Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said
today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage.
It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the
ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern
of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State]
Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while
claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of
the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson
for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment 'Issue 1,'
and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source
for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris
playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it.
Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt
said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and
none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy
and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a
paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data.
Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines
without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have
against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry
with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no
tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the
posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."
Bob Fitrakis, an
attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection
Coalition, Fitrakis said today: "There were far fewer machines in the
inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen
people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American
areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election --
like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The
absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the
third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush
was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's. [more]
Additionally
Twenty GOP-dominated Ohio counties provided wrong information to former
felons about their voter eligibility. In Hamilton County, home of
Cincinnati and the Republican Taft family, officials told numerous
former felons that a judge had to sign off before they could vote,
which is blatantly false.
In Cincinnati, some 150,000 voters were moved from
active to inactive status within the last four years for not voting in
the last two federal elections. This is not required under Ohio law,
but is an option allowed and exercised by the Republican-dominated
Hamilton County Board of Elections. [more]
Pictured Above: (left) Uncle
Tom Puppetician Kenneth Blackwell- Ohio Secretary of State and Bush
Campaign Co-Chair. Pictured (right) -- an absentee ballot mailed by the Florida
Republican Party in July. While Gov. Jeb Bush reassured Floridians that
touch screen voting machines were reliable, the Republican Party sent
the opposite message to some voters: it urged Miami voters
to use absentee ballots because touch screens lack a paper trail and
cannot "verify your vote." [more]
