Cleveland was the great hope for the Kerry/Edwards ticket for carrying Ohio on Election Day, 2004. Kerry won Cleveland by 83% to 16%, but due largely to a woefully “low voter turnout”, that was only enough to come within about 118,000 votes of carrying Ohio.
In October I posted on DU a thread entitled
“Was Kerry Cheated out of almost 100,000 votes in Cleveland Along?”, where I postulated that one of the main sources of Kerry’s Ohio “loss” was electronic deletion of votes from Cleveland by the Cuyahoga County central tabulator. I gave two reasons for believing this: 1) A surprisingly very low voter turnout in Cleveland, compared with the rest of Cuyahoga County, and 2) A reversal in Cuyahoga County of the normal positive correlation between voter turnout and voting machine allocation per voter (as described in
Section IV, page 3, of the Democratic National Committee report on the Ohio Election).
People working for the Democratic Party or its allied organizations in Cleveland felt certain on Election Day that their get-out-the-vote efforts were highly successful, because they could see visual evidence of that in long voting lines throughout the city. With this in mind, I reviewed reports from the national Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), and found that Cleveland had by far a lower reported turnout (53.4%) than the lowest turnout in any county (75.5% in Hamilton County) that was characterized by ten or more reports of long lines – not including counties that used electronic voting machines (Franklin and Mahoning Counties), where we now know that insufficient allocation of voting machines to Democratic precincts depressed “voter turnout” considerably (because of long voting lines which prevented many potential voters from voting). On the assumption that the woefully low voter turnout in Cleveland (which used punch card voting machines and therefore was not susceptible to the same problems as were seen in electronic voting machine counties) may have been due to fraudulent electronic deletion of votes, and assuming that the actual voter turnout was similar to Hamilton County, I calculated the net votes lost to the Kerry/Edwards ticket in Cleveland due to this process to be 47,764, as explained
here.
(To digress for a minute, I also postulated in the above noted posts, based on several findings, that an approximately equal number of votes were stolen from Kerry through voter registration fraud. I later discovered some additional confirmation for massive voter registration fraud in Cuyahoga County, which I discussed in
this post, most importantly including the finding by
Vicki Lovegren that more than 165,000 voters were purged from the Cuyahoga County voter roles, probably illegally, and probably targeted at Democrats. This digresses from the main subject of this post, but I didn’t want people to think that deletion of votes from the central tabulator in Cuyahoga County was the only significant source of election fraud in Cuyahoga County.)
How can we verify whether electronic fraud was actually committed in Cleveland?Although there are strong reasons IMO for believing that electronic fraud was committed on Cleveland in the 2004 election, those reasons do not constitute proof. As a matter of fact some DUers have suggested to me that the electronic fraud that I postulate is unlikely to have occurred, because it could have been evaluated without too much trouble. All one would have to do is add up the individual pre-tabulator precinct totals for each Cuyahoga County precinct and then compare that with the vote totals for all of Cuyahoga County, as determined by the Cuyahoga County central tabulator. If these totals match, or even come close to matching, then that would prove me wrong. But where are these numbers? Despite my posting on this issue on DU several times and generating long discussions about it, nobody to my knowledge has been able to come up with these numbers.
Then a couple of DUers, kiwi_expat and philb, showed me a
report written by the Green Party representative/observer who attended the partial recount in Cuyahoga County. The part of this report most relevant to this discussion IMO is this:
Anomalies were found. Almost all of the witnesses that I spoke with felt that the ballots were not in random order, that they had been previously sorted. There would be long runs of votes for only one candidate and then long runs for another, which seemed statistically improbable to most.
From what they were able to get through, witnesses found that signature counts were very much different from the official recorded number of ballots.
So, it would appear that the individual pre-tabulator precinct counts do NOT match the count presented by the central tabulator. However, the above Green Party observer account does not provide any specific numbers, but rather just a general observation that would suggest that the counts don’t match. But again, I am unaware of any effort to actually ascertain the extent to which the counts do or do not match.
My attempts to verify whether or not the counts match – my correspondence with Michael VuConsequently, some DUers suggested that I contact Michael Vu, Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, to find out from him what if any efforts have been made to ascertain whether or not the precinct counts match the central tabulator count in Cuyahoga County. Here is a verbatim description of my e-mail correspondence with Michael Vu:
Me: Dear Mr. Vu:
I am concerned about the very low turnout in Cleveland precincts during the 2004 Presidential Election -- especially given the numerous complaints of very long lines seen on Election Day. Can you tell me if anyone, to your knowledge, has compared the official returns with the signatures in the poll books of Cleveland precincts.
Thank you very much.
Vu: In response to your email, the Board of Elections is responsible to conduct an audit of the election. This begins 11 days after the election. We are responsbile for accounting for any discrepancy that occurred at the polls. This entails going through the poll book, audit book to determine how many ballots were issued and how many were counted on election night. Also, we are responsbile for crediting those that voted by going through the poll book. We then match what was counted for each precinct against how many voters received credit for that precinct.
I hope this has sufficiently answered your question. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Me: Thank you, but I don't quite understand what you're saying.
You say that you're responsible for accounting for any discrepancy that occurred at the polls, and then taking various actions. But my question was whether you actually audited the poll books to see if there was any discrepancies between the poll books and the number of votes cast. Did you feel the need to do that, and was it done?
Vu: As stated in my previous email, the Board reviews the Audit Book during the canvassing period and at the time of giving credit to each voter that voted. The agency then compares this number to the total of votes counted (votes cast) for each precinct.
Therefore, the simple answer to your question is, yes.
Me: Thank you Mr. Vu.
Can you tell me what was found when this was done please?
Vu: I will send you the results of our findings.
He wrote me his last e-mail, promising me the information I requested, almost four weeks ago. I have recently wrote back to him, asking when I can expect that information, but I don’t expect to receive from him the information that I need.
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