by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair
Feb. 14, 2005
If it were not for Kenyon College, I might have missed, or skipped, the whole controversy. The place is a visiting lecturer's dream, or the ideal of a campus-movie director in search of a setting. It is situated in wooded Ohio hills, in the small town of Gambier, about an hour's drive from Columbus. Its literary magazine, The Kenyon Review, was founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939. Its alumni include Paul Newman, E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Winters, Robert Lowell, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and President Rutherford B. Hayes. The college's origins are Episcopalian, its students well mannered and well off and predominantly white, but it is by no means Bush-Cheney territory. Arriving to speak there a few days after the presidential election, I found that the place was still buzzing. Here's what happened in Gambier, Ohio, on decision day 2004.
The polls opened at 6:30 a.m. There were only two voting machines (push-button direct-recording electronic systems) for the entire town of 2,200 (with students). The mayor, Kirk Emmert, had called the Board of Elections 10 days earlier, saying that the number of registered voters would require more than that. (He knew, as did many others, that hundreds of students had asked to register in Ohio because it was a critical "swing" state.) The mayor's request was denied. Indeed, instead of there being extra capacity on Election Day, one of the only two machines chose to break down before lunchtime.
By the time the polls officially closed, at 7:30 that evening, the line of those waiting to vote was still way outside the Community Center and well into the parking lot. A federal judge thereupon ordered Knox County, in which Gambier is located, to comply with Ohio law, which grants the right to vote to those who have shown up in time. "Authority to Vote" cards were kindly distributed to those on line (voting is a right, not a privilege), but those on line needed more than that. By the time the 1,175 voters in the precinct had all cast their ballots, it was almost four in the morning, and many had had to wait for up to 11 hours. In the spirit of democratic carnival, pizzas and canned drinks and guitarists were on hand to improve the shining moment. TV crews showed up, and the young Americans all acted as if they had been cast by Frank Capra: cheerful and good-humored, letting older voters get to the front, catching up on laptop essays, many voting for the first time and all convinced that a long and cold wait was a small price to pay. Typical was Pippa White, who said that "even after eight hours and 15 minutes I still had energy. It lets you know how worth it this is." Heartwarming, until you think about it.
The students of Kenyon had one advantage, and they made one mistake. Their advantage was that their president, S. Georgia Nugent, told them that they could be excused from class for voting. Their mistake was to reject the paper ballots that were offered to them late in the evening, after attorneys from the Ohio Democratic Party had filed suit to speed up the voting process in this way. The ballots were being handed out (later to be counted by machine under the supervision of Knox County's Democratic and Republican chairs) when someone yelled through the window of the Community Center, "Don't use the paper ballots! The Republicans are going to appeal it and it won't count!" After that, the majority chose to stick with the machines.
Across the rest of Ohio, the Capra theme was not so noticeable. Reporters and eyewitnesses told of voters who had given up after humiliating or frustrating waits, and who often cited the unwillingness of their employers to accept voting as an excuse for lateness or absence. In some way or another, these bottlenecks had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts. So did many disputes about "provisional" ballots, the sort that are handed out when a voter can prove his or her identity but not his or her registration at that polling place. These glitches might all be attributable to inefficiency or incompetence (though Gambier had higher turnouts and much shorter lines in 1992 and 1996). Inefficiency and incompetence could also explain the other oddities of the Ohio process -- from machines that redirected votes from one column to the other to machines that recorded amazing tallies for unknown fringe candidates, to machines that apparently showed that voters who waited for a long time still somehow failed to register a vote at the top of the ticket for any candidate for the presidency of these United States.
However, for any of that last category of anomaly to be explained, one would need either a voter-verified paper trail of ballots that could be tested against the performance of the machines or a court order that would allow inspection of the machines themselves. The first of these does not exist, and the second has not yet been granted.
I don't know who it was who shouted idiotically to voters not to trust the paper ballots in Gambier, but I do know a lot of people who are convinced that there was dirty work at the crossroads in the Ohio vote. Some of these people are known to me as nutbags and paranoids of the first water, people whose grassy-knoll minds can simply cancel or deny any objective reasons for a high Republican turnout. (Here's how I know some of these people: In November 1999, I wrote a column calling for international observers to monitor the then upcoming presidential election. I was concerned about restrictive ballot-access laws, illegal slush funds, denial of access to media for independents, and abuse of the state laws that banned "felons" from voting. At the end, I managed to mention the official disenfranchisement of voters in my hometown of Washington, D.C., and the questionable "reliability or integrity" of the new voting-machine technology. I've had all these wacko friends ever since.) But here are some of the non-wacko reasons to revisit the Ohio election.
First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general -- and probable -- one nationwide and statewide.)
In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. So maybe we have a barn-burning, charismatic future candidate on our hands, and Ms. Connally is a force to be reckoned with on a national scale. Or is it perhaps a trick of the Ohio atmosphere? There do seem to be a lot of eccentrics in the state. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. In addition to this eminence, they also possess distinctive (but not particularly African-American-sounding) names. In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.
In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more undervotes than Republican ones.
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In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes.
The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243.
This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney.
(The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general -- and probable -- one nationwide and statewide.)
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Earlier related reports from our archives:
Feb. 1, 2005:
Election fraud: Shut up, they explain
Jan. 26, 2005:
Ohio recount volunteers allege electoral tampering, legal violations and possible fraud
Jan. 24, 2005:
The strange death of American democracy: Endgame in Ohio
Jan. 13, 2005:
Ohio pulls plug on electronic voting
# with comments by Kathy Fisher and H&HH
Jan. 11, 2005:
Election farce comes to a predictable end
# with comments by Aaron Laundry
Jan. 11, 2005:
The last man to concede...
by Sheila Samples, ScoopExcerpt: The irregularities were so massive and widespread it took Conyers 102 pages to list them. His report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," was released on January 5, and is a clear indictment of the shameful lengths to which Republicans will go to derail democracy. At the same time, in a buoyant fund-raising letter to Ohians while the votes were still being counted, Blackwell made the case that he should be elected governor in return for saving the Great Buckeye State from "an unapologetic liberal named John Kerry," and for delivering the spoils to Bush.
Jan. 6, 2005:
Democrats interrupt electoral vote count, force brief debate on Ohio elections
Jan. 4, 2005:
The recount that wasn't,
a chance to reassure voters missed
by Steven Leser, Elites TV# The recount that wasn't, for the election that wasn't, of the President that isn't ... =Phil H.=
Jan. 3, 2005:
Bush asks judge to toss Ohio election suit
- Ohio recount highlights continuing vote trouble
- Vote protesters try last hurrah
- Vote challengers accuse Blackwell
of trying to let 'clock run out'
Jan. 3, 2005:
Is there one senator who will
stand up for black voters?
Jan. 2, 2005:
Footprints of electoral fraud: Early numbers
Dec. 31, 2004:
Greens, Libertarians re-open Ohio lawsuitExcerpt: "We've documented in this filing how this recount was not conducted in accordance with uniform standards throughout Ohio" as required by the U.S. Constitution, said John Bonifaz, a lawyer from the National Voting Right Institute representing the candidates.
Ohio law requires an elections board to manually recount a randomly selected 3 percent of ballots. If the totals match certified results for those precincts, all the county's votes are then machine-counted. If the hand count is off, a county must manually recount all its ballots.
The filing, part of an ongoing lawsuit originally brought by a county board of elections to stop the recount, alleges counties did not randomly select precincts for the manual recount and some workers altered votes to prevent a full hand count.
Dec. 31, 2004:
Ohio's official non-recount ends
amidst new evidence of fraud, theft and
judicial contempt mirrored in New Mexico
Dec. 27, 2004
Evidence of fraud and disenfran-
chisement in Ohio: A partial list
Dec. 25, 2004:
Ohio numbers support claims of Triad fraud
Dec. 23, 2004:
Video suppors Ohio vote fraud claim revealed# TruthOut says the video supports and adds to the Hocking County elections official's affidavit, and I have no reason to doubt TruthOut, but the video didn't work on our computer. =H&HH=
Dec. 23, 2004:
Guide to New Mexico vote irregularities
PDF FILE (REQUIRES ADOBE ACROBAT)
Dec. 23, 2004:
Warren County recount --
Snookered? What happened?
Dec. 22, 2004:
In Ohio, almost 1 in 50 votes
for president didn't count
Congressman seeks exit poll data
Dec. 21, 2004
Election results in southwestern Ohio
Dec. 21, 2004:
Election official “must have mis-heard” about patch installed on computer
and other unknown news about the very odd 2004 election
. Democrats' lawyer asks Blackwell for
investigation of TRIAD tampering
. Congressman implicated in vote fraud
. Recount continues in Ohio as vote machine
company makes odd "service calls"
. Recount observer not allowed
to inspect machines
. Ohio Justice throws out election challenge
. Ohio election officials
obstruct recount, say Greens
. Kerry, Bush pick up votes in Ohio
. "Please, please, please, count all the votes"
. Election challenge refiled by activists
. “Everyone felt better” after
technician “repeated a repair”
. Votes ought to be counted
Dec. 20, 2004
“Default settings” on voting machines
Dec. 20, 2004:
Global Election Systems email proves
they knew votes were not all countedExcerpt: "One more interesting thing to note: the AccuVote knows that it has dropped the ballot. So the question has always been, should we increment the card counter, and should we log the event. Currently we do neither. There are two schools here. One says we should notify the voter, log it, add a dropped ballot counter, send an incident report to the secretary of state, etc etc. The other is to increment the counter and send the voter on their ignorantly blissful way. Right now we kind of split the difference."
# So, they didn't increment the counter, they didn't log the event, and they sent the voter on his/her ignorantly blissful way? What if they put these machines in places with Democratic majorities? =Underground Panther in the Sky=
Dec. 18, 2004:
An introduction to ... The stolen election of 2004
Dec. 18, 2004:
Ohio vote count battles escalate amidst new evidence of potential criminal activity
Dec. 18, 2004:
Cuyahoga County ballots
seemed “pre-sorted” to volunteers
Dec. 15, 2004:
Proof of Ohio election fraud exposed Excerpt: TRIAD is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also donated money to both the Republican Party and the election campaign of George W. Bush. TRIAD manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November.
... A representative from TRIAD Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the TRIAD supplied Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system had a bad battery and had "lost all of its data". He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it and another "spare" tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was. He finally re-assembled everything and said it was working but to not turn it off.
He then asked which precinct would be counted for the 3% recount test, and the one which had been selected as it had the right number of votes, was relayed to him. He then went back and did something else to the tabulator computer.
The TRIAD Systems representative suggested that since the hand count had to match the machine count exactly, and since it would be hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count to come out exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers. He suggested making them look like employee information or something similar. The people doing the hand count could then just report these numbers no matter what the actual count of the ballots revealed. This would then "match" the tabulator report for this precinct exactly. The numbers were apparently the final certified counts for the selected precinct.
Dec. 14, 2004:
Zogby insists polls were "very,
very good, extremely accurate"
. Professor says vote numbers
don't add up
. Congressman wants 'raw' exit poll data
. Who did voters pick on Nov. 2?
In some cases, we'll never know
. Former Congressman jailed
for confronting Blackwell
. Ohio Supreme Court won’t
block certification?
. Some voters hold out hope
for Kerry victory
. Ohio counties dealing differently
with Kerry recount requests
. FBI, Congressional staffers curious
about self-described
vote fraud programmer
Dec. 13, 2004:
Ex-Congressman’s account of arrest
for speaking to BlackwellExcerpt: So at around 10 am, Carrie and I went to the front desk with a copy of the Conyers letter and presented our driver's licenses. We were told to wait while the receptionist called the Secretary of State's office, which told her "someone will come down and get the letter."
At that point, we retreated to Zuppa's, a very untrendy cafe located on the north side of the lobby. We ordered orange juice and sat down at a table. Within minutes, security was all over us.
"You must leave this building now,” said an exasperated Borden security cop, his hands shaking quite visibly.
“What’s the charge?” I asked. “Are we trespassing or do you just ‘reserve the right to refuse service to anyone?’”
“You must leave this building now,” he repeated. ...
Dec. 10, 2004:
Media account of
Ex-Congressman’s arrest
Dec. 13, 2004:
Ohio vote fraud battle heats up
by Katherine Yurica, Axis of Logic
Dec. 13, 2004:
Startling new revelations highlight rare Congressional hearings on Ohio vote
Dec. 12, 2004:
20 amazing facts about voting in the USA
Dec. 12, 2004:
Ohio absentee vote inflated
Dec. 12, 2004:
Blackwell's "locked-down" Ohio
poll records left in unlocked building
Dec. 11, 2004:
Complete original exit polls from 2004 election
Dec. 11, 2004:
Diebold pays $2.6-million
to settle California lawsuit
Dec. 11, 2004:
Ohio election investigation thwarted
by surprise Blackwell order
Earlier related reports from our archives:
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