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I thought it might help to have a full text version to quote from. Or, of course, you can just mention the number.
Untangling the voting controversies
Since the hotly contested presidential election, dozens of allegations of voter ireegularities and conspiracies have been made, many on the Internet. Here are several of the claims most often heard and an analysis of their veracity.
NORTHEAST OHIO
1. More ballots were cast than there are registered voters in Cuyahoga County.
Unofficial results posted on the Cuyahoga County Board of Election's (sic) Web site showed several suburbs that appeared to have more votes than registered voters. The board admits it's confusing, but the numbers included absentee votes case in congressional/legislative districts, not just the individual suburbs.
2. The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections' canvass report shows the county with 22 more precincts than the Ohio Secretary of State's report.
The Cuyahoga board counts the number of absentees cast in the 22 House/Senate/Congress districts separately, so it's reflected as 22 additional precints.
3. The Cuyahoga Count Board of Elections rejected 34 percent, or 8,552, of the 25,309 provisional ballots cast – a high percentage of votes to lose in an area that voted 2 to 1 for Kerry.
The rejection rate was definitely higher, but not completely unexpected because of the large turnout and run in last-minute registrations. Statewide, the rejection rate was about 23 percent. The board rejected 5,770 provisional ballots because voters weren't registered. A national watchdog group is challenging. On Nov. 26, the People for the American Way Foundation sued Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The foundation wants the court to order the electronic voter-registration rolls cross-checked against paper registration records, and to have each individual voter notified and given a chance to contest the decision.
AROUND OHIO
4. A computer glitch in Franklin County (Gahanna) resulted in 3,893 extra votes for Bush.
It happened, and Franklin board officials have no idea why a push-button voting machine malfunctioned. The error, discovered the day after the election, was to be corrected in the board's official count, said Deputy Director Mike Hackett, a Democrat. The machine's cartridge and “reader” will be sent to Danaher, the manufacturer, to find out why, but not until the official count – and recount, if there is one – is completed, he said. The other machines appeared to have accurately reflected the number of registered voters.
5. A computer glitch in Mahoning County (Youngstown) resulted in a count of negative 25 million votes.
It happened, and another glitch in Mahoning's electronic touch-screen voting machines produced a count of plus 12 million votes. Five precincts came back with garbled numbers, which election officials believed were caused by bad cartridges. The error was discovered immediately. Numbers were downloaded again and corrected that night.
The result: Countywide, Kerry, won 63 percent to Bush's 37 percent – similar to the 2000 election.
6. Some precints in Montgomery County (Dayton) reported a high percentage of voters who cast ballots but didn't vote for president.
A punch-card counter had an electrical problem that wasn't immediately detected, so those votes weren't tabulated properly. The undervote problem was corrected in an offcial count completed on Nov. 23, said the board's deputy director, Steven Harsman, a Democrat.
The result: Bush pisked up about 1,000 votes; Kerry about 400.
7. In Lucas County (Toledo), some ballots weren't counted when optical-scan machines clogged.
At some precincts, ballots got wet and weren't being read. Poll workers were instructed to store those ballots in emergency compartments unthil the machines were fixed, and then ballots were scanned by bipartisan teams, said Election Director Paula Hicks-Hudon, a Democrat. She wasn't sure how many ballots were affected but estimated there were less than 1,000.
8. The CEO of Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines, was quoted last year as having promised to win Ohio for Bush.
Only two Ohio counties – Lucan and Hardin (in northwest Ohio ) - used Diebold machines, and those were optical-scan mahcines that read paper ballots. Blackwell had postponed the rollout of Diebold touch-screen machines until security risks could be addressed.
The result: Kerry won in Lucas county with 60 percent.
Bush won Hardin County with 63 percent.
9. Two counties found peple who voted twice and one county found about 2,600 voted double-counted.
An elderly couple in Madison Count voted twice – by absentee ballots and then in person on election day. The county prosecutor is determining whether criminal charges should be filed. In Summit County, election officials found 19 double votes for such garden variety of reasons as voting absentee and in person or voting in an old precinct and provisionally in a new precinct, said Deputy Director John Schmidt, a Democrat. The problems were discovered in a post-election review and are being investigated. And in Sandusky County, a duplicate disc was accidentally made for 10 precincts. “It just doubled votes for everybody,” said Elections Director Barb Tuckerman, a Democrat. The problem was discovered three days later, when one precint reported 131 percent voter turnout. A correction was made when vote totals were certified.
10. Predominantly black areas of Franklin County (Columbus) were shorted on voting machines, creating longer lines to discourage voters in heavily Democratic precincts.
William A. Anthony Jr., Franklin County Democratic Party chairman and chairman of the Board of Elections, who is black, told the Columbus Dispatch that long lines were caused by higher turnout, an overall lack of voting machines and a ballots with more than 100 choices for some voters. What's more, he added, the supervisor in charge of allocating voting machines is a Democrat.
11. Election board were so back-logged that some failed to get voter cards on polling places to new registrants in time, messed up absentee ballots and generally disenfranchized new voters, most of whom are Democrats.
Advocacy groups have found evidence that a few hundred seemingly valid voters in Cuyahoga County were not listed in poll books, and for some people absentee ballots arrived late or not at all. But the scale of these problems seems small in perspective, given the number of registered voters in the county rose from 820,000 to more than 1 million in the past four years. It's also impossible to say ifthose affected by election errors were Democrats or Republicans, because Ohio voters do not have to declare a party affiliation in general elections, and both parties aggressively courted new voters.
12. Election officials in Warren County (near Cincinnati) locked out the media and others not on a pre-approved list as votes were counted, citing a terror threat.
It happened, but Jeff Ruppert, a lawyers for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, was inside and saw nothing unusual. “It was as clear and open as it could possibly be,” he said. Witnesses also included Democratic members of the election board and several Democrats hired to help count votes.
AROUND THE NATION
13. Several heavily Democratic counties in Florida uncharacteristically voted for Bush, which suggests inaccuracies.
The Miami Herald reviewed more than 17,000 optical-scan ballots in three counties where Democats heavily outnumbered Republicans, but backed Bush. The results were accurate, the paper reported.
14. Electronic voting machines were purposely rigged for Bush.
Computer experts say that it is conceivable that votes cast on electronic machines could be manipulated. Election officials counter, however, that too many checks and balances exist – in Ohio, boards of elections are controlled by equal number of Democats and Republicans, for example – for it to happen. Those who are less trusting are taking the issues, among others, to court in Ohio and Florida.
15. Touch-screen machines in Broward Count, Fla., started counting backward.
The St. Petersburg Times reported that vote-counters in the machines weren't programmed to expect more than 32,000 votes in any single precinct. As the limit was exceeded, vote totals started to decline. The error was noticed and fixed. Nobody's vote was lost.
16. The Wyoming secretary of state Web site shows an unofficial voter turnout of 106 percent.
There were 232,396 registered voters in Wyoming prior to the election, and 245,789 voted. This is possible because Wyoming allows voters to register and vote at the polls on Election Day.
17. How could the exit polls be so wrong? They showed Kerry ahead in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. He wound up losing Ohio and Florida, two must-win states.
Even academicians are battling over this one. Researchers at California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that there were no ireegularities, baed on early unofficial returns in Florida. But as analysis by the University of California at Berkeley claims to have found “statistical anomalies” in several heavily Democatic Florida counties. And a University of Pennsylvania professor calculated the odds of exit polls being off in all three key states at 250 million to 1. Nonsense, says Richard Morin, The (sic) Washington Post's director of polling. The exit poll numbers could indeed be accurate, he said, but, historically, they are not predictors of outcomes, at least not in close elections. “In the case of blowouts, yeah, they can be suggestive,” he said, comparing exit polling to predicting the winner of a football game after the first quarter.
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