'Ohio's first poll tax'
Hearings expose conspiracy in November voting
By Martha Grevatt
Cleveland
"The last round was marked by significant fraud and that it
therefore can't be upheld as a fair result."
What could this statement be referring to? State Department
Spokesman Richard Boucher was directing his comments to the
recent election in Ukraine. The real fraud took place much
closer to home: in Ohio.
Public hearings in Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Cincinnati
and Washington, D.C. have torn off the veil of media and
government denial. Hundreds of witnesses have given sworn
testimony, pointing to a deliberate and coordinated effort to
disenfranchise tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of Ohio
voters, primarily African Americans.
The year 2004 saw an unprecedented number of new voter
registrations among African Americans, and a record voter
turnout was anticipated. The Bush campaign saw this as an
obstacle to securing a critical win in Ohio. Thus began the
construction of what one witness called "Ohio's first poll
tax."
Tens of thousands of new registrations were not entered at
all or not entered properly on the rolls. Ohio Secretary of
State J. Kenneth Blackwell withheld Help America Vote Act funds
needed to maintain a current and accurate database and to train
poll workers, whose job was further complicated by a new
procedure on provisional ballots.
Provisional ballots are given to registered voters whose
names do not appear on the rolls where they showed up to vote.
The new rule required that they be submitted at the correct
precinct or they would be discarded.
Blackwell, who also chaired the Bush-Cheney campaign in
Ohio, didn't act alone. Ahead of the elections, the Ohio
Republican Party, in collusion with the Republican National
Committee, illegally profiled Black voters, seeking to have
tens of thousands of urban voters disqualified. When that
failed they secured a court's permission to have one challenger
per precinct, or several at every poll, intimidating
voters.
Racist poll challengers
Statutes permitting partisan challengers have been
overlooked for decades. "The Ohio statute, originally codified
in 1831, was amended in 1859 to permit challenges based upon a
voter's possession of a 'visible admixture of African blood,'"
testified Judith Browne, acting co-director of the Advancement
Project.
"In 1868, the law was again amended to include questions for
challenged voters about their racial identity and the racial
composition of their neighborhoods. In 2004, there was serious
concern that the discriminatory nature of these statutes would
be resurrected."
These concerns proved to be well-founded. In Hamilton
County, which includes Cincinnati, only 55 percent of white
voters had Republican challengers at their polling places,
compared to 89 percent of Black voters. Voters in predominantly
Black precincts were eight times more likely to be challenged
than voters in predominantly white ones. The challenge rate was
three times higher for Black voters in Cuyahoga County, which
contains Cleveland.
Another racist tool involved the distribution and condition
of voting machines, possibly discussed during a private meeting
on Election Day between Bush, Blackwell and Franklin County
Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder.
Damschroder delivered an excess number of voting machines to
the suburbs while inadequately supplying the predominantly
Black precincts in Columbus. Of those precincts, 59 out of 74
had less than one machine per 300 voters; in the suburbs 58 out
of 73 had more than one machine per 300 voters.
In Cuyahoga County fewer machines were available for the
November election than were used in the primaries. All over the
state machines were kept in storage while others malfunctioned.
This led people to wait in line in driving rain as long as 10
hours. It may never be known how many had to leave without
voting, but one poll watcher who testified suggested 8,000 in
the Youngstown area alone were disenfranchised this way.
Rep. John Conyers, holding hearings on the issue in
Washington, has blasted the Bush team for its "campaign of
deception." Prior to the election, voters received bogus
letters with Board of Elections letterheads and/or calls from
impostors posing as elections officials, directing them to the
wrong polls or telling them they couldn't vote. Fliers were
spotted stating that only Republicans were voting on Tuesday,
Democrats on Wednesday.
Misinformation that convicted felons could not vote was
disseminated widely. Absentee voters received letters stating
their ballots were no good because they had supposedly given
the wrong address.
At the polls both new and longtime voters found their names
missing. At least 500 such names were presented before a
Cuyahoga County hearing sponsored by the AFL-CIO. Some people
were sent from poll to poll, each time waiting in the rain to
vote, and some gave up. Confusion reigned supreme when they
were offered provisional ballots, not knowing if they were in
the correct precinct or not, or if their vote would be
counted.
One man was threatened with the charge of voter fraud
because he had erroneously filled out a provisional ballot in
the wrong precinct and, realizing it wouldn't be counted, was
trying to fill out another in the correct precinct.
Adding to all of this were polls opening late or closing for
lack of pencils, cars being ticketed or towed, leaflets
threatening to arrest voters with outstanding traffic warrants
or owing back child support, provisional ballots being trashed,
and any number of unreported dirty tricks.
Now tens of thousands of the 155,000 provisional ballots
disqualified on technicalities, along with 92,000 "spoiled"
ballots, may never be counted. They were not included in the
statewide recount completed Dec. 17 (after Bush electors were
already sworn in).
In a classic Catch-22 situation, the disregarded ballots
were not included in the recount because they were never
counted in the first place!
Machine politics
This report would be incomplete without discussing the
voting machines and the people who sell them.
In August 2003, Walden O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., stated
that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president." Ohio-based Diebold manufactures
optical scan machines and the touch-screen electronic voting
machines that were used in four Ohio counties. They give no
paper receipt.
A Johns Hopkins University study reports that Diebold's
software contains "stunning flaws" and that results can be
altered at the polls or by remote control. Scores of voters
were in fact stunned when they voted for Kerry and then saw the
screen read a vote for Bush.
ES&S supplied a few Ohio counties with touch-screen
machines and manufactures 60 percent of all the voting machines
used in the U.S. ES&S began in the 1980s, when brothers Bob
and Todd Urosevich founded DataMark with funding from William
and Robert Ahmanson. The Ahmanson family has funded the
Heritage Foundation; the Discover Institute, whose focus is
un-discovering evolution; and the Chalcedon Institute, which
advocates the death penalty "for homosexuals and
drunkards."
DataMark became American Infor ma tion Systems, with
Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as chair. It then bought out
Business Records Corp., partially owned by Carolyn Hunt of the
right-wing Hunt oil family, to become ES&S. With Hagel at
its helm, the company provided 80 percent of the voting
machines used when Hagel first won the Nebraska Senate
race.
Founder Todd Urosevich remains a top executive at ES&S,
but not so his brother--Bob Urosevich now heads up Diebold
Election Systems!
Diebold technicians were involved in questionable
"servicing" of optical scanners in Toledo prior to the
recount.
According to sworn testimony by the Hocking County Board of
Elections deputy director, a technician from TriAd illegally
tampered with computers and instructed her on how to create a
"cheat sheet" to make sure the recount matches the official
results. TriAd manufactured the punch card machines used in 41
of Ohio's 88 counties. Its founder, Tod Rapp, is a long-time
contributor to Republican and right-wing causes.
Where's Kerry?
One would think Sen. John Kerry and the Democratic Party
would be on the front lines of challenging this deliberate
undermining of basic democratic procedures. Exit polls, which
University of Illinois statistician Ron Baiman testified have a
55,000,000-to-1 chance of being wrong, showed Kerry the victor
in Ohio. But in fact, the recount only took place after the
Green and Libertarian parties challenged the official
results.
Kerry has yet to speak at any of the rallies or hearings,
but is halfheartedly backing the legal challenges, now that the
Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. John Conyers put the Ohio election
in the national spotlight.
Kerry, Bush and their respective parties are both part of
the same anti-democratic capitalist system. They both support
the war against Iraq, and their positions on same-sex marriage,
an issue instrumental in securing the Bush vote in Ohio, are
almost identical. They both recognize that racism, including
the denial of suffrage, is indispensable to maintaining
capital's power over labor.
Kerry, like Gore in 2004, would sooner hold back the
seething anger than mount a real challenge to centuries of
racist oppression.
Despite Kerry's vacillation, none of these violations has
gone unchallenged.
Packed hearings have brought to light the damning statistics
but also the raw emotions around this horrible act of
profiling. Hundreds of people from around the country
volunteered and contributed over $100,000 for the recount.
A rally at the State House in November featuring the Rev.
Jesse Jackson drew 900 outraged people. Activists continue to
demonstrate, and have set up a tent city outside Secretary of
State Blackwell's office.
Jackson was back in Columbus Dec. 13, while the Bush
electors were being sworn in, for the filing of one of many
lawsuits seeking to decertify the "official" Ohio election
results.
The fight for the basic right of suffrage, to complete the
unfinished revolution cut short by the defeat of
Reconstruction, is a just fight deserving the utmost
solidarity. Its best hope is to link up the fight over the Bush
(s)election with the fight to overturn the whole Bush (and
Kerry) program of war, bigotry and exploitation.
Reprinted from the Dec. 30, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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