"Cumulatively, the serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards."

"Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any Senator, Congressperson, any President, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 Corporation."

"It’s not about Republicans, but our republic. It’s not about Democrats, but our democracy. It’s not about an election result, but about an election system that’s broken and needs to be fixed."

Having spent at least 100 hours on the Internet reading election horror stories and Congressman Conyer’s 102-page report, I could not say for sure whether I believed voters intended to elect John Kerry or George W. Bush on November 2, 2004. When I started to assemble the data I had gathered I thought I could find "the answer." Here’s what happened.

First, there was the issue of polls. Before the election, the major pollsters called the election for John Kerry. When John Zogby announced on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on the eve of the election that he was calling the election for Kerry, I thought that cinched it. Kerry would win. Princeton Professor Sam Wang daily assembled the latest state polling data into a meta-analysis, which--on the polling data alone--showed Bush the winner on the basis of decided voters. He called the election for Kerry, however, based on some assumptions concerning undecided voters. As it turned out, the meta-analysis based on decided voters, in his words, "captured the exact final outcome." Later, after the election, Professor Wang analyzed the pre-election polls to determine how close they were to the final outcome. In Ohio, the pre-election polls had predicted the outcome. In Florida, those polls were off by a margin of 4 percent.

Early exit poll data showed Kerry to be the winner. The early data, however, were removed from Internet websites as the election returns came in favoring Bush. As the returns came in, the pollsters conformed their polls to the returns. Pollsters, who trade on the accuracy of their polls, do not like being seen to be wrong. Generally, exit polls accurately reflect how the voters really voted so when the exit polls that had seemed to show Kerry winning were "conformed," I, along with many others, suspected election fraud.

Experience working in the Mendocino County polls over the last six years, both with the old punch card system and with the new Diebold voting equipment, gave me some confidence in my own ability to evaluate the stories I had been reading on the Internet. I believed the optical scanning Diebold equipment we used in Mendocino County, which reads paper ballots, tallying the votes as the paper is fed into a free-standing unit, was tamper-proof because two tapes of the tally are printed out in the local precincts BEFORE the units are connected to a central computer in the County offices. One tape must be taped to the door of the polling place and the other is sealed in an envelope that the Precinct Inspector returns to the county office. The numbers on the tapes, not the numbers conveyed from the precinct to the central computer, are the official numbers.

In Volusia County in Florida, where the voting equipment is the same as that used in Mendocino County, Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org found elections officials destroying "poll tapes" that had been signed by the precinct workers. She actually tangled with one official over a trash bag containing the original tapes, which she had requested under the Florida Public Records Act. It turned out that the results the county had submitted to the Florida Secretary of State were not from the Nov. 2 tapes, but poll tapes printed out on Nov. 15. With the two sets of poll tapes in hand, Harris and her Blackboxvoting associates found differences of hundreds of votes. She said there was a clear pattern of all the anomalies favoring George W. Bush. Apparently the elections officials ignored the safeguards provided by Florida law.

In Ohio, Professor Wang’s analysis and the outcome agree. However, it appears that votes were "added" to enhance the outcome, giving Bush a wider margin in the popular vote. In Miami County, a Republican stronghold 65 miles West of Columbus, Ohio, a state where Bush won 51 percent to 49 percent, there are some precinct level data available on the website Freepress.org., compiled by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. His data show some strange anomalies. For example, there were 7,394 more voters than in 2000, and if the recorded numbers are accurate, Bush "won" 7,002 of their votes, or 95 percent. When compared to the 2000 voting patterns, that seems improbable. In 2000, Bush had won in Miami County by a margin of 24.40 percent. In 2004, he won by a margin of 31.88 percent.

The turnout raises other questions as well. Of the 33 precincts, Gore had won in 8, whereas in 2004, Kerry won in only 1 precinct. When Phillips compared the 2000 vote to the 2004 vote, precinct by precinct, he found more new votes attributed to Bush in 2004 than would be indicated by Bush/Gore margins for those precincts in 2000, in keeping with his finding that 95% of the "new" votes went to Bush. Further, some precincts showed improbably high voter turnout: 98.55 percent (all but 10 registered voters), 94.27 percent, and 88.42 percent. A later canvass of the precinct with the 98.55 percent turnout turned up 25 registered voters who had not voted after less than 50 percent of registered voters had been contacted. I found no information as to how "extra" votes were, or could have been, added.

One or two county voting records may not indicate fraud. But the anomalous findings do need to be investigated. If the Miami findings indicate fraud, then fraud may be present in other counties as well. To determine whether the turnouts reported to the Ohio Secretary of State are accurate requires careful scrutiny of the voting rosters in each precinct. By first looking at the rosters, the absentee ballot envelopes, and the provisional ballot envelopes, the numbers of voters can be determined. Then those numbers must be compared to the numbers submitted to the Secretary of State. If the reviewers, who must not be partisan, find discrepancies between the sum of the voters on the rosters, absentee ballot envelopes and provisional ballot envelopes, there must be a fraud investigation.

We need to know.

Janie Sheppard is a Ukiah resident.
AS PRINTED IN THE UKIAH DAILY JOURNAL, SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 2005, p. 5-6

For more information on election fraud, see the Solar Bus Election Fraud and Reform Center