Philzone.org Discussion Board: Archive 2004: Politics Archive 2004: Election Challenge Filed in Ohio Supreme Court

http://www.nbc4i.com/politics/3992559/detail.html

Challenge Filed Hours Before Electoral College Ohio Vote
Court Could Decide To Hear Challenge

POSTED: 11:05 am EST December 13, 2004
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Challengers of the state's presidential election results asked the Ohio Supreme Court on Monday to review the outcome hours before the Ohio delegation to the Electoral College was to cast ballots for president and vice president.

If the court decides to hear the challenge, it can declare a new winner or throw out the results. The challengers said they also plan to ask the court to stop the Electoral College delegation's vote until their case can be decided.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus lawyer working for the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy, accused President Bush's campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."

Jackson said the challengers noticed Bush generally received more votes in counties that use optical-scan voting machines and questioned whether the machines were calibrated to record votes for Bush. <more>

kick

Hey Will, If Kerry's campaign doesn't dispute the election why do you?


>>Kerry issued a statement last week saying reports of voting problems should be investigated to ensure there are no doubts in future elections. His campaign does not dispute that Bush won the election, but supports the recounts.



http://www.boston.com/dailynews/348/nation/Election_challenge_filed_hours:.shtml




Einstein worded this situation nicely, "Insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

>>>"Insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."


UHollis the Great worded it this way, "Sanity is the playground for the unimaginative."

Einstein had no reason to distrust the universe

There's ample evidence here, besides your answer is the first part of the Kerry Camp quote you posted

Kerry has always said he doesn't dispute the outcome of the election,
he has never said he believed that the outcome was Bush being reelected

Bush winning via Fraud means that the true outcome of the Election was a Kerry victory

thus there is no reason to dispute the outcome!

by the way,
have you not seen the letter Kerry sent to the 88 Ohio election boards?

---

quote:

December 10, 2004
Re: Presidential Recount

Dear Director and Deputy Director:



Enclosed please find a copy of a letter personally signed by John Kerry appointing me as his legal counsel with respect to the recount for President and Vice President of the United States, with full authority to act on behalf of him and John Edwards, including appointing witnesses to attend the recount. Also enclosed is a letter personally signed by John Kerry designating witnesses to attend the recount in your county.



On behalf of John Kerry and John Edwards I am making the following requests regarding the conduct of the recount:



1. The selection of precincts for the three percent hand count should be according to a scientifically valid random sampling method. I am aware that you have received a letter from Votewatch regarding this issue with an offer by that organization to provide resources to ensure that the sampling method is valid. We urge you to accept this offer of assistance or otherwise be able to demonstrate that the method employed by the Board to select the precincts for the three percent hand count is scientifically valid.


2. We request that each candidate be given the opportunity to select at least one precinct for a hand count, either as part of or in addition to the three percent hand count.


3. For those counties that use touch screen voting systems, we request that the three percent hand count include a hand count of three percent of the ballot images stored in the each of the redundant memories of the machines selected for the recount and on any paper trail for the machines.


4. We request that the Board provide the opportunity for candidates participating in the recount to have the programming and calibration of the tabulating system, scanners, and electronic voting machines verified by independent experts.


5. We request that the test used by the Board to verify the logic and accuracy of the computer tabulating program be performed for each precinct, including any separate absentee precinct. Further, the test should include testing for under and over voted ballots.


6. We request that computer printouts of the recount results include the under and over votes recorded in each precinct.


7. John Kerry and John Edwards hereby request to have their witnesses visually inspect all ballots for which your voting system has not recorded a vote for President and Vice President, i.e. the undervote and overvote ballots. If the Board does not agree to a visual inspection of these ballots, then we hereby request to visually inspect all ballots pursuant to R.C. § 3515.04 and OAG 74-103.


8. We request to inspect envelopes and related paperwork for all uncounted provisional and absentee ballots. This includes documents stating the reason or reasons that a ballot was not counted and the documentation to support the same.


9. In order to verify candidate rotation, we request to inspect the ballot page assemblies of all punch card voting devices and the ballot faces of all touch screen voting machines used at the polls or at the Board’s office.


10. For those counties where the names of Nader and Camejo were visible to voters on the ballots, ballot pages or faces of voting machines, i.e. where the names were not covered over with a sticker or blacked out or the ballots were not reprinted without their names, we request to know whether any votes were cast for Nader and Camejo for President and Vice President.


11. We request that absentee ballots which were postmarked by election day, November 2, 2004, and were received by the board no later than November 12, 2004, be counted if the voter did not vote at the polls.


The above requests are in addition to any other requests that may be made by our witnesses.

If you should have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Very truly yours,


cc: Daniel J. Hofheimer

Kerry-Edwards State Counsel, Ohio
Donald J. McTigue

---

>>>Kerry has always said he doesn't dispute the outcome of the election,
he has never said he believed that the outcome was Bush being reelected

Bush winning via Fraud means that the true outcome of the Election was a Kerry victory

thus there is no reason to dispute the outcome!

When did Kerry say this or is this what you think Kerry thinks?

Bill you are missing the point. The point is that a large and growing number of americans are having doubts about the legitimacy of the election process WHATEVER the results are. This is not about putting Kerry in the white house, this is about restoring a sense of democracy to a lot of people. This should concern both parties. It is suspicious that republicans are not concerned, and would rather ridicule us then help to put our fears to rest. I urge you to ask your representatives to push for an open inquiry into election questions. Lets put this issue to rest.

I think perhaps the folks that are against this know deep down theres a possibility their guy Shrub rigged the election, and are afraid to face the fact their guy is a slime-ball asshole. (As is Kerry, by the way)

"When did Kerry say this or is this what you think Kerry thinks?"

He didn't specifically say this. This is my opinion based on his actions

He is not making the same mistake as Al Gore did in 2000

He has waited for the people to bring this action on, by themselves
He didn't make it about his own winning or losing
He has allowed it to be about our Democracy
Now it's about us winning or losing our right to vote

and this is why it's going to work

*

you can see the case documents here:
http://joeorgren.com/MossvBush1.pdf

but remember,
this is just a general outline of the charges.
it is for the Supreme Court's use in deciding on whether to hear the case(which it most likely will)

once the trial begins
all the specific evidence will be brought out

When I was in WPB florida the local news said early voters were complaining that when they selected Kerry on the touch screen, Bush would get checked. Never heard about it again.

If Kerry's campaign doesn't dispute the election why do you?<<

maybe Kerry's vote WASN'T suppressed, stolen or manipulated. Many have reason to believe otherwise with respect to their own vote.

In Ohio, we rage on...

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/996
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/990

Ohio vote count battles escalate amidst new evidence of
potential criminal
activity
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
December 18, 2004

The epic legal battle over Ohio's presidential vote count is
back in the
state Supreme Court, with an election challenge claiming
George W. Bush was
wrongly declared the winner on Nov. 2 and seeking a
court-ordered reversal
of that victory.

Meanwhile, efforts to recount Ohio's vote may have been
fatally tainted by
the Republican Party, raising questions of what the GOP has
to hide, and
prompting demands for criminal prosecution.

New affidavits point to possible criminal activity by top
Ohio election
officials, raising yet more questions about the 2004 vote.
Rhonda J.
Frazier, a former employee of the Ohio Secretary of State's
office, has
confirmed in an affidavit taken by Cynthia Butler, working
with
freepress.org, that the Office had secret slush funds.
Frazier says it also
failed to comply with the requirements of "The Voting Reform
Grant" that
required all the voting machines in Ohio to be inventoried
and tagged for
security reasons.

"I was routinely told to violate the bidded contracts to
order supplies from
other companies for all 17 Secretary of State offices
throughout the State
which were cheaper vendors, leaving a cash surplus
differential in the
budget," Frazier states, "After complaining about the
office's repeated
practices of violating grants and contracts I was fired."

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has come under intense
fire for his
role in officiating the disputed Ohio balloting and vote
count. Blackwell
served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign while running
an election he
says went "smoothly."

Blackwell's role has been central to a week that started
with a bang and
rapidly escalated to a dramatic last-minute filing at the
state Supreme
Court Friday afternoon, December 17.

On Monday, December 13, with Rev. Jesse Jackson at hand,
citizen activists
filed the now-famous landmark Moss V. Bush action demanding
the Ohio Supreme
Court vacate the apparent victory for George W. Bush and
award the state's
20 electoral votes -- and thus the presidency -- to John
Kerry. The filing
lists a litany of problems with the November 2 balloting and
vote count. The
official tally showed a victory for George W. Bush of some
119,000 votes.
But the filing claims the real outcome was a 134,000 vote
victory for John
Kerry, and it demands the Court install a slate of
Democratic electors.

The filing was followed by a unique Congressional hearing
staged at Columbus
City Hall. Conducted by U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the
nearly four-hour
gathering hosted a wide range of testimony charging
manipulation,
intimidation and fraud surrounding the Ohio election. Most
pointed to
Secretary of State Blackwell's "clear conflict of interest"
as election
administrator and Bush-Cheney co-chair. Among other things,
in the lead-up
to Nov. 2 Blackwell circulated a taped message asking Ohio
voters to approve
a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and
abolishing spousal
benefits for unmarried partners. That partisan position came
amid multiple
orders from Blackwell to local election officials on how to
conduct the
actual vote count.

At noon on Monday, 20 Republican electors convened at the
Ohio statehouse
and certified their votes for Bush, which were then mailed
to Washington. On
January 6, they will be evaluated by Congress. It is now
possible that for
the first time since 1877, there will be a formal challenge
to those
electoral votes by Democratic members of Congress.

High among the charges against Blackwell was the fact that
he delayed
certifying the Ohio vote count to make it impossible for a
meaningful
recount to occur before the electors met. If this was a fair
vote, wondered
Rev. Jackson, "what are they hiding?"

Jackson plans to be fully visible on January 3 at a large
rally in Columbus,
Ohio sponsored by Rainbow/PUSH.

But far more serious charges than a mere delay surfaced at
Conyers' hearing.
A letter from the Shelby County Board of Elections, obtained
through the
Freedom of Information Act, admitted that data critical to a
meaningful
recount had been discarded, possibly illegally. Sworn
testimony from
election observers in Greene County indicated that ballots
had been left
loose on tables in an unlocked, unguarded building, open to
manipulation and
theft, prior to a recount. And in Lucas County and Hocking
County, it was
revealed that technicians from the Diebold and Triad
companies had
inexplicably taken control of voting machines and dismantled
them, rendering
verifiable recounts impossible.

On Wednesday, December 15, U.S. Representative John Conyers
posted an
affidavit from Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer
science and a
voting technology consultant. In Professor Jones' opinion,
the bizarre
behavior by the Triad Company, which provides computer
software and voting
machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, may have tainted the
entire recount
effort. A Triad employee took apart a computer used in the
recounting
process and inserted new parts as well as alleged
modifications of the
software. "As a result, the incident in Hocking County could
compromise the
statewide recount and undermine the public's trust in the
credibility and
accuracy of the recount," Jones stated in an affidavit.

As evidence of fraud, manipulation and sabotage of a recount
poured in,
citizen activists filed for a Temporary Restraining Order
demanding the Ohio
Supreme Court step in to protect ballots and voting records
from further
destruction.

On Thursday, Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyers denied the
original Moss v.
Bush filing, saying it had wrongly joined actions on two
separate elections,
the one for president and one for Chief Justice of the Ohio
Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court race of Moyer and Ellen Connally had been
part of the
filing because citizen litigators found fraud in its conduct
as well.

The litigation team worked all night in order to refile the
two challenges
on Friday, December 17. These challenges on both the
Bush-Kerry race and on
the Supreme Court case were filed separately, reinstating
the original
thrust of Monday's action and asserting that Kerry had won
the Ohio vote, as
had Connally.

With court battles escalating, attempts to conduct a
meaningful recount have
proceeded. Democratic, Green and Libertarian party officials
have helped in
training volunteers to examine voter records and what to
look for as the
Ohio vote tally continues. Hundreds of volunteers are
observing at election
boards around the state trying to get a grasp on what
actually happened
November 2. Amy Kaplan, head of the Green Party's Franklin
County recount,
reported to the Free Press that two of the electronic voting
machines in
Franklin County had faulty cartridges that generated error
messages despite
being in use on Election Day.

The observers' work has been frustrated and the recount
tainted by destroyed
records, compromised evidence, and by private vendors who
have
"re-programmed" machines in both Lucas and Hocking Counties.

Despite his early concession, Kerry has now issued a letter
to election
boards in all 88 Ohio counties asking a series of questions
about the vote
count. Thus, charges that Republicans are hiding an outright
theft have
gained increasing media attention, as have charges that
deliberate and
illegal destruction of records has been rampant.

Where this will all lead remains unclear. An escalation of
court battles is
the only certainty. The presidential election of 2004 is by
no means over.