WERE OHIO'S RESULTS RIGGED AGAIN

BRAD FRIEDMAN, HUFFINGTON POST - With so much going on, few have noticed
the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the
crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term
for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly
impossible, that perhaps even the mainstream corporate media will have
no choice but to look into it.

As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are
on the case. I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five
initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial
proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right
was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell
research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration
(he recently plead guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing
it hard alongside progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and
Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race
correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the
poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the
Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the
final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by Reform Ohio Now -- a
bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for electoral
reform . . . On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian
Right were against, the final results were impossibly different -- and
we mean impossibly -- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the
election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

. . . This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates
of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in
44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employing the same Diebold
Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State
decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the
largest test of its kind ever held.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/the-staggeringly-impossib_b_10589.html


BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMAN, FREE PRESS, OH - The Dispatch was
somehow dead accurate on Issue One, and then staggeringly wrong on
Issues Two through Five. Sadly, this impossible inconsistency between
Ohio's most prestigious polling operation and these final official
referendum vote counts have drawn virtually no public scrutiny. Though
there were glitches, this year's voting lacked the massive
irregularities and open manipulations that poisoned Ohio 2004. The only
major difference would appear to be the new installation of touch screen
machines in those additional 41 counties.

And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues
Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead
accurate for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible
statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines
on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked
by someone wanting to change the vote count.

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget
forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every
Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future
of American democracy.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559