Ohio Recount Rigging Case Goes to Court

The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that the trial of the three election workers accused of rigging the 2004 presidential election recount in Cuyahoga County is finally underway. As you may recall, this was the case where poll workers 'randomly' selected the precincts to recount by first eliminating from consideration precincts where the number of ballots handed out on Election Day failed to match the number of ballots cast and, then opening the ballot boxes in private and pre-counting until they found cases which would match up. What is interesting here is that they have already admitted doing this and that it was clearly counter to the letter and the spirit of the law, but still insist it wasn't really 'wrong,' presumably since they only did it to avoid having to go to the bother of a full recount as required by law.

Comments

Re:Hypocrisy

[Teresita]

The initial count showed her trailing Rossi by 261 votes Recount #1 diminished that lead to only 42 votes. Recount #2 gave her a 10-vote lead. Enter the courts, tossing in some ballots, tossing out others. The final results had Christine Gregoire ahead by 130 votes

Washington State

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Dino Rossi asked a judge to review the election. The (Republican) judge in (conservative) Chelan County heard the evidence and ruled that the (Republican) Secretary of State had followed the law. Rossi did not appeal, accusing the (fractured) state Supreme Court of bias.

The biggest problem with that election was outrageous sloppiness in (Democratic) King County. It looks more like sloppiness than fraud, given that the problem is that they misplaced and didn't count thousands of ballots that were likely to have favored Gregoire. The Secretary of State excoriated them for that and other screwups. (They also tried to cover up a spectacular failure to keep a record of how many absentee ballots came in).

For more about King County, see blackboxvoting.com.

Counting twice, but fewer boxes

[MarkusQ]

That said I don't even know how this could be considered a reasonable argument since they had to count the boxes twice if I understand thing correctly.

The law says they have to manually recount a randomly selected 3%, and if that comes out close enough they can do the rest of the recount by running it through the machine again. Otherwise they would have had to manually recount them all.

So they did a quick search for precincts that might match (e.g., skip the ones where the total number of votes was way off or that otherwise looked fishy), counted some of them until the had 3% that would pass muster, and that became their "random sample" for the public recount.

What is amazing is that they (&, IIRC, the voting machine tech that helped them) admitted this to the people doing the recount.

--MarkusQ

Re:Obsession with Ohio

[skymt]

I was skeptical, so I did a web search. This Boing Boing post has links to coverage from CNN and CBS. I guess he really said it.

Here's the exact quote (from Wally O'Dell, Diebold CEO and former Republican fundraiser):

I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.

Re:The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting...

[Gregg M]

Did you RTFA? Prosecutors do not allege vote fraud or that the mishandling of the recount affected the outcome of the presidential election.

That's why it's not a big deal. But it doesn't stop you or the editors from making a mountain out of a molehill.

Did you RTFA? They said they didn't think it would change the out come of the election, because they weren't able to do a full recount. The recount they did was rigged. They said they were only following standard procedure. If that's not going to effect the outcome I don't know what is. The flawed recount still gave Kerry more votes. If this was done in every county in Ohio it could have swung the election.