to be true. Still, it’s hard to believe, for instance, that the 2004 presidential election in Ohio could have been stolen through massive voter fraud, since it seems like it would take so many people to do it. But when you read articles like this report by Steve Rosenfeld on Alternet, you have to wonder:
Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.
The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.
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“The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election,” said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. “We’re in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General’s office.”
“On the one hand, people will now say you can’t prove the fraud,” he said, “but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side.”
The Republicans responsible for retaining those ballots used a number of “dog ate my homework” excuses to explain the missing ballots.
The presidential ballots and election records were lost, misplaced, damaged by water, taken to landfills – all apparently by mistake, due to miscommunications, or because the local election administrators were not aware of the state ballot preservation law or the federal court order, according to letters to Brunner’s office from the various county election boards.
“Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner’s) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions,” wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. “Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill.”
“The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots,” wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. “To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.”
“No one could remember the disposition of said ballots,” wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County’s Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the “unvoted” or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.
Lest we forget, this is the state in which arithmetical miracles took place on election day, along with other strange events:
Compared to Ohio’s Democratic urban core, turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000 election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether Bush’s vote was padded. The most notable example is more than 10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true. In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity in a presidential year.
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In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert – which they later retracted – ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner’s office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election. In nearby Butler County, unused ballots are also missing, fueling speculation that they might have been used by Republican partisans to pad the president’s totals.
“The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred,” said Arnebeck. “You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result.”
“The same situation occurred in Clermont County,” he said. “We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county,” he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. “So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush.”
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Another big category of votes that will never be explained are the nearly 129,000 ballots that were rejected by voting machines and not counted. Many of these 2004 ballots – a mix of computer punch cards, paper ballots to be marked by ink and electronic votes – are among the incomplete 2004 election records. One post-election analysis found 94,000 of these ballots come from Democratic-majority precincts, and estimated these that ballots could have cost Kerry an additional 26,000 votes.
It’s perfectly possible that some of these ballots may have been mistakenly discarded. But it is impossible to believe that the extent of the loss could have been so great if the people involved were acting in good faith. They violated federal law and a court injunction. They should have known about the former and had to know about the latter.
We can only hope that now that the Democrats have taken over the statewide offices in Ohio that the Republicans will be unable to steal the election there in 2008. Florida is obviously still vulnerable, as are any other toss up states in which Republicans hold the pertinent state offices.
It seems clear in retrospect that Kerry should have challenged the Ohio results. Had he done so, it would have pushed this issue into the front burner in the national media. As it is, very few people are aware that the 2004 election was probably stolen. National Democrats have been strangely silent about this issue, no doubt worried that the beltway pundits would cluck disapprovingly if they did something as unseemly as demand honest elections.
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