First Hand Sworn Accounts from Ohio Voters

This article cites transcripts of sworn testimony concerning "questionable practices" in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election:

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/930

(snip)

"I pushed John Kerry and my vote immediately jumped up to George Bush. After I started screaming about them cheating again, the aide hurried up and came over and said, oh, that's been happening a lot."

(snip)

Many, many additional first hand accounts of problems reported by Ohio voters are listed.

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of such officials, even when challenged, seems to demonstrate that what had seemed to be a culture of unambiguously endemic criminality among these neocons, has actually been transcended to the point where it has become simply the default status.

So confident are they in their recidivist culture, that, on the contrary, it now seems to them, that the very notion of questioning the lawfulness of their conduct, is the delinquent, aberrant behaviour - certainly not their own...

These people are so sure they're right, they don't need facts, they don't need logic, and they don't need rules.

Tom Pinnetello: "Once it was my turn, I got inside and looked over the voting machine, and this is one of the electronic voting machines. It consisted of an array of blinking lights urging you to vote for something, and once you did vote for something, the blinking light would go out and a steady red light would appear next to your selection. On the upper left-hand part was the selection for president. I wanted to do this, I wanted to get this out of the way, that's what I came here, to vote, that was my number one priority. So I pushed the button for John Kerry for president of the United States. And the light -- the flashing light went out and the light next to John Kerry's name came on. ... Once I was finished, I got down to the lower right-hand corner and the big green vote button was beckoning. I almost pushed it and I said, no, wait a minute, I want to -- I want to proofread what I just did. I want to look over my selections. I looked up into the upper left-hand corner and the area for president of the United States was now flashing again. My vote for John Kerry had been neutralized. It had been reset. Now, you can call this a glitch, you can call this a design flaw, you can call it a bologna sandwich if you want, but whatever you call it, that machine nearly threw out and neutralized my vote for John Kerry.”

Thanks, Straight Shooter, the account you just excerpted and emphasized in response #3 above was furnished by Mr. Pinnetello, as cited in the same article.

Indeed, the voting issues reported by these Ohio voters do appear serious.

Here is the paragraph from Janine Smith-White's testimony that was cited in the article. My original posting excerpted a portion of testimony attributed to her. Here is the full quote from the article, with emphasis added:

"Janine Smith-White, Youngstown:
“I went to my polling place approximately about 9:45 to vote. I waited, I would say, 30 minutes in a line. When I did get to my machine, I pushed John Kerry and my vote immediately jumped up to George Bush. After I started screaming about them cheating again, the aide hurried up and came over and said, oh, that's been happening a lot. Just go ahead and push John Kerry again and I'm saying, you say that's been happening a lot and it hasn't been corrected? Yes, but we can't do anything about it. So I did push John Kerry again and the vote did stay on John Kerry. Even though I completed my voting and after I went over my ballot and I pushed the vote button, I'm still not sure that I voted for John Kerry because, I mean, did my first vote that went to George Bush count or did John Kerry count.” (emphasis added)