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

2 Months is a Long Time

[Quilted Porcupine]

On when they would do a full hand-count, if needed: "Our plan was to regroup after Christmas and just work through it." That quote strikes me as awfully suspicious itself. If the election results were in dispute, waiting a couple months to actually start counting all the ballots by hand seems incredibly lax, at best.

OK

[Black Parrot]

Does this mean we'll be seeing criminal charges against others who subvert the voting process, say by shipping machines with different software than they submitted for certification, or trying to obstruct voting on election day?

Re:Hypocrisy

[wpegden]

In other words, the Democrats, who lost by a narrow margin, did not request the recount. If there'd been any real question about the outcome, they would have done so. So that's not what's at stake.

I'm not sure about this. In this particular case, you may well be right that there was no real question about the outcome---however, I don't think that necessarily follows from the fact that Democrats didn't challenge the votes. Sure, I agree that in cases where the vote counts are very close, the losing major party will often challenge the vote, hoping that a few incidental errors will be corrected in their favor. On the other hand, I think a losing major party will rarely, if ever, launch a concerted challenge over a bigger issue in voting: for example, challenging the idea evoting (as it is now) or broader voting procedures, even if they potentially stand to gain from doing so in that particular election. Both big parties stand to benefit from the "brave new world" of e-voting and Diebold, etc., and I think they realize that. Neither is willing to launch any sort of crusade to destroy it. Only the political outsiders (greens, libs, socialists, whoever) are in the position where the voting establishment will never work for their benefit, and so they are the only ones who really want to challenge it.