The Questions Still Swirling Around the Ohio 2004 Presidential Vote Counts

Thivai Abhor at Dialogic points us to a key article from the Detroit Free Press which discusses the new challenge (Finally!) from John Kerry to the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio. Here's a snip but - as always - I encourage you to read the entirety:

Republican election officials here have been chomping at the bit to shred, burn or otherwise destroy the ballots and other related materials from the dubious vote count that gave George W. Bush a second term. Yet, in several rural southwest Republican-dominated counties, you have to trip over boxes of ballots and election material from earlier elections dating back as far as 1977 in order to see the stickers "Destroy on 9/3/06" on the 2004 ballot boxes.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, is running for governor. His dual role as administrator of the election and state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign has raised deep-seated embarrassment and ire throughout the Buckeye State.

The disturbing revelations of irregularities, theft and fraud continue to pour from the ballots still stored by election boards around the state. Statistician Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips has been instrumental in the research process along with a volunteer crew of election protection activists. This summer, Dr. Ron Baiman of Loyola has also been analyzing ballots and other election records from the 2004 election in a project funded by the CICJ. Many have spent countless hours pouring through and photographing piles of voter records and thousands of ballots, some of them stacked in filthy, leaky warehouses. Through this work, the evidence that the 2004 election was stolen continues to build. We will cover some of these new revelations in a future piece.

Unfortunately, some vital material has already been destroyed by various county election boards. Fears have also been expressed that some BOEs might ignore the new orders to preserve the ballots. Some 2004 election workers have already been indicted in Cuyahoga County. A major partisan battle has erupted in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland over the actions of the Executive Director of the Board of Elections, Michael Vu, for Cuyahoga County. Nominally a Democrat, Vu only holds his position because of the support of Cuyahoga County BOE Chair, Robert Bennett, also the Chair of the Ohio Republican Party. Bennett and his fellow Republican on the election board are keeping Vu from being ousted by the Democratic Party who originally appointed him. Legal battles also continue over the firing of Sherole Eaton, a federal whistleblower who dared to call attention to unauthorized manipulations of a central tabulator during the recount in 2004 in Hocking County.

How many more such legal and political battles will come is unclear. But what is clear is that it will take years of hard investigating to get to the bottom of what really happened in 2004. And that doing so will require preservation of the ballots, which the GOP has been all too eager to destroy.