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Vote-by-Mail: The Real Winner Is Democracy •
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Ohio Recount Steeped in Fraud
Democracy Week | Commentary
Saturday 01 January 2005
There is something you can do.
The presidential vote recount in Ohio is over - or is it? The Green and Libertarian Party candidates who paid for the recount may have a claim of fraud against election officials and at least one voting machine company. If they can't get a new recount, they ought to at least get their money back.
Here's what happened.
Any Ohio county did not have to do a full hand recount if a random sample of three percent of the ballots in their county matched the original count.
The first fraud count: Not all the counties, if any, pulled the test precincts at random, nor did they allow the trained observers to see how the test precincts were selected.
Rep. John Conyers, ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to all the presidential candidates, in which he he stated: "At least one precinct in Medina County that would not have voting anomalies was both carefully pre-selected and pre-counted, so that the initial 3% recount that is mandated by the Ohio Secretary of State would not return a mismatch between the initial tally and the recount." [Read Rep. Conyers' Letter]
Once they selected the test precincts, some counties shared that information with the voting machine technicians, who then made adjustments on the machines and gave advice on how to create an exact match. That would be the second fraud count. Technicians from Triad, the company operating many of the counting machines, visited 41 of the 88 county election offices.
Triad technicians admitted that they helped the counties avoid the full recount by faking the match on the three percent count. [Read a transcript of the admissions].
When all else failed, election officials changed ballots to make the count come out right. An election official stated that she "did not want the hand count and the machine count to be different because they did not want to do a complete hand count," according to a trained observer quoted in Rep. Conyers’ letter. That would be fraud count number three.
Mr. Conyers also wrote to Triad, asking them to provide information regarding the company's ability to control the machines remotely, which a Triad representative admitted. [Read Rep. Conyers' Letter to Triad]
Fraud count number four would be that the Secretary of State, who also served as Mr. Bush’s state campaign chairman, refused to issue guidelines to the counties for the handling of undervotes, overvotes and other issues, a clear violation of the “equal protection” ruling of Bush v. Gore. Counties used wildly different rules during the count and the recount, depriving the recount parties of true value for their investment.
The same Secretary Blackwell may have been a party to the systematic violation of equal voting rights by shorting minority precincts of voting machines, while over seventy extra machines languished in a truck. The day-long lines in many minority neighborhoods cost Mr. Kerry thousands of votes, by some estimates.
This article scratches the surface of what was done in Ohio to suppress and subvert the vote and render the recount meaningless. For in depth reporting, your best source is The Columbus Free Press.
What Can You Do?
Rep. Conyers has said that he will stand to object to the acceptance of the Electoral College vote when it arrives at a joint session of Congress at 1pm on January 6. Other House members will join him. One Senator is needed to stand with them.
Senators don't want to look like lunatics. They need support from home. The most effective thing Americans can do THIS MONDAY AND TUESDAY is to print out the Conyers' letters from the links in this article, write a quick letter to the editor as a cover letter, and hand carry them to local newspaper editorial writers.
If a Senator with a concern for democracy can be found, then the Ohio mess will become a major story as committees investigate and the mainstream press piles on. The chance of it overturning the presidential election is miniscule, but it will set the stage for election reforms and for the punishment of criminals in high places, and it will dissolve the notion of a present mandate.
A useful cover letter would state that, regardless of party, Americans must insist on the fair and non-partisan administration of elections, and that our Senators should stand with Rep. Conyers to demand an investigation and a pledge of reform before this year’s election is accepted by Congress. We are too great a country to accept damaged goods instead of a reliably honest election result, or else our claims of spreading democracy to other lands is a sham. Your letter could remind the editors of how many people have sacrificed and died for our freedoms, the emblem of which is, more than our flag, our ballot.
After you hand deliver the letter to your newspaper, take a copy to the field offices of your two Senators, if you live within distance.
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Vote-by-Mail: The Real Winner Is Democracy
By Bill Bradbury
The Washington Post
Saturday 01 January 2005
While many states were embroiled in fights over touch-screen voting machines and provisional ballots and struggling to find enough people to staff polling places, Oregon once again quietly conducted a presidential election with record turnout and little strife.
Oregon's vote-by-mail system has proved reliable and popular. Critics said that vote-by-mail is prone to fraud. But signature verification of every voter before a ballot is counted is an effective safeguard against fraud.
Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate contended that vote-by-mail would suppress voter participation. But record numbers of Oregonians registered to vote, and almost 87 percent of them cast ballots.
Critics argued that vote-by-mail eliminates the communal experience of voting on Election Day. But community activities promoting voting were readily available to Oregonians on Election Day and in the days leading up to it. With two weeks to conduct public education and get-out-the-vote efforts, Oregonians were surrounded by civic engagement reminders. Oregonians have also started a new communal experience: voting at home, showing their children the ballot and talking to them about how important it is to vote.
Vote-by-mail is voter-friendly, and high turnout in every vote-by-mail election shows that voters like the convenience. Oregonians receive ballots in the mail two weeks before Election Day, allowing ample time to research issues, review and mark the ballot, and eliminating the need to stand in long lines waiting for a polling booth.
Voters are busy, but voting fits their schedule if they may return their ballot at any time during those two weeks and up until 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters may mail their ballots or save a stamp by dropping them off in person at any of the official sites located throughout the state. The earlier that ballots come in, the more time election officials have to check for any problems and to process the ballots to ensure that every vote counts. With a large number of ballots received before Election Day, the first tally released on election night contained nearly 50 percent of the vote and proved to be an accurate predictor of the final numbers.
Vote-by-mail provides an automatic paper trail. Every vote-by-mail ballot is read by reliable optical scan machines, and the paper is available should a hand recount become necessary. Mailed ballots are not forwarded by the post office, and the constant updating of voter rolls provided by returned ballots allows Oregon to have accurate and updated voter rolls without the risk of partisan purges.
Without polling places, vote-by-mail eliminates the expensive and time-consuming recruitment and training of poll workers. As a result, the cost of a vote-by-mail election is nearly 30 percent less than the cost of a polling place election.
Centralized supervision and control of ballot processing by elections officials in county elections offices, instead of dispersed polling places, maintains uniformity and strict compliance with law throughout the state.
An impressive percentage of Oregon's registered voters cast ballots in this election. Each of those voters can be confident that the mechanism of democracy in Oregon suits their needs, runs smoothly and fairly, and, most importantly, protects their votes.
The answer to the nation's voting anxiety is not a national standard that imposes new rules on an outdated system of polling places. The answer is a low-tech, low-cost, reliable and convenient system that makes it easier to vote and easier to count votes. The answer is vote-by-mail.
Bill Bradbury is Oregon's secretary of state.
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