Sunday, August 12, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
Dear Joe Strupp:
On June 12, 2006, Editor and Publisher included an article about voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election. You may be interested in taking another look at that article.
Here is an excerpt:
Carl Weiser, government and public affairs editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer, agreed. “I read it and nothing in there was really new,” he said. “The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy.”
In the weeks after this article was published, I sent several messages trying to determine the identity of these “folks who know Ohio elections best.” I never got an answer.
However, this week, on The Cincinnati Enquirer’s political blog, Carl Weiser has written the following ( http://tinyurl.com/yufns5 ):
The groups behind the lawsuit say they have uncovered evidence of possible tampering in Clermont County, a traditionally Republican-leaning county where Bush won easily.
For example: oval-shaped stickers were inexplicably found on at least 10 ballots in Clermont County, for several several state and local races as well as president and the same-sex marriage ballot issue.
The tiny white stickers would have blocked an optical scanner from counting a vote for the pencil mark that’s visible below. Two of those ballots from Pierce Township were preserved and observed by Enquirer reporters Thursday.
Brian Green, an elections attorney at Brunner’s office, confirmed that the stickered presidential ballot – which negated a vote for Kerry – is perplexing and that the Bush oval above it clearly has a darker, wider pencil mark. None of the other ovals marked on the two-page ballot are as dark or outside the oval to the same extent.
Clermont County elections officials said they no longer use stickers to remake spoiled or mismarked ballots. The county has since purchased newer optical scanners that would not count stickered ballots.
Clermont County Board of Elections Director Mike Keeley, who became director in March 2006, said he is unaware of anyone misusing stickers during the 2004 election. The county’s newer optical scanning equipment would not count votes if stickers were placed on ballots today, he said.
“That would show as an invalid ballot,” he said Thursday. “That was old equipment, old procedures, old process.”
The county’s former Board of Elections director, Daniel Bare, did not return phone calls for comment, but Bob Drake of Anderson Township, a mathematical education professor at the University of Cincinnati, signed a sworn affidavit saying Bare and other county election workers acknowledged stickers were used to cover stray marks on ballots during the 2004 election.
In an interview with The Enquirer, Drake said he and others “noticed some ballots had stickers completely covering (a) Kerry vote. A different shade of pencil where the Bush bubble was filled in. ... There should’ve been an investigation. There was criminal activity.”
The blog post is an accompaniment to a piece in their print version. ( http://tinyurl.com/2ekylc )
My political website discovered Bob Drake back in September, 2006. Only now has The Enquirer seen fit to write about this, and only eleven days after The Columbus Dispatch covered the story. ( http://tinyurl.com/28wy9z )
From my perspective, it looks like there is more than meets the eye with Weiser’s comments from a year ago.
Thanks,
The Dean of Cincinnati
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