Ohio Election Audit Find Massive Descrepancies

Ohio Vote Audit for 2004 election finds massive discrepancies:

CLEVELAND — Computer vote-memory card totals failed to match electronic voting machine ballot tallies in more than one quarter of the samples checked from the November election in the state’s most populous county, an independent audit showed Thursday.
In the 37 sample precincts where results didn’t match, there may have been corrupted memory cards, missing or torn reports, faulty printers or other problems, according to the independent audit commissioned by the Cuyahoga County elections board.

These are exactly the kinds of memory cards which were highlighted by the HBO Documentary, Hacking Democracy earlier this year. But where the differences in totals enough to change the outcome of the 2004 elections?

Because the checks involved unofficial counts, the audit committee wasn’t in a position to say whether vote totals might have been affected, member Ron Olsen said.

So although there may have been massive problems, exactly who those problems may or may not have benefited remains unclear - so far. Clearly these results should warrant further investigation and explaination particularly in the wake of the scandal upon scandal which has plagued Cuyahoga County.

Ohio's Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett, an essential player in putting George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, is no long chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. His milestone resignation leaves a legacy of scandal, recrimination, massive voter purges, felony convictions and a pivotal role in a stolen presidential election.

Bennett has quit in a signature cloud of graceless accusations and cheap shots at Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's newly elected Secretary of State, who asked him to resign along with the rest of the Cleveland election authority. His forced departure marks the biggest landmark yet in the unraveling theft of the presidential elections in Ohio 2004.

Bennett remains chair of the Ohio Republican Party. In 2004 he was apparently asked by White House consigliere Karl Rove to stay on at the Cuyahoga BOE to help guarantee Bush's second term. Cleveland is Ohio's biggest and most Democratic urban center. A massive sweep there by John Kerry was widely expected to have given him the White House. It was Bennett's job to mute that margin, and apparently that's exactly what he did.

Leading up to the 2004 vote, Bennett oversaw the quiet purge of some 168,000 registered voters from the Cuyahoga rolls, including 24.93% of the entire city of Cleveland, which voted 83% for Kerry. In one inner city majority African American ward, 51% of the voters were purged. Centered on precincts that voted more than 80% for John Kerry, this purge may well have meant a net loss to the Democrats of tens of thousands of votes in an election that was officially decided statewide by less than 119,000.

Vyan