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Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio
By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts
in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly
Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line
snaking out of the precinct door.
She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and
watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without
casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her
mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of
Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?
Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.
"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener said. "County officials knew
they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't
enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."
Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on
Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000
frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that
such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio
tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral
college majority.
But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest
marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly
acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters,
poll workers, election observers and election board and party
officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several
cities.
In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty
instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of
provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party
candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown
number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.
In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election
officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with
the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many
leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations
had been purged.
"There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very
significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year that demand
reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election law program at
the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor.
"We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want to
minimize that."
Franklin County election officials -- evenly split between
Republicans and Democrats -- say they allocated machines based on past voting
patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But they
acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000
registered voters.
Ohio is not particularly unusual. After the 2000 election debacle,
which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an election
decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote
Act in 2002. The intent was to help states upgrade aging voting
machines and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. To a point, it
has had the desired effect.
"Viewed dispassionately, the national elections ran much more
smoothly than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in voting behavior and
methodology. Because of improved technology "nationwide, we counted
perhaps 1 million votes that we would have lost four years ago."
But much work remains. Congress imposed only the minimal national
standards and included too few dollars. Tens of thousands of machines --
including 70 percent of Ohio's machines -- still use punch-card
ballots, which have a high error rate. A patchwork quilt of state rules
governs voter registration and provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are
given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls --
studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number
of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. But in
Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single
provisional ballot in 2004.
In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election meltdown, professors and
graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley studied
this year's voting results, contrasting counties that had electronic
voting machines with those that used traditional voting methods. They
concluded, based on voting and population trends and other indicators,
that irregularities associated with machines in three traditionally
Democratic counties in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000
excess votes for Bush in a state the president won by about 381,000
votes. The study prompted heated critiques from some polling experts.
Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too. But he ran the numbers and came up
with the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," Stewart said.
"There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine
Democratic counties."
Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout, who directed the study, said the
problem in Florida probably lies with the technology. (Florida's
touch-screen machines lack paper records.) "I've always viewed this as a
software problem, not a corruption problem," he said. "We'd never tolerate
this level of errors with an ATM. The problem is that we continue to do
democracy on the cheap."
A Heated Run-Up
By October, the Bush and Kerry campaigns knew that this midwestern
state was a crucial battleground. Each side assembled armies of 3,000
lawyers and paralegals, and unaffiliated organizations poured in thousands
more volunteers. Both parties filed lawsuits challenging rules and
registrations.
Two decisions proved pivotal.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was
co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state
law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must cast
provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct
where they reside. For cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati, where
officials long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the
ruling promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take
those ballots, but the alternative is disenfranchisement," said Michael
Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes
Cleveland.
Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase
of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the
vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County boards are
split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type of
machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County, officials decided
to quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines.
Other counties decided to muddle through. At Kenyon College, a surge
of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox County
officials allocated two machines, just as in past elections. In voter-rich
Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus, election
officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their
analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines.
"Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one
election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of
Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."
On Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans voted, 900,000 more
voters than in 2000.
In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio
State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of
voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to
vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the predominantly
black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers,
and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse
their lateness.
"It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it being
this bad."
Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations
had been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election,"
Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept telling me, 'You must be
mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted.
I felt like I'd been scrubbed off the rolls."
Aftermath of Nov. 2
After the election, local political activists seeking a recount
analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They
found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter
showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of
the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for
Kerry.
Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and
turnout was lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or
design, but I counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my
precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State
Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to
certifying the vote.
Franklin County officials say they allocated machines according to
instinct and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the
need to examine the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles,
we'll have to look more closely at this," he said.
In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to
vote. "They had to skip classes and skip work," said Matthew Segal, a
19-year-old student.
In northeastern Ohio, in the fading industrial city of Youngstown,
Jeanne White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, an
African American newspaper, stepped into the booth, pushed the button for
Kerry -- and watched her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what
happened; I started screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting
early!' "
It was not her imagination. Twenty-five machines in Youngstown
experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." "It
happens every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for
Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. "It's something we have
to live with, and we can fix it."
As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and officials
disqualified about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses
Cincinnati and its Ohio suburbs, 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out
because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those
cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple
precincts -- but workers directed them to the wrong table.
In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the
provisional ballots. Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers
may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account
for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers
of votes for conservative third-party candidates.
Still, state officials saw little to apologize for, particularly in
the case of provisional ballots. A recent count of provisional ballots
sliced 18,000 votes off Bush's margin in Ohio. "In Washington, D.C., a
voter who casts a ballot in the wrong precinct cannot have that ballot
counted," said Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell. "Yet in Ohio, it
was 'voter suppression' and 'voter disenfranchisement.' "
In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and
talk of Republican conspiracies mounted. "A lot of folks who, having
put an enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed
in the righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said
Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County election board.
Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to
play down the anger. National Democrats -- including the chief counsel
for Kerry's campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm
Bush's victory.
But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger
heard among rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial
theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in
the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from
Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and
over: 'We knew this would happen.'
"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"
Slevin reported from Cincinnati. Special correspondents Michelle
Garcia in New York and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.
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