RHP Audits Ohio's Mid-Term Election

Auditing the mid-term election
by Richard Hayes Phillips
April 6, 2007

In the 2006 general election, according to unofficial results posted on the website of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, there were 4,177,498 ballots cast in the State of Ohio. Of these, only 3,831,716, or 91.72%, contained a vote for Governor, and only 3,826,829, or 91.61%, contained a vote for United States Senate. These numbers created the appearance of undervote (or overvote) rates of 8.28% and 8.39%, respectively, in the two most hotly contested statewide races on the ballot. When the unofficial election results are examined county by county, there was a strikingly abnormal distribution of undervotes. I chose the United States Senate race to examine in detail because there were only two candidates on the ballot (and one write-in candidate), which makes the mathematical analysis simpler than for the Governor's race, in which there were four candidates on the ballot (and two write-in candidates).

FULL REPORT AT LINK in pdf

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2528

In 16 of the other 17 counties, including 4 of the 10 most populous counties in the State of Ohio,
the percentages of undervotes were clearly anomalous, ranging from 11.91% (in Montgomery
County) to 26.48% (in Cuyahoga County), with a combined rate of 19.46%, or six and one-half
times the rate in the rest of the state. Just four counties -- Cuyahoga, Lucas, Montgomery and
Stark -- accounted for 219,332 undervotes, or 62.55% of the statewide total of 350,669. Cuyahoga
County alone accounted for 148,928 undervotes, or 42.47% of the statewide total. It was difficult
to believe that more than one in four voters in Cuyahoga County could not decide between
Sherrod Brown and Mike DeWine.

UNOFFICIAL RESULTS: UNITED STATES SENATE

Ballots Votes Undervotes/
Cast Counted Overvotes

16 counties 1,382,455 1,113,568 268,987 19.46%
71 counties 2,775,090 2,692,133 82,957 2.99%

As it happens, the voting
machine vendor in all 17 of these touch screen counties was Diebold Election Systems.

Franklin is the majority county of Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. During the 2006
Congressional election cycle, incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce faced Democrat
County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy in a contest that resulted in an official margin of
victory for Congresswoman Pryce of less than 1?2 of 1% or 1,055 votes out of more than
222,000 ballots cast thus requiring an automatic recount.

The Franklin County election was administered using the ES&S iVotronic direct
recording electronic voting machine, or DRE, with a voter verifiable paper audit trail, or
VVPAT. There were 45,684 ballots cast on optically scanned paper absentee ballots and
150,186 ballots cast on 2,341 VVPAT DREs. To my knowledge, it was the closest
Congressional election in the Country that used VVPAT DREs.



http://www.electioncenter.org/Testimony/Damschroder%20Testimony%20House%20Administration%2003%2020%2007.pdf