There has been some “housecleaning” done at the Franklin County Ohio Board of Elections recently. As many as 114,000 people have been purged from the registration rolls in Franklin County OH which leaves 733,023 registered voters on the registration rolls. I strongly urge any American to call or email their local election official to make sure that you are still registered. This is happening all across Ohio but it may very will be happening in other states as well.
I understand that it is necessary for local election officials to clean up their registration rolls because many people move and some die but 114,000 people out of 845,000 is a lot of moving and dying.
Whether you believe that John Kerry actually won Ohio or not, the voting irregularities that took place in the 2004 election will be worse, not better in 2006 and 2008 and here is why I think that.
But first, I must strongly urge you to buy “What Went Wrong in Ohio” – the Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election.” You can also view it in pdf format here.
Here are some facts regarding the 2004 Election in Franklin County Ohio.
At seven of the eight polling places in Franklin County, a heavily populated urban community, there were only three voting machines per location; but there had been five machines at these locations during the 2004 primary.
Hardship caused by the misallocation of machines based on emails and other transmissions, with waits of 4-5 hours or more being the order of the day. For example, we have learned of four hour waits at Precincts 35B and C in Columbus; seven hours waits for one voting machine per thousand voters, where
the adjacent precinct had one station for 184 voters.”
In a number of locations, polling places were moved from large locations, such as gyms,where voters could comfortably wait inside to vote, to smaller locations where voters were required to wait in the rain.
Dr. Bob Fitrakis testified before the House Judiciary panel that Franklin County Board of Elections Chair, Bill Anthony, said that a truckload of 75 voting machines were held back on election day while people waited 5 to 6 hours to vote.
So many (mainly democratic) registered voters did not vote in the 2004 election because of the misallocation of machines. I must also point out that in many precincts, republican challengers were forcing all African American voters to produce ID even though by law, you do not need to produce an ID unless you are first time voter.
Now while I have been concentrating on the disenfranchisement of newly registered voters during the 2004 election, it did not occur to me that many people who have been registered for many years may have been the ones that were forced to cast provisional ballots during the election in 2004 and did not have their votes counted.
In Franklin County Ohio, there were almost 1,500 people who were were forced to cast provisional ballots and their ballots were not counted because they were listed as unregistered but yet were listed as registered in the Board of Elections database.
see link.
Ohio’s place as a key 2004 battleground for President Bush and Democrat John Kerry drew unprecedented voter-registration efforts to Columbus last summer and swelled the number of voters in Franklin County to more than 845,000.
Elections officials explained the anomaly at the time as a result of inactive voters who remained on the rolls, but the statistic sparked pre-election fraud allegations against a number of Democratic-leaning groups.
County Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said the proportion of registered voters is still high — 91.5 percent of the eligible population after the purge — but the clock is now ticking for 93,000 who haven’t voted since before 2002.
They could be purged from the voter rolls in 2009 if they don’t cast ballots or notify the elections board that they want to remain registered.
Were these 114,000 people that were recently purged but listed on the inactive voter list not showing up on the Board of Election poll books during the 2004 election? Were these people the ones that were forced to vote on a provisional ballot?
Even according to Matthew Damschroeder’s own testimony, the machine allocation was not based on the number of registered voters but on the number of “active” registered voters.
Not only were 114,000 recently purged because they did not VOTE in the 2004 election but it looks like 93,000 others also did not vote and will be moved to the “inactive” voter registration lists.
I urge all of you to help in any way possible to let Ohioans know that although they think they are registered and voted in the 2004 election, they may not be registered at all or be listed in the “inactive” voter registration rolls in which there vote will not count in 2006 or 2008.
And one more note, Kerry lost Ohio by 118,000 votes. In this one county alone, 207,000 registered voters did not vote in the 2004 election.