Northwest Indiana Discussion

NOTE: Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006). Freepress.org

In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted July 30, 2007.


The problem of "undervote." In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them -- it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen.

Some 14.6% of 2004 Ohio votes were cast on electronic machines with no paper trail, rendering them unauditable. But on election night, electronic machines and computer software were used throughout the state to tabulate paper ballots. The contrasts are striking. Officially, Bush built a narrow margin of roughly 51% versus 48% for Kerry based on votes counted on election night. But among the 147,400 provisional and absentee ballots that were counted AFTER election night, Kerry received 54.46 percent of the vote. These later totals came from counts done by hand, as opposed to counts done by computer tabulators, many of which came from Diebold.

Since the 2004 election, a handful of media organizations, civil rights groups, attorneys, historians and authors have been investigating how the president won in Ohio by 118,775 votes. These inquiries have had two primary focuses: examining Republican-led voter suppression tactics and problems with the vote count, suggesting vote count fraud.

On Election Day in many Ohio cities, the turnout -- or voter accommodation rate -- in these traditional Democratic strongholds was markedly lower than in nearby suburbs, where Republicans have tended to be the majority. In Columbus, the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association sued saying African-American voters in Franklin County were disenfranchised because urban precincts received fewer voting machines per capita than the whiter, wealthier suburbs. They noted urban precincts had many more voting machines during the spring primary.

For instance, in Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert -- which they later retracted -- ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.

"The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred," said Arnebeck. "You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result.