OH Recount news: Wood County tally done, unchanged

[EMunster]

Anyone know anything about this county?



BOWLING GREEN - A recount of presidential ballots in Wood County yesterday left the tally unchanged.

President Bush took 53 percent of the vote while Democrat John Kerry received 46.4 percent of the vote. Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik, who was one of two candidates who requested the recount in every county in Ohio, received 0.28 percent of the vote in Wood County.

Deborah Hazard, deputy director of the Wood County Board of Elections, said workers recounted the votes for president in four precincts by hand, then ran them through an automatic ballot reader.

The results matched, so they ran the county's remaining 101 precincts through the ballot reader and obtained results identical to those certified by the elections board Dec. 1.


http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041214/NEWS17/412140375

[catgirl]

1. The answers are in the machines

I'm afraid the major rigging was probably in the machines. Recounting will change nothing. We need to examine the machines!

[seabeyond]

3. i agree n/t

[jdog]

4. I think these were punch card ballots though.

http://www.electionline.org/advsearch_result.jsp?oneclick=true&orderby=name&sort=DESC&limit=&state=OH&topics=1&topic0=22

[eowyn_of_rohan]

5. We ought to have a chance with the paper ballots

inc the 95,000 spoiled ones, unless the real ones have been replaced.

[googly]

17. The cheater software is prolly replaced by honest version already

so I am afraid that inspection will only serve to confirm smirky's win.

[electropop]

19. No, the honest software will produce new results in some areas

Plus, the evidence of voter suppression is solid.

[googly]

39. Not unless ALL of the exact same voters who cast votes on that machine

are asked to revote. This is a dead end, as I see it. We gotta find someone who wrote the cheater software and have her confess to the crime.

[Nederland]

24. Couldn't be

If the machines were rigged then they wouldn't match the hand count (unless ALL the obseverves to the recount were in on it).

[Guarionex]

26. exactly....

that's only one precinct! maybe they got a precinct were no fraud occured..!! check the machines, check the machines!!!!

[NVMojo]

35. I agree, it is deeper than just this and if these were hand ballots...

or punch, who is to say they were all there? I don't trust the system at all anymore.

[WritersBlock]

2. This has bothered me ... precincts chosen "at random"

But unless they're chosen in the presence of the recount observers, in a way that ensures a random selection, how do we know the choice of precincts is truly random? (I'm not versed in statistics, so I can't say what that would be - I'd have different people draw precinct numbers out of a hat after everyone in the room agreed that each precinct's number was indeed in the hat, I guess?)

Anyway, my point is that, hell, that statute was on the books long before the election. I don't think for a minute that there wasn't advance planning to take care of choosing precincts "at random" in the event of a recount.

:tinfoilhat:

[jdog]

6. I agree

and there's still the ballot shuffling problem and the other efforts at disenfranchisement.

[seabeyond]

7. sheeit, they could even have precincts set up

to be the clean ones in recount. that is hte bitch about a liar and crook, once they are identified as such, i dont trust them with squat

[righteous1]

12. My understanding is that the Dem BOE personel have equal input

in selecting the 3% "test" ballots. They would have to be party to the conspiracy for it to work

[pgh_dem]

22. or BOE Dems just incompetent

Placement (or lack thereof) of voting machines in minority precincts makes a pretty good case for incompetence on the part of these Dem BOE people.
Hey, maybe they're Dixiecrats too? Like good ol Teresa LePore?
William Anthony, Dem Chairman/BOE Director could come out and say 'Minorities were disenfranchised in Franklin, Hamilton and Cuyahoga Counties, due to a total breakdown in the system, which led to lines from 2 to 10 hours. This result was unintentional, nevertheless I am resigning out of shame.' If he would say that, I'd believe he was just incompetent, but an OK guy.
Everything I've seen from him has been, "Everything went smoothly, considering..."
*flush*
(edited for clarity)

[bones_7672]

20. Recount is a bi-partisan effort at the county level. Fraud would

have to be done by both parties there.

[Hobbes199]

23. Never mind that they've had a month and a half

To recreate any damn totals they want. Fraud needs to be investigated at this point, recounts will only show slight gains for Kerry if anything.

[lostnfound]

8. Punch Card - Triad. This county seemed okay to begin with. Numbers:

Kerry 28216 Bush04 32574 Delta = 4358
Gore 22687 Bush00 27504 Delta = 4817
D: +24% R: +18%

Democrats gained 24%; Republicans gained 18% in votes. Both ran intense get-out-the-vote but some former Bush voters switched to Kerry and likely very, very few former Gore voters switched to Bush.

In other words, it looked the way most states should have gone.

[fliesincircles]

13. Nader got 1500 in 2000

Plus there were ~800 "no vote/spoiled" ballots. That's the weirdest thing about alot of Ohio counties, where did the Nader votes go?

edit: bad no-vote number.

[AndrewClarke]

14. There were 757 ballots . . .

. . . that didn't register a vote for President. The rules say that before choosing the 3%, "ballot cards must be inspected for hanging chad attached by one or two corners, mutilations, and other invalidities. If a chad is attached by three or four corners, a vote shall not be counted for that particular candidate, question or issue." I wonder how thorough their inspection was.

In Washington, of the 13 counties using punchcards, 12 had the results change in the machine recount.

[Cobalt Violet]

9. How about a rigged recount?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=154620&mesg_id=154620

[Last Lemming]

10. Recount?

All they seem to be doing is verifying consistancy in vote count between the computer and individual counters. What a waste of time. The program that altered the vote count is gone. . .

[lostnfound]

11. Wrong--these are punchcards in this county.

Welcome to du, last lemming.

[Last Lemming]

15. Today it really feels like too little too late

But I'm in for the fight

[skip fox]

16. No surprise with Wood Co., ever. Always pretty

strongly Republican despite Bowling Green State Univ. in Bowling Green.

The real question deals with urban counties.

[pgh_dem]

18. Wood county not included on lawsuit

The lawsuit has list of counties it alleges were messed with. Wood County not on that list.

[Flint-oid]

38. I noticed that too.

[sunnystarr]

31. Exactly ....

My Mom lies in a cemetery in Bowling Greene, and I lived there with my kids for about 6 months years ago. At the time it was a small town surrounded by farm land. My brother still lives there. I doubt it's changed that much. Recounts should be in urban areas. That's where the suppression and other antics took place. Recount Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati instead of Bowling Green and it's neighboring smaller towns.

[merh]

21. They picked the counties they know have no problems

or irregularities! :argh:

[Terre]

25. Not off by even ONE vote?

In 4 precincts? How likely is that?

[KittyWampus]

37. I Have Same Question. Not Off By Even ONE Vote? That's Seems Highly

unlikely.

[texpatriot2004]

27. Kerry's letter yesterday spoke to the random selection of

precincts, saying they had to be proven scientifically random. I think several other points that they made are relevant to the recounting also.

[sunnystarr]

32. Yeah, but the Election Official noted he doesn't have to follow what

Kerry's representative wanted.

[texpatriot2004]

28. Gee, I wonder if the election officials posted the recount tallies

on the wall so they would have a cheat sheet for the machines?

[sunnystarr]

33. I was wondering the same thing ... that guy from Triad probably

made the rounds to all county BOE's.

[EFerrari]

41. Triad guy probably delivered the recount tallys n/t

[Shalom]

29. Hopefully, the exception proves the rule......nt

[Hobbes199]

30. Isn't the fact that they matched exactly cause for concern?

You'd expect some difference. Every single recount seems to show slightly different results. Unless of course, the ballots were transfered to properly weighted paper, with perfectly inked/punched ballots.

[pointsoflight]

40. Yes. Hand recounts almost never match machine counts. n/t

[mostly_lurking]

42. In the WA recount quite a few counties match exactly

There are a lot of "zeroes" in the net change columns.

http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount_resultsbycounty.aspx

[november3rd]

34. It's a good sign

After all, what we really want is verifiable, transparent and genuinely honest elections.

[liberal43110]

36. Tiny County

Clearly, this example highlights many of the issues--some related, some independent--that we have been examining (or not, in the case of the media) in our very flawed election system.

* A recount does not address issues of voter suppression and intimidation.

* A recount does not address the issue of voting machine allocation to precincts, and intentionally depriving urban or minority precincts of sufficient voting machines.

* A recount does not address the need for a thoroughly transparent election process, including access to voter registration, poll signature books, actual physical ballots when they are available, and the software used in each voting machine and central tabulators.

* This Wood County example illustrates the need for truly random selection of precincts to recount (and from the the information provided I can not tell how the precincts were selected).

* Finally, if there is anything remotely positive that I took away from this story, it is that Wood County is a tiny county in Ohio and anything found (or not found) here will not likely matter ultimately. This is not as important as the issues already uncovered that could be addressed in a recount:

* Franklin County (Columbus): systematically underallocating voting machines to the most urban and minority precincts
* Franklin County (Columbus): suspicious results that gave Bush an extra 4000-plus votes in Gahanna
* Cuyahoga County (Cleveland): obvious mistakes {perhaps fraud) of feeding punch cards from one precinct into scanning machine of another precinct, producing glaringly obvious errors in which minor third-party candidates earn more votes than either Kerry or Bush because the order of candidates on the ballot is random in each precinct and must correspond to the order programmed in that precinct's reading machine to determine results
* Montgomery County (Dayton): consistent ballot spoilage rates of around 25%, when the statewide spoilage rate was around 2%
* Statewide: a huge number (92,000) of ballots without a vote for president (hopefully, with the re-examination of a recount, some votes could be determined

[merwin]

43. Look at Washington State. Most precincts had a shift of some sort.

Most of them were by one or two votes and ended up canceling each other out, but a ZERO change is damn near impossible.