Emphasize peep! (The peep we’ve all been waiting for 🙂

Kerry campaign scrutinizes Ohio
Checks provisional ballots, other issues
By Scott Hiaasen for The Plain Dealer.

Lawyers with John Kerry’s presidential campaign are gathering information from Ohio election boards about uncounted ballots and other unresolved issues from last week’s election.
Attorneys say they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry’s promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted. They describe this effort, which began this week, as a “fact-finding mission.”…
Dan Hoffheimer, the statewide counsel for the Kerry campaign, said the goal is to identify any voting problems to prevent them in the future – and quell doubts about the legitimacy of the Ohio election being raised on the Internet.
“We’re not expecting to change the outcome of the election,” Hoffheimer said. “We want to be sure that the public knows what really happened.”
The campaign’s inquiries come against a backdrop of increasing hysteria among Internet activists who, in chains of e-mails and articles, claim that Ohio’s election was so riddled with problems that the outcome may not be legitimate.
For example, a confusing counting method used in Cuyahoga County’s election totals wrongly suggests that more than two dozen suburbs had more votes than voters. And a computer glitch in Franklin County added nearly 3,900 phantom votes for Bush in one precinct…
The Kerry campaign has compiled a list of more than 30 questions for local election officials, asking about the number of absentee and provisional ballots, any reports of equipment malfunctions on election night, and any ballots that still listed third-party challenger Ralph Nader as a candidate. (Nader was removed from the ballot by Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.)

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Nice job Donna!
She makes the really excellent point that, if the Repubs had lost, due to any reason whatsoever, you can bet they’d be fighting to recount every single vote.
I hope there’s somebody listening out there.
Kerry and Edwards: are you listening?!?

Worst Voter Error Is Apathy Toward Irregularities
By Donna Britt for The Washington Post.

Is anyone surprised that accusations of voter disenfranchisement and irregularities abound after the most passionately contested presidential campaign in memory? Is anybody stunned that the mainstream media appear largely unconcerned?
To many people’s thinking, too few citizens were discouraged from voting to matter. Those people would suggest that not nearly enough votes for John Kerry were missed or siphoned away to overturn President Bush’s win. To which I’d respond:
Excuse me — I thought this was America.
Informed that I was writing about voter disenfranchisement, a Democratic friend admitted, “I’m trying not to care about that.” I understand. Less than two weeks after a bruising election in a nation in which it’s unfashionable to overtly care about anything, it’s annoying of me even to notice.
But citizens who insist, election after election, that each vote is sacred and then shrug at hundreds of credible reports that honest-to-God votes were suppressed and discouraged aren’t just being hypocritical.
They’re telling the millions who never vote because “it doesn’t matter anyway” that they’re the smart ones.
Come on. If Republicans had lost the election, this column would be unnecessary because Karl Rove and company would be contesting every vote. I keep hearing from those who wonder whether Democrats are “too nice,” and from others who wonder whether efforts by the mainstream media to be “fair and balanced” sometimes render them “neutered and less effective.”
Perhaps. But the much-publicized voting-machine error that gave Bush 4,258 votes in an Ohio precinct where only 638 people cast ballots preceded a flood of disturbing reports, ranging from the Florida voting machine that counted backward to the North Carolina computer that eliminated votes. In Ohio’s Warren County, election officials citing “homeland security” concerns locked the doors to the county building where votes were being counted, refusing to allow members of the media and bipartisan observers to watch…
Why aren’t more Americans exercised about this issue? Maybe the problem is who’s being disenfranchised — usually poor and minority voters. In a recent poll of black and white adults by Harvard University professor Michael Dawson, 37 percent of white respondents said that widely publicized reports of attempts to prevent blacks from voting in the 2000 election were a Democratic “fabrication.” More disturbingly, nearly one-quarter of whites surveyed said that if such attempts were made, they either were “not a problem” (9 percent) or “not so big a problem” (13 percent).

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I was mad as hell about Nader running at all. And we’re still not sure (since we’re not sure about any of the numbers in this election) if he affected Kerry’s numbers adversely or now.
That said, it looks like Nader’s the only one so far with enough guts to request a recount. Where’s Kerry in all of this!?!
This post goes with this one.

State approves Nader recount
By The Associated Press.

State election officials agreed Friday to a last-minute recount of the presidential race requested by Ralph Nader.
Nader asked for a recount in 11 wards last week, but the state initially said no because his request did not include the $2,000 fee. He had until 4:30 p.m. Friday to get the money to the Secretary of State’s office.
Nader’s campaign said some voting machines in the state logged results that favored President Bush by as much as 15 percent over what previous trends and exit polls would suggest.
Nader requested hand recounts in Litchfield, Sandown, Newton, Danville, Salem, Pelham, one ward in Somersworth and four wards in Manchester.
Nader’s campaign could be required to pay additional fees as the recount proceeds. There was no estimate as to when the recount might begin.
Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese said the campaign would consider requesting additional recounts after reviewing the results of the initial 11.

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Naked Promotional Announcement (Keith Olbermann)

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County

New Standards for Elections
By The New York Times.

1. A holiday for voting. It’s wrong for working people to be forced to choose between standing in a long line to vote and being on time for work. Election Day should be a holiday, to underscore the significance of the event, to give all voters time to cast ballots and to free up more qualified people to serve as poll workers.
2. Early voting. In states that permit it, early voting encourages people to turn out by letting them vote at times that are convenient for them. And it gives election officials and outside groups more time to react to voting problems ranging from faulty voting machines to voter intimidation.
3. Improved electronic voting. For voters to trust electronic voting, there must be a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast, and mandatory recounts of a reasonable percentage of the votes. The computer code should be provided to election officials, and made public so it can be widely reviewed. There should be spot-checks of the software being used on Election Day, as there are of slot machines in Nevada, to ensure that the software in use matches what is on file with election officials.
4. Shorter lines at the polls. Forcing voters to wait five hours, as some did this year, is unreasonable, and it disenfranchises those who cannot afford the wait. There should be standards for the number of voting machines and poll workers per 100 voters, to ensure that waiting times are reasonable and uniform from precinct to precinct.
5. Impartial election administrators. Partisan secretaries of state routinely issued rulings this year that favored their parties and themselves. Decisions about who can vote and how votes will be counted should be made by officials who are not running for higher office or supporting any candidates. Voting machine manufacturers and their employees, and companies that handle ballots, should not endorse or contribute to political candidates.
6. Uniform and inclusive voter registration standards. Registration forms should be simplified, so no one is again disenfranchised for failing to check a superfluous box, as occurred this year in Florida, or for not using heavy enough paper, as occurred in Ohio. The rules should be geared to getting as many qualified voters as possible on the rolls.
7. Accurate and transparent voting roll purges. This year, Florida once again conducted a flawed and apparently partisan purge of its rolls, and went to court to try to keep it secret. There should be clear standards for how purges are done that are made public in advance. Names that are due to be removed should be published, and posted online, well in advance of Election Day.
8. Uniform and voter-friendly standards for counting provisional ballots. A large number of provisional ballots cast by registered voters were thrown out this year because they were handed in at the wrong precinct. There should be a uniform national rule that such ballots count.
9. Upgraded voting machines and improved ballot design. Incredibly, more than 70 percent of the Ohio vote was cast on the infamous punch card ballots, which produce chads and have a high error rate. States should shift to better machines, ideally optical scans, which combine the efficiency of computers and the reliability of a voter-verified paper record. Election officials should get professional help to design ballots that are intuitive and clear, and minimize voter error.
10. Fair and uniform voter ID rules. No voter should lose his right to vote because he is required to produce identification he does not have. ID requirements should allow for an expansive array of acceptable identification. The rules should be posted at every polling place, and poll workers should be carefully trained so no one is turned away, as happened repeatedly this year, for not having ID that was not legally required.
11. An end to minority vote suppression. Protections need to be put in place to prevent Election Day challengers from turning away qualified minority voters or slowing down voting in minority precincts. More must be done to stop the sort of dirty tricks that are aimed at minority voters every year, like fliers distributed in poor neighborhoods warning that people with outstanding traffic tickets are ineligible to vote. Laws barring former felons from voting, which disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, should be rescinded.
12. Improved absentee ballot procedures. Voters outside of their states, including military voters, have a right to receive absentee ballots in a timely fashion, which did not always happen this year. Absentee ballots should be widely available for downloading over the Internet. Voters should not be asked, as military voters were this year, to send their ballots by fax lines or e-mail, denying them a secret ballot.

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Update 9:52 pm: In re-reading this, a thought occurs to me: Can anyone help me out with some data supporting the numbers in the second paragraph? Thx! – lisa
Someone emailed this to me, and I thought it was interesting.
It was written by Carl Dix, the National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, and a cofounder of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality.
It reads like it was written before or during the election, rather than afterwards.
We disagree on the point that I do believe that voting Bush out of office is a postivie step in the right direction. Or would have been…or will be…or, well, you get the picture.

Another Stolen Election? — Time For Serious Resistance!
by Carl Dix
Black people have had to fight fiercely for every gain. From slave revolts down thru people being killed just for trying to register to vote, every step of the way has been marked by struggle to force the authorities to grant basic rights. Now today the right to vote is being snatched back from many Black and Latino people.
Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Earlier this year, Florida’s Secretary of State issued a list of 47,000 “felons” who would be ineligible to vote. Most of them were Black. Florida was forced to make the list public, and it was found to contain thousands of errors, including having hundreds of people who were listed as being convicted in the future. This is on top of the 94,000 people, again mostly Black, who were stricken from the voting rolls by a similarly error filled list in 2000, most of whom have not still not been put back on the voting lists!
Ohio is using an old state law about the kind of paper voter registrations must be on to invalidate newly registered Black voters. The Republican Party has lined up thousands of “poll watchers,” who are really political thugs, to challenge Latinos and Blacks to present proof that they are citizens or that they live in the precinct they’re voting in on election day. This is another rerun of 2000 when some “poll watchers” wore shirts that falsely implied they were federal police to intimidate people from even trying to vote. Additionally, corporations tied to the Republicans have made electronic voting machines that leave no way to check the accuracy of their count that will be used in states across the country.
All this is on top of the way the criminal injustice system works to criminalize Black and Latino people. Youth of color are routinely jacked up by the cops, beaten down and arrested for nothing more than being the wrong color or having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is part of the reason why half of the two million people in jail in the US are Black.
Bush and company are out to disenfranchise millions of Black and other minority voters. THIS POINTS TO THE PROSPECT OF A STOLEN ELECTION IN 2004.
This is what the Republicans did in 2000, and the Democrats let them get away with it. They didn’t build a fight to stop it and stood in the way of others who wanted to fight it. Things must be different this time. There must be massive resistance to any and all attempts by Bush and company to steal the presidency again!

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Even though I personally feel that Nader should have dropped out of the election the day before, at least he has the guts to ask for a recount.
No word yet on any response from the GAO to the letter sent on Friday by three Democratic congressmen requesting a formal investigation.
The complete letter is included below (underneath the quote that goes with this story).

Nader requests N.H. vote recount
By Kevin Landrigan for the Telegraph Online.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire after getting seven-tenths of 1 percent of the vote.

This is from the November 8, 2004 program.

Amy Goodman’s Interview With Bev Harris from blackboxvoting.org and Aviel Rubin from Johns Hopkins University (Real Stream) (Ogg (50 MB), MP3 28MB)
Bev Harris is the creator of blackboxvoting.org and the one spearheading a huge Freedom Of Information Act request for election information.
Aviel Rubin of John Hopkins University is the one who wrote the highly respected and virtually unchallenged white paper,
Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, which detailed the insecurities of electronic voting machines.
(Thanks, Joel!)