Explosive New Vote Fraud Developments Continue To Rock Ohio And Florida
March 23, 2007
Breaking news in vote fraud cases in both Ohio and Florida are feeding a firestorm of controversy that is likely to
continue escalating, with major implications for the 2008 election and the future of e-voting machines.
In Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, the newly elected Secretary of State, has received two of the four resignations she requested
from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE). The two Democrats on the Board, Edward Coaxum, Jr. and Loree Soggs,
have complied with her call for their departures from Cleveland's scandal-ridden election authority.
However, Robert Bennett, who chairs both the Cuyahoga BOE and the Ohio Republican Party, has thus far refused Brunner's
request. So has Sally Florkiewicz, Bennett's fellow Republican on the BOE. Should they continue with their refusal to
resign, Brunner has threatened to hold public hearings, in the wake of which she could force the resignations.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that a criminal investigation is underway which centers on the Cuyahoga BOE's
conduct of the November 2006 election. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason has turned again to Erie County Prosecutor
Kevin Baxter who recently won felony convictions of two BOE workers for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for
another criminal investigation. Baxter will be investigating “possible criminal wrongdoings” related to ballot security
and the scanning of absentee ballots.
A Cleveland State University Center for Election Integrity study has exposed various election irregularities in Cuyahoga
County in the 2006 election. Among the most egregious were the BOE’s failure to secure the dual keys (one for the Dems
and one for the Republicans) required for the vote counting rooms; that they allowed shared computer passwords; and that
they allowed an unexplained cable connection to the county’s vote counting computer.
The Free Press also has viewed a video shot by Jeff Kirkby showing Cuyahoga County election workers downloading the
county’s election data onto portable laptops that were allegedly allowed to go home with BOE employees. These practices
raise serious concerns over election data security.
Massive computer failures during the May 2006 primary led in February 2007 to the resignation of Michael Vu, who was the
executive director of the Cuyahoga BOE at the time. Both Bennett and Vu pushed for the $20 million purchase of Diebold
voting machines over strenuous objections from election protection activists, whose concerns were cablecast in the HBO
documentary “Hacking Democracy” shown nationwide just prior to the November 2006 election.
On March 21, the Dayton Daily News reported that “After two days of tests, the results are in: About 2,500 people cast
ballots in November on 56 malfunctioning electronic touch-screen voting machines in Montgomery County, said Steve
Harsman, county board of elections director.”
The Free Press has previously reported that there were nearly 30,000 undervotes in Montgomery County during the 2006
gubernatorial race, meaning an abnormally high 13.67% of all voters reportedly recorded no vote for the state’s highest
office. (See chart posted with this article at the Freepress.org web site courtesy of Pete Johnson and CASE-Ohio)
Similar undervote problems exist in Adams, Darke, Highland, Mercer and Perry counties.
Meanwhile, Jonathon Simon has informed the Free Press that the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) is analyzing data from
Adams County as part of a project to compare exit polls to actual votes. In the 2004 election, the exit polls showed
John Kerry winning, while the actual machine and computer tabulated results gave the state to Bush by 118,000 votes.
Meanwhile, in Florida, internal memos from the ES voting machine company indicate an e-voting machine created an undervote problem, according to Wired News. In Sarasota
County, 18,000 ballots recorded no votes in a hotly contested congressional race.
“But the memo, which the company sent to Florida election officials before the state's September primary, revealed that
the iVotronic machines had a flaw that sometimes caused machines to respond slowly to a voter's touch ‘beyond the normal
time a voter would expect to have their selection highlighted.’ The memo stated that a software upgrade was required but
couldn't be certified before the September election. In its absence, ES sent election officials a warning sign to post at polls advising voters that they might need to press the screen for
several seconds before their votes would register,” wrote Wired News.
Reginald Mitchell, lawyer for People for the American Way, told Wired News that “this memo is the smoking gun….”
The six counties under investigation in Ohio all used Diebold machines suggesting that both major suppliers of e-voting
machines have similar flaws that create undervotes.
These waves of breaking news about serious problems in the conduct of the 2004 and 2006 elections, and in the
performance of electronic voting machines in the two states that have decided the last two presidential elections, make
it a virtual certainty that we have barely begun to see the full extent of what has really been done to the American
democratic system.
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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of three books on the presidential election of 2004, and continue to cover breaking
election protection issues at www.freepress.org.