[Mb-civic] A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio

[Michael Butler]

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    A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio
    By Steven Rosenfeld
    AlterNet.org

     Friday 12 November 2004
 An effort led by Common Cause and the Alliance for Democracy is underway in
Ohio to conduct a statewide recount.

    Efforts to launch an official statewide recount of the Ohio presidential
vote are underway. While it's unclear if a recount will result in a Kerry
victory, it's likely to highlight many flaws in Ohio elections that may have
tilted results toward Republicans and against Democrats.

     Common Cause of Ohio and the Alliance for Democracy, a progressive
coalition, Thursday announced they were launching a recount campaign for
Ohio. Columbus, Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who represents both groups,
said both the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates
would seek a recount if the $110,000 filing fee could be raised. "Common
Cause and the Alliance for Democracy are not partisan. The purpose of the
recount is to verify the honesty of the process," Arnebeck said. "That is in
the interest of anyone who would be declared the winner."

     A coalition of progressive groups will hold a public hearing on
election abuses this Saturday in Columbus calling on the Kerry campaign to
pay for the recount. Meanwhile, they have created a Web page to collect
donations at the Alliance for Democracy site. The Kerry campaign reportedly
was sending lawyers to Ohio to look into election irregularities, but
Arnebeck said only the public interest groups were now committed to a
recount.

     While there have been many accounts of problems associated with the
Ohio vote, from reports of 90,000 spoiled ballots, to software glitches
resulting in more votes tallied than the number of registered voters, to new
voters not being notified where their polling places were, to too few voting
machines in Democratic strongholds, the only legal process that could
immediately address some of these concerns is a recount.

     The recount would be just that: a recounting of all the votes cast. If
the results change, meaning more votes are added to Kerry's total ­ then the
official result, what the secretary of state certifies, is changed.

     "It's re-certified," Arnebeck said. "If Kerry emerges victorious, he's
president." Of course, a certification in Kerry's favor for Ohio won't take
away the fact that Bush won the popular vote by 3.5 million votes.

     And he clock is ticking on the Ohio process. In coming days, the Ohio
secretary of state is expected to announce that the provisional ballots have
been counted. A losing candidate for president then has 5 days to request a
recount, filing the paperwork and filing fee. That cost is $10 per precinct,
which comes to slightly more than $110,000. As of Friday morning, $35,000
had been raised. There is a possibility that not all Ohio counties will
finish the provsional ballot count, which would prompt those seeking the
recount to pursue other actions, Arnebeck said.

     In Florida in 2000, before the Supreme Court interceded in the election
outcome, there was no statewide recount conducted. A coalition of newspapers
later analyzed the vote, in essence, doing their own recount. They found Al
Gore had won. That result was spun by those defending George W. Bush,
however, saying that the smaller number of counties where Gore wanted a
recount would not have made Gore president.

     There is a big difference between this effort and what Bev Harris and
Black Box Voting are doing. That group, which is investigating computer
voting fraud, is making Freedom of Information Act requests. That does not
have the force of law behind it to change election results, unless it is
entered as evidence in litigation sparked by a recount. The recount sought
by the Ohio groups can revise the official state count.

     There are three new areas where votes can come from in Ohio: absentee
ballots, provisional ballots, and computer errors. Arnebeck said he has
evidence how in one rural county more computer votes were counted than there
were registered voters. Arnebeck said that the issue has been referred to
the FBI. Arnebeck also said that the provisional ballots are also thought to
favor Kerry, adding that this week the Ohio Republican Secretary of State
Ken Blackwell was issuing new orders to disqualify provisional ballots if
the voter did not enter their dates of birth. That shows how political a
supposedly mechanical process already has become.

     On the other hand, there are aspects of Ohio's vote that a recount is
not likely to resolve. Questions such as what happened to people who did not
vote ­ because they never received notifications after registering by mail,
or because of long lines and too few voting machines in their precincts, may
not get addressed, as a recount is a formal procedure where local election
officials redo the count.

     In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, for example, there was a
clear pattern of a shortage of voting machines in Democratic inner city
precincts, where new registrations skyrocketed, compared to the more
middle-class white, GOP-dominated suburbs. Deliberately putting too few
machines would violate the national Voting Rights Act. But that's hard to
prove - especially because the county's election supervisor has said all the
local boards are bipartisan. On the other hand, Ohio activists point out
that people with longtime GOP ties supervised the county's election.

     Still, there are many things that a recount could yield - apart from
the possibility of Kerry victory. There is a tremendous need for a plausible
explanation of what actually happened on Election Day in Ohio. Kerry's
Wednesday morning concession pre-empted that explanation.

     "Many people are saying, why bother to do this? The answer is we have
not gathered all the facts," Arnebeck said. "Until you recount the votes,
and look at the possibility of a sophisticated computer fix, you cannot draw
conclusions. Whatever it costs to properly analyze this is nothing in terms
of enabling the country to move forward. They just have to raise the money
to officially file the recount request. The case is ready."

  

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