[Sosfbay-discuss] Convictions Confirm Ohio 2004 Recount Was Rigged

[JamBoi]

Note: my (JamBoi's) work on this issue is how I became the Greens #1
blogger and one of the world's most well known electoral justice
bloggers (and if you're unaware of the mindblowing amount of activism
I've done on the stolen 2004 election simply google for JamBoi and
you'll get >12,000 hits, most all of them really are my own original
blogging posts!!!)  

I'm extremely pleased to see that the fraudulent 2004 elections are
finally getting some justice applied to them.  Don't let the
Demlicans/Republicrats treat your vote as if it were there's to
determine the fate of!  It was not President-in-exile Kerry's right to
fail to count all the votes as he'd pledged to do - those votes were
not his personal property, but rather belonged to We the People!

The most advanced technology humankind has ever concieved of to
implement democratic secret ballots are Paper ballots, hand counted by
human beings.  Accept no substitute.  When cheating occurs with paper
ballots its done at the retail level and requires massive numbers of
people (who are caught or fess up rather quickly usually) to carry out.
 When done by computer (and bear in mind I'm a Software Engineer with
full credentials saying this) it is done at the wholesale level and one
or just a handfull of criminal cracker computer programmers can insert
two lines of code among millions, remove them and make off with an
election with no evidence left behind!!!  Don't let computers and
proprietary corporations steal your democracy!!!  Just say no to
computers in elections!

Democracy's most sacred sacrament = secret ballot voting!  Paper
ballots, hand counted by non- or multipartisan humans only!

Drew


From:	 "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>  Subject:	 [usgp-media]
Ohio convictions confirm that the 2004 recount was rigged (Bob Fitrakis
& Harvey Wasserman, Free Press)
Date:	 Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:58:54 -0800 (PST)
 
(This important news is a month old, but I don't
think I've seen it circulated on any discussion
lists -- Scott)

Convictions Confirm Ohio 2004 Recount Was Rigged

First Criminal Convictions From Ohio's Stolen
2004 Election Confirm Recount Was Rigged

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
Free Press (Ohio), January 27, 2007
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2379


The first felony convictions of two Cleveland
poll workers stemming from Ohio's stolen 2004
election confirm that the official recount in
that contested vote was, in the words of county
prosecutors, "rigged." The question now is
whether further prosecutions will reach higher up
in the ranks of officials who may have been
involved in illegalities throughout the rest of
the state. 

The convictions have come down in Cuyahoga
County, where Democratic candidates traditionally
run up huge majorities. Suspicious vote counts
and other irregularities cut deeply into John
Kerry's margins in 2004. Official vote counts
gave the state---and thus the presidency---to
George W. Bush by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5
million counted. 

A statewide recount, paid for by the Green and
Libertarian Parties, was marred in 87 of the
state's 88 counties by the types of illegalities
that led to this week's convictions. Only in
Coshocton County was a full, manual recount
performed. 

Throughout the rest of the state, under the
direction of Republican Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell, mandatory random sampling was
not done, as prescribed by law. Instead, poll
workers illegally chose sample precincts for
recounting where they knew there would be no
problems, and then routinely recounted the rest
of the ballots by machine, rendering the recount
meaningless. 

Blackwell simultaneously served as state co-chair
of the Bush-Cheney campaign. This fall he was
defeated in his campaign for governor by Democrat
Ted Strickland. 

County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the
Cuyahoga trial by charging that "the evidence
will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not
for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless."
Baxter said three election workers "did this so
they could spend a day rather than weeks or
months" on the recount. "This was a very hush
operation." 

Jacqueline Maiden, the county election board's
third-ranking employee, and Kathleen Dreamer, an
assistant manager, have each been convicted of a
felony count of negligent misconduct and a
misdemeanor count of failing to perform their
duties. Rosie Grier, the board's ballot
department manager, was acquitted on all seven
counts raised against the three. Sentencing is
scheduled for late February. Defense attorneys
have indicated they will appeal. The felony
conviction carries a possible sentence of six to
18 months. 

The county prosecutors have not yet alleged vote
fraud. No do they say mishandling the recount
affected the election's outcome. Dreamer's
defense attorney, Roger Synenberg, said the
defendants "were just doing [the recount] the way
they were always doing it." 

But Cuyahoga's precinct-by-precinct vote counts
and turnout numbers varied wildly and improbably.
Several predominantly black precincts showed
turnouts of less than 30% in a county where
overall turnout was around 60%. One ward showed a
7% turnout as compared to surrounding precincts
with turnouts nearly ten times as high. 

Further prosecutions may now hinge on what Maiden
and Dreamer might tell prosecutors about the role
played by higher-ups. The assumption is
widespread that the decision to consciously
designate test precincts, rather than choose them
at random, must have been at least tacitly
approved by Secretary of State Blackwell. 

In Cleveland, Robert Bennett, chair of the
state's Republican Party, also served as chair of
the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Cuyahoga
BOE Executive Director Michael Vu was chosen by
the county Democratic Party. Under Vu's
direction, the county's elections have been rife
with chaos, irregularities and apparent fraud.
When the Democrats recently tried to remove him
from his post, Vu was supported by Bennett and
the Republican Party. He kept his job when
Blackwell strategically abstained from a key
removal vote. 

There is growing evidence that what happened in
Cleveland was the rule, rather than the
exception, in Ohio's 2004 presidential recount.
Sworn testimony at a public hearing in Toledo
indicates Diebold technicians were involved in
picking "random" precincts to be recounted there.
A memory card was apparently lacking from at
least one optiscan machines. 

Miami County election officials admit they merely
ran the optiscan ballots through the ES 550
counter, rather than doing the prescribed random
recounts. Free Press reporters have found recount
results varied signficantly from official
results, which should have triggered a hand
recount of all the ballots in the county. This
was never done in Miami or in any other Ohio
County except Coshocton. 

Handwritten field notes from Paddy Shaffer, the
Green/Libertarian Recount Coordinator in Delaware
County in 2004, call into question the role
played by ES&S technician Sam Hogsett. On
December 15, 2004, Shaffer recorded at 2:42pm
that Hogsett was "...tapping tabulator machine on
left. There are two machines in the room. Kim
[Spangler] says he is doing this because the
light/ the switch keeps going out. He has now
handled the machines multiple times." 

At 4:25pm, Shaffer recorded "ES&S tech Sam
Hogsett back on the machine and touching the
ballots. They are working on Genoa precincts. My
intuition is screaming get him away from the
ballots and machines. ... He continued moving
around the machines, stacking in the ballots." 

At 5:05pm Shaffer noted "Sam is back loading and
stacking. Throughout much of this time, Sam is
the one to call out the precinct total and the
name." 

Sam Hogsett is more than an ES&S technician
according to Shaffer and others who investigated
him, who have found his letters to the editor
quite alarming. Voting rights activists troubled
by Hogsett's role in the recount found letters
posted under the name Sam Hogsett, Crown City, at
the southeatern Ohio newspaper website
www.herald-dispatch.com. One of the letters
begins as follows: "I recently read in this
pitifully left-leaning editorial section that the
spineless, thoughtless, moral less useless
left-wing liberal America hater Robert Sheer is
unsuccessfully attempting to use an
apples-to-oranges comparison to wrongfully attack
our Second Amendment rights." Hogsett goes on to
write: "... He [Sheer] believes that if I were to
take a Smith and Wesson and blast his little pea
brain to bits, that his family should be able to
sue the manufacturer and the gun dealer who sold
it to me." 

Initially, Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost
obtained a temporary restraining order stopping
the recount in Delaware County on November 23,
2004. 

The Delaware Gazette noted a complaint from
Shaffer about the role Hogsett played in the
recount as a private voting machine company
technician, and in a report dated January 1,
2005, Shaffer wrote the Delaware County Board of
Elections that John Myers of the Delaware County
Democratic Party said that, "He was very pleased
that unlike many counties that are at the mercy
of computer technicians, Delaware is not. He
[Myers] said during both conversations, even
repeated over and over, that they do their own
programming. So why was Sam Hogsett needed? Why
involve the technician in the process of the
recount?" 

Board of Elections records in Fairfield County
document that when the recount was not matching
thus mandating a full handcount under Ohio law,
the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office
recommended that Sam Hogsett be brought in to
deal with the discrepancies between the official
count and the recount. After Hogsett arrived and
took charge of the recount as a private ES&S
technician, the vote matched perfectly for the
first time. 

In Athens and Auglaize Counties, BOE workers who
attempted to blow the whistle on apparent
election irregularities were forced out of their
jobs. 

Overall, the illegalities prompting these initial
convictions in Cuyahoga County appear to be the
rule rather than the exception in the handling of
the Ohio 2004 recount statewide. The question now
is whether parallel prosecutions will follow in
other counties. And whether such prosecutions
might include those who are likely to have
ordered or approved the illegalities that marred
the recount in Cleveland, and throughout the rest
of the state. 


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors
of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS
RIGGING 2008 ( http://www.freepress.org/), and,
with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?,
published by the New Press. 

___________________

JamBoi
Jammy The Sacred Cow Slayer

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com


 
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