VOTE  (CONT)

Ohio's 2004 ballots were to be destroyed last September. However that fate was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled in the early phase of trying a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that accused Ohio officials of suppressing the minority vote in Ohio's cities. The state's new Secretary of State and Attorney General, both Democrats, are now holding settlement talks for that suit, suggesting its claims have merit. However, unlike Florida after the 2000 election, there still has yet to be a full accounting of Ohio's presidential vote.

What's clear, however, is the highest ranks of the Republican Party's political wing, including White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the party's most tech-savvy computer gurus and the former Republican Ohio Secretary of State, created, owned and operated the vote-counting system that reported George W. Bush's re-election to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory - the boost from Ohio's countryside - have yet to be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting to date suggests that what happened on the ground and across Ohio's rural precincts is at odds with the vote tally released on Election Night.

As numerous congressional committees attempt to retrieve and examine the secret White House e-mails surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors, those panels must also probe the privatization and partisan manipulation of the 2004 presidential vote count in Ohio. The lessons from 2004 have yet to be fully understood or learned.

Similarly, the House Administration Committee, which is expected to soon mark up H.R. 811, a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, to regulate electronic voting technology, also must take heed. The vote count and outcome of American elections cannot be left in the hands of known partisans, who can control and manipulate how the votes are counted and what is reported to the media and American people.

Public vote counts on private, partisan servers and secret proprietary software have no place in a democracy.

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