Gee, This Sounds Vaguely Important...

The headline reads: "Ohio Elections Officials Convicted of Tampering with 2004 Presidential Recount." But of course, most of America hasn't seen this headline because the mainstream media outlets have barely touched this story. Call me crazy, but this seems like too big of a story to only be running in the local Ohio press and alternative media sources on these here internets. Apparently, the mainstream media has forgotten that the state of Ohio is the state that handed Bush a second term on a silver platter. It seems to me that the fact that the recount of the presidential freaking election was rigged is a pretty big story. But then again, I'm not part of the mainstream media so what do I know about big stories?

Two election workers in one of Ohio's most densely populated areas and traditional Democratic stronghold, Cuyahoga County, were convicted of illegally rigging the county's recount. According to Erie County Special Proesecutor Kevin Baxter, the recount was fixed not necessarily for political reasons, but because the election employees were too damn lazy to do their jobs properly. Election coordinator Jacqueline Maiden and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer were both covicted of "negligent misconduct of an elections employee," a felony that carries a possible sentence of 6 to 18 months in prison. A third woman, Rosie Grier, the assistant manager of the board's ballot department was indicted but acquitted of the charges.

Under Ohio law, a county is supposed to randomly count 3% of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be counted by machine. If there are discrepancies between the two supposedly random samples, a full recount, by hand, is ordered. According to Special Prosecutor Baxter, what Dreamer and Maiden did, to avoid the labor intensive hand count, was to employ a method known as "hack and stack." The "hack and stack" method, according to blackboxvoting.org works like this:

Some recounts and audits rely on so-called "random" manual counts of a small percentage of the ballots, which are then compared against the voting computer counts for those precincts. The safeguard can be defeated by manipulating the precinct selection process, or by manipulating the ballots in the selected precincts to make sure they match before counting them. This "stacks" the recount or audit so that only subsets of data that match machine counts are examined.

In Cuyahoga County, citizens noticed that the ballots arrived for the public
recount already sorted into sets for Bush and sets for Kerry. Kathleen Wynne videotaped the sorted piles and videotaped as she asked Kathleen Dreamer and Jacqui Maiden to explain the sorting and pre-selected piles. She captured them on videotape admitting that they had not chosen randomly.

So let me get this straight... there is evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt that the recount in one Ohio county was rigged. Is it unreasonable to think that there may have been election fraud in other counties? Nahhhh... I'm sure the results from the other counties were all on the up and up, right? We can take them at their word, can't we?

Oh but wait... there's more. You knew there had to be, didn't you? Oh yes, there's a wrinkle in this story that should really bear some scrutiny. It seems that both Dreamer and Maiden have chosen to fall on their swords to protect their bosses. To date, neither Cuyahoga Elections Director Michael Vu nor Cuyahoga County Board of Elections chair Bob Bennett have publicly answered a single question about the fraudulent election results. But the cherry on top is that the defense attorney for Dreamer and Maiden was one Roger Synenberg, formerly the chairman of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board. Interesting that as defense counsel for Maiden and Dreamer, neither was advised to take a plea bargain. They both could have lessened their sentences had they cooperated with the prosecutors investigating the case. Makes you wonder what dirty little secrets they would have uncovered, doesn't it?

But no, there's no story here. Nothing to see here, move along. Just ask the media.

~Kevin S.