Coshocton Co. Recount Uncovers "Remarkable and Mysterious Disaster "

[dzika]

FROM: The Nashua Advocate

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Green Party Analysis of Coshocton County Recount Uncovers Remarkable -- and Mysterious -- Disaster

By ADVOCATE STAFF

-snip-
According to a Green Party press release published December 18th,
2004, the Party appears to have no idea whatsoever how many recounts
Coshocton County has conducted and when, which vote tallies were
produced and when, and whether, in general, hundreds of "new" votes
were "reinserted into the tabulations" after the general election or
after, even, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's December
6th, 2004 certification of the statewide vote.

-snip-
The assumption of the Green Party appears to be that additional
ballot inspections were conducted by Coshocton County after the
election, and that these inspections may or may not have constituted
manual "recounts" of the ballots. The notion that Secretary
Blackwell certified the "wrong" numbers is undercut by the fact that
the Secretary certified precisely those post-provisional numbers
released by the county itself on November 19th, 2004. What this
means, then, is that in the seventeen days between November 19th,
2004, and December 6th, 2004 -- when Ohio's statewide vote was
certified -- Coshocton County "found" 1,089 new ballots (ballots in
which Kerry fared substantially better than he had on election day)
which it then failed to report to Secretary Blackwell.

Link:
http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2004/12/news-election-2004-green-party_18.html


A lot of assumptions in this article... I hope that someone can help to make some sense out it.

[GetTheRightVote]

1. Thank you for the post, this is really good news, I hope it sticks

[Ellipsis]

2. 1089/11=99

is this a set up?

another mysterious number divisible by 11

k

[GoBlue]

8. OMG

And 1089/9 =121; the square root of 121 is 11. And the square root of 1089 =33 which is 3x11 or the age at which Jesus was crucified. And, 99=9x11 . It's no mystery at all. The terrorists did it to make Bush look bad.

[Razorback_Democrat]

12. Okay!

:tinfoilhat:

[chitown]

3. recount

44 of the ballots were picked up in the manual recount.

The rest of the ballots were added around december 10th the headliner was given to the witnesses for the recount had that date on it.

All the ballots were recounted so unless someone made up new ballots it seems as though some precincts just weren't counted all the way.


If you look at the undervote for this county when Blackwell certified it the undervote was 7.9 percent for the county by far the largest in the state.

So that would take out suspicion that new votes were added.

What most likely happened is some parts of precincts weren't counted by accident and when they were setting up for the recount they noticed the 7.9 undervote and thus figured out something was wrong.

The undervote after the recount was 2 percent which is more on line.

[dzika]

5. So the headline:

...Recount Uncovers Remarkable -- and Mysterious -- Disaster

Might be a little dramatic?

Are you suggesting this "Disaster" can be easily explained?

I'm just asking because I really don't understand what's going on with all of these numbers.

[nashuaadvocate]

7. That's one possible explanation, ChiTown...

...on the other hand, it's not the explanation Coshocton officials have given for what happened. In fact, they've given no explanation at all, as far as I can tell.

In fact, they seemed to hope that the Green Party recount observers wouldn't notice the disparity, which is why they tried to fool them by presenting as "election day" results a set of results which actually contained 1,089 votes not reported on election day *or* certified by Secretary Blackwell. Sounds like a disaster to me; don't you think so?

Yes, Coshocton had a high spoilage rate, but so did other, more Democratic-leaning counties. For example, a similar spoilage rate in Cuyahoga County would lead to the "discovery," in a manual recount, of 53,044 "uncounted" ballots. And if Cuyahoga were to have a 60% validity rate -- as Coshocton has had -- 31,826 of those ballots would have a valid vote for President on them.

In one county, 31,826 new votes to be counted. Imagine it!

The Advocate's consistent position has been that disparities such as these *cannot* simply be deduced from the "unofficial" election day vote totals or the "official" certified vote totals. Only when counties are forced to manually inspect all their ballots -- as almost every county would have been forced to do under the recent recount, had nearly every single county not, apparently, cheated -- do these "errors" (or, as I'd term thousands of votes disappearing in an administrative fog, "disasters") come to light.

The News Editor
The Nashua Advocate
http://www.nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/

[dzika]

4. The News Editor from

The Nashua Advocate posted some answers to questions about a similar article in this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x176944

[dzika]

6. Yet Another thread...

...is have a great discussion of questions arising from this article.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x177079

[RaulVB]

9. Guys, you are downplaying the relevance of this development (kick)

[htuttle]

10. Is there a single precinct in Ohio or Florida...

...that maintains any sort of evidentiary chain on the ballots? Christ, they seem to keep finding boxes of them in closets, trunks of people's cars, shoved in church basements, etc...

I can't believe that so many election precincts are so utterly incompetent. Not just this year -- been hearing horror stories like this from 2000 and 2002 as well.

[RaulVB]

11. Kick (n/t)