Ohio :  Recount Is On  
With an apathetic media and political establishment, we may never learn the answers  
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor  

     “I would like to welcome you to the Ukraine,” lawyer Susan Truitt said on December 4 to a rally of American citizens gathered in the capitol—the capitol of Ohio , that is. Truitt, a co-founder of the Ohio Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, spoke in the shadow of a statue of Ohio Republican William McKinley, America ’s 25th President.  
     While the world’s attention has been focused on election fraud in the Ukraine, one of the world’s youngest democracies, where a revote has recently been ordered, a disturbingly similar situation has been virtually ignored in America , the cradle of modern democracy. The opposition leader, Senator John Kerry, pulled out the day after the election, breaking his promise to fight to ensure that every vote would be counted. With that, the political establishment lost all interest.  
     Yet, two minor party candidates—David Cobb of the Greens and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarians—are demanding a recount in Ohio, and plunked down the money to pay for it three weeks ago.  
     There are also larger questions of electoral integrity. The variety of irregularities in Ohio alone is so extensive that it filled a 14-page letter that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sent to Ohio Secretary of State Kent Blackwell on December 2, posing 34 separate questions about the election.  
     “Collectively, we are concerned that these complaints constitute a troubled portrait of a one-two punch that may well have altered and suppressed votes, particularly minority and Democratic votes,” the letter stated.  
     “First, it appears there were substantial irregularities in vote tallies.... Second, it appears that a series of actions of government and non-government officials may have worked to frustrate minority voters.”  
     The scope of these irregularities has led Truitt and two other attorneys—Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis—to prepare a suit challenging the election before the Ohio Supreme Court. A challenge, unlike a recount, can examine all forms of interference in an election, provided they are substantial enough to alter the outcome.   
     The corporate media’s apathy has been striking. Joe Strupp, a senior editor at Editor and Publisher, found that none of the editors surveyed at Ohio’s major papers “find the allegations highly convincing or plan to devote major resources to them”—a circular form of reasoning that may also defeat the lawsuit challenging the election, Truitt admitted on Pacifica Radio’s “Sunday Salon,” hosted by Larry Bensky.  Strong circumstantial evidence casts doubt on Bush’s victory. But without the legal discovery process to get harder evidence, the case may be rejected before it’s begun.
     Adding to the Catch-22 aura hanging over everything, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell—a statewide co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign—delayed certifying the election until December 6. A recount (as opposed to a challenge) cannot be filed until after another seven day “announcement period”—meaning it cannot begin before the day Ohio’s Electoral College votes are certified. An attempt to start the recount earlier was denied by Federal Judge James Carr, because the recount wasn’t being sought by Kerry, the only one who could suffer the “irreparable harm” needed to hold the recount earlier.  
     The assumption that American elections are sound beyond question appears deeply entrenched in the political establishment. But on-the-ground observers—such as election protection volunteer Pat Nave, formerly attorney for the Port of Los Angeles —have a different perspective.  
     “The thing that struck me the most was how sloppy everything was,” Nave recalled. “Part of it was because there was so much vote effort going into registering people until the very end.” The Ohio system couldn’t cope with the massive registration drive that added hundreds of thousands of new voters to the rolls.  
     The board of elections in Lucas County , where Nave worked, was “working all night long every night” updating its voting roles with new registrations. “One night we were working around nine at night,” Nave recalled. “We got a call from board of electors, asking if we had anyone we could send over to help them enter data.”  
     The result was “very bad data entry,” Nave noted, which meant a lot of wrong addresses, a lot of people who didn’t get their absentee ballots, and a lot of people who weren’t on the precinct rolls—even though some of them were  on the lists posted outside the precincts to show who had voted at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.  
     Many who didn’t get their absentee ballots returned to vote in their home precincts, and Nave took calls from a number of them. “Somebody form New York called, somebody from Chicago , from Missouri, from Florida ... They cared enough about the election that they came home when they did not get their absentee ballots.”  
     They called in part because Blackwell had ruled that they wouldn’t be allowed to vote if an absentee ballot had been sent out.  
     His ruling was not overturned until 3 p.m. on Election Day.  
     Any reporter in the state could have discovered this brewing mess in an hour or two, well before Election Day. Yet, a month after Election Day, Ron Royhab, editor of the Toledo Blade, told Editor and Publisher, “We have not found any irregularities.”  
     Perhaps he should have consulted the letter from Congressional Democrats.   
     He would have learned about the lockdown of the Warren County administration building, barring reporters from observing the counting. “Officials claimed they were responding to a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of 1-10, and that this information was received from an FBI agent,” the letter noted. The FBI denied having any such information.  
     He would have learned about three precincts in Perry County , where the number of votes tallied exceeded the number of voters who signed in.  
     He would have learned about Mahoning County , where “numerous voters reported that when they attempted to vote for John Kerry, the vote showed up as a vote for George Bush.”  
     He would have learned about Democratic State Supreme Court Candidate Ellen Connally, a heavily-outspent black Cleveland judge who out-polled Kerry in a number of rural counties: Auglaize County, 7312 to 5729; Brown County, 7407 to 7058; Butler County, 59,532 to 54,185; Clermont County, 29,464 to 25,318; Darke County, 8817 to 6683; Highland County, 6118 to 6012; Mercer County, 6607 to 4924; Miami County, 17,206 to 17,039; and Putnam County, 4,785 to 4,348.  
     “While you may have found an explanation for these bizarre results,” the House Democrats wrote, “it appears to be wildly implausible that 5,000 voters waited in line to cast a vote for an under-funded Democratic Supreme Court candidate and then declined to cast a vote for the most well-funded Democratic Presidential campaign in history.”  
     The House Democrats’ list is hardly exhaustive. It focuses on the hardest evidence of the most suspicious occurrences.  Far more questions have been raised by ordinary citizens communicating on the internet. But the gatekeepers at Ohio’s daily newspapers are content in their cocoons. The same applies to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, MSNBC and all the rest, Bensky observed on Sunday Salon.  
     “They have decided not to pursue this,” he said.  
     “[W]e have found very little evidence that anything has happened in the election that didn’t happen in every other [ Ohio ] election,” Ben Marrison, editor of The Columbus Dispatch, told Editor and Publisher.  
     Perhaps. But perhaps that’s just the problem. Pat Nave has seen it close up, and he thinks it’s time for a change—not just in Ohio, but nationwide. He’d like to see an end to Tuesday voting—a relic of long-vanished18th Century market days. And he’d like to see mandatory registration at age 18, if not mandatory voting.  
     “There are any number of benefits they lose if they don’t register for selective service. It seems we should do something similar to register to vote,” Nave said.  
     He’s seen elections in Chile and Australia, where voting is mandatory.  
     “You don’t have negative campaigning,” he stressed. “The purpose of negative campaigning is to keep people away from the polls who’ll never vote for you.” In the end, “It hurts the ability of those elected to lead,” since negative campaigning undermines trust in whoever gets elected.  
     And then there’s the electoral college....  
     Electoral reform is Nave’s new passion. And he was just one of thousands who saw America’s dysfunctional system close up and personal this year.  
     Welcome to the Ukraine.