Election 2004: Stolen or Lost

Many of us fear that the Ohio election was stolen because people – like talk-show sleuths, blogger number-crunchers, forensic attorneys, crusading professors and partisan activists – keep telling us so. We don't even know most of these people, yet we gladly forward their e-mails and web links, their pronouncements, analyses, essays and statistical exercises. While their credentials may not be that impressive, we listen to their conspiracy theories because – frightened by the direction our country has taken – we want to believe them. 

As an old-style investigative reporter, I, too, was alarmed by charges that outright fraud might have changed the outcome of the most important presidential election in recent times. So I recently traveled to Ohio – where I connected with a group of attorneys who were fighting to have the Ohio presidential results overturned, and the state – and, by extension, the presidency – awarded to Kerry. In legal pleadings known collectively as the "Contest" these attorneys are not shy about using the F-word: "While a variety of methods were used to perpetrate the election fraud of which there is clear and convincing evidence in the form of the exit polls, ... it is likely that traditional easily detectable means were one of the principal methods of the election fraud."

Strong words indeed. Among the evidence supporting them:

• Specific instances in which strange or troubling things happened when people voted or while votes were being counted.
• The discrepancy between exit polls and the final result.

This week, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., released a report that catalogues widespread problems in the Ohio vote. The report concludes that the "massive and unprecedented" voting irregularities in Ohio were in many cases caused by "intentional misconduct and illegal behavior." Sounds like fraud to me.

Conyers' report is considerably tamer and more cautious than earlier pronouncements out of his office, and certainly more so than many of the allegations being circulated on the internet. Much of his report, however, is based on charges emerging from the Contest. Let's see how such charges hold up under close scrutiny.

Voting Irregularities

Charge: Misallocation of voting machines

Finding: True

Intentional? Probably not

The Contest petition lists specific counties where voting irregularities occurred, including Franklin and Trumbull: "In Franklin County there was a discriminatory assignment of more voting machines per registered voter to precincts with more white voters than African-American voters. ..."

William Anthony is the chairman of the Franklin County board of elections. As an African American and a Democrat himself (in fact, he is the county chairman and works as a union representative) Anthony resents the suggestion that Franklin County authorities somehow worked to help Bush. "I worked my ass off in those precincts," he says of African-American areas of the county.

A precinct-by-precinct historical comparison of registered and actual voters, and of voting machine assignments, does show that some precincts with a large African-American population ended up with fewer machines per person than some mostly white precincts. But Anthony points out that Franklin County faced a number of challenges. For one thing, it was using very old electronic voting machines that under new state law will be defunct by the next presidential election, when every county will be required to have a paper trail for recounts. Given the short lifespan of the machines, it didn't make economic sense to buy more of them. So it was a matter of allocating a scarce resource. That resource was stretched thinner by an increasing population. Franklin County had a spurt of growth in outlying areas, with blocks of apartments sprouting recently where cornfields had been. Suddenly, authorities had 29 additional precincts to conside – requiring approximately 200 more machines.