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kster Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:32 PM
Original message
Gee, This Sounds Vaguely Important...
The headline reads: "Ohio Elections Officials Convicted of Tampering with 2004 Presidential Recount." But of course, most of America hasn't seen this headline because the mainstream media outlets have barely touched this story. Call me crazy, but this seems like too big of a story to only be running in the local Ohio press and alternative media sources on these here internets. Apparently, the mainstream media has forgotten that the state of Ohio is the state that handed Bush a second term on a silver platter. It seems to me that the fact that the recount of the presidential freaking election was rigged is a pretty big story. But then again, I'm not part of the mainstream media so what do I know about big stories?

Two election workers in one of Ohio's most densely populated areas and traditional Democratic stronghold, Cuyahoga County, were convicted of illegally rigging the county's recount. According to Erie County Special Proesecutor Kevin Baxter, the recount was fixed not necessarily for political reasons, but because the election employees were too damn lazy to do their jobs properly. Election coordinator Jacqueline Maiden and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer were both covicted of "negligent misconduct of an elections employee," a felony that carries a possible sentence of 6 to 18 months in prison. A third woman, Rosie Grier, the assistant manager of the board's ballot department was indicted but acquitted of the charges.

Under Ohio law, a county is supposed to randomly count 3% of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be counted by machine. If there are discrepancies between the two supposedly random samples, a full recount, by hand, is ordered. According to Special Prosecutor Baxter, what Dreamer and Maiden did, to avoid the labor intensive hand count, was to employ a method known as "hack and stack." The "hack and stack" method, according to blackboxvoting.org works like this:


Some recounts and audits rely on so-called "random" manual counts of a small percentage of the ballots, which are then compared against the voting computer counts for those precincts. The safeguard can be defeated by manipulating the precinct selection process, or by manipulating the ballots in the selected precincts to make sure they match before counting them. This "stacks" the recount or audit so that only subsets of data that match machine counts are examined.
In Cuyahoga County, citizens noticed that the ballots arrived for the public recount already sorted into sets for Bush and sets for Kerry. Kathleen Wynne videotaped the sorted piles and videotaped as she asked Kathleen Dreamer and Jacqui Maiden to explain the sorting and pre-selected piles. She captured them on videotape admitting that they had not chosen randomly.



http://java-fiend.livejournal.com/136997.html
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peacebird Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:34 PM
Response to Original message
1. Can a full recount be demanded now? And if the results flipped Ohio, can we place
the real winner in office?
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Kurovski Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:43 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. It makes for a stronger case for impeachment, imo
The results were already certified.
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GreenPartyVoter Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:44 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. That would be both sweet and ironic, as Sen. Kerry opted not to run this time
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tbyg52 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:48 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. If there were justice, yes. nt
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zeemike Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:49 PM
Response to Reply #1
5. It ain't gonna happen
This story is already dead to the media and to the politicians as well.
only left is for the convicted to be sentenced to probation and given a better job than they had before.
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kster Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 06:11 PM
Response to Reply #1
7. I think the people would demand it, if the media would do its job
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file83 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 05:52 PM
Response to Original message
6. It's not important. It's only our democracy being railroaded into the gutter.
No big deal.
:sarcasm:
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bleever Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 07:20 PM
Response to Original message
8. These people will be speaking with a special prosecutor,
so we may well see this story get bigger and better-known.

:)
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babsbunny Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 07:28 PM
Response to Original message
9. What can our Democratic Leadership do about this?
Do they even know? Do they care?
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autorank Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 07:45 PM
Response to Original message
10. You find the coolest articles...to the point and interesting, to say the least
This is one time I'm happy to say, who cares what MSM does righ tnow. They're also ignoreing the Fitszgerald prosecution of Libby too. Back to their old tricks, MSM types are more focused on Rosie and "the Donald" than they are on "Bush versus The Whold Demn World."

They'll come around and Ohio has Democrats in charge now. Not just any Democrats, Democrats who've seen elections stolen again and again.

There will be fireworks and it will get national attention.

This is a good perspective. Nice to know we're not the only ones with these complaints.

KR
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Pharaoh Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-28-07 08:28 PM
Response to Original message
11. It seemed obvious to me
election night and the ohio exit polls were all for kerry and mysteriously flipped overnight.

There was almost a news blackout on the story........

"if it wad'nt on the tv, it did'nt happen"
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