Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots

["Paul Tiger" <paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.gadsdentimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060831/ZNYT02/60831
0336/1011&sectioncat=NEWS
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots


By IAN URBINA
New York Times
With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to
be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure
from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at
least for several months.

Since the election, questions have been raised about how votes were tallied
in Ohio, a battleground state that helped deliver the election to President
Bush over Senator John Kerry.

The critics, including an independent candidate for governor and a team of
statisticians and lawyers, say preliminary results from their ballot
inspections show signs of more widespread irregularities than previously
known.

The critics say the ballots should be saved pending an investigation. They
also say the secretary of state’s proposal to delay the destruction
does not go far enough, and they intend to sue to preserve the ballots.

In Florida in 2003, historians and lawyers persuaded state officials not to
destroy the ballots in the 2000 presidential election, and those ballots are
stored at the state archive.

Lawyers for J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state, said although
he did not have the authority to preserve the ballots, Mr. Blackwell would
issue an order in a day or two that delays the destruction and that reminds
local elections officials that they have to consult the public records
commissions in each county.

Federal law permits, but does not require, destroying paper ballots from
federal elections 22 months after Election Day.

The critics say their sole interest in the question is to improve the voting
system.

“This is not about Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush or who should be
president,’’ said Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, a New York group that is part of the lawsuit.
“This is about figuring out what is not working in our election system
and ensuring that every cast vote counts.

“There is a gap between the numbers provided in the local level
records, which until recently no one has been allowed to see, and the
official final tallies that were publicly released after this election, and
we want to figure out why that gap is there.”

The planned action of Mr. Blackwell, a Republican who is running for
governor, and the threatened suit could draw attention to possible
irregularities in the election that he supervised.

The suit would follow what researchers call the first time anyone other than
county and state officials in Ohio have been given such extensive access to
the main material from the previous presidential election.

After eight months inspecting 35,000 ballots from 75 rural and urban
precincts, the critics say that they have found many with signs of tampering
and that in some precincts the number of voters differs significantly from
the certified results.

In Miami County, in southwestern Ohio, official tallies in one precinct
recorded about 550 votes. Ballots and signature books indicated that 450
people voted.

The investigation has not inspected all 5.6 million ballots in the election
because the critics were not given access to them until January. That
followed an agreement by the League of Women Voters, a plaintiff in another
election suit against the state, that it was not contesting the 2004
results, Mr. Goodman said.

The new suit, to be filed in Federal District Court in Columbus, would be
argued on civil rights grounds, saying the state deprived voters of equal
treatment.

Last week, lawyers sent a legal notice to Mr. Blackwell notifying him that
suit was pending and asking him to issue an administrative order directing
the 88 county election boards to retain the 2004 records.

“The decision of who decides whether the records will be preserved is
quite simply not the secretary’s to make,” said Robert A.
Destro, a lawyer for the secretary of state’s office.

Mr. Destro said preservation decisions belonged to the county public records
commissions, the county boards of elections and the Ohio Historical Society.

“But by issuing this order,” Mr. Destro added, “the
secretary of state will prevent any records from being destroyed for at
least several months while this matter is studied more closely.”

Steven Rosenfeld, a freelance reporter formerly with National Public Radio,
said the investigative team analyzed three types of sources. They are poll
books used by officials to record the names of voters casting ballots,
signature books signed by voters and used to verify that signatures match
registration records, and optical scan and punch card ballots, used by 85
percent of the voters in the state. The rest used touch-screen machines.

“We’re not claiming that what we found reveals a huge
conspiracy,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “What we’re claiming is
that what we found at least reveals extremely shoddy handling of ballots,
and there are some initial indications of local-level ballot
stuffing.”

In Miami County, Mr. Rosenfeld said, the team found discrepancies of 5
percent or more in some precincts between the people in the signature books
and the certified results.

In 10 southwestern counties, he said, the team found thousands of punch card
ballots that lacked codes identifying the precinct where the ballot was
cast. The codes are typically necessary for the machines processing the
ballots to “know’’ to record which candidate receives the
votes.

Mr. Rosenfeld is a co-author of a book that The New Press is to publish next
month, “What Happened in Ohio?: A Documentary Record of Theft and
Fraud in the 2004 Election.” The other co-authors are Harvey
Wasserman, an election rights advocate and an adjunct professor of history
at Columbus State Community College, and Robert J. Fitrakis, a lawyer who is
running for governor as an independent.

Robert F. Bauer, a lawyer from Washington who represented Mr. Kerry and the
Democratic National Committee on voting issues before the 2004 election, was
skeptical about the critics’ case.

“The major discrepancies that they are identifying are not materially
different than what has already been highlighted,” Mr. Bauer said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kerry sent a fund-raising e-mail message calling for support
for Representative Ted Strickland, the Democrat who is running for governor.
Mr. Kerry wrote that Mr. Blackwell “used his office to abuse our
democracy and threaten basic voting rights” in 2004.

Multiple suits failed in challenging the 2004 election in Ohio, and most
studies after the election concluded that irregularities existed, but that
they would not have changed the outcome.

In January 2005, the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee
issued a report finding “massive and unprecedented voter
irregularities and anomalies” in the election.

In March 2005, the Democratic National Committee issued a report that said 2
percent of the Ohio electorate, or “approximately 129,543
voters,” had intended to vote but did not do so because of long lines
and other problems at polling stations.

But the report said those and other frustrated voters “would not have
erased Bush’s 118,000 vote margin in the stat