King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association et al v. J. Kenneth Blackwell et al

Filing 118

BRIEF on Jurisdiction, Discovery and Evidence Issues Identified by the Court re 113 Order by Plaintiffs Willis Brown, Miles Curtiss, Paul Gregory, King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, League of Young Voters/Columbus, Ohio Voter Rights Alliance for Democracy, Matthew Segal & Harvey Wasserman. (Attachments: # 1 Appendix Att 1 Architecture Map, # 2 Appendix Att 2 Connell Deposition, # 3 Appendix Att 3 GovTech Voter DB K, # 4 Appendix Att 4 GovTech Mirroring & Website, # 5 Appendix Att 5 SmarTech Proposed Map, # 6 Appendix Att 6 RFK Jr Evidence Summary) (Arnebeck, Clifford) Modified on 7/18/2011 to clarify text (kk2)

Published on Thursday, June 1, 2006 by Rolling Stone magazine
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their
votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television
and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had
gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded.
Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil
hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the
election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy
theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors
on a large scale.''(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling
had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never
received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably
shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm
called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register
voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In
New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously
failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide,
according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1
million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's
victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from
the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a
recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami
County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in
inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren
County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from
monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of
polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in
2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at
American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by
13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent:
Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully

examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive,
coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican
election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix
the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the
overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have
their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by
118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact
from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at
the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the
unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into
account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes
for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were
supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their
ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an
outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican
outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''
Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced
observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou
Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in
individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where
the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the
inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't
just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of
error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters
and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in
which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask
voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely
accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than
three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political
consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such
surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of
elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the
Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit
polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied
Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six
media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an
embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the
networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with
''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count.
Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the
polls as flawed.(21)
''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it
was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004
election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go
on the air with them again.''
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter
survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox
News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal,
Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with
assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll,
Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times
larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to
approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at
7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at
least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime
Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of
eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by
a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's
neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the
statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by
and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as
9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins
departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit
polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points.
Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5
percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who
specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert
are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he
says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three

critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.''
(See The Tale of the Exit Polls)
Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by
Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says.
''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have
been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls,
Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is
deeply troubling.
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was
unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the
electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters
on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that
skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that
Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official
report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons
that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush
voters.''(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight
researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not
Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush
strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed
the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data
presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually
contradicts it.''
What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote
count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent
of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where
Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of
one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush
country.(39)
''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the
supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground
states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of
African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day
complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly
ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the

National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls
against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In
twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed
widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were
stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the
disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,''
in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have
received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only
thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3
billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.''
The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have
won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter
intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at
Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely
nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are
''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every
Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state
with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and
energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the
campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)
But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the
counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As
Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and
federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration
to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a
powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal
electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed
firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who
co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)
Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state
as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing
fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for
the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural
counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and
during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of
Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a
federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that
occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis
Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in
Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can
frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''
The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John
Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's
failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the
committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than
50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that
outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems,
the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it
involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)
''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as
limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We
could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to
testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''
When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the
election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone
interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of
the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen
involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland,
Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the
names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national
elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were
wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)
There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged
to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were
deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because
they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where
more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the
lowest in the state.
According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of
voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day
-- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were
unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in
its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties
canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To

those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A
New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional
Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in
Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air
and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio
Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban
voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During
the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in
New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain
from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by
zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five
counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party
Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to
invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail
came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic
strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list
included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military,
college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless
people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed,
proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70)
Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at
Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a
process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that
anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to
challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the
very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of
intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged
voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)
''I'm afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never going to show up
on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky Board of Elections, told local
reporters. ''Many of them are young people who have registered for the first time. I've called
some of these people, and they are perfectly legitimate.''(75)
On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional right to due process
and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP
challenge(76) -- but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they
were improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's ruling,
stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged

registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.
On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders
from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail does not implicate fraud,'' the
court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority
voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79)
Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of
urban voters in the battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)
Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for
felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in
Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to
vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation.
According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the
Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election,
around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their
hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating
calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast
ballots.(84)
This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National
Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were
deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a
Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he
warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and
halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were
not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos
of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl
Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)
IV. Barriers to Registration
To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an
arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree,
Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that
election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound
unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to ROLLING
STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The postal service had
recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not
disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet
Blackwell's order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further
specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived
the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated
as applications for a registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new
card.(90)

Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be
denied the right to vote because of a registration error that ''is not material in determining
whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.''(91) The decision immediately threw
registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages
saw their efforts invalidated.(92) Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no
longer accept its own registration forms.(93) Even Blackwell couldn't follow the protocol: The
Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight
paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately
revoked his order on September 28th -- six days before the registration deadline.(94)
But by then, the damage was done. Election boards across the state, already understaffed and
backlogged with registration forms, were unable to process them all in time. According to a
statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition,
16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election
officials,(95) and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions
on their registration cards.(96) Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were
disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election
decided by barely two percent.(97)
Despite the widespread problems, Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration
errors after the election -- in Toledo -- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing
snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state.(98) The top elections
official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the
county board of elections and the county Republican Party.(99) The GOP post was previously
held by her husband, Tom Noe,(100) who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state
funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush
campaign.(101)
State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ''areas of grave
concern.''(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board
had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that
mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations
dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city)
would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of
nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked,
''We may not get to them.''(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an
entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required
by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were
filed prior to the deadline -- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised
''several thousand'' voters from Democratic strongholds.(107)
The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow
Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of
postcards sent to confirm voter registrations(108) -- records that could have been used in the
GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an

elections official tampering with the documents.(109) Investigators slammed the elections board
for ''a series of egregious blunders'' that caused ''the destruction, mutilation and damage of public
records.''(110)
On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank
ballots were kept out in the open, ''with no security measures in place.''(111) The state's assistant
director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they
leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.(112)
In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the
damage was done. At a ''Victory 2004'' rally held in Toledo four days before the election,
President Bush himself singled out a pair of ''grass-roots'' activists for special praise: ''I want to
thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.''(113)
V. ''The Wrong Pew''
In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters from receiving
provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were mandated in 2002, when Congress
passed a package of reforms called the Help America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of
the most egregious injustice in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of
lawfully registered minority voters from the polls because their names didn't appear on flawed
precinct rolls. Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must
be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's
registration proves valid.(114)
''Provisional ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea Wang,
an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the
commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act. ''But then different states
erected barriers, and this new right became totally eviscerated.''
In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots.
(The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move
often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the
vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to
whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed
eligible.(115) When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely
contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make
provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: ''By not
even mentioning this group -- the primary beneficiaries of HAVA's provisional-voting provisions
-- Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in
Florida in 2000.''(116)
But instead of complying with the judge's order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell
insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he
compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul -- saying
that he'd rather go to jail than follow federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld

Carr's ruling on October 23rd -- but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of
voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being
offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that
denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But
that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to
filter down to the precinct level at all -- denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.(119)
We will never know for certain how many voters in Ohio were denied ballots by Blackwell's two
illegal orders. But it is possible to put a fairly precise number on those turned away by his most
disastrous directive. Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their
county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone
who showed up at the wrong precinct -- a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live
in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places. On October 14th, Judge Carr overruled the
order, but Blackwell appealed.(120) In court, he was supported by his friend and campaign
contributor Tom Noe, who joined the case as an intervenor on behalf of the secretary of
state.(121) He also enjoyed the backing of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who filed an amicus
brief in support of Blackwell's position -- marking the first time in American history that the
Justice Department had gone to court to block the right of voters to vote.(122) The Sixth Circuit,
stacked with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided with Blackwell.(123)
Blackwell insists that his decision kept the election clean. ''If we had allowed this notion of
?voters without borders' to exist,'' he says, ''it would have opened the door to massive fraud.'' But
even Republicans were shocked by the move. DeForest Soaries, the GOP chairman of the
Election Assistance Commission -- the federal agency set up to implement the Help America
Vote Act -- upbraided Blackwell, saying that the commission disagreed with his decision to deny
ballots to voters who showed up at the wrong precinct. ''The purpose of provisional ballots is to
not turn anyone away from the polls,'' Soaries explained. ''We want as many votes to count as
possible.''(124)
The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to
navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn
just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were
misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election
Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some
were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a
provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000
provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the
wrong line.(126)
In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St.
Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the
city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when
the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was
counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she
wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to

her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other
voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of
Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)
All told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's registration barriers did the trick.
Black voters in the state -- who went overwhelmingly for Kerry -- were twenty percent more
likely than whites to be forced to cast a provisional ballot.(129) In the end, nearly three percent of
all voters in Ohio were forced to vote provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots
were ultimately rejected.(131)
VI. Long Lines
When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had
managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it
didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their
precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and
Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in
Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or
more -- often waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line
for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three
in the morning.(132)
A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee
concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election
Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The
vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban,
minority and Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average
of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.(135)
The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts.
Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to
speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In
most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the
state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of
precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)
Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to
inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were
supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than
$30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable
systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken
Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying
electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper
ballots.(138)
''No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep. Kucinich. ''He's a
rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute details of his office. There's no doubt

that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.''
At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election
officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters.
Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one
machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers
report concluded that the ''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies
to specifically target Democratic areas.''(140)
In Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters(141) -- more than half of them
black(142) -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000 machines to handle the
huge surge.(143) ''On Election Day, the county experienced an unprecedented turnout that could
only be compared to a 500-year flood,'' says Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin
County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.(145) But
instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder decided to
''make do'' with 2,741 machines.(146) And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in
distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone
seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004,
while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines.(147) An analysis by voter
advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were
in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.(148)
The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press,
white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only
twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.(149) ''The
allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts
with high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government
professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around
Columbus.(150)
By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving
the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process.
Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.(151) A lawsuit ensued, and the
handwritten affidavits submitted by voters and election officials offer a heart-rending snapshot of
an electoral catastrophe in the offing:(152)
From Columbus Precinct 44D:
''There are three voting machines at this precinct. I have been informed that in prior elections
there were normally four voting machines. At 1:45 p.m. there are approximately eighty-five
voters in line. At this time, the line to vote is approximately three hours long. This precinct is
largely African-American. I have personally witnessed voters leaving the polling place without
voting due to the length of the line.''
From Precinct 40:
''I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all

my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four
to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches.
I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.''
Precinct 65H:
''I observed a broken voting machine that was not in use for approximately two hours. The
precinct judge was very diligent but could not get through to the BOE.''
Precinct 18A:
''At 4 p.m. the average wait time is about 4.5 hours and continuing to increase?. Voters are
continuing to leave without voting.''
As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary
restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots.(153) But it was too late:
According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in
Columbus had already given up and gone home.(154) When closing time came at the polls,
according to the Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens who had
waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio law, which stipulates that those in line at
closing time are allowed to remain and vote.(155)
The voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly Democrats. Because of the
unequal distribution of voting equipment, the median turnout in Franklin County precincts won
by Kerry was fifty-one percent, compared to sixty-one percent in those won by Bush. Assuming
sixty percent turnout under more equitable conditions, Kerry would have gained an additional
17,000 votes in the county.(156)
In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives
on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties -- most of them in predominantly black
and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not
disenfranchised by fraud,''(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create
delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late
October that the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''(159)
The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ''there exists
an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines
out the doors.'' Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton
County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared
to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the
Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward.
''I have faith,'' he ruled, ''that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground
will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their
ballots.''(161)
In fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling stations, where
they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic precincts. By the end of the day, thanks

to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list
of 35,000 names from its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to
the survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the polls because
of registration challenges -- even though federal law required that they be provided with
provisional ballots.(163)
VII. Faulty Machines
Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found
themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million
votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In
heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry''
on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated
in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar
''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other
states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on
the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the
Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a
fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260
votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom
638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was
corrected before the certified vote count.)
In addition to problems with electronic machines, Ohio's vote was skewed by old-fashioned
punch-card equipment that posed what even Blackwell acknowledged was the risk of a
''Florida-like calamity.''(170) All but twenty of the state's counties relied on antiquated machines
that were virtually guaranteed to destroy votes(171) -- many of which were counted by automatic
tabulators manufactured by Triad Governmental Systems,(172) the same company that supplied
Florida's notorious butterfly ballot in 2000. In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote
for president at all -- most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction
of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president -- generally in the range of
half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji
-- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If
counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have
been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its
ballots.(174)
Most of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In Cleveland, where nearly 13,000
votes were ruined, a New York Times analysis found that black precincts suffered more than
twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-leaning precincts had
nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning precincts.(176) Last April, a federal
court ruled that Ohio's use of punch-card balloting violated the equal-protection rights of the
citizens who voted on them.(177)
In addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre miscounts known as
''ballot crawl.'' In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily African-American precinct, Constitution Party

candidate Michael Peroutka was credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In
Precinct 4N, where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party
candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik and
Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across Cleveland -- 11M, 3B,
8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ''It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to be cast for
Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party candidate,'' the Conyers report
concludes.(179)
But it's not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to
Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was credited with twenty
percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004,
compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)
VIII. Rural Counties
Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and
minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in
rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good
old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across
southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer,
Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key
indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other
races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the
twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.
Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state
Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than
Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget.
And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than
Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these
twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded
Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten
percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were
unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)
Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket candidates
shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says. ''That just doesn't happen. The
question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?''
They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of
presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is
that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer,
the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve
questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the
president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over

Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean
election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry
to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll
analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into
a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''
How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual
ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical
scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House
Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white
stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI,
described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In
Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55
percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An
investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people
who swear they didn't vote. (186)
In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the
software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to
two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen
machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that
manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized
log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100
percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were
inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to
Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)
The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the
election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet
away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an
unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die
behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a
way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials
-- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale
of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election
officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.
In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an
investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to
declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had
even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown.
(When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials
responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's
determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted
accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties
in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry
received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did
for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the
possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the
locked-down facility.'' (194)
Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like
several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the
measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of
the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush
outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words,
you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay
marriage. (195)
IX. Rigging the Recount
After Kerry conceded the election, his campaign helped the Libertarian and Green parties pay for
a recount of all eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under state law, county boards of election were
required to randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both by hand
and by machine. If the two totals reconciled exactly, a costly hand recount of the remaining votes
could be avoided; machines could be used to tally the rest.
But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to
charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and
secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count.
They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ''random'' sample of three percent used
for the recount.
''If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts,'' said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has
filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. ''They screwed with the
process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full,
countywide hand count.'' (196)
Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In Hocking County, deputy
elections director Sherole Eaton caught an employee of Triad -- which provided the software
used to count punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties (197) -- making unauthorized
modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the Conyers committee
that the same employee also provided county officials with a ''cheat sheet'' so that ''the count
would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand-recount of the county.'' (198)
After Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired.
(199) The same Triad employee was dispatched to do the same work in at least five other
counties. (200) Company president Tod Rapp -- who contributed to Bush's campaign (201) -- has

confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid
hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand.
(202)
Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to
tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the
presidential ballots. (203) If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the
purposes of the recount, it's no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped
skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On
November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be
permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election. (204)
X. What's At Stake
The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the
2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating
allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ''We're in a terrible
fix,'' Rep. Conyers told me. ''We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down
the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That's why our citizens are not up in arms.''
The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith
Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. ''I was a sports reporter, so I
was used to dealing with numbers,'' he said. ''And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an
insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped.''
Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. ''I was stunned by the
lack of interest by investigative reporters,'' he said. ''The Republicans shut down Warren County,
allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a
camera and a few reporters out there?''
Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. ''You can rock the
boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble,'' he said. ''You cannot say: By the
way, there's something wrong with our electoral system.''
Federal officials charged with safeguarding the vote have also failed to contest the election.
''Congress hasn't investigated this at all,'' says Kucinich. ''There has been no oversight over our
nation's most basic right: the right to vote. How can we call ourselves a beacon of democracy
abroad when the right to vote hasn't been secured in free and fair elections at home?''
Sen. John Kerry -- in a wide-ranging discussion of ROLLING STONE's investigation -expressed concern about Republican tactics in 2004, but stopped short of saying the election was
stolen. ''Can I draw a conclusion that they played tough games and clearly had an intent to reduce
the level of our vote? Yes, absolutely. Can I tell you to a certainty that it made the difference in
the election? I can't. There's no way for me to do that. If I could have done that, then obviously I
would have found some legal recourse.''
Kerry conceded, however, that the widespread irregularities make it impossible to know for

certain that the outcome reflected the will of the voters. ''I think there are clearly states where it is
questionable whether everybody's vote is being counted, whether everybody is being given the
opportunity to register and to vote,'' he said. ''There are clearly barriers in too many places to the
ability of people to exercise their full franchise. For that to be happening in the United States of
America today is disgraceful.''
Kerry's comments were echoed by Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National
Committee. ''I'm not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided,'' Dean says. ''We
know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. It should
not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate
elections. That's what we suspect has happened, and we'd like to safeguard our elections so that
democracy can still be counted on to work.''
To help prevent a repeat of 2004, Kerry has co-sponsored a package of election reforms called
the Count Every Vote Act. The measure would increase turnout by allowing voters to register at
the polls on Election Day, provide provisional ballots to voters who inadvertently show up at the
wrong precinct, require electronic voting machines to produce paper receipts verified by voters,
and force election officials like Blackwell to step down if they want to join a campaign. (205)
But Kerry says his fellow Democrats have been reluctant to push the reforms, fearing that
Republicans would use their majority in Congress to create even more obstacles to voting. ''The
real reason there is no appetite up here is that people are afraid the Republicans will amend
HAVA and shove something far worse down our throats,'' he told me.
On May 24th, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried unsuccessfully to amend the immigration bill
to bar anyone who lacks a government-issued photo ID from voting (206) -- a rule that would
disenfranchise at least six percent of Americans, the majority of them urban and poor, who lack
such identification. (207) The GOP-controlled state legislature in Indiana passed a similar
measure, and an ID rule in Georgia was recently struck down as unconstitutional. (208)
''Why erect those kinds of hurdles unless you're afraid of voters?'' asks Ralph Neas, director of
People for the American Way. ''The country will be better off if everyone votes -- Democrats and
Republicans. But that is not the Blackwell philosophy, that is not the George W. Bush or Jeb
Bush philosophy. They want to limit the franchise and go to extraordinary lengths to make it
more difficult to vote.''
The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the
president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a
cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that
the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been
deprived of our faith in democracy itself.
American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and
cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two
elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the
insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully

recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a
government by the people.
Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ''is the right upon which all other rights depend.'' Unless we ensure
that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.
For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.
-1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the
Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times,
November 14, 2004.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&
n
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results
3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal
Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.
http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_
v1.0_usletter.pdf
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald
Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson
County, OR), September 21, 2004.
http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush
bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune
(Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data,
January 4, 2005, pg. 2.
http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News
Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted:
People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election
Assistance Commission,'' September 2005, pg. 10.
http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.
12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes.''
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S.
President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004
Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5
http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf
15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by
Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November 4, 2004.
http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx
19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, "U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine," Associated Press, December
11, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html
Daniel Williams, "Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New
Election," The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls,
Election Fraud, and the Official Count," Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
23) Mitofsky International Web site. http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm

24) Tim Golden, "Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners," The New York Times,
August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004 Presidential Election: Who
Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote
Count Data." FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9
http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times,
November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes.
Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.
http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2,
2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research
and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable
Evidence of Vote Miscount," U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23,

2006. http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf
41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, "Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States," November 2,
2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html
43) John McCarthy, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," Associated Press Online,
November 30, 2004.
44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer
http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates&fn=main-h.htm&cp=PORC
45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30,
2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November
18, 2000.
47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch,
April 30, 2006.
http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B1-02.html
49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,''
Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, "Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush."
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The
Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page
8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary
Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots
Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID
=73195662517954
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times,
September 26, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=1254024000&en=
cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington
Times, October 28, 2004. http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm
63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html
64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered,
October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy
Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.
http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
66) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,"
Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, "Early Returns on Election Reform," George Washington Law Review, Vol.
74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,"
Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges
Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County
Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October
27, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/
NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy
Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.
http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger,
October 26, 2004.
75) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger,
October 26, 2004.
76) Miller v. Blackwell, (S.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004)
http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
77) James Drew and Steve Eder, ''Court Rejects GOP Voter Challenge; Some Counties Hold
Hearings Anyhow; 200 Voters Turned Away,'' Toledo Blade, October 30, 2004.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041030/NEWS09/410300450/-1/NE
WS
78) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v.
Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/petitionforrehearingenbanc.pdf
79) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v.
Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/petitionforrehearingenbanc.pdf
80) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression
Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
Greg Palast, "New Florida Vote Scandal Feared," BBC News, October 26, 2004.
81) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression
Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.
82) Greg J. Borowski, ''GOP Demands IDs of 37,000 in City,'' Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
October 30, 2004. http://www2.jsonline.com:80/news/metro/oct04/271173.asp
83) "The Disenfranchisement of the Re-Enfranchised; How Confusion Over Felon Voter

Eligibility in Ohio Keeps Qualified Ex-Offender Voters From the Polls," Prison Reform
Advocacy Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2004.
http://www.prisonsucks.com/scans/Ohio%20Felon%20Voting%20Rights%20Paper.pdf
84) Preserving Democracy, 64.
Note: Additional reporting contributed to this paragraph.
85) Gardner Selby, ''Hundreds of Texans Ride Bandwagons Around U.S.; Volunteers Say
Election is Too Important Not to Hit the Campaign Trail,'' San Antonio Express-News (Texas),
October 15, 2004.
86) ''Down to the Wire,'' Newsweek, November 15, 2004.
87) Lynda Gorov and Anne E. Kornblut, ''Gore to Challenge Results; No Plans to Concede; top
Fla. Court refuses to order resumption of Miami-Dade County,'' The Boston Globe, November
24, 2000.
http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Gore_to_challenge_results+.shtml
88) Al Kamen, "Miami ?Riot? Squad: Where are they Now?" Washington Post, January 24,
2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31074-2005Jan23.html
89) Al Kamen, "Walking the Talk," Washington Post, April 21, 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042002067.html
90) Secretary of State Directive, No. 2004-31, Section II, September 7, 2004.
91) Tokaji, pg. 1227 and Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1971(a)(2)(B) (2000).
92) Jim Bebbington and Laura Bischoff, ''Blackwell Rulings Rile Voting Advocates,'' Dayton
Daily News. 93) Congress of the United States House of Representatives, Committee on the
Judiciary, letter from Conyers to Blackwell.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohblackwellfollowupltr12304.pdf
94) Catherine Candisky, ''Secretary of State Lifts Order on Voting Forms; Lighter Paper Now
Deemed Acceptable for Registration,'' Columbus Dispatch, September 30, 2004.
95) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2004, Greater
Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition, updated May 9, 2006, page 14.
http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Analyses_Full_Report.pdf
96) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page 5.
97) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page. 1.
98) Lucas County Board of Elections -- Results of Investigation Following November 2004

General Election, April 5, 2005, Richard Weghorst and Faith Lyon.
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/electionsvoter/lucas/LucasCountyInvestigationReport.pdf
99) "Feds Confirm Investigation of GOP Campaign Contributor," The Associated Press State &
Local Wire, April 28, 2005.
100) Mark Naymik, ''Coin Dealer Raised Chunk of Change for Bush,'' Plain Dealer, August 7,
2005.
101) Christopher D. Kirkpatrick, "Noe Indicted for Laundering Money to Bush Campaign,"
Toledo Blade, October 27, 2005.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051027/DEVELOPINGNEWS/51027
023
Mike Wilkinson and James Drew, "Grand Jury Charges Noe with 53 Felony Counts," Toledo
Blade, February 13, 2006.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060213/BREAKINGNEWS/6021301
5
102) Lucas County Report, pg. 2.
103) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
104) Lucas County Report, pg. 10.
105) Lucas County Report, pages 9-10.
106) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
107) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.
108) Lucas County Report, pg. 18.
109) Lucas County Report, pages 18-19.
110) Lucas County Report, pg. 19.
111) Lucas County Report, pages 4, 6.
112) Lucas County Report, pg. 6.
113) "Remarks by the President at Victory 2004 Rally," Seagate Convention Centre, Toledo,
Ohio, October 29, 2004, The White House.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041029-16.html

note: Bernadette and Tom Noe?s last name is incorrectly spelled "Noy" in the official White
House transcript.
114) Help America Vote Act, Title III, Uniform and Nondiscriminatory Election Technology and
Administration Requirements, Subtitle A Requirements, Section 302.
http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt
115) Directive No. 2004-33 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County
Boards of Elections 1 (Sept. 16, 2004.).
116) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division, The
Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf
117) Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, ''Defiant Blackwell Rips Judge; Secretary Says He?d go to
Jail Before Rewriting Ballot Memo,'' Cincinnati Enquirer, October 22, 2004.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/22/loc_blackwell22.html
118) Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell, (N.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004).
And Tokaji, pg. 1229
119)Tokaji, pg. 1231
120) ''Judge, Blackwell, Spar Over Provisional Ballots,'' The Associated Press, October 20, 2004.
121) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western Division, The
League of Women Voters of Ohio, et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04 CV 7622
http://www.moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/lowv/doc15a.pdf
122) David G. Savage, Richard B. Schmitt, "Bush Seeks Limit to Suits Over Voting Rights," Los
Angeles Times, October 29, 2004. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1029-10.htm
123) Judge Julia Smith Gibbons August 2, 2002
Judge John M. Rogers November 27, 2002
Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton May 5, 2003
Judge Deborah L. Cook May 7, 2003
http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/internet/court_of_appeals/courtappeals_judges.htm
124) Darrell Rowland and Lee Leonard, "Federal Agency Distances Itself from Ohio Official;
Blackwell Says Their Provisional-Balloting Positions are the Same," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio),
October 20, 2004.
125) David S. Bernstein, "Questioning Ohio," Providence Phoenix, November 12 -18, 2004.
http://www.providencephoenix.com/features/other_stories/multi_1/documents/04259695.asp
126) Norma Robbins, ''Facts to Ponder About the 2004 General Election,'' May 10, 2006.

http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Facts_to_Ponder.pdf
127) Fritz Wenzel, "Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of November 2nd
Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County," Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334/-1/NEWS
128) Interview with Stephanie Tubbs Jones
129) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004
Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 6.
130) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
131) Ohio Secretary of State Web site, Provisional Ballots; Official Tabulation, November 2,
2004. http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=148
132) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to ?Lost? Voters in Ohio,"
Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
Christopher Hitchens, "Ohio?s Odd Numbers," Vanity Fair.
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/050214roco05?print=true
Additional analysis by Bob Fitrakis, editor of the Columbus Free Press, and Richard Hayes
Phillips.
133) Democracy at Risk, pg. 3.
134) Preserving Democracy, pg. 29.
135) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.
136) Bernstein, Providence Phoenix 137) U.S. Election Assistance Comm'n, Funding for States,
http://www.eac.gov/early_money.asp
and Tokaji, pg. 1222.
138) ''The Battle Over Voting Technology,'' PBS, Online NewsHour, December 16, 2003.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/vote2004/primaries/sr_technology_debate.html
Paul Festa, ''States Scrutinize e-Voting as Primaries Near,'' CNET News.com, December 8, 2003.
http://news.com.com/States+scrutinize+e-voting+as+primaries+near/2100-1028_3-5114062.html
139) Preserving Democracy, pg. 27.
140) Preserving Democracy, pg. 30.
141) Matt Damschroder, chairman of Franklin County Board of Elections.

142) Preserving Democracy, pg. 26.
143) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio,"
Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64737-2004Dec14?language=printer
144) Correspondence with Matt Damschroder.
145) Suzanne Hoholik and Mark Ferenchik, "GOP Council Hopes Rising; Party expects ruling
on peititions will put its candidate on ballot," Columbus Dispatch, March 26, 2003.
146) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.
147) Mark Niquette, "GOP Strongholds Saw Increase in Voting Machines," Columbus Dispatch,
December 12, 2004.
http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2004/12/12/20041212-A1-03.html&rfr
=nwsl
148) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio,"
Washington Post, December 15, 2004.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64737-2004Dec14.html
149) Columbus Free Press editor, Bob Fitrakis.
150) "Voting Machine Allocation in Franklin County, Ohio, 2004: Response to the U.S.
Department of Justice Letter of June 29, 2005," Walter R. Mebane, Jr., February 11, 2006, Page
13. http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/franklin2.pdf
151) Tokaji, pg. 1238.
Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLinecomplaint.pdf
152) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLinecomplaint.pdf
153) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, slip op. At 1 (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2,
2004). http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLineOrder.pdf
154) Washington Post, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Michael Powell
and Peter Slevin, December 15, 2004.
155) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.

156) Affidavit of Richard Hayes Phillips, December 10, 2004.
http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/AffidavitPhillipsShowsKerryCouldWi
nOhio.html
157) Mark Niquette, "Finally, It's Time to Vote; U.S. Appeals Court Overturns Ban, Allows
Challengers Back in Polling Sites," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 2, 2004.
158) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division,
Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-738, page 3.
http://www.ohsd.uscourts.gov/pdf/Spencer.65.ord.pdf
159) James Dao, "The 2004 Campaign: Ohio, G.O.P. Bid to Contest Registrations is Blocked,"
The New York Times, October 28, 2004.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20C11FA39590C7B8EDDA90994DC404482
160) Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell; In the United States District Court for
the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division; Case no. C-1-04-738.
http://www.ohsd.uscourts.gov/pdf/Spencer.65.ord.pdf
161) Dan Horn, Howard Wilkinson, and Cindi Andrews, "Supreme Court Justice Allows
Challengers," Cincinnati Enquirer.
http://www.enquirer.com/midday/11/11032004_News_mday_challengers03.html
162) Tokaji, pages 1237-1238.
163) Democracy at Risk, pg. 20.
164) The Columbus Free Press.
165) "Errors Plague Voting Process in Ohio, Pa." The Vindicator, November 3, 2004, Vindicator
Staff Report http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php
166) Voters Unite catalogues news reports from around the country that give examples of
dysfunctional voting machines, among other election stories.
http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp?sort=date&selectstate=ALL&selectproblemtyp
e=Machine+malfunction
167) The Columbus Free Press.
168) Jim Woods, "In One Precinct, Bush's Tally was Supersized by a Computer Glitch,"
Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 5, 2004.
169) Hitchens, Vanity Fair.
170) Letter from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, to Doug White, President, Ohio

Senate 3 (Feb. 26, 2004).
171) Sixty-eight counties used punch card ballots. Thirteen used optical scan machines. Seven
used touch-screen technology.
172) Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls For FBI Investigation Into Ohio Election," The
Associated Press State & Local Wire, December 15, 2004.
173) Tokaji, Page 1221.
174) Jim Konkoly, ''Volunteers Complete Local Recount,'' Coshocton Tribune, December 18,
2004.
175) New York Times, "Voting Problems in Ohio Spur Call for Overhaul," James Dao, Ford
Fessenden, December 24, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/national/24vote.html?ex=1261544400&en=0e0adbe08ff79
c22&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
176) Ken McCall and Jim Bebbington, ''Two Precincts had High Undercounts, Analysis
Shows,''Dayton Daily News, November 18, 2004.
177) Lisa A. Abraham, "Punch-Card Voting is Illegal," Akron Beacon Journal, April 22, 2006.
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/14404305.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
178) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
179) Preserving Democracy, pg. 57.
180) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
181) Analysis completed by using official tallies on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
Official tallies for Kerry:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=135
Official tallies for Connally:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=138
182) Preserving Democracy, pg. 55.
183. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=135
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=138

184. Letter from Rep. John Conyers to Chris Swecker, assistant director of the Criminal
Investigative Division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. See attached affidavits.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohelecfbifollowupltr12805.pdf
185. Miami County Board of Elections.
186. Confirmed by Bob Fitrakis of the Free Press
187. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.
188. Erin Miller, "Board Awaits State Follow Up," The Evening Leader.
http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/06/news/news.01.txt
189. "Preserving Democracy," pages 58-59.
190. The Associated Press, "News Groups Sue Ohio Elections Chief Over Poll Access,"
Associated Press, November 2, 2004.
and
Mark Crispin Miller, "None Dare Call It Stolen," Harper's, August 2005.
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html
191. Incidents in Warren County were catalogued in a series of articles by the Cincinnati
Enquirer:
Erica Solving, "No Changes in Final Warren Co. Vote Count; E-mails Released Monday Show
Lockdown Pre-planned," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 16, 2004.
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160355/1056
Erica Solving, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland
Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html
Erica Solvig and Dan Horn, "Warren Co. Defends Lockdown Decision; FBI denies warning
officials of any special threat," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 10, 2004.
Erica Solvig, "Warren Co. Recount Goes Public; After Election Night lockdown, security eases
up," Cincinnati Enquirer, December 15, 2004.

192. Erica Solvig, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland
Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html
193. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web
site.
194. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 52.
195. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web
site.
196. Joan Mazzolini, "Workers Accused of Fudging '04 Recount; Prosecutor Says Cuyahoga
Skirted Rules," The Plain Dealer, April 6, 2006.
http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1144312870224340.x
ml&coll=2
197. Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls for FBI Investigation Into Ohio election," The Associated
Press, December 15, 2004.
198. Affidavit, December 13, 2004, Sherole Eaton, Re: General Election 2004, Hocking County.
http://www.truthout.org/mm_01/5.121004.Robersondep.pdf
199. Jon Craig, "'04 Election in Hocking County; Worker Who Questioned Recount is Asked to
Quit," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), June 1st, 2005.
http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2005/06/01/20050601-B3-03.html&chc
k=t
200. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 81.
201. www.opensecrets.org
202. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 82.
203. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 83.
204. Ohio Secretary of State's press office.
205. Count Every Vote Act of 2005
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_493.pdf

206. Dena Bunis, "Senate Limits Immigration Debate," The Orange County Register, May 24,
2006.
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1153484.php
207. Tokaji's blog, Election Law at Moritz, "McConnell's Voter ID Amendment," May 22, 2006.
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006/05/mcconnells-voter-id-amendment.html
208. United States District Court Northern District of Georgia, Rome Division.
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/Order%20Granting%20Preliminary%20Injunction%20emai
l.pdf
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