A Dumb Donkey Report

By Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press. Posted July 12, 2005.

The Democratic National Committee's investigation into Ohio's 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party's 'election protection' efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn't fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.

The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio's cities during the 2004 presidential election. It cites and spends most of its time analyzing the most visible problems: from shortages of voting machines in minority precincts, to unreasonable obstacles to voter registration, to disproportionate use of provisional ballots on Election Day among new voters and Democratic constituencies, to inadequate poll worker training and election administration, to poor post-Election Day record keeping.

But the DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable — even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines, known as DREs. The DNC asked for access to the new electronic voting machines and their software, but was denied by local election officials and the private manufacturers. The report leaves the matter there.

It is statements like this one, on page 189, and a failure to follow-through that make the report more than a disappointment to election protection workers, voter rights advocates and those grassroots activists who worked for John Kerry's campaign. Speaking of the new electronic voting machines, the DNC report states, that "many of the county boards (of elections) do not actually control the electronic records created during the tallying process." When the Fairfield County Board of Elections was asked for election results, they merely forwarded data from a private vendor.

Since county vote totals are tabulated on computers and sent directly to the Secretary of State's office — who has real-time access to those figures — you might expect the report to address the question of whether the 2004 vote count was susceptible to fraud. It doesn't.

The DNC says it sought access to the computers used to record and tabulate Ohio votes, but those same county boards of election that didn't control the data -- and the voting machine manufacturers who did — declined, citing "security concerns" (p.187) and "vendors pointed out their extreme discomfort with providing this sort of access to a partisan organization."

That might sound reasonable, if you don't recall — and the report does not recall — that the chief executive of the nation's largest electronic voting machine manufacturer, Diebold's Walden O'Dell, was not only a top-tier fundraiser for George W. Bush, but also promised in an infamous August 14, 2003 fundraising letter to Republicans that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Also, both ES&S and Triad corporations, the latter which tabulated ballots in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, have well-established Republican ties.

The DNC report is filled with omissions of that magnitude and dismissals of the work of citizen-activists who — with no help from the DNC, or Kerry campaign — fought for a fair accounting of the 2004 vote after Election Day.

Consider these paragraphs from an introductory letter to the report from Donna Brazile, the chair of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute.

"Although voters across America voiced concerns which questioned the fairness and the accuracy of the 2004 general election, President George W. Bush's narrow victory in Ohio (a pivotal state) provided sufficient electoral votes to ensure his re-election. There was a myriad of litigation surrounding the general election in Ohio that targeted controversial conduct on the part of the Office of the Secretary of State.

"Following the election recount, the House Judiciary Democratic Staff published an exhaustive report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" that is replete with anecdotal evidence of numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters."

People who put their lives on hold and went to Ohio to work for John Kerry will shake their heads. Brazile cites "a myriad of litigation" that her party and candidate fought, did not fund and sought to undermine. Moreover, the reference to the House Judiciary Committee's Democrat Staff inquiry as "anecdotal" is an insult to voting rights activists and volunteer lawyers who conducted public hearings -- at their own expense, not the DNC's — and took sworn testimony from more than 1,000 voters who cared enough and volunteered to testify under oath and file affidavits. The hearings were anything but anecdotal; they were perhaps the largest group of people to testify under oath about elections in the history of the state. The first two hearings in Columbus occurred within two weeks of Election Day. Four other hearings in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Warren occurred more than a month before the DNC could conduct its phone survey from the east coast.

Steven Rosenfeld is senior producer of The Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio. Bob Fitrakis is a political science professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at Columbus State Community College and editor of the Free Press.

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