More Trials and Tribulations for Ohio

[mulethree]

Tova Andrea Wang
The Century Foundation, 12/30/04

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Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, with the backing of a number of progressive organizations, filed a motion in court last week challenging the presidential election. The petition argues it is almost statistically impossible for the exit poll data and the actual vote count to have varied so dramatically absent fraud, which the document alleges for the most part was carried out through the manipulation of electronic voting and counting machines. Whether or not Arneback can prove such a case, these allegations of high-tech fraud only serve to distract from the more mundane but critical ways that voting machine problems disenfranchised Ohio voters. And unlike machine tampering, these failures and abuses of the voting system are disturbingly well-documented.
The machine problem in Ohio was two-fold: (1) there weren't enough of them and the breakdown of who did and did not have sufficient machines was extremely suspicious; (2) the overwhelming majority of machines in use were not electronic, but the same old punch cards Florida made notorious in the 2000 election.

As detailed in my recent piece in the American Prospect, the failure to provide a reasonable number of voting machines in Ohio led to lines and wait times to vote that were not just unacceptably high—they were possibly an unconstitutional denial of voting rights. In Ohio, voters had to wait in line for up to ten hours. Thousands of voters were still waiting in line when the polls closed at 7:30 P.M.

How many people decided not to wait?

What makes this more disturbing are emerging revelations of just where the machines were and where they weren't. According to the New York Times, among the 464 complaints about long lines in Ohio collected by the Election Protection Coalition, nearly 400 came from Columbus and Cleveland, where a huge proportion of the state's Democratic voters live. Completely nonsensically, Franklin County election officials in Columbus actually reduced the number of machines in urban precincts and added them in the suburbs this year. An analysis by the Columbus Dispatch showed that predominantly Democratic Franklin County precincts—those where Democrat Al Gore got at least 70 percent of the vote in 2000—had seventeen fewer machines used in 2004. At the same time, the strongest GOP precincts-where George W. Bush got at least 70 percent of the vote four years ago-received eight more machines.

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