Ohio to Delay Destroying of Presidential Ballots

[cal04]

With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at least for several months.

Since the election, questions have been raised about how votes were tallied in Ohio, a battleground state that helped deliver the election to President Bush over Senator John Kerry.

The critics, including an independent candidate for governor and a team of statisticians and lawyers, say preliminary results from their ballot inspections show signs of more widespread irregularities than previously known.

The critics say the ballots should be saved pending an investigation. They also say the secretary of state’s proposal to delay the destruction does not go far enough, and they intend to sue to preserve the ballots

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31ohio.html?hp&ex=1156996800&en=24bc6b6a59183170&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[babylonsister]

1. Great news! Thanks! nt

[bleever]

2. Great news.

Fifth rec., because it's important to knowing what happened in Ohio, and American, in November 2004.

[roseBudd]

3. I have a question about this paragraph...

"In 10 southwestern counties, he said, the team found thousands of punch card ballots that lacked codes identifying the precinct where the ballot was cast. The codes are typically necessary for the machines processing the ballots to “know’’ to record which candidate receives the votes."

I am in SW OH and the precincts were not punched like they were in Indiana, it was just on the ballot, not sure if it was printed or stamped but it was just printed letters. My understanding is that the header card, which looks like a ballot except it is pink, must precede each precinct change for the card reader to know how to tabulate because of ballot rotation.

Like I said in Indiana, the precinct was identified with a punch. If you dropped several precincts ballots on the floor and got them all mixed up the reader would still read the ballots correctly.

My first suspicion is that by not using the punch card technology in Ohio to identify the precinct the reader can be "fooled" into mistabulating a ballot. A ballot simply needs to be snuck into the wrong stack for this to happen. How convenient. Card readers read punchs. In order for card reader to read a precinct number that is printed there would have to be a scanner with a builtin OCR program.

Here are the technical specs for a punch card reader:

http://www.cardamation.com/page3.html

Does anyone see any indication they can read something other than holes?

In addition Richard Hayes Phillips wrote the following:


In Warren County we have photographs of punch card ballots for 12 of 157
precincts. The punch code at the bottom of the cards is the same for
every precinct. Near the bottom of every punch card appear these words:

TO BE FILLED IN BY ELECTION BOARD ONLY

Beneath this are the following words:
PRECINCT NO. ________________________

This line is always blank. Nowhere on the punch cards is the precinct
identified by punch code, and nowhere on the front of the punch cards is
the precinct identified in writing.


According to Dave Keeler, President of Dayton Legal Blank, Inc., which
prints ballots for 70 of 88 counties in Ohio, the precinct must be printed
on the back of each punch card ballot, by law. Board of Elections
employees in Muskingum and Seneca counties have confirmed that the
precincts were identified on the backs of the punch cards used in their
counties. We do not know if the precincts were identified on the backs of
the punch cards used in Warren County, because our photographers were not
allowed to touch the punch cards, and they never saw the back side of any
of them. Employees of the Warren County Board of Elections placed the
cards in stacks, front side up, on tables, spread them out eight at a time
to be photographed, and never, ever, turned them over. Thus I cannot
eliminate the possibility that ballots punched for Kerry were shifted to
other precincts where, due to ballot rotation, they would be tabulated as
votes for Bush. I shall explain the methodology as simply as possible."

He then goes on to explain ballot rotation.

[bleever]

4. That's a crucial observation.

So many questions will never be answered if those ballots are destroyed.

[roseBudd]

5. Need an engineering type to tell us whether a card reader can

read anything other than punchs.

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/

http://www.cardamation.com/page3.html

Indiana used punchs to identify the precinct. Ohio used printed precincts. Why in the hell would they not use the technology of punchs.

Did Ohio ever have the precincts punched like Indiana? Can't get an answer from Sherrod Brown on that.

[bleever]

6. Fitrakis had posted images of OH ballots on freepress.org

where you could see a precinct ID card that had actually been punched as a ballot (another Bush vote, surprise).

That's at least one precinct not counted.

I went looking at freepress.org, but haven't found the images yet.

[roseBudd]

7. I looked also and could not find them, perhaps someone had bookmarked them

[mod mom]

8. It's at a confusing location on their site. I re-locate it by googling

freepress.org + Warren County. Here you go:

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2006/1355

[roseBudd]

10. None of those ballots have a precinct number, since their is a spot

to fill in the precinct number I wonder if this means the number is stamped or printed. If it is stamped at the county level, a county could make more ballots for a particular precinct and no one would know how mant ballots they started with versus how amny ballots they ultimately ended up using. Once a ballot is detached from the stub it is disassociated from the serial number.

[rumpel]

9. Good news

and good morning NY Times -

we're getting there - geez did you see the picture? No respect for the votes - old pump station....sigh