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Letter to Howard Dean about the DNC election report and the evidence of vote fraud in Ohio

by Open-Publishing - Monday 27 June 2005
3 comments

Elections-Elected USA

Dear Governor Dean:

I
have much admiration for you and high hopes for your success as DNC
Chairman. And I think that you would have made a fine, if not a great
President. However, I have to tell you I believe that you are making a
big mistake by embracing the recent DNC report on the 2004 Ohio
election, which significantly under-plays the extent to which that
election represents a threat to our democracy.

In particular,
the repeated assurances of the lack of evidence for election
determining fraud is misleading, gives a false sense of security to
U.S. citizens, and in my opinion fails to encourage the kind of
political climate that is needed in this country to facilitate
meaningful election reform - given the fact that our country’s
government and news media is heavily dominated by the Republican Party.
I would think, as a minimum, before making such assurances in this high
profile report, that care should have been taken to adequately address
the prevalent arguments that fraud did indeed play a major role in
determining the outcome of the Presidential election in Ohio, and
therefore the United States.

But this report did no such
thing, as I intend to make clear in detail below. I believe that the
following issues are relevant to my point:

1. Failed, unlawful recount, and lack of cooperation from the Secretary of State
First
and foremost, an assurance to the citizens of this country that fraud
played no major role in the outcome of this election should be based on
a full investigation. A fair, lawful and transparent recount of the
votes, as mandated by Ohio law would be the first step in this process.
Yet, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell did everything in his
power to prevent such a recount.

Samples for the recount were
chosen in a non-random manner, contrary to state law, and every effort
appears to have been made to ensure that results of the 3% sample
recount would match election day results, so as to prevent the
occurrence of county-wide hand recounts. Perhaps the most flagrant
example of this was Sherole Eaton’s testimony that a Triad technician
in Hocking County modified a vote tabulator prior to the recount and
advised election officials on how to manipulate voting machinery to
ensure that a hand recount would match the machine recount: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml
Ms. Eaton was fired from her job as a result of this transgression. How
many others witnessed similar events but did not possess enough courage
to risk their livelihood in order to make their observations public, as
Ms. Eaton did?

Furthermore, Mr. Blackwell has steadfastly
refused to testify under oath with regard to the numerous
“irregularities” associated with the Ohio election, and has made every
effort to bar the public from access to essential documents that might
shed some light on what happened on election day. Under these
circumstances, statements to the effect that evidence of massive
election fraud sufficient to swing the election “have not been found”
are misleading and inappropriate, especially when given extra
credibility by virtue of the fact that these statements are made by the
opposition party. On the contrary, the burden of proof should be put on
Blackwell to show that fraud was not involved.

2. Implausibly low voter turnout in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County
On
page 3 of Section IV of the DNC report, there is a discussion about
how, in general, voter turnout is strongly related to the ratio of
machines per voter. This is an important point and it makes sense
because, as pointed out later in the DNC report, insufficient numbers
of machines per voter can result in reduced voter turnout because of
voters leaving the voting lines when they are unable to wait several
hours to vote. However, in Cuyahoga County the normal relationship is
inexplicably reversed, so that voting machines per voter is negatively
associated with voter turnout. Other than to note this as a fact, the
DNC report does not comment further on this very strange finding.

Richard
Hayes Phillips, a statistical expert in identifying statistical
anomalies whose findings have been widely publicized, has stated that
there are at least 30 precincts in Cleveland with inexplicably low
voter turnout, ranging as low as 7.1%. In addition, he noted at least
16 precincts where votes intended to be cast for Kerry were apparently
shifted to other candidates: http://blog.democrats.com/node/812

, likely a result of non-aligned ballots, similar to the infamous Palm
Beach County “butterfly ballot” of 2000. He then goes on to calculate
that a 60% turnout in heavily Democratic Cleveland would have resulted
in 22,000 additional votes for Kerry.

I have not thoroughly
evaluated these claims of Phillips, but certainly voting machine
tampering could explain the otherwise unexplained dual findings of low
voter turnout in Cleveland and the negative relationship between voting
machine allocation and voter turnout in Cuyahoga County. I believe that
this anomaly deserves serious investigation.

3. Voter suppression through insufficient machine allocation - Franklin County
So-called
“low voter turnout”, in addition to being due to actual low voter
turnout, could also be due to fraudulent discarding of ballots (as
suggested in point # 2, above), or it could be due to insufficient
machine allocation, resulting in voting line waits of several hours,
and the consequent need for many voters to leave before voting. There
were numerous reports of this problem in Ohio on election day, most
prominently documented in John Conyers’ U.S. House Judiciary Committee
Democratic Staff Report http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010605Y.shtml
. These reports came from predominantly minority and Democratic
precincts, especially from Franklin County, where lines of between two
and seven hours long were reported.

A study that looked at voting machine allocation per voter by precinct partisanship http://copperas.com/machinery
/ showed that machine allocation was far less adequate in precincts
that voted for Kerry. In fact, it appears from looking at the
scatterplot that there were about 30 Kerry precincts where there was
less than one machine per 440 registered voters, while there were no
Bush precincts in this category. This same study showed that “voter
turnout” decreased substantially in Franklin County as machine
allocation decreased. And an extensive analysis by Elizabeth Liddle
came to a similar conclusion http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&ta...
. This is consistent with the DNC report analysis for all of Ohio, as
noted above. Furthermore, as Bob Fitrakis reveals, all this happened
while 68 voting machines were available in Franklin County but held
back http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704Fitrakis/111... .

Richard
Hayes Phillips calculates that this low voter turnout induced in
Franklin County through the misallocation of voting machines resulted
in approximately 17,000 lost votes for Kerry in Columbus alone. This is
easy to understand, given the relationship between inadequate numbers
of voting machines and “low voter turnout”, and the fact that this
problem occurred very disproportionately in minority and Democratic
precincts.

So, what does the DNC report have to say about this?
It says that those who decided to leave the polls early because of long
lines were split evenly between Bush and Kerry voters. This is simply
unbelievable, given the highly disproportionate allocation of voting
machines to Republican precincts. I think that statement is disturbing.

4. Anomalies in southwestern Ohio
Three
large, heavily Republican counties in southwestern Ohio (Clermont,
Butler, and Warren) provided Bush with a margin of 132,685 votes. These
counties provided Bush with a margin of only 95,575 votes in 2000 - a
difference of more than 37,000 votes compared to 2004, a year in which
Kerry did considerably better than Gore in 2000. Each of these counties
were among the top ten of Ohio’s 88 counties with regard to Bush vote
margin compared to Bush’s vote margin in 2000.

Could this mean
that these counties were trending even more Republican in 2004 than in
2000? Perhaps. But consider that the Democratic candidate for Chief
Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Ellen Connally, a liberal
African-American from Cleveland, and little known in southern Ohio,
achieved 43.3% of the vote in these three counties in 2004, compared to
only 31.0% for Kerry http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/connally.htm and actually polled more than 13,000 more votes than Kerry, though state-wide she ran considerably below Kerry.

Also
consider the fact that part of the reason for Bush’s excess vote margin
in the three counties was an extra-ordinarily large increase in voter
registration from 2000, including a 30% increase in Warren County. Yet,
according to the DNC report, an increase in voter registration was
supposed to favor Kerry in 2004. Furthermore, Warren County was the
site of the infamous lockdown, rationalized by the bogus excuse of
national security, which allowed Republican officials to tally the
Warren County vote in private http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/10/loc_warrenv... .

What
does the DNC report have to say about this? First, the report goes to
great lengths to show that Kerry’s vote percentage state-wide was
highly correlated with the percent of African-Americans, the percent
vote for the Democratic Senatorial candidate, Eric Fingerhut, and the
percent not voting “yes” on Issue 1 (the ban on gay marriage). It then
goes on to suggest that because these trends fit the expected pattern,
the evidence is strongly suggestive that widespread fraud did not
occur.
The correlation of Kerry’s vote percent with that of the
Democratic Senate candidate, the percent of African-Americans in a
precinct, and not voting yes on issue 1 should not be a surprise. But
Kerry only lost Ohio by 2.1%. Therefore, it is entirely plausible that
there could be slight anomalies from the expected pattern that could
account for much if not all of Bush’s 2004 vote margin, and yet would
do little to diminish the overall pattern. The DNC report does not
specifically mention the comparison of Fingerhut’s performance in
Clermont, Butler, and Warren Counties, versus Kerry’s performance.
Fingerhut polled 36.1% of the vote statewide, compared to 24.5% of the
vote in Clermont, Butler, and Warren Counties http://election.sos.state.oh.us/results/SingleRaceSumma...

. Again, much less of a span than the differential for Kerry, who
polled 49% statewide, versus 31.0 percent in Clermont, Butler, and
Warren counties.

5. Late vote surge in Miami County
In
Miami County on election night, after 100% of precincts had reported,
an additional 19,000 ballots were reported, giving Bush an additional
vote margin of about 6,000, while changing the total Bush and Kerry
percentages by no more than three hundredths of a percent http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
. What makes this additionally suspicious is that Miami County reported
a 20.9% increase in turnout for 2004, compared to 2000, despite a gain
in population of only 1.4%, AND Miami County reported the second
largest vote gain for Bush of Ohio’s 88 counties (2nd to Butler
County), compared to his performance in 2000. The DNC report has
nothing to say about this.

6. Vote switching in Mahoning County
According
to the Washington Post, an investigation identified 25 electronic
voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, which transferred an
unknown number of votes from Kerry to Bush http://www.ballotintegrity.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard....
. This was part of a larger national pattern, for which a review of the
national Electronic Incidence Reporting System (EIRS) determined that
87 out of 94 reports of electronic vote switching to EIRS favored Bush http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
. The post report goes on to state “Due to lack of cooperation from
Secretary of State Blackwell, we have not been able to ascertain the
number of votes that were impacted or whether the machines
malfunctioned due to intentional manipulation or error.”

What
does the DNC report have to say about this? In Section VII, on
electronic voting, it notes that it is not possible to determine the
baseline accuracy of DRE machines. Then, in Section IX, “Experience on
the Ground in Ohio”, the vote switching in Mahoning County is covered
in exactly ten words. Also, one sentence is allocated to this issue in
Section X of the report.

7. As yet uncounted ballots
There
remain 106,000 ballots uncounted, including over 92,000 for which
machine tallies have not indicated a choice for President, and about
14,000 uncounted provisional ballots http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/10...

. Most of these come from areas where Kerry voters predominated. The
DNC report does not specifically say how many uncounted ballots remain,
though it does note that counting them all could not possibly overturn
the election. That is true, when considered as an isolated issue.
However, when combined with all the other issues that the DNC did or
did not address in its report, these ballots could make the difference.

In conclusion, the DNC report barely touched on many widely
publicized issues (only a portion of which I have covered in this
letter) that suggest that fraud could have or was likely to have made
the difference in the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. Addressing
other issues, while failing to address these issues does not provide
assurance that fraud was not pervasive in the 2004 election, though the
DNC report suggests exactly that. The facts that Kerry won the Ohio
exit poll by a statistically significant 4.2% and that no cooperation
in investigating the possibility of fraud is forthcoming from the
Secretary of State’s Office, add much additional weight to this
problem. In my opinion, this is the most important issue facing us at
this time, because until this issue is addressed we are unlikely to
ever have a Democratic Congress, President, or Judiciary. Therefore, I
beg you to distance yourself from this report and adopt a more
assertive stance towards one of the most serious crises that this
country has ever had.

http://www.democraticunderground.co...

Forum posts

  • Your full of crap !

  • Thanks for your thoughtful critique of our work in the DNC Ohio 2004
    report.

    All I will say about your overall argument that the report does not
    take into account everything that is known about the 2004 election in
    Ohio is that that is correct. The report did not have in its scope to
    try to gather evidence regarding all of the administrative decisions
    and processes involved in the election. So, for example, we did not
    seek to gather documents regarding the handling of voter registrations
    coming in shortly before the election, even though we expected that
    mishandling of those would be related to voting problems. Indeed, it
    seems from what we did find regarding especially provisional ballots
    that mishandling of voter registrations was a problem. But resource
    constraints drove the decision to limit the scope of the data
    collection in that way. We were and are mindful that the study we did
    was neither the only one nor the last. Others with advantages such as
    subpoena power and a longer time horizon we hoped would be able to
    push more insistently into such questions. Also, even though the
    report includes descriptions of election-day problems and voter
    protection efforts in parts of the state (especially Cuyahoga County),
    it does not attempt a census of all the reports of that kind that have
    been produced. The DNC report was not framed as a synthesis but as an
    effort to get analytically sharp answers about specific questions.

    Here are some comments regarding each of your numbered points.

    "1. Failed, unlawful recount, and lack of cooperation from the
    Secretary of State": We used a data file containing election returns
    and information about voter registration and turnout in precincts
    that, as I understand it, came from the Secretary of State’s office.
    I did not personally acquire the data. As the DNC report states, Eric
    Greenwald had that job. I believe that that file was supposed to
    reflect the latest version of all the information, including revisions
    based on recounts in precincts where those occurred. We went through
    several versions of that data file, as our analysis turned up problems
    in it. There were horrendous problems with data from Lucas County,
    which traced to records being incorrectly combined in the file from
    the SoS (I determined that by comparing the SoS data to a canvass file
    we received from Lucas County). A few other counties apparently had
    similar problems. Lucas is the only one I worked out all the details
    for myself, before receiving revised data from the SoS. Up to the
    penultimate version of the file that was used to produce the results
    appearing in the DNC report, there were many outliers for Butler
    County that I was told stemmed from a permuted records problem like
    the one in the Lucas County data. I did not have time to verify that
    with information other than the SoS data, as the deadline was
    approaching and I needed to redo all of the statistical analysis to
    use the corrected data. The number of oddities and outliers in the
    analysis of the Kerry-Bush vote split fell considerably between the
    penultimate and the final version of the data used for the DNC report.

    The files we used to run the analysis reported in the DNC report,
    except for information about precinct racial composition (which the
    DNC does not wish to release), are available from my website, at
    http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/Ohio2004/OhioDNC/

    "2. Implausibly low voter turnout in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County": We
    found many anomalous results in Cuyahoga County. The significant
    negative coefficient for the effect of voting machine provision on
    voter turnout (precinct report Table 3) is striking but small.
    I did not emphasize it because it does not appear to be associated
    with large practical declines in voter turnout, but you are right to
    call attention to the anomaly. Cuyahoga was also unusual in the
    analysis of the Kerry-Bush vote split. Only in Cuyahoga was a higher
    proportion voting for the anti-gay marriage amendment associated with
    a higher share of votes for Kerry, and there were unusally many
    outlier precincts in Cuyahoga (precinct report Tables 34 and 35). We
    remark in the DNC report that the results observed for Cuyahoga County
    warrant further investigation.

    "3. Voter suppression through insufficient machine allocation -
    Franklin County": You state the following:

    "So, what does the DNC report have to say about this? It says that
    those who decided to leave the polls early because of long lines were
    split evenly between Bush and Kerry voters."

    I don’t believe such a claim occurs anywhere in the DNC report. The
    Voter Experience Survey (Section III) finds that across the state
    between 2 and 3 percent of voters left the polls due to long lines and
    did not return. The precinct analysis of the effect of voting machine
    provision on voter turnout produces a comparable estimate. The sample
    size in the Voter Experience Survey is too small to make a reliable
    estimate of the partisan breakdown of the voters who said they left
    the polls due to long lines.

    "4. Anomalies in southwestern Ohio": You mention that the DNC report
    does not present results specifically for Clermont, Butler, and Warren
    Counties. The results for all counties are available in the file
    checkpres2simnlN.Rout that is included in the file DNCreplic1.zip,
    downloadable from my website mentioned above. Here are the results
    for the three counties you mention. I’m also including results for
    Miami County, which is the topic of your point 5.

    These are robust binomial logistic regression model estimates,
    matching those reported for three counties in precinct report Table
    34. Variable "dsenlogit04" is the logit of the vote for Fingerhut,
    "I1logit" is the logit of the vote Yes on Issue 1, and "VANHAAprop" is
    the proportion African American.

    county 9 : BUTLER

    Choice 1 : kerry04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 0.407 0.0201 20.3
    dsenlogit04 0.931 0.0198 47.1
    I1logit -0.203 0.0189 -10.7
    VANHAAprop 1.340 0.1150 11.7

    LQD sigma: 1.115918
    TANH sigma: 1.037107

    Number of Observations: 288
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 0

    county 13 : CLERMONT

    Choice 1 : kerry04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 0.241 0.0368 6.54
    dsenlogit04 0.841 0.0263 32.00
    I1logit -0.158 0.0326 -4.84
    VANHAAprop 1.790 0.6040 2.96

    LQD sigma: 0.9000457
    TANH sigma: 0.827516

    Number of Observations: 191
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 0

    county 55 : MIAMI

    Choice 1 : kerry04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 0.538 0.0488 11.00
    dsenlogit04 0.923 0.0402 23.00
    I1logit -0.223 0.0510 -4.38
    VANHAAprop 0.603 0.4200 1.44

    LQD sigma: 1.083368
    TANH sigma: 1.011146

    Number of Observations: 82
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 0

    county 83 : WARREN

    Choice 1 : kerry04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 0.451 0.0488 9.24
    dsenlogit04 0.855 0.0326 26.20
    I1logit -0.331 0.0414 -8.00
    VANHAAprop -0.121 0.0899 -1.35

    LQD sigma: 1.259254
    TANH sigma: 1.152096

    Number of Observations: 157
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 0

    The only unexpected result is the negative estimate for the
    coefficient for VANHAAprop in Warren County, but that estimate is not
    statistically significant. I decided to highlight only statistically
    significant deviations from the expected coefficient signs. There are
    no outlier precincts in any of these four counties.

    You write the following.

    "Also consider the fact that part of the reason for Bush’s excess
    vote margin in the three counties was an extra-ordinarily large
    increase in voter registration from 2000, including a 30% increase in
    Warren County. Yet, according to the DNC report, an increase in voter
    registration was supposed to favor Kerry in 2004."

    In fact we observe that larger increases in registration from 2002 to
    2004 mostly went with higher proportions of votes for Kerry, but
    larger increases in voter turnout from 2002 to 2004 mostly went with
    higher proportions of votes for Bush. Regarding the increase in
    turnout, the Summary of Principal Findings in the precinct report
    states, "Increases in voter turnout above the rates expected based on
    the 2002 general election were strongly associated with the proportion
    voting Yes on Issue 1 (opposing gay marriage)." Other evidence in the
    report shows that where registration increased sharply during 2004, so
    did the proportion of voters forced to cast a provisional ballot (see
    the provisional ballot survey conducted in Cuyahoga County, Sections
    IV and V, and the analysis of data from Franklin County, at the end of
    Section VI). So part of what happened was that Republican GOTV
    produced better results than Democratic GOTV did, and part of what
    happened is that Democratic registration efforts were thwarted by
    inadequate (to say the least) election administration.

    "5. Late vote surge in Miami County": For analysis of the Kerry-Bush
    vote split in Miami County see the preceding item. We lacked data
    about the number of voting machines in each precinct for Miami County,
    so data from that county are not included in the precinct report
    analysis that compared turnout in 2002 to turnout in 2004 (precinct
    report Tables 6 and 8). For analysis that includes Miami County see
    the file checkprecturnout2mN.Rout included in the file DNCreplic1.zip,
    downloadable from my website mentioned above. Here are results from
    that file for "Opt Central" counties. Variable "vlogit02" is the
    logit of turnout in 2002 and "I1logit04" is the logit of the vote Yes
    on Issue 1.

    [1] "Opt Central"

    Choice 1 : votescast04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 1.040 0.0179 58.00
    vlogit02 0.671 0.0155 43.40
    I1logit04 0.194 0.0303 6.42

    LQD sigma: 2.340966
    TANH sigma: 2.136888

    Number of Observations: 593
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 4

    county place
    4337 GEAUGA HUNTSBURG TOWNSHIP PRECINCT B
    7951 MIAMI CONCORD TOWNSHIP SOUTH EAST PRECINCT
    7952 MIAMI CONCORD TOWNSHIP SOUTH PRECINCT
    7953 MIAMI CONCORD TOWNSHIP SOUTH WEST PRECINCT

    GEAUGA & ACA & -5.14 \
    MIAMI & ABX & -6.95 \
    MIAMI & ABY & 5.02 \
    MIAMI & ABZ & 5.83 \

    There are four outlier precincts, three of which are from Miami
    County. Two of them have substantially higher turnout than expected
    based on 2002 and support for Issue 1 and one has substantially lower
    turnout.

    "6. Vote switching in Mahoning County": In the analysis that related
    the Kerry-Bush vote split to the vote for governor in 2002, no
    Mahoning precinct is an outlier (precinct report Tables 30—33). The
    analysis that compares the Kerry-Bush vote split to other 2004 votes
    find nothing unusual in parameters estimated using the precinct data
    from Mahoning. Here are the results for Mahoning from
    checkpres2simnlN.Rout.

    county 50 : MAHONING

    Choice 1 : kerry04 Estimates and SE:
    Est SE.Sand t.val.Sand
    (Intercept) 0.870 0.0194 44.90
    dsenlogit04 1.120 0.0269 41.50
    I1logit -0.298 0.0458 -6.51
    VANHAAprop 1.040 0.0813 12.80

    LQD sigma: 1.255465
    TANH sigma: 1.179296

    Number of Observations: 311
    Number of observations with at least one zero weight: 0

    county SPC precinct std.resid
    7331 MAHONING ACV YOUNGSTOWN CITY SECOND WARD PRECINCT L 3.672540
    7333 MAHONING ADK YOUNGSTOWN CITY THIRD WARD PRECINCT H -3.164071
    7536 MAHONING AQV YOUNGSTOWN CITY SIXTH WARD PRECINCT I -3.921959

    Even though there are no outlier precincts in Mahoning, there are
    three precincts in Mahoning County that have notably unususal results.
    The summaries printed in checkpres2simnlN.Rout list every precinct
    that has a studentized residual with magnitude greater than 3.0 (a
    precinct that’s an outlier has a residual of magnitude greater than
    4.0). You can see the three precincts that had Kerry-Bush vote split
    results that were that unusual, relative to the estimated model. In
    two of the precincts the vote for Kerry was unusually low and in one
    the vote for Kerry was unsually high.

    "7. As yet uncounted ballots": As you observe, we did extensive
    analysis of the residual vote. Unavailable data prevented us from
    doing anything regarding uncounted provisional ballots.

    You state, "The facts that Kerry won the Ohio exit poll by a
    statistically significant 4.2%...." We decided not to do anything
    with the exit poll data once it became clear we would not be able to
    find out the precincts they used (we tried pretty hard). That meant
    we would have no new evidence to add to the extensive public
    controversy on the topic. The DNC study therefore takes no position
    regarding the exit polls. My own opinion, based on closely following
    the extensive controversy and talking to various people, is that the
    exit polls in Ohio had a Democratic bias. But that’s just my opinion.

    Walter Mebane

    * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - *
    Walter R. Mebane, Jr. email: wrm1@cornell.edu
    Professor office voice: 607/255-3868
    Department of Government cell: 607/592-0546
    Cornell University fax: 607/255-4530
    217 White Hall WWW: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/
    Ithaca, NY 14853-7901
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