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polls, six to go to work and six who were either elderly or handicapped. But things were worse in other areas of Columbus.
In precinct 1-B where there were 1,620 registered voters, a 27% increase in voter registration, the precinct had five voting machines in 2000 and only three in 2004. Where did they go? Out to Republican enclaves like Canal Winchester, where two machines were added since 2000, for a total of five to service 1,255 registered voters? Or were they re-routed to Dublin 2-G where 1,656 registered voters apparently needed six machines, twice the number of Columbus' 1-B?
Nearby in Dublin precinct 3-C, 910 registered voters were allocated four voting machines. No doubt machines were shifted from precincts like Columbus 44-G with 1,620 voters and registration up 25%, which lost one machine from the 2000 elections to 2004.
In Cleveland, where a public hearing was held on Saturday, November 20, there was a different pattern of voting irregularities. These include heavily Democratic wards with abnormally low reported rates of voter turnout, three under 20%. In Precinct 6-C where Kerry beat Bush 45 votes to one, allegedly only 7.1% of the registered voters cast ballots. In precinct 13-D where Kerry received 83.8% of the vote, only 13.05% reportedly voted. In precinct 13-F where Kerry received 97.5%, the turnout was reported to be only 19.6%.
One explanation comes from Irma Olmedo, who provided the Free Press with a written statement of her activities in the heavily Hispanic ward 13, which contained the three low voter turnout precincts.
"Ohio does not have bilingual ballots and this disenfranchises many Latino voters who are not totally fluent in English . . . there were 13 poll workers at the school and none knew Spanish. Some could not even find the names of the people on the list because they couldn't understand well when people said their names. . . . Some people put their punch card ballots in backwards when they voted and discovered that they couldn't punch out the holes. They had not read the instructions which were in English, that they had to turn the card around in order to vote," Olmedo stated.
Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted. The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish instructions and the misspelling of names: "I noticed that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the pollworkers were not able to find his name, these people were told to complete a provisional ballot because their names were not on the list."
In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of State's website there are 24,788 provisional ballots, most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio reelection committee.
There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count for third party candidates who received less than one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215 votes to Bush's 21 and Kerry's 290. In this precinct, Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91% of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest that Kerry's votes were inadvertently or intentionally shifted to Peroutka.
In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote buying, the lack of machines in African American neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new voter registration cards by a private company hired to process the forms.
Exit polls on Election Day from both the polling firm Zogby International and CNN projected John Kerry winning the state of Ohio. University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven Freeman calculated the odds that the exit polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being wrong are 250,000,000 to one. Pollster John Zogby, President of Zogby International, is quoted as telling the Inter Press Service of Stockholm that "something is definitely wrong."
Zogby commented that he was concerned about the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote tallies stating "We're talking about the free world here."
The Alliance for Democracy-Ohio is preparing a lawsuit challenging the outcome of Ohio's election results due to the massive voting irregularities that have emerged in sworn testimony and affidavits.
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The author has a Ph.D in Political Science and a J.D. He is a lawyer working with the Alliance for Democracy-Ohio and the Editor of the Columbus Free Press. Reporting in this article also came from Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D and Joe Knapp (http://copperas.com/fcelection/wardbubble.jpg). For additional documentation, visit http://freepress.org/
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