Lawsuit Before the Ohio Supreme Court

freepress.org
Lawsuit Before the Ohio Supreme Court
Summarized by Mary Anne Saucier, Columbus, Ohio

NATURE OF THE ACTION On December 13, 2004, numerous Ohio citizens contested “the certification of the election of the electors pledged to George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney for the offices, respectively, of President of the United States and Vice President of the United Sates for the terms commencing January 20, 2005…” and “…the certification of the election of Thomas Moyer for the office of Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court for the term commencing in 2005.”

LAWSUIT REFILED On December 16, 2004, Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer threw out the complaint because it had two election challenges. The following day, on December 17, thirty-seven voters and their lawyers refiled the election challenge for President and Vice President of the United States. The other case for the office of Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was refiled on December 20, 2004.

DEFENDANT-CONTESTEES are George W. Bush (candidate for the office of President of the United States of America), Richard B. Cheney (candidate for the office of Vice President of the United States of America), Karl Rove (chief election strategist and tactician for the Bush-Cheney campaign), the Bush-Cheney 2004 Committee, Thomas J. Moyer (Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice candidate), J. Kenneth Blackwell (Ohio Secretary of State), and the 20 Ohio Bush electors.

ATTORNEYS filing the suits are Clifford O. Arnebeck Jr. (Chairman, “Ohio Honest Election Campaign” of The Alliance for Democracy, and Chair of Legal Affairs Committee for Common Cause-Ohio); Robert Fitrakis, PhD (Director/Editor, Columbus Free Press, and Professor of Political Science at Columbus State Community College); Susan Truitt (Co-founder of Citizen’s Alliance for Secure Elections-Ohio); Peter Peckarsky, Technology Lawyer, based in Washington, D. C.; and such other attorneys retained by them for the litigation.

ELECTION CONTEST The defendants are accused of being part of “the pattern of vote fraud and discrimination… which operated to deprive numerous Ohio citizens of their constitutional and statutory rights.

“CLAIM FOR RELIEF” cited:

· INITIAL STATE ELECTION EXIT POLLS INDICATE KERRY-EDWARDS WON The 2004 National and State Election exit polls (interviewing voters immediately after they voted), directed by “the respected and world-renowned Warren Mitofsky,” showed dramatic differences between initial (“uncalibrated”) exit polls and the corrected exit poll (adjusted later to conform to the voting) for Ohio and a number of other states. The initial poll results were only available for a very short period of time when Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff) claimed victory for Bush in Ohio, and “called for a concession and an end to any inquiry into the results.” But, “…when these uncorrected results are compared to the ‘official’ state-by-state results, it is clear that election fraud (or other irregularity) occurred in the counting of the vote in Ohio and a number of other states.”

· NATIONAL EXIT POLLS INDICATE KERRY-EDWARDS WON “The vote fraud in connection with the national vote may also mean that the national exit poll is the most accurate representation of the votes actually cast. This means that candidate Bush probably did not win a ‘mandate’ of 3.5 million votes but actually lost the national vote by a significant margin to John Kerry. The chance of Kerry receiving a greater percentage of the popular vote than Bush in an honest election was 98.7%.”

EXHIBIT A contains a paper by Steven F. Freeman, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, entitled “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Honest? An Examination of Uncorrected Exit Poll Data. Part I: The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.” It presents “clear and convincing evidence of election fraud” in ten of the “battleground” states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

· LAWFUL BALLOTS DESTROYED OR ALTERED; UNLAWFUL BALLOTS ADDED “On information and belief, plaintiffs-contestors allege that traditional means of vote fraud were used…that unlawful ballots were added to those cast by lawful voters and that lawfully cast ballots were either destroyed or altered.” In Ohio, it is believed that at least 130,656 votes were deducted from Kerry-Edwards and added to Bush-Cheney.

· ABSENTEE VOTES NOT LISTED Dr. Werner Lange studied poll books in Trumbull County and found “580 absentee votes were cast for which there was no notation of absentee voting in the poll books.”

· UNLAWFUL DENIAL OF ACCESS TO POLL BOOKS Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, also co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign, “ordered all 88 boards of election to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote on December 6, 2004.” This “apparently caused violations of R.C. 3599.161(B) and (C) and may have caused such violations by every board of elections in the state…Each violation “of any provision of Title XXXv (35) is a separate instance of criminal election fraud pursuant to R.C. 3599.42” and could be a basis for removing Blackwell from office, if convicted.

· THERE WAS NON-TRADITIONAL TAMPERING WITH VOTES AND THEIR TABULATION Physical or electronic access can easily be gained to the voting and vote tabulating systems.

Exhibit B, written by Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEH, entitled “How to Hack the Vote: the Short Version,” (www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm) shows how this can be done by “changing the votes actually received by one or more candidates in a race, leaving the total votes cast in the race unchanged, and erasing or falsifying the electronic audit trail which could show the access to the computer and the spreadsheet.” Or unauthorized operating instructions could have been “inserted into the software used to operate either the vote tabulating machines or the voting machines.”



KERRY WON OHIO AND THE PRESIDENCY; ELLEN CONNALLY WON THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE OHIO SUPREME COURT



· It is believed “that due to error, fraud, or mistake…” that at least 130,656 votes “were deducted from the total number of votes actually cast for the Kerry-Edwards ticket and added to the number of votes actually cast for the Bush-Cheney ticket.” Kerry-Edwards won Ohio by at least 142,537 votes. It is thereby requested that at least 130,656 votes be added to the Kerry-Edwards ticket and the Kerry-Edwards Electoral College electors be issued certificates of election.

· At the same time, it is believed “that due to error, fraud, or mistake…” that 216,779 votes were deducted from Ellen Connally and added to those cast for Thomas J. Moyer. This means that “Ellen Connally won the election for Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court by at least 149,326 votes.”



EXAMPLES OF CONSTITUTIONAL AND STATUTORY VIOLATIONS:



· AUGLAIZE COUNTY - voting machine errors. A former employee of ES&S, “the company that provides the voting systems in Auglaize County, had access to and used the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results…a violation of county board of election protocol…Mr. Nuss was suspended and then resigned.”

· CUYAHOGA COUNTY - (1) “more than 10,000 voters” were kept from voting; (2) in a mostly black precinct, confused results for Kerry and third party candidates indicated “fraud, error, or mistake”; (3)“there was an effective denial of the right to cast a provisional ballot and have that provisional ballot counted. 8,099 were “ruled invalid,” about 1/3 of those cast; (4) “voters were misled when they received phone calls incorrectly informing them that their polling place had been changed”; and (5) in some cases, “arrows on the absentee ballots did not align with the correct punch hole” which “led to voters casting a vote for a candidate other than the candidate they intended to support.”

· FRANKLIN COUNTY - (1) In some absentee ballots, there was lack of alignment in the punch card hole, such as occurred in Cuyahoga County; (2) about a dozen voters were told that their voting location had been changed by someone “claiming to be from the County Board of Elections..”; (3) “there was a discriminatory assignment of more voting machines per registered voter to precincts with more white voters than African-American voters..”; and (4) there were “numerous reported instances of vote hopping (in which a voter selecting Kerry for President saw the choice displayed on the machine ‘hop’ to Bush for President).”

· KNOX COUNTY – (1) Mostly white precincts received more voting machines than precincts with a majority of African-American voters; and (2) certain precincts lacked enough voting machines.

· HAMILTON COUNTY – (1) Mostly white precincts received more voting machines than predominantly African-American precincts; (2) there were some voting machine errors keeping voters from inserting ballots “all the way into certain machines…”; (3) candidates Kerry-Edwards names were omitted from some absentee ballots; and (4) a Republican precinct judge was asking every voter for their address and “being a jerk about it.”

· JEFFERSON COUNTY – “some challenged voters were not notified that their registration was challenged and their right to vote was in question. Their names were merely published in a nearly unreadable list in the local newspaper.”

· LAKE COUNTY – “some voters received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NAACP drives that they could not vote.”

· LUCAS COUNTY – (1) there was “discriminatory assignment of voting machines to precincts; and (2) machine errors “snarled the process throughout the day. Jammed or inoperable voting machines were reported throughout the city. Lucas County Election Director Paula Hicks-Hudson said the Diebold optical scan machines jammed during testing in the weeks before the election.”

· MAHONING COUNTY – (1) voting machine errors included one precinct “recorded a negative 25 million votes”; (2) twenty to thirty “ES&S iVotronic machines needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate’s opponent”; (3) about a dozen of these machines had to be reset because they “essentially froze.” And, (4) “there were numerous reported instances of vote hopping (in which a voter selecting Kerry for President saw the choice displayed on the machine ‘hop’ to Bush for President).”

· MERCER COUNTY – Voting machine errors showed “289 people cast (punch card) ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded for president. The county’s Web site appeared to show a similar conflict… It would appear that about 4,000 votes (nearly 7%) were not counted for a candidate.”

· MIAMI COUNTY - (1) In Concord Southwest precinct “voter turnout was a highly suspect and improbable 98.55%. In Concord South precinct, there was a highly improbable 94.27% voter turnout.” (2) After all precincts had reported, “18,615 votes came in” and are “statistically suspicious..”

· MONTGOMERY COUNTY - Voting machine errors showed two precincts with “25% presidential undervotes. This means no presidential vote was recorded on ? of the ballots. The overall undervote rate for the county was 2%. The undercount amounted to 2.8 percent of the ballots in the 231 precincts that supported candidate Kerry, but only 1.6 percent of those cast in the 354 precincts that supported candidate Bush.”

· SANDUSKY COUNTY - (1) There was an overcount “when a computer disk containing votes was accidentally inserted into the vote tabulating machines twice by an election worker.” (2) Also, it was “discovered some ballots in nine precincts were counted twice.”

· STARK COUNTY - “The Election Board rejected provisional ballots cast at the wrong precinct in the right polling place.” This had been allowed in other elections.

· TRUMBULL COUNTY - a voter forged a registered voter’s name and gave a different address. When the registered voter arrived, she was allowed to vote.

· WARREN COUNTY - “there were irregularities in the county on election night when officials locked down the county administration building and blocked anyone from observing the vote count.”

· IN SEVERAL COUNTIES, besides Franklin and Mahoning, “there were numerous reported instances of vote hopping..” Kerry voters saw their votes go to Bush.



The attorneys are basing their arguments on Ohio’s Revised Code 3515.16, entitled “Testimony in Supreme Court.” All testimony will be given in the form of depositions.

The contestors may have 20 days to take and file testimony and the contestees 20 more days, but “the court may render such judgments and make such orders as the law and facts warrant.”

Michael I. Shamos from the Institute for Software Research International, at Carnegie Mellon University, believes “it is possible to overturn the Elector’s vote to match the will of the people if the irregularities are enough to overcome the margin of victory.”

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Default settings on Voting Machines

freepress.org

Default settings in Mahoning County
by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.

A disturbing story has been widely circulated that a vote for Bush was the default choice in the software of electronic voting machines in a number of states. By definition, “default” settings are built-in by the manufacturer to make sure their programs work properly, and can be changed by the user. Some examples of default settings on a home computer are screen savers, type face, and screen resolution.

According an article by Ann Harrison, posted at http://www.counterpunch.org/harrison12082004.html

in certain counties in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New Mexico where touch screen voting machines were used, there have been complaints from voters who selected Kerry on the touch screen and saw their votes change to Bush on a summary screen. In addition, there was a specific problem with the Sequoia AVC Edge machine (not used in Ohio) where voters actually saw preselected default choices presented to them.

With touch screen machines, it is possible to set up a default choice for Bush that would not be seen by the voters. Their votes would be automatically cast for Bush unless they successfully overrode the default choice of the computer. Likewise, if they deliberately chose not to vote for president, their votes would be counted for Bush.

Mahoning County was by far the largest county in Ohio where touch screen voting machines were utilized. According to a report by the Youngstown Vindicator at http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php

Mark Munroe, Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, said there were 20 to 30 machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate’s opponent. In addition, about a dozen machines needed to be reset because they “essentially froze.” Later on election night, problems arose in 16 precincts (11 in Youngstown, 2 in Boardman, and one each in Jackson Township, Craig Beach, and Washingtonville), causing election results to be delayed for three hours as Board of Elections employees checked the vote tallies of the touch screen machines.

Mahoning County utilized ES&S Ivotronic touch screen machines. The administrative password for these machines was reported on the ES&S website itself.

By default, the password is 1111. According to http://savethevote.com/issues/glitches.htm this password cannot be modified easily, which would mean that anyone who knows the password could change other default settings on the machines.

Lists of Election Day incident reports are posted at https://voteprotect.org/epc/index.php?display. Click on Research/Maps to find the state, and then the county, in which you are interested.

For Mahoning County there are 116 incident reports, 28 of them involving machine problems. Most of these are complaints consistent with the voting machine having a preselected default setting. There are several reports of machines miscasting votes, always away from Kerry, that do not specify a polling site. Most, however, do specify a polling place, and for these I have ascertained the precinct by calling the Board of Elections or referring to their website at http://www.electionohio.com/mahoning/findpollinglocation.asp.

In addition, we have the specific ID number for three machines (noted below):

TOUCH SCREEN COMPLAINTS, MAHONING COUNTY

Youngstown 1F, Mill Creek Community Center, 496 Glenwood Avenue, Youngstown (2 reports). Machine not working; “arrow moves to other candidates repeatedly.”

Youngstown 2A, Spanish Evangelical Church, 1408 Rigby Street, Youngstown (6 reports). Two of three machines not working properly, or vote for presidential candidate is “reversed.”

Youngstown 2B, Mary Haddow School, 2800 Oak Street Extension, Youngstown (1 report). Two machines down.

Youngstown 2C, Elizabeth Baptist Church, 7 South Garland Avenue, Youngstown (1 report). Machine # V0112442-C “not properly recording votes.” Brought to attention of presiding judge at 7:40 AM, recalibrated by Board of Elections employee at 9:35 AM, machine not shut down during that time.

Youngstown 2E, Price Memorial Zion Church, 920 Dryden Avenue, Youngstown (6 reports). Two voters “selected Kerry and Bush’s name came up.” They succeeded in voting for Kerry on their second attempts. One voter “had to scroll through and vote five times before his votes were finally recorded.” Two voters said the “presidential vote option never appeared while they were going through trying to vote,” it happened to a third voter at the same time, and on two different machines.

Youngstown 3C, Tabernacle Baptist Church, 707 Arlington Street, Youngstown (1 report). Machine # V0107749-C “malfunctioning, screen flashes and scrolls, shows different results or no results.”

Youngstown 5F, Martin Luther Lutheran Church, 420 Clearmount Drive, Youngstown (1 report). One touch screen machine broken, second one erased votes.

Youngstown 5G, Hillman Elementary School, 164 West Myrtle, Youngstown (1 report). When voter pressed Kerry, the screen “went blank” four times. Five attempts were required.

Boardman 20, St. John’s Greek Orthodox Church, 4955 Glenwood Avenue, Boardman (2 reports). Vote for Kerry goes to Bush. On third attempt, screen shows vote correctly. Poll worker dismisses complaint, saying machine is “temperamental.” Another voter needed two attempts to cast vote for Kerry.

Poland Village 1, North Elementary School, 361 Johnston Place, Youngstown (1 report). Pressed Kerry button, third party candidate appeared on screen. On the second attempt it worked.

Struthers IC, St. Nicholas Byzantine Church, 1898 Wilson Avenue, Youngstown (1 report). Machine # V0114343-C repeatedly marks Democratic vote as Republican. Many voters complained of this problem. Election worker had to restart and recalibrate the machine.

These are only some of the broken or improperly functioning machines. The Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections reported many more than these. Most of the incident reports are precinct-specific, and they cry out for scrutiny of the 2004 and 2000 election results at the precinct level. However, the precinct boundaries in Youngstown have been completely redrawn since the 2000 election, making a meaningful comparison possible only at the ward level, not the precinct level.

In the table below, the 2004 results are listed on the top lines, and the 2000 results on the bottom lines. Percentages for candidates are derived from votes counted for president. Percentages for “undervotes,” ballots with no candidate selected or otherwise not counted, are derived from total ballots cast.

COMPARISON OF 2004 AND 2000 RESULTS IN YOUNGSTOWN
Cast Valid Republican Democratic Undervotes
WARD 1 2629 2596 209 8.05% 2339 90.10% 33 1.26%
2140 1977 131 6.62% 1796 90.84% 163 7.62%
WARD 2 3823 3781 295 7.80% 3434 90.82% 42 1.10%
3537 3315 205 6.18% 3018 91.04% 222 6.28%
WARD 3 3539 3488 450 12.90% 2981 85.46% 51 1.44%
3200 3038 386 12.70% 2545 83.77% 162 5.06%
WARD 4 5422 5372 1353 25.19% 3967 73.85% 50 0.92%
5023 4919 1222 24.84% 3419 69.51% 104 2.07%
WARD 5 5456 5371 1204 22.42% 4107 76.47% 85 1.56%
4946 4783 1064 22.25% 3542 74.05% 163 3.30%
WARD 6 3206 3178 420 13.22% 2723 85.68% 28 0.87%
2790 2619 432 16.49% 2105 80.37% 171 6.13%
WARD 7 4941 4890 1183 24.19% 3657 74.79% 51 1.03%
4587 4452 1107 24.80% 3117 70.01% 135 2.94%

As shown in the table above, the Republican percentage of the vote increased significantly in Wards 1 and 2, increased slightly in Wards 3, 4, and 5, and actually decreased in Wards 6 and 7. In fact, the actual number of Republican votes decreased in Ward 6. This trend can be studied more closely by comparing the changes for both parties in each ward, as shown in the table below:

GAINS OR LOSSES FOR BOTH PARTIES
Republican Democratic
WARD 1 78 12.60% 541 87.40%
WARD 2 90 17.79% 416 82.21%
WARD 3 64 12.80% 436 87.20%
WARD 4 131 19.29% 548 80.71%
WARD 5 140 19.86% 565 80.14%
WARD 6 -12 -1.98% 618 101.98%
WARD 7 76 12.34% 540 87.66%

Note that the Republican share of the increased vote was 17.79% in Ward 2, which is 11.61% more than what Bush received in the 2000 election. This is also the ward where half the complaints (14 of 28) about touch screen voting machines were filed. In Ward 1, the Republican share of the increased vote was 12.60%, which is 5.98% more than what Bush received in the 2000 election. There were complaints filed here as well, in Precinct 1F, where the touch screen machine recorded “other candidates repeatedly.” In Ward 3, where a complaint was filed in Precinct 3C, Bush’s share of the increased vote was 12.80%, which is 0.10% more than he received in the 2000 election. This might seem insignificant were it not for the complaint that the touch screen “flashes and scrolls, shows different results or no results,” and for voting patterns in the other wards of Youngstown.

In Ward 4, Bush’s share of the increased vote was 19.29%, which is 5.55% less than he received in the 2000 election. In Ward 5, Bush’s share of the increased vote was 19.86%, which is 2.39% less than he received in the 2000 election. In Ward 6, Bush actually had a net loss of 12 votes, or -1.98%, which is 18.47% less than he received in the 2000 election. In Ward 7, Bush’s share of the increased vote was 12.34%, which is 12.46% less than he received in the 2000 election.

It is entirely possible that the increases in Bush’s percentage of the vote in Wards 1, 2, and 3 of Youngstown were due to default settings for Bush on the touch screen voting machines. Both the statistical evidence and the anecdotal evidence are entirely consistent with this conclusion. Even in the wards where Bush lost ground to his Democratic opponent, default settings for Bush may have served to cut his losses. The lack of posted complaints specific to these wards should not be construed to mean that all the touch screen machines in these wards were operating properly.

Touch screen machines are touted as a technological advance because they prevent all “overvotes,” ballots with two or more candidates selected for the same office, and because they prevent “undervotes,” ballots with no candidate selected, unless by deliberate choice of the voter.

“Undervotes” have long been a real problem, undermining the ability of election results to reflect the will of the electorate. Undervotes are especially common with punch cards. If the machines are not emptied frequently they become filled with chads, which can prevent the voter from punching fully through the card, or prevent the voter from fully inserting the punch card into the machine, in which case the punches will not be aligned properly. The machine will then fail to record a vote.

It is an affront to voting rights for election officials to refuse to examine by hand the punch cards that the machines failed to identify as valid votes. There are always people who go to the polls and choose not to vote for a presidential candidate, but not many.

Undervotes are less common with optical scanners, which are machines that scan paper ballots for marks made by voters in spaces next to candidates’ names. There are always some ballots with marks that are not detected by the scanner, and these must be examined by hand if the will of the voter is to be determined. Again, it is an affront to voting rights for election officials to fail to do so. Machines should be utilized to minimize the number of ballots that must be read manually, but should not be assumed to eliminate this task altogether.

In Mahoning County, optical scanners were used for all voting in the 2000 election, and for absentee ballots in the 2004 election. Again, the 2004 data are listed on the top lines, and the 2000 data on the bottom lines.

COMPARISON OF UNDERVOTES, 2004 AND 2000
Cast Counted Uncounted
YOUNGSTOWN 29,016 28,676 340 1.17%
26,223 25,103 1120 4.27%
SUBURBS 86,919 86,233 686 0.79%
78,347 77,128 1219 1.56%
ABSENTEE 18,354 17,966 388 2.11%
12,319 12,011 308 2.50%
COUNTY WIDE 134,289 132,875 1414 1.05%
116,889 114,242 2647 2.26%

The percentage of uncounted votes in 2004 was twice as high for absentee ballots with optical scanners as for Election Day ballots with touch screens. The problem with touch screens lies not in the number of undervotes, but in the reason why the number is so low.

One way to examine the Mahoning County election results is to look for the precincts with the most undervotes.

MAHONING COUNTY PRECINCTS WITH 2.5% OR MORE UNDERVOTES
Precinct Reg Cast Turnout Bush Kerry Undervotes
YOUNGSTOWN 5G 687 316 46.00% 19 247 44 13.92%
YOUNGSTOWN 3G 684 306 44.74% 26 263 13 4.25%
YOUNGSTOWN 3D 686 225 32.80% 16 192 8 3.56%
STRUTHERS 1B 460 237 51.52% 50 178 7 2.95%
CAMPBELL 4B 542 288 52.77% 53 225 8 2.78%
LOWELLVILLE 1 517 329 63.64% 88 230 9 2.74%
YOUNGSTOWN 1F 595 265 44.54% 16 235 7 2.64%
YOUNGSTOWN 3C 813 266 32.72% 34 218 7 2.63%

There are 312 precincts in Mahoning County. In only 8 precincts was the percentage of undervotes 2.5% or more, and 5 of these precincts were in Youngstown.

Youngstown 3C, Tabernacle Baptist Church, 707 Arlington Street, Youngstown, was the one where the touch screen “flashes and scrolls, shows different results or no results.” As a result, 7 undervotes were cast.

But without question, the most interesting of these precincts is Youngstown 5G, Hillman Elementary School, 164 West Myrtle, Youngstown. There were 9 complaints about long lines, slow pace, and “planned confusion,” despite having 6 voting machines. More importantly, this is the precinct where a voter pressed Kerry and the screen “went blank” four times. Five attempts were required to cast a vote. Apparently other voters had this problem also, as there were 44 undervotes, 13.92% of the ballots cast, three times the rate of any other precinct in Mahoning County. It is obvious that nearly all of these were Kerry voters, as he won the precinct with 247 votes to 19 for Bush. It is also obvious that the default setting on the defective machine was for no vote at all. The complaint was not that Bush’s name appeared on the screen when voters pressed Kerry, but that the screen “went blank.” This precinct serves to illustrate how many votes could default to an opposing candidate with one machine programmed in this manner.

Another way to examine the Mahoning County election results is to look for precincts with zero undervotes. In the 2000 election, when optical scanners were used, there were 11 precincts out of 416, or 2.6%, where every ballot cast was counted for president. In the 2004 election there were 21 precincts out of 312, or 6.7%, where every ballot cast was counted for president.

Without question, the most interesting of these precincts is Youngstown 2E, Price Memorial Zion Church, 920 Dryden Avenue, Youngstown. There were many reports of voter suppression and intimidation here.

Since the 2000 election, the 19 precincts of Ward 2 have been consolidated into 12. Price Memorial Zion Church was the polling place for more than one precinct, and voters were not told which side of the room to go to. One voter had to go home, check her registration card, and return again to vote. An 88-year-old woman who had voted at the same polling place for 40 years learned only on Election Day that her precinct had been changed and that her new polling place was farther away.

Another voter who had recently changed her address to this precinct was told by the Republican challenger that her name did not appear on the rolls. When she stated her intention to vote at the precinct for her old address, the Republican challenger took her name and called ahead, so she felt she would be challenged again if she went there. She was so upset by the challenge that she was afraid to vote even by provisional ballot, fearing that it would not count. There were complaints at 7:00 AM, 9:57 AM, 10:26 AM, and 11:45 AM that the Republican challenger was intimidating voters, standing too close, leaning and looking over their shoulders.

But the most damning evidence about Youngstown Precinct 2E is the fact that no undervotes were reported. This is the precinct where two voters selected Kerry and Bush’s name came up, where one voter had to scroll through five times before his votes were finally recorded, and where three voters said that the presidential option never appeared at all while they were trying to vote, and that this happened on two different machines. How could a presidential option fail to appear on the screen, even on one occasion, let alone three times with three different voters, and no undervotes be cast? By setting up a touch screen machine with an unseen default candidate, the one whose name sometimes appears against the will of the voters.

If touch screen machines are to be used, against the better judgment of this writer, it is essential to allow inadvertent undervotes by having a default setting for no vote at all, and that the machines function properly so that the number of undervotes is small. To steer undervotes into the column of a candidate chosen by a computer hacker is nothing short of fraud. The number of votes stolen in this manner may seem small in any given precinct, but it can happen almost everywhere at once, automatically, undetected, without a paper trail.

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Washington's recount, issues elsewhere show that reform is needed

statesmanjournal.com
Top democracy deserves first-rate voting system

Washington's recount, issues elsewhere show that reform is needed

Ballots mysteriously appeared or disappeared. Vote totals didn't add up. Regional officials barred a controversial candidate from the ballot. And hundreds of thousands of residents registered complaints.

In a developing democracy, such incidents would spark international condemnation and insistence on electoral reforms.

Americans and their leaders should join that chorus, even though those problems happened in Hometown, U.S.A.

This not to say that President Bush's forces stole the 2004 election or that John Kerry was the real victor. Despite the disputed votes in Ohio and elsewhere, Bush won. All that's left to do is count the electoral votes Jan. 6 in Congress.

The system worked. However, it has too many cracks, especially for a country that considers itself the world's leading democracy.

Look back at Oregon's chaotic decision about whether Ralph Nader would be on the presidential ballot. He was doomed by state petition-signature rules that weren't followed to the "T." To a neutral observer, it might appear as over-enforcing rules to hurt Nader and help Kerry.

And Oregon's election was comparatively well-run.

In the Washington governor's race, the vote tally has varied with every count and recount. More than 700 ballots were mistakenly rejected in King County, and it's unclear whether they ever will be counted.

In other states, voters complained about standing in lines for 10 hours, about poll workers not having enough provisional ballots and about machines switching votes between candidates. In many places, voters used touch-screen ballots that lacked paper trails for recounts.

All of this happened after America embarked on voting improvements after the 2000 election debacle.

Two federal agencies, the Government Accountability Office and the U.S. Election Commission, will take a national look at how the 2004 election was conducted. But Congress and the states should take these steps:

# Place elections, campaign-finance controls and congressional/legislative redistricting in the hands of nonpartisan officials. Create an independent election commission or convert the secretary of state's offices to true nonpolitical operations.

# Invest much more in election equipment, personnel and training. Many ballot-counting errors can be attributed to undertrained or overworked election employees.

# Set national standards that require written records for all votes cast, ensure adequate numbers of voting machines in all precincts and provide increased monitoring and faster resolution of voting problems.

# Require states and local jurisdictions to adopt clear-cut standards for tabulating disputed votes and petition signatures. Develop backup systems to audit the handling of such votes. Write those rules in language that rank-and-file voters can understand.

# Examine how other democracies conduct elections to see what we can learn from them.

Oregon's and America's election systems are pretty good, but we shouldn't settle for "pretty good" when it comes to the foundation of our democracy: elections.

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The greatest story never told

freepress.org
The greatest story never told
by Robert Lockwood Mills

There’s a story to tell this Christmas season about evil and redemption, about hope for the future. No, it isn’t the one about King Herod and the Babe of Bethlehem. That story has been told thousands of times, and has inspired Christians and even many non-Christians for two millennia. The new Christmas story hasn’t been told, because as was the case in Palestine two thousand years ago, the public isn’t quite ready to receive the news. There’s no room in the inn…not yet, at least.

The United States of America began as a secular country that welcomes religion, not as a religious country that tolerates secular humanism. It is a nation of laws, not men. Our founding fathers were mostly God-fearing gentlemen, but contrary to popular belief, the late 18th-century was not a time when religious observances were prevalent. We’ve become a religious nation, which is good, but in the evolution we’ve lost sight of the guiding principles on which America was founded.

Among our cherished institutions is freedom of the press. John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant, wrote an article in a New York newspaper in 1733 that portrayed William Cosby, a Governor appointed by King George II to keep the colonies in line, as a tyrant. Zenger was brought up on libel charges, but in a landmark decision, he was acquitted in court on the grounds that he had written the truth. Under kings, any criticism is libel, truthful or not; but in a democracy, truth has dominion over despotism.

The United States is in crisis, 271 years after Zenger established press freedom as a precious right of Americans. A new despot has emerged in the form of corporate control of media. Our big-city newspapers and TV networks have consolidated; what the public learns and what it doesn’t is governed by a handful of oligarchs more concerned with the financial status quo, about their earnings and pleasing Wall Street, than about informing citizens. In 1733, what King George didn’t want printed was libel. Today, what the media barons don’t want read might not be libel…but it doesn’t get printed, either.

The present writer was in Florida on Election Day, as a poll watcher for Election Protection Coalition, a non-partisan group concerned with preventing a repeat of the 2000 election debacle. What he saw first hand persuaded him that fraud had occurred on a massive scale--- in Florida, Ohio, and probably in other battleground states.

At his polling site, a largely minority area in Hillsborough County, half as many voting machines were in use as had been used for the earlier primary. Across town, the same situation prevailed. Long lines forced many potential voters to choose between their civic duty and privilege (voting) and their work and family responsibilities. Hillsborough County was the tip of the iceberg, as it turned out; the same happened all throughout Florida and Ohio. But in predominantly Republican neighborhoods, plenty of voting machines were on hand, lines were normal, and everyone who wanted to vote, did.

I saw another apparent anomaly. A touch-screen voting machine “flipped” a woman’s vote from John F. Kerry to George W. Bush. The woman was visibly upset, but it seemed to us poll watchers like a mere computer glitch, no different than a super market checkout machine that records an incorrect price for lettuce. It seemed that way, at least, until reports came in from all around the country about other electronic vote flipping. In Youngstown, Ohio, it went on all day without the machines being fixed.

Was a rash of faulty computers to blame? Possibly. Except that almost without exception, every switched vote went in the same direction…from Kerry to Bush.

Within 48 hours of John Kerry’s concession on November 3, no fewer than 57,000 complaints had been lodged about one voting irregularity or another: unfair allocation of voting machines, penalizing minority neighborhoods; votes switched from Kerry to Bush electronically; minority voters being told by “election officials” that because of the long lines, they could vote on Nov. 3 if they wished; voters threatened with having their cars towed if they didn’t leave the queue; others denied provisional ballots on invalid premises, still others directed to the wrong polling stations by people posing as election monitors.

Late in the afternoon of Nov. 2, exit polls were forecasting a clear Kerry victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote. At the White House, Bush adviser Karen Hughes told the president he’d lost. She knew that exit polls, because of their reliability, have often been used by the United States to measure the legitimacy of foreign elections; indeed, the Ukraine election was discredited on that very basis. Dick Morris, who once worked for Bill Clinton but is now a Republican adviser, said, “Exit polls are almost never wrong.”

But the tabulated vote told a different story. George W. Bush was winning. The exit polls, as it happened, had been very accurate in states that used mostly paper ballots. But they were wildly “inaccurate,” always favoring John F. Kerry, in states using predominantly electronic voting machines. Touch-screen and optical-scan voting equipment is manufactured exclusively by corporations with ties to the Republican Party. The source code inside these machines (which could reveal if they had been tampered with) is considered proprietary information, not subject to review or audit by non-partisan or Democratic election officials. The opportunity for non-detectable fraud is manifest.

Open-minded people, none of whom work at a major American newspaper or for a major television network, began to wonder, “Maybe the exit polls were right all along. Maybe it’s the tabulated vote that was manipulated in George W. Bush’s favor.” Reports circulated on the Internet, a combination of reported facts and theories. College professors analyzed the election data and concluded that the likelihood of all the anomalies and inconsistencies occurring in one candidate’s favor was infinitesimal.

The New York Times devoted several front-page stories to the fraudulent election…in the Ukraine, that is. Its one front-page article on allegations of election fraud in Florida and Ohio carried a headline suggesting that Internet bloggers had been devising wild conspiracy theories, but that sensible folks were quickly debunking them. Meanwhile, Senator John Conyers, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held hearings in Washington and Columbus, Ohio at which witnesses detailed gruesome incidents of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. A software programmer offered an affidavit stating that in October, 2000, a Florida state legislator (now a congressman) had asked the programmer’s company to devise a vote-rigging prototype, which the programmer did…in time for the 2000 election. The congressman in question had been Jeb Bush’s running mate in a 1994 gubernatorial race. The allegation has not been refuted, except in the form of a non-specific blanket denial by the software company and its lawyer. The congressman remains silent.

None of the above news has reached holiday revelers in this Christmas season. The same media that failed to investigate Bush administration claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now won’t explore what happened on Nov. 2. They’re eager to report to us on fraudulent elections in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, Kazakhstan, even Puerto Rico. But the very notion that an administration that deceived the American people about why it engaged in preemptive war against a country that wasn’t threatening us, would also rig an election in its own favor, is somehow incomprehensible.

King Herod killed babies in ancient Palestine. One newborn, later to be called the Prince of Peace, somehow escaped to Egypt and survived. Three Wise Men journeyed from the Far East to herald the miracle of His birth, guided by a bright light that symbolized truth.

Where are our Three Wise Men today? Where is the Star of Bethlehem in 2004? Will the truth be known? It would be a wonderful Christmas present for a country that has lost its way.

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Election study finds widespread ballot-counting problems

shns.com
Election study finds widespread ballot-counting problems

By THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service

- A review of election results in a 10-county sampling revealed more than 12,000 ballots that failed to record a vote for president, almost one in every 10 ballots cast. The unofficial audit by Scripps Howard News Service uncovered malfunctioning voting machines, improperly designed ballots and poor accounting procedures around the nation.

The review of certified election returns led authorities to restore 662 votes for president in Louisiana and West Virginia that had been miscounted in easily detectable errors made by local officials.

But most of the ballots discovered missing in the study will remain lost.

"I'm so upset over this that I can't sleep," said Sandy Campbell, clerk of Pike County, Ark., upon learning that a damaged optical scanning machine permanently lost nearly 700 votes. "We had no idea this had happened. But I'll know what to look for in the future. We'll try never to let this happen again."

The study - part of a yearlong project examining errors in America's election practices - checked the accuracy of the Nov. 2 election by comparing official results for president against the reported number of ballots cast in more than 2,400 counties nationwide.

Ten counties with some of the nation's worst voting record discrepancies were selected in the project. Local election officials were asked why their vote tallies didn't match their ballot counts.

All but one county official admitted they did not make this important crosscheck before reporting results that, most now concede, contained significant errors. State officials also failed to notice the discrepancies.

"This speaks to the need for states to be more thorough," said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, after seeing results of the Scripps Howard study. "Every state is accountable to ensure their procedures and practices deliver election results with integrity."

Four of the 10 counties contacted in this study have amended their official vote certifications.

"We're so glad we found this. I don't know how it happened. Thank you so much for calling us," said Registrar of Voters Bettye Moore in Madison Parish, La., after finding errors that misplaced 419 votes for Democrat John Kerry and 15 lost votes for President Bush.

Richard Kirby, clerk for Calhoun County in rural West Virginia, said he accidentally erased 229 votes for Bush. He had earlier indicated the incumbent had received just one vote.

"I messed up when transferring the data (onto official reporting forms). It was so obvious that it should have been caught but it wasn't," Kirby said. "I will send a revised certification report to the secretary of state. In the future, I'll just check myself better and have somebody else check my work."

Two counties in Indiana made significant mistakes when counting the number of voters who went to the polls last month.

"I can't believe I did this!" said Jackson County Clerk Sarah Benter upon discovering a 1,664-vote error in her ballot count. "I'm going to have to get with our state Election Division to get this fixed."

The absentee vote was accidentally counted twice in White County, Ind., causing a 992-vote error in the ballot count. "You are just way too observant for me," Election Clerk Mary Reid said. "I need to get this fixed right now."

Other problems uncovered in this study found much larger numbers of miscounted votes that cannot be corrected or recovered. The largest discrepancy occurred in Carteret County, N.C., where a programming error in a 10-year-old touch-screen voting machine erased 4,439 ballots.

"It was the most elementary error," said Edward Pond, chairman of the Carteret County Elections Board. "The machine was set so that it had a vote capacity of only 3,005 votes. If I hadn't been there watching the tally, I don't know when we would have noticed this."

Pond said his board plans to "send a letter of apology to each of these voters" and to invite them to a new election Jan. 11 to vote for North Carolina's agriculture commissioner, which is still undecided because of the error.

The Scripps Howard study found a significant discrepancy in the vote count in Burke County, N.C., which also uses dated touch-screen machines. Burke County voters cast 34,604 ballots, but only 30,762 votes for president were recorded. Less than 89 percent of the voters recorded a presidential preference.

Election experts say any time 2 percent or more of ballots cast in a major race fail to record a vote, those numbers should be investigated.

"These are the figures that I have," said Greer Suttlemyer, director of elections in Burke County.

Scripps Howard notified the North Carolina State Board of Elections of the discrepancy, and an audit team was sent to the county last week under the direction of the board's general counsel, Don Wright.

The attorney concluded the electronic ballot was poorly designed. It displayed the option to vote for president on the screen where voters could select the "straight-party voting option."

That design is particularly confusing, Wright said, because under North Carolina law a straight-party vote to select all candidates from one party does not include the vote for president.

"I can only make the assumption that voters thought the straight-party option would include the other office that was on the same screen," Wright said.

Voting machines again came under suspicion in two Arkansas counties where optical scanners apparently falsely reported that hundreds of voters selected two or more presidential candidates, a disqualifying error called "overvoting."

"Basically, we had a mechanical failure," said Pike County Clerk Campbell. The scanner disqualified 692 of the county's 4,083 voters - more than one in six voters. The machine also disqualified 433 votes in the U.S. Senate race for the same reason.

"We sent a technician to Pike County to check," said Meghan McCormick, spokeswoman for Omaha-based Election Systems and Software Inc., which manufactured Pike County's optical scan machine. "There was a scratch on Sensor 'A' that has already been repaired. The scratch probably occurred during the election, but we'll never be certain."

A similar optical scanner in Crittenden County, Ark., reported that 1,853 of the county's 17,284 voters had selected more than one presidential candidate. Another 131 ballots were counted as having no checkmarks for president.

About one in every eight ballots cast in Crittenden County failed to register a choice for president.

"I'm surprised by this. But that ballot was very confusing," said Scott Ferguson, a full-time radiologist and part-time chairman of the Crittenden County Election Commission. "I think it was a grouping problem."

Crittenden County's presidential ballot contained several unusual design elements, including presidential slates that provided selections next to both presidential and vice presidential candidates.

Ferguson admitted,"I'm not sure what would happen" if voters darkened the oval next to both President Bush's name and the oval next to his running mate, Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The vice presidential bubbles were not programmed," said Lou Ann Driver, the county's data processing technician who wrote the tabulation routines for the scanner. "If people voted for Bush and Cheney, well, that wasn't supposed to count as an overvote."

Driver said county workers tried to put the presidential and vice presidential candidates on one line, but the names were too long to fit in the available space.

Regardless of the cause of overvotes in Crittenden County, there was no justification for conducting a recount, according to Tim Humphries, staff counsel to Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels.

"There is no authority under the Arkansas Code for a recount after the election has been certified," Humphries said. "The law says if there is to be a recount, it must happen before then."

He said Arkansas state employees "do not compare the presidential vote against the total vote. Hopefully, the county election commissions do that."

But most of the local election officials contacted for this story - and in dozens of other interviews conducted throughout the year - said they were unaware of discrepancies between vote tallies and the number of ballots cast. Instead, county officials often claim large discrepancies are the deliberate choice of many voters to ignore major races like president or governor.

"Most of them just didn't vote," Kirby said. "It's weird but it happens." But he double checked the vote in his West Virginia county and called back a day later to confess: "It was an error. I know, because I made the error."

Officials in two of the 10 counties selected in this study refused to review ballots or check for missing votes.

"I don't have time to go through all of this, although it does sound like it ought to be gotten to the bottom of," said County Clerk John Jones of Worth County, Mo.

Only 1,132 of his 1,326 ballots registered a presidential vote, which means nearly 15 percent of Worth County voters appear to have ignored the presidential race. "Sir, I cannot record votes for president that are not there," Jones said later.

Only 2,063 of the 2,283 ballots cast in Adams County, Idaho, registered a vote for president. Officially, only 90 percent of the voters in this rural county had an opinion in the presidential race.

"If you can convince the secretary of state of Idaho to order a recount and to reimburse my county for it, then we'll do a recount. But I'm not going to do it," said Adams County Clerk Michael Fisk. "All of that stuff has been put away. What difference does it make? The election is over."

Fisk said Scripps Howard's request that he review he election tallies angered him.

"You are not going to assert that any votes are missing in Adams County. I'm not going to listen to that stuff. Goodbye," With that, Fisk hung up the telephone.

Back in Washington in his commission office four blocks from the White House, Soaries said it's important for election reform advocates to understand the severe limitations many local governments face.

"They have limited resources, varying standards. So why do people get surprised when we get results like these?" Soaries said while holding pages of data from the Scripps Howard study.

"We don't want to attack people who don't have the resources or who've not had the training necessary. We have to tell the truth, but we don't want to beat up on these people."

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Falling Chads, Not Hanging Ones, Affect Ohio Recount

channelcincinnati.com

Falling Chads, Not Hanging Ones, Affect Ohio Recount
Officials Cite Them To Explain Increased Totals For Bush And Kerry

CINCINNATI -- Hanging chads that came loose when punch-card ballots were handled again or rerun through tallying machines explain most of the additional votes President Bush and Democrat John Kerry are picking up in Ohio's recount, election officials said Friday.

With 65 of Ohio's 88 counties reporting final recounts to The Associated Press on Friday, including the large urban counties of Cuyahoga, Hamilton and Franklin, Bush has gained 395 votes and Kerry has gained 554 votes.

The running tally accounts for 4.4 million votes cast, or about 74 percent of the total certified vote from the Nov. 2 election.

Neither campaign expects the recount to change the outcome. Bush won Ohio's 20 electoral votes by a margin of about 119,000.

Franklin and Cuyahoga counties were among the many reporting little or no change from the recount. In Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, Bush lost six votes while Democrat Kerry gained 17, which election workers attribute to hanging chads and worker error.

The largest change was in Hamilton County, which includes metropolitan Cincinnati, where Bush gained 212 votes and Kerry 180. Kerry also picked up 125 votes in Mahoning County.

The biggest loss to date was for Bush in Knox County, where he dropped 13 votes. Kerry lost 8 votes in the central Ohio county.

Pamela Swafford, deputy elections director in Hamilton County, attributed the differences to chads falling out of punch-card ballots during re-handling.

Observers from the Bush, Kerry and third-party campaigns have been watching as teams that each include Democratic and Republican election workers inspected ballots with loose chads to determine voter intent.

"Just barely touching them, they pop, they come out," Swafford said. "That's not unusual. When you're talking about that many ballots, that's bound to happen."

Libertarian and Green party presidential candidates who received less than 0.3 percent of the Ohio vote requested the statewide recount and paid $113,600 for it, saying they were concerned about reports of election irregularities and wanted to ensure that all votes were counted.

The Kerry campaign supports the recount, while Republicans have called it a waste of time.

Ohio law requires an election 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.

Election officials said the 3 percent hand-counts matched in virtually all the recounts done so far.

Election officials also attributed changes to voter error in filling out paper ballots for optical-scan voting machines, and election worker error in hand-recounting of stacks of ballots.

A spokesman for the third-party candidates said in a statement Friday that elections officials were obstructing the recount, including charges that observers were told they couldn't ask questions and an allegation of voting machine tampering.

"Ohio's partisan vote-counter and Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, presided over the most error-ridden election in the country and he is now intent on preventing the people of Ohio from scrutinizing those results," Blair Bobier said.

A messages seeking comment was left with a Blackwell spokesman. A message also was left for the director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which Bobier accused of preselecting the precincts to be recounted rather than choosing them at random.

In Ashland County in northern Ohio, Bush gained 38 votes and Kerry 20 because election workers examined optical scan ballots by hand that weren't read by the machines, elections director Kathy Howman said. The ovals on those ballots were filled in with ink instead of the required pencil.

"Most of these were absentee ballots, and maybe people did not read the directions," Howman said. "But the voter intent was clear, so the board decided to count those ballots."

The recount revealed other trends in the many counties with little or no change.

Bush gained one vote in Delaware County, also likely due to a hanging chad, elections director Janet Brenneman said, making his final victory there 53,143-27,048.

The county had 632 ballots with no vote for the office of president and another 89 where two or more candidates were punched, invalidating the vote.

"If they don't like any of the candidates, they'll punch them all out so that no one can mess with their ballot," Brenneman said.

Elections officials in two counties where the vote totals were unchanged by the recount said they hope it shows the reliability of Ohio's election procedures, despite criticism by activists over reports of voting machine shortages and lines at polling places in some areas.

"We were just thrilled that there were no discrepancies. Actually, the punch-card system is a pretty good system," said Donna Moore, director of the Noble County Board of Elections in Caldwell. Bush's total stayed at 3,841 and Kerry's at 2,654 after the recount.

"We're feeling pretty proud of ourselves, to prove to some of these people how wrong they were," said Margaret Hansen, director of the Monroe County Board of Elections in Woodsfield. Her county's recount left the totals unchanged for both major-party candidates, with Bush at 3,424 and Kerry at 4,243.

Hansen said Friday night there was no basis for Bobier's claim that Monroe County refused to do a required full hand count. She said a machine failed on Tuesday, but it was replaced Wednesday after consulting with Blackwell's office and the recount was completed without incident.

Bobier said in a telephone interview he was not familiar with all the allegations in the statement he released.

"Those come from our observers, based on daily reports," he said.

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College Republicans' Fundraising Criticized

washingtonpost.com
College Republicans' Fundraising Criticized
Front Organizations Were Used in Direct-Mail Campaign That Collected Millions

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page A05

The College Republican National Committee is under fire for using front organizations to collect millions of dollars in contributions, including money from elderly people with dementia.

During the 2004 campaign, the group sent out direct-mail solicitations under such letterheads as "Republican Headquarters 2004" and "Republican Election Committee."

One four-page letter asked prospects to send $1,000 together with an American flag pin for President Bush to wear to "Republican Headquarters" to ensure that Bush knows "there are millions who are giving him the shield of God to protect him in the difficult days ahead."

In small print at the bottom of one page, the letter notes: "A project of and paid for by College Republican National Committee."

Many donors complained that they thought the money was going directly to the Republican Party, and not to the college group, which is no longer affiliated with the GOP. The controversy over the letters has produced angry responses from leaders of state College Republican chapters, including those in Washington state, North Carolina and New York.

The University of Washington College Republicans approved a resolution calling on Eric Hoplin, chairman of the national committee, "to take full responsibility for his actions," acknowledge that those actions have substantially harmed the College Republicans grass-roots organization and "promptly resign."

Dan Centinello, New York College Republicans chairman, complained that the national leaders have not taken prompt and decisive action to correct the situation. "I don't want to see hard work by all of us be tarnished by a fundraising scandal," he said.

Internal disputes over fundraising tactics have been brewing among College Republican groups for at least three years, but they surfaced in late October, after the publication of damaging news reports in the Seattle Times and the Durham Herald-Sun.

The Times reported that a number of elderly donors gave far more money than they could afford.

"I don't have any more money," Cecilia Barbier, 90, a retired church worker in New York who made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000, told the paper. "That was all the savings. . . . Now I'm scrounging."

Monda Jo Millsap, 68, of Van Buren, Ark., told the Times that she emptied a savings account, then got a $5,000 bank loan to give a total of $59,000.

In the immediate aftermath, Hoplin e-mailed top state officials of the organization, telling them not to speak to the news media. "We need the story to go away," he wrote. "The story is full of lies and distortions written by a well-known liberal who is out to get us. If the press asks you about it, tell them you have no comment."

Hoplin declined to be interviewed for this report. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "We've come to discover that there are a few donors who have been confused, a few donors who have some form of dementia, who aren't entirely sure of the amount of money that they're giving -- and how often they're giving." He said that donors who believe they were misled will have their money refunded.

Late last month, the College Republican executive board approved a verbal resolution proposed by Hoplin to review and likely cancel the organization's direct-mail contract with Virginia-based Response Dynamics Inc., according to sources who attended.

The College Republicans once were an arm of the Republican National Committee. In anticipation of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, it became independent and formed in April of that year what is known as a 527 organization under the tax code. Since then, the College Republicans have raised $14.8 million, largely through the direct-mail program run by Response Dynamics.

Ron Kanfer, who operates Response Dynamics, defended the company's solicitations. "When you mail out a million letters and somebody does something inadvertently and it's pointed out, they get a refund," he said. He added that all fundraising letters from the College Republicans are approved by top officials of the group.

Kanfer noted that since Response Dynamics took the account, "the College Republican budget has increased twenty-five-fold." The mailings, he said, use "the same lists that every Republican fundraiser basically mails -- gun owners, pro-life activists, businessmen who don't like attorneys. It would be absurd to think we have lists called 'dementia people.' "

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Tribal Money Linked to GOP Fundraising

washingtonpost.com
Tribal Money Linked to GOP Fundraising
Skybox Events Were Not Always Reported to FEC

By Susan Schmidt and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page A01

For most politicians, fundraising is a dreaded chore. But until recently, Rep. John T. Doolittle of California and other members of the House Republican leadership had adopted a painless solution: fundraising events in luxury sports boxes leased largely with the money of Indian gaming tribes, where supporters snacked on catered fare in plush surroundings as they watched the Wizards, Caps, Redskins or Orioles.

Doolittle, a Mormon, is an ardent opponent of casino gambling, so it is somewhat ironic that he would invite supporters to watch the Wizards play the Sacramento Kings from an MCI Center suite paid for by casino-rich Indian tribes. But the plaque at the door to Suite 204 did not say Chitimacha or Choctaw. It said "Jack Abramoff," a name synonymous with largesse and influence in the GOP-controlled Congress.

Until the power lobbyist's downfall this year, Abramoff spent about $1 million annually in funds largely provided by his tribal clients to lease four skyboxes -- two at FedEx Field and one each at MCI Center and Camden Yards. Season after season, he kept them brimming with lawmakers, staffers and their guests, part of a multimillion-dollar congressional care and feeding project that even the brashest K Street lobbyists could only watch with awe or envy.

Lobbyists entertain lawmakers and their staffs routinely -- so much so that congressional rules limit the extent of it to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But Abramoff and the lobbyists who worked for him took spending for this form of hospitality to unprecedented heights. They used tribal money, records and interviews show, to pay for events that appeared to be designed more to help House Republicans' campaigns and Abramoff's overall lobbying effort than the Indians' legislative causes. Some members of Congress involved actively opposed Indian gambling.

"Jack Abramoff had one of the biggest schmoozing operations in town," said Rob Jennings, president of American Event Consulting Inc., an organization that raises funds for Republicans.

A list of skybox fundraising events maintained by Abramoff at his former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, lists 72 events for members of Congress between 1999 and 2003. All but eight were put on for Republicans, many of them members of the House leadership. Some of the fundraising events, including Doolittle's, were not reported as required under federal election laws.

A few blocks from MCI Center, Abramoff also wined and dined politicians and their aides at Signatures, his expensive Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant, billing tribal clients for hundreds of thousands of dollars in meals there, sources familiar with the billings said. The Agua Caliente tribe of California, for example, paid Greenberg Traurig as much as $20,000 a month in lobbyists' expenses, much of it for meals at Signatures, a person who has examined the bills said. In some months the tribe was billed for more than 20 luncheon and dinner events.

The Agua Caliente also paid $300,000 toward the cost of the skyboxes one year, tribal Chairman Richard Milanovich said.

Federal investigators are examining tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and public relations fees Abramoff obtained from the tribes. They are also looking into his dealings with members of Congress and their staffs, lawyers involved in the inquiry said. Senior prosecutors in the Justice Department's fraud and public integrity sections are poring over hundreds of thousands of e-mails, computer files and bank records subpoenaed from Abramoff and former associates, including records of campaign contributions and trips, meals and gifts such as the use of skyboxes that Abramoff lavished on members of Congress.

Abramoff, once one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, was forced to resign from Greenberg Traurig after disclosures earlier this year about the lobbying and public relations fees he and an associate charged a group of Indian tribes. The Senate Indian Affairs committee has tallied fees from six tribes that total $82 million over a three-year period.

Abramoff's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that "Indian tribes made permissible and lawful contributions to underwrite the use of sports suites for various fundraisers. Whether these contributions were properly reported was the responsibility of the campaigns, not the tribes nor Mr. Abramoff."

Other lobbyists said that it was highly unusual for a single lobbyist to control so many sports boxes. According to John F. Jonas of Patton Boggs LLP, "Personally leasing four skyboxes is highly unusual and excessive. [But] it seems to be in character with his excessive fees."

Although some tribal members complained about the fees and expenses, most of the tribes' leaders were convinced by Abramoff that the spending was necessary to advance their interests in Washington.

The big prize for members of Congress was in the more than $3.5 million in federal campaign contributions that six tribes made at Abramoff's direction, two-thirds of it to Republicans. The meals and the games were added perks that provided settings for Abramoff and the 10 or so lobbyists who worked for him to obtain access to members and ingratiate themselves to congressional aides.
'It Was a Big Draw'

The skyboxes were available to members of Congress for the asking, Jennings said. "The word was out among fundraisers," he said. Politicians could sell skybox tickets to supporters for $500 to $1,000, said Jennings, who arranged six events in the skyboxes for two of his clients, House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) and Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.). "It was a venue that was fun to use," Jennings said. "It was a big draw."

Abramoff or one of the lobbyists who worked for him at Greenberg Traurig, and earlier at the firm now known as Preston Gates & Ellis LLP, arranged the fundraisers, former Abramoff associates said.

"It was kind of Jack's box. It was owned by Jack, not Greenberg Traurig. He was very proud of it," said a former associate from Greenberg Traurig. "Everything was always catered; Jack would pay for the catering. It was about $1,000 an event."

Keeping track of events, catering and ticket distribution required the nearly full-time attention of an administrative assistant, said two former Abramoff associates familiar with the logistics of the box management. Abramoff billed the tribes for the costs associated with the skyboxes through a company he created called Sports Suites LLC.

Doolittle, one of dozens of House members to use the skyboxes, was particularly close to Abramoff, former Abramoff associates said. The fundraiser list, obtained by The Washington Post, indicates that he was signed up to use boxes at MCI Center and Camden Yards on five occasions. Doolittle's spokeswoman, Laura Blackmann, said the congressman used the MCI Center box for a fundraiser, but only once, on Feb. 25, 1999.

Of the other four occasions Doolittle is listed on Abramoff's fundraiser log, Blackmann said: "Abramoff may have reserved it, but we did not use it."

In enacting limits on congressional gifts, Congress set the value of skybox tickets at $49, under the $50 limit. Using that calculation, the donation of a box with space for 20 people for a fundraising event would have a value of almost $1,000.

Doolittle's federal election records do not show that he paid for the use of the boxes or reported their value as an in-kind contribution, a lapse Blackmann acknowledged. "It was an in-kind contribution, and it was an oversight that it wasn't reported, but we are taking steps to correct that," she said recently.

An event planning firm operated by Doolittle's wife, Julie, which did work with an Abramoff-sponsored charity, was issued a subpoena for documents this summer in the Justice Department inquiry.

A candidate for office who does not fully disclose such contributions can be subject to a fine to be determined by the Federal Election Commission. The more flagrant the violation, the steeper the fine tends to be.

Abramoff's most powerful ally on the Hill, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), another gaming opponent, held a fundraiser in the MCI Center box for the performance of the Three Tenors on May 7, 2000, according to the list of events maintained in Abramoff's office. The list also shows he held an event in a box at FedEx Field on Sept. 18, 2000.

DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy said that DeLay's fundraising aides remember sending out invitations for the Three Tenors event to reward donors and that the event probably occurred. There was no obligation to report the use of the box under federal law, he said, because the site was used for an event that benefited DeLay's state political action committee.

The office found no record of the use of Abramoff's box for a fundraiser at a Redskins-Dallas Cowboys game on Sept. 18, 2000, as listed in Abramoff's records. "We don't have anything indicating it was offered or utilized," Roy said. "We just don't know."

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) hosted four fundraising events in Abramoff boxes but did not pay for the use of the boxes or report them as gifts, his spokesman confirmed. After he was asked about the fundraisers, Hayworth's chief of staff said the congressman intends to amend his FEC reports to correct the oversight.

Hayworth, co-chairman of the Native American Caucus, did have contact with the tribes Abramoff and his team represented.

After The Post questioned Hayworth's office about his failure to disclose his skybox fundraising events, an aide said staffers had contacted the FEC about the mistake and planned to amend the congressman's filings. Abramoff's firm never sent a letter telling the Hayworth campaign the value of the in-kind contributions, said Joe Eule, Hayworth's chief of staff. "From talking to other people," Eule said, "this is how things happened over there. People would request these letters, and they'd never be forthcoming."

Fundraising events were held at only a fraction of the many games at the three venues. The rest of the time, the boxes were filled with Abramoff's lobbyists and congressional staffers they sought to cultivate. Members of his lobbying team typically carried around wads of tickets to dole out to Hill aides.

Abramoff not only lobbied staffers, he regularly hired them. Three former aides to DeLay worked as lobbyists for Abramoff at Greenberg Traurig: former deputy chiefs of staff Tony Rudy and Bill Jarrell; and former DeLay spokesman Michael Scanlon, who formed a public relations company that worked in tandem with Abramoff.

Other Hill veterans joined Abramoff's lobbying team and entertained their former congressional colleagues in the skyboxes, including former aides for Doolittle, Sens. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), John Breaux (D-La.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), and Young, the representative from Alaska.
A Lawmaker Under Scrutiny

One member of the House leadership already under scrutiny for his ties to Abramoff, House Administration Committee Chairman Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), used the MCI Center box, and his chief of staff was later hired by Abramoff. A Senate panel investigating Abramoff released e-mails last month showing that Abramoff directed a Texas tribe to contribute $32,000 to Ney in 2002, days after Ney took steps to sponsor legislation sought by the tribe.

Abramoff's fundraising log shows an event for Ney at MCI Center on March 15, 2001. FEC records show that Abramoff and three men associated with him in a Florida-based casino cruise line called Suncruz each donated $1,000 to Ney that day.

Ney had been helpful to them the year before, when Abramoff and a partner, Adam Kidan, were embroiled in acrimonious efforts to buy Suncruz. In an unusual step, Ney criticized the cruise line's owner, Gus Boulis, in statements placed in the March 30, 2000, Congressional Record, putting pressure on Boulis to sell; he then praised Kidan as Suncruz's new owner when the sale went through.

The following year, five weeks before the MCI Center fundraiser for Ney, Boulis was slain gangland style in a case that is under investigation. The FBI also is investigating possible bank fraud in the purchase of Suncruz, law enforcement sources said. An attorney for Abramoff said he and the banks involved "were victims of the wrongdoing of others."

Neil Volz, Ney's chief of staff, joined Abramoff's lobbying team in early 2002. Last month, Ney amended his FEC reports to reflect in-kind contributions of $1,470 from Volz for fundraising events at MCI Center in 2002 and 2003.

Kidan, contacted for this article, said Suncruz contributed $310,000 toward the cost of the skyboxes in 2000.

Abramoff's other tribe-funded perk for House Republican leaders was his downtown restaurant, Signatures. DeLay and others occasionally met for private lunches in the back room, a source familiar with the restaurant's management said.

Many meal receipts for members, staff and Abramoff's team were turned over to Greenberg Traurig; the firm then billed the tribes, said this source and others, including people associated with the tribes. Signatures, said the source, was a money drain on Abramoff, operating at a deficit of tens of thousands of dollars a month.

The person who has seen bills sent to the Agua Caliente tribe said they sometimes listed the lobbyists present and the guests who were entertained, but not always.

On occasions when fundraising events were at Signatures, said Lowell, "either tribes or the campaigns themselves properly underwrote the use of the restaurant and, again, the reporting requirements belong to the campaigns."

Jill Perry, director of marketing and communications for Greenberg Traurig, said in a statement that "the conduct by Mr. Abramoff which has come to light since he left Greenberg Traurig is antithetical to the way we do business and contrary to our firm's values and culture. We continue to conduct a comprehensive internal investigation of these matters."

Researcher Derek Willis contributed to this report.

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Oh that's why

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Coalition to defeat Social Security

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The New Deal

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The True Values of The Day

washingtonpost.com

The True Values of The Day

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, December 24, 2004; Page A17

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God -- for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.

-- the late Archbishop Oscar

Romero of El Salvador

This is supposed to be the year when moral values dominated politics. On the eve of Christmas, let's talk about values.

In any given city this Christmas, homeless people will not be looking forward to opening presents. They will be lucky to have a place to go at all. They will, by Archbishop Romero's radical and demanding definition, be the true participants in Christmas. But it's unlikely that the rest of us will think much about them. Isn't that a question of values?

Unemployed parents who love their children as much as the rest of us love ours won't have the same chance to show them materially the love they feel in their hearts. God willing, their kids will understand. But some kids, watching other kids in the television ads, might wonder: Why can those parents give their kids all that stuff that my parents can't give me? Isn't that a question of values?

In the fall, I got the chance to moderate a post-election panel at Fordham University's Center on Religion and Culture in New York. Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska noted that on Jan. 1, the quotas protecting what's left of the U.S. textile and apparel industry will end. "Over a 12-month period," he said, "three or four million jobs that are currently paying $8 to $10 an hour are going bye-bye unless those jobs are protected.

"Now, I hazard to guess that most of those individuals will move into the ranks of poverty," Kerrey went on. "They'll move to minimum-wage jobs, which is 20 or 30 percent under poverty today. . . . If it's a young woman who gets pregnant and says, 'I don't have health insurance anymore. I can't -- it's expensive to raise a baby right today' -- that they're more likely to choose an abortion even if Bush appoints anti-Roe v. Wade justices that overturn it, because they're going to make what I consider to be a tragic choice out of economic necessity."

Whatever you think of abortion or, for that matter, free trade, who can argue with Kerrey's central assertion: that the abortion rate is more likely to go up when economic opportunities for the poor are curtailed? (As Mark W. Roche of Notre Dame noted in the New York Times this fall, the abortion rate dropped by 11 percent during the prosperous years of the Clinton presidency.) Shouldn't all who care about abortion be passionately committed to changing the economic circumstances in which women make their choices? Isn't that a question of values?

In many parts of our country, parents who lack health insurance are wondering if they will be around for their children next Christmas. A mother has a lump on her breast and worries about the cost of having it checked out. A father has chronic chest pains but decides that seeing a cardiologist would be too expensive. They ought to get help. Isn't that a question of values?

In Iraq, young men and women serving their country complain of equipment shortages and wonder why their leaders didn't send enough troops in the first place. Could it be that acknowledging the true cost of the Iraqi invasion at the outset might have endangered all those tax cuts -- and might have reduced support for the war? Isn't that a question of values?

Archbishop Romero was murdered on March 24, 1980, because he chose to stand with El Salvador's poor against a repressive regime. "Brothers, you came from our own people," Romero told soldiers in El Salvador's army. "You are killing your own brothers. . . . In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: Stop the repression."

How many among the cardinals and bishops and pastors and preachers and televangelists who now enjoy favor in high places would have the courage to do what Archbishop Romero did? In fairness, how many of the rest of us would? Isn't that a question of values?

A child was born in a manger because there was no room for his family anywhere else. Wasn't that a question of values?

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Groups on Right Say Christmas Is Under Attack

washingtonpost.com

Groups on Right Say Christmas Is Under Attack
Others Call Outcry A Ploy for Funds

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 24, 2004; Page A04

Many of the conservative Christian groups that led the fight this year to ban same-sex marriage are sounding an alarm about efforts to block Christmas celebrations.

Representatives of the groups -- including the Alliance Defense Fund, the Thomas More Law Center and Liberty Counsel -- say the two issues, and other pending fights over public display of the Ten Commandments and teaching of evolution, are linked by a belief among religious conservatives that traditional values are under siege in the United States.

"The sentiment is the same for the same-sex marriage battle or for Christmas: It's the pervasive idea among religious people that traditional values are under attack from all different angles," said Erik Stanley, chief counsel for the Liberty Counsel.

Those on the other side of these battles say the Christian groups are wildly exaggerating the threats from a phantom enemy for the purpose of mobilizing evangelicals to contribute funds (some groups are explicitly using the Christmas issue to raise money) or to become politically active. On the Christmas fight, the American Civil Liberties Union, the group most often cited as the enemy of traditionalists, says it has not filed a single case blocking Christmas displays this year and cites half a dozen instances over the past year in which it has fought on the side of more religious expression.

"This is the winter equivalent of those summer stories about shark attacks being on the increase," says Barry Lynn, who heads the liberal group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The conservative groups, he said, "think they can make Christians feel like a besieged majority. It creates a Christian solidarity against all those who would oppress them: secularists in this season, gay and lesbians next month, abortion the next month."

Whether the threat is real or a straw man, conservatives have been aggressive this season in citing the danger to Christmas. This week, Jerry Falwell, a conservative leader, told supporters that "so-called civil libertarians attempt to purge all vestiges of faith from the American public square." Also this week, Paul M. Weyrich, another conservative leader, proclaimed that "the campaign to eliminate Christmas from our society is well underway." Several conservative commentators have echoed the charge on television and radio and in newspapers.

The Rutherford Institute, declaring "Christmas Under Siege," cites a "growing tendency among public schools and government officials to ban references to Christmas or Christianity." The Alliance Defense Fund, which has been battling gay unions, sent letters to more than 6,700 schools as part of its "Christmas Project." It has 700 "allied attorneys" looking for cases where local authorities have sought to secularize the holiday, and it has found three dozen instances of bans on candy canes, prohibitions on Christmas colors, and cancellation of holiday celebrations that had Christian components.

Even President Bush, who joined with religious conservatives in efforts to ban same-sex marriage, has become a target of those fearing the secularization of Christmas. The Web site WorldNetDaily complained this week of an absence of Jesus and other Christian references on the White House Web site or in the White House Christmas decorations or the Bush Christmas card. "What's virtually missing from the White House commemoration of Christmas this year?" the Web site asked. "Jesus."

Some of those leading the fight for religious Christmas celebrations acknowledged there is no hard evidence of an increase in efforts to secularize the holiday. Richard Thompson, who leads the Thomas More Law Center, said there is anecdotal evidence of more efforts to ban Christian displays but "I don't have a statistical base."

What has indisputably increased is an effort by Christian groups to push back when such incidents are found. "There are cases like that every year, but I think it's becoming more and more evident to Christians," he said. "More and more Christians are ready to resort to litigation."

Linking the Christmas dispute to the battle over gay marriage, Thompson said: "They're different issues, but I think you could make a general rule that there is a resurgence of Christian activism in the public arena. It's a reaction to what the left wing has been doing for the last several years."

In the case of gay marriage, Christian groups were reacting to efforts to legalize same-sex unions in California and the Northeast. That fueled anger that helped gay-marriage bans pass in 11 states.

In the case of secularizing Christmas, it is more difficult to demonstrate a widespread threat. "It's very convenient for Christians to say the culture has changed and they've lost power, but Christians have never been stronger politically," said Marci A. Hamilton, who teaches at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and has written a book, "God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law."

She said the threat to Christmas "is not secularization, it's pluralization. The law doesn't say Christian symbols have to be taken out of schools, only that it can't only be Christian, it has to be pluralistic."

ACLU President Nadine Strossen, similarly, said the conservative complaints are "like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling." She adds that while there are "occasional violations in either direction" on church-state separation, "if anything, since 1985, the Supreme Court has become more supportive of government-sponsored religious exercises."

The conservative groups agree there have been no recent legal cases limiting religious expression. Liberty Counsel's Stanley said threats to Christmas have not jumped this year. "I think the response to those threats are increasing," he said.

At the Alliance Defense Fund, staff attorney Joshua Carden said the defense of Christmas has become a large campaign "just in the last couple of years where people see more outrageous incidents when Christmas is being removed from the public square."

Part of the emergence of the outrageous incidents, he said, comes from his group's efforts to highlight them. But, Carden added, Christmas "is under attack, and ADF wants to defend it."

Staff writer Alan Cooperman contributed to this report.

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Recount: Dems win Washington gov's race

CNN.com

County recount gives win to Democrat
GOP vows to continue fight in governor's race

(CNN) -- Democrat Christine Gregoire finished 130 votes ahead in the roller-coaster Washington governor's race after results of a hand recount including disputed ballots were released Thursday by King County.

Gregoire called on state residents to unite. But Chris Vance, the GOP state chairman, had already vowed: "This battle is not over."

Outgoing Gov. Gary Locke, a fellow Democrat, referred to Gregoire as the "apparent governor-elect" Thursday evening.

But Gregoire said she would not declare victory over Republican Dino Rossi until Washington's secretary of state certified the results of the hand recount.

"A lot of heated words have been said during this recount," she said. "But with the election coming to a close, I am confident that we can begin moving forward as one state."

The three-term state attorney general's tenuous 10-vote lead widened when she picked up 120 more votes from hundreds of ballots added to the count because of a ruling by the state Supreme Court.

King, the most populous of the state's 39 counties, was the last to complete its hand recount.

The result means that when Secretary of State Sam Reed certifies the results -- scheduled to happen next week -- Gregoire will be named governor-elect. Rossi had held that title after he was certified the winner of the first and second counts of the vote.

State law does not allow either side to ask for another recount. But the imbroglio over the closest gubernatorial election in Washington state history, which has already stretched more than seven weeks, will apparently not end.

"We believe Dino Rossi is the legitimate governor-elect of the state of Washington," Vance said in a statement. "We will continue fighting to protect his election."

Election officials in King County, which includes Seattle, announced Thursday afternoon that the disputed ballots gave Gregoire 311 more votes compared to 191 for former Republican state Sen. Rossi, for a net gain of 120 votes.

That put Gregoire's overall lead after the third tabulation of ballots at 130 votes, out of nearly 2.9 million votes cast.

Vance said the GOP now plans to ask election officials in other counties across the state to reconsider votes cast for Rossi that were rejected -- a door he said was opened when the state Supreme Court allowed King County to reconsider more than 700 ballots that election officials discovered had been left uncounted because of a computer error.

Vance said the GOP would ask Reed, a fellow Republican, to delay final certification "until we know every legitimate vote has been counted."

Republicans also have the option of going to court to formally contest the election once Reed certifies the results.

The new governor is scheduled to be inaugurated in less than three weeks, on January 12.

Locke said Rossi ran a "brilliant" campaign and the issues he raised in the campaign "must be addressed."

"Emotions are running high because we all care about this great state, and we all care about the future of our state," he said. "Both have been excellent candidates with different views and priorities, but there must be an end. Our state must come together, and we must move on with the governing of our state."
Results flip

Rossi, 44, led Gregoire by 261 votes after the initial count, a margin small enough to trigger an automatic statewide machine recount. After the second tabulation, he led by 42 votes.

But citing the narrowness of the margin, 57-year-old Gregoire refused to concede, and the state Democratic Party put up a $730,000 deposit to pay for a statewide hand recount, which put her into the lead for the first time.

Because that recount flipped the result, Democrats will get their money back and the state will pay the cost of the retabulation.

In the midst of the hand recount, election officials in King County said they discovered the some 735 absentee ballots. When they evaluated the ballots on Thursday, 566 were found to be valid and added to the count.

Republicans went to court to stop those votes from being included, arguing that their emergence was suspicious and that state law limited recounts to only those ballots that had been counted in the earlier tallies. But on Wednesday, the state Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that the disputed ballots should be added to the county's recount result.

The ballots were originally rejected because the signature on the ballot did not match the voter registration signature in King County's computer system. But Dean Logan, the county's election director, said the ballots were excluded by mistake because the voter registration signatures were never entered into the computer system.

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Bush to resubmit blocked judicial nominees

CNN.com

Bush to resubmit blocked judicial nominees
Strengthened majority in new Senate could ease approvals

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush will renominate a group of judicial nominees who were blocked by Senate Democrats during his first term, the White House said Thursday.

"The president nominated highly qualified individuals to the federal courts during his first term, but the Senate failed to vote on many nominations," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "Unfortunately, this only exacerbates the issue of judicial vacancies, compounds the backlog of cases and delays timely justice for the American people."

After the November election, Republicans added to their majority in the Senate. They now control the chamber by a 10-vote margin, 55 to 45.

According to the Web site of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy, Bush has nominated 34 people for appeals courts, and 18 of them have been confirmed. Of his 97 nominations for district courts, 88 were confirmed.

Republicans were angered during Bush's first term when Democrats used filibusters to block several of Bush's nominees to federal appellate courts. (Full story)

With the expectation that Bush might soon get to make appointments to the Supreme Court, the issue has taken on even more prominence. (Full story)

"The Senate has a constitutional obligation to vote up or down on a president's judicial nominees," McClellan said. "The president looks forward to working with the new Senate to ensure a well-functioning and independent judiciary."

In response to Republican charges of obstructionism, Senate Democrats have countered that they have voted to confirm the vast majority of Bush's judicial nominees and are blocking only those that are so conservative that they are out of the mainstream.

"I'm encouraged that the president plans to renominate these well-qualified candidates to the federal bench," said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution subcommittee. "I hope that with a new Senate, tempered by the last two elections, we will have a fresh start to the confirmation process."

But Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of being divisive.

"The Bush Administration is ending the year as they began it, choosing confrontation over compromise, ideology over moderation, and defiance over cooperation," he said in a written statement.

Leahy said Democrats have supported more than 200 of Bush's judicial nominees, and the federal court system has its lowest number of vacancies in 16 years.

"On some of their controversial nominees, they may prevail because of their monopoly of power. The big loser, however, will be the independence of our judicial branch of government."

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, also sharply criticized Bush.

"The president has regrettably signaled his renewal of partisan warfare," Neas said, characterizing Bush's action as a "plan to re-nominate extremist nominees."

"The president and his team want to pack the federal courts with right-wing ideologues, and roll back decades of progress in social justice," he said. "This portends long, hard months of debate over the federal courts, and sends a truly disturbing signal of what we can expect if and when a Supreme Court vacancy occurs."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said last month he hoped Senate Democrats would drop their filibusters against Bush's judicial nominees, but said if they did not, he would change Senate rules to end the practice. He said, however, that Republican gains in the Senate might make such a change unnecessary.

Earlier this month, Judge Charles Pickering Sr., named to a recess appointment on a federal appeals court after Senate Democrats blocked his nomination, said he will retire. Pickering, 67, blamed Democrats for forcing him to step down. (Full story)

Those the White House said will be renominated, the respective courts and the dates on which they were first nominated are:

For the Court of Appeals:

* Terrence W. Boyle (4th Circuit; May 9, 2001)

* Priscilla Richman Owen (5th Circuit; May 9, 2001)

* David W. McKeague (6th Circuit; Nov. 8, 2001)

* Susan Bieke Neilson (6th Circuit; Nov. 8, 2001)

* Henry W. Saad (6th Circuit; Nov. 8, 2001)

* Richard A. Griffin (6th Circuit; June 26, 2002)

* William H. Pryor (11th Circuit; April 9, 2003)

* William Gerry Myers III (9th Circuit; May 15, 2003)

* Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit; July 25, 2003)

* Brett M. Kavanaugh (D.C. Circuit; July 25, 2003)

* William James Haynes II (4th Circuit; Sept. 29, 2003)

* Thomas B. Griffith (D.C. Circuit; May 10, 2004)

For District Courts:

* James C. Dever III (Eastern District, N.C.; May 22, 2002)

* Thomas L. Ludington (Eastern District, Mich.; Sept. 12, 2002)

* Robert J. Conrad (Western District, N.C.; April 28, 2003)

* Daniel P. Ryan (Eastern District, Mich.; April 28, 2003)

* Peter G. Sheridan (N.J.; Nov. 5, 2003)

* Paul A. Crotty (Southern District, N.Y.; Sept. 7, 2004)

* Sean F. Cox (Eastern District, Mich.; Sept. 10, 2004)

* J. Michael Seabright (Hawaii, Sept. 15, 2004)

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