Raining, gloomy, crappy, chilly.... it looks like even God is conspiring to keep those Democrats away from the polls!
Some surprising stats from the Ohio Secretary of State web site: Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) and Franklin County (Columbus) had the highest (and second highest) number of registered voters who didn't vote, in the entire state: 340,473 in Cleveland and 330,248 in Columbus.

The two most liberal counties in the state have the highest number of no-shows, and a turnout rate that was almost 10% lower than the state average? Hmm...I guess Dubya just didn't piss off the liberal city slickers enough to get them out to vote.

On the one hand, the rate of no-shows seems to correlate with population: the third highest number of no-shows was in the third most populous county (Hamilton). On the other hand, Hamilton had a higher-than-average turnout rate, and guess who they voted for? Hint: it's Cinncinati, which borders Kentucky.

This could be a completely legal, if unethical, tactic by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to suppress the vote: there simply weren't enough voting machines. I arrived at the polls at 6:30AM, when they opened, and had to wait an hour to vote. Many people waited much longer, and many people simply left when they saw how long the lines were, or after waiting in the rain for a few hours. Curiously, you didn't heat about these problems in the Republican-dominated suburbs. Remember, Blackwell is the guy who refused to accept new registrations that weren't printed on bond paper until the courts slapped his wrist. According to a poll worker, voting machines are allocated according to turnout in the previous election, which means that last-minute voter drives are going to result in longer waits, but if those liberal counties really did register hundreds of thousands of new voters, how come lines were so long if the turnout rate was actually lower in those counties?

Note the San Jose Mercury News www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/sp ecial_packages/election2004/10091977.htm/ [mercurynews.com] headline: "Despite long lines, voter turnout in Ohio not record breaking". And from the article: "The county just didn't plan on having a whole college to vote," said Sussman, who waited 10 hours to cast his vote for Kerry at 9 p.m., two and a half hours after the polls closed.

This also puts into perspective Blackwell's successful battle in the days before the election to prevent provisional ballots from being cast outside of one's own precinct. I suspect Blackwell knew there weren't nearly enough voting machines in certain precincts, and wanted to prevent voters from simply trotting to the next precinct to vote. For instance, in Republican-dominated Worthington, 10 minutes north of my precinct, there were no lines. The most clever thing about it is that it's not illegal, just unfair.

Meanwhile, if half of those 670,000 voters did actually show up at the polls, and if their votes tracked the actual results in those counties (Cleveland 66% for Kerry, Columbus 54%), that would have swung the election, since the difference in Ohio was around 136,000 votes.

Brushing aside conspiracy theories, it seems that blackboxvoting.org would do well to at least question how voting machines were allocated in Ohio. It wouldn't be too hard to look at voter turnout in the last election, and compare that with actual voting machine allocations. Who will bet me $1 that left-leaning precincts were short-shrifted?

Ohio Remains A Battleground As Late Voting Delays Count (NYT) (Long lines,late voting)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30617FA3D580C708CDDA80994DC404482

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According to local newspaper reports, Democrats had registered 140,000 new voters in Cuyahoga County -- essentially Cleveland and the surrounding areas -- in the months leading up to the election. And virtually as soon as the polls opened, Cleveland locals began braving a cold, steady rain and growing lines to cast their vote. Some 1,500 poll monitors volunteering for Election Protection, many of them law students and lawyers from the northeast, also fanned out across Cuyahoga County.

In Brooklyn Acres, a working-class, white area and long heavily Democratic, people -- many of them old and handicapped -- began showing up before the polls even opened at 6:30 a.m.

Across town, at Superior Elementary School in East Cleveland, an impoverished and predominantly African American city which sits adjacent to Cleveland but is still within Cuyahoga County, lines were long and emotions high.

aside from some long lines -- up to three hours at some locations -- a few broken voting machines and a smattering of misinformed poll workers, there were none of the systemic and potentially ruinous problems some election officials had been bracing for.

A number of polling places, especially in the Shaker Heights suburb, had tremendous lines because certain precincts were understaffed and did not appear to have enough voting booths.

One Civil Rights Commission lawyer who asked that his name not be used told AlterNet: "The biggest problems we found were at Woodbury Elementary School in Shaker Heights where there weren't enough machines and one group, which was all African American, was having to wait three hours to vote."

As the skies blackened and wind and rain whipped across the city, Doris Quinones, executive director of the Bronx Tourism Council who'd traveled with her husband from New York the day before, and Nancy Cribbs, attorney for Cleveland State University, huddled outside Louis Munoz Marin Middle School in the Tremont area of Cleveland, giving advice to Spanish speaking voters. "We've had a record turnout," said state Democratic Party spokesman Dan Trevas.

ACLU Ohio spokesman John Durkalski said he was concerned about the long lines throughout the state and the group would be waiting and reviewing complaints before taking any legal action.

Dan Frosch is an independent journalist based in New York City. He's been on staff at the San Gabriel Valley Weekly section of the Los Angeles Times

www.alternet.org/election04/20398/

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CLEVELAND ---- Before sunrise at the Aurora School in Bedford City east of Cleveland, nearly 100 voters lined up in the rain. ""It''s never been this crowded this early. I''m impressed,"" said Camille Huffman, 38, a bank worker who has been voting in the area since she was 18. ""This district used to be mixed …… now there''s more minorities here and about a third qualify for free lunches,"" one teacher said. ""That''s who I see coming out today, minorities, lower income, single mothers, people who need to be heard who Bush isn''t helping.""
Democratic challenger Hope Evans, 35, whose husband was among 600 Cleveland teachers laid off in last May''s round of cuts, said, ""I''ve never seen the electorate more polarized than by Bush with fear and wedge issues. . ""I''ve been voting here as long as I can remember and my name isn''t on the list,"" the woman said.

""More young people are voting who are displeased with how the country is being run,"" Wingo said. ""The lines should have much better organization,"" she said. ""My Section F had so many, we needed more booths.""

An Election Protection attorney at the De Souza school, Ilana Kohn, 37, helped tackle the severe problems with long lines. ""There were only five open machines for a line of 100-plus voters,"" she said. ""The presiding judge called the county board many times but they were no help. The election workers didn''t know how to tell people about provisional ballots. I helped several people who [had been given] the wrong information.""
www.pww.org/article/articleview/6046/1/239

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Rain can't dampen voting; Residents lineup for ballots

Tensions were running high and raindrops falling steadily as local voters headed to the polls in one of the closest elections this country has seen. Minor problems also occurred at the Dwyer Memorial Senior Center, also in Bay Village, where two voting machines turned up missing.

Average waiting times outside polling places in the West Shore were about 30 minutes, with voting numbers doubling at many locations. I've never seen lines like this, said Judith McKenna of Fairview Park. But it's worth it to stand in the rain. This is the most important election in a long time.The polling station lines are really long, and more young people are out here voting, even in this weather, said Danielle Cansky.. David Atone of Bay Village the 18-year-old waited 45 minutes to cast his vote for the first time.

www.cleveland.com/sun/sunherald/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1099589978325820.xml#continue

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Dirty Tricks and Voter Suppression

Cuyahoga County Democrats standing in line were shut off by Ken Blackwell from voting at 8:30 while less Democratic Hamilton County of Cincinnati was allowed to vote til 10. . Those carrying ID & registration cards sent by the Board of Elections were refused in many cases because their names were not on the computer . Ludlow precinct... had hours long lines.. while the Republican precinct tables in the same bldg. were empty.. deliberate understaffing of Democrat precincts
LUCAS COUNTY A Toledo polling place in a Democratic precinct was shut down for more
than an hour 'lack of pencils' PUBLIC RADIO reported that the record for standing in line in a
Democratic precinct (in rain or no rain) was SEVEN hours.
FEW MACHINES FEW STAFF
FRANKLIN COUNTY Ohio students stood in line for 4 hours.. few machines little staff... arranged by Ms Holcombe, president of Ohio State, who is also supervising the primate abusing university's giving AIDS to cat in veterinary medicine school and breaking rat spines in another dept.
CARDS ALREADY PUNCHED FOR BUSH were reported in Cuyahoga County
GOP HACKERS USED INTERNET EXPLORER MICROSOFT FLAWS SUCH
AS DSO EXPLOITS to destroy the machines of home computers of Kerry volunteers.
Solution: 1. sue Microsoft 2. get Firefox of Mozilla or other
safer faster software
OBERLIN Only 2000 students.. but they had to wait hours to vote KENYON A small student body.. but they had to wait hours SUMMIT COUNTY Akron Those who registered address changes were illegally classified as 'provisional' ballots

CANTON: base for DIEBOLD: voting machine manufacturer whose CEO O'Dell said his job
was to get electoral votes for Bush.. gave money to Dick Cheney at the Fairlawn Hilton.
www.whatreallyhappened.com/votefraud.html
Diebold's installation through fraud of Talent in Missouri,
Sununu in NH, Allard in Colorado, and VP Mondale's opponent in Minnesota.

WHO DID THIS?
www.publicintegrity.org/pns 100 war profiteers including GE, owner of NBC, Carlyle Group, Lockheed, URS owned by Dianne Feinstein's husband Blum
www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org see other vote fraud
http://chapelhill.indymedia.org/print.php?id=12397

http://www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=2800

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Report vote fraud

www.ohiodems.org White
http://kerry.senate.gov
www.indyvoter.org
www.naacp.org
www.aclu.org
www.acluohio.org
www.egroups.com/messages/ohiovotefraud

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