Ohio Clermont Rumors – Get the FACTS

[adolfo]

Guys, we must get our facts straight. Here is some information I’ve confirmed directly with Clermont BOE and other sources.

----------------------------------------------
There was no hand count.

Some ballots were limp from humidity.

Optical scanners worked fine.

(4) Optical Scanners are ES&S model 315

Central tabulator runs ERS
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Link that supports some of the above:

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050804/NEWS01/508040335/1077/NEWS01

[Fly by night]

1. So why the delay and why the disruption to the counting process?

And how did they count those ballots that were too "humid" to be run through the scanner?

BTW, thanks for your rumor control. There's a lot of rumor going around that only does us a disservice.

[tridim]

2. Good points..

There was no hand count.
-Then why was there a report that there was a hand count? Someone doing the counting said that to a reporter. Why?

Some ballots were limp from humidity.
-Then they should all be hand counted. There's no guarantee the machine count is correct.

Optical scanners worked fine.
-Says who? Are the machines designed to read damp cards? Let's see where it says that in the manual.

[adolfo]

3. Official Explanation

Those are just the official explanations. If you have anything reliable that contradicts it then bring it forward. These issues should be resolved.

Do you have any links?

[bahrbearian]

4. The "Official Explanation" contradicts itself.

Why hasn't the problem occurred before?

[adolfo]

6. Good Question

Looking back at Clermont's history I believe we should audit their results regardless of rumors.

[philb]

25. Here is an article reporting on the problems: is it wrong?

http://billmon.org/archives/002073.html

[adolfo]

9. Thanks

>>Then why was there a report that there was a hand count? Someone doing the counting said that to a reporter. Why?

We should get that on an affidavit. How can we track the witnesses down?

[roseBudd]

21. You said, "how can we track the witnesses down?" I suggest touching base..

with Howard Wilkinson:
Howard Wilkinson Public affairs 513-768-8388 [e-mail]

This is his story and he has political connections stretching back decades. When a reporter calls, people answer. In addition the Enquirer/Gannett will and does sue for information. But you have to wear your calm cool analytical hat in all your dealings. The Toledo Blade is kicking ass right now and Enquirer reporters may be wanting to kick some ass too. Massage the reporters ego.

point 1 There is no diebold in SW Ohio. Bringing up BBV will not fly. Stick to the facts. Clermont had extremely anomalous results in 04 AND recount witnesses observed white round stickers on the ballots. Was this because of election night fraud or was it to avoid a hand recount?

Optiscan and punch card ballots are still tabulated by proprietary software. The difference is that punchcard and optiscan fraud is more risky than DRE fraud BUT the risk opf a hand recount is so low and can be managed by leaving certain precincts fraud free and then using those precincts in a hand recount.

[adolfo]

22. Will do

Thanks Rose.

[mopinko]

5. how did these ballots get "wet" indeed.

how humid was it that day? were they counted in a central location? if there were computers, there was air conditioning. it should not have been humid in the building.

[adolfo]

8. Don't know

Maybe it is a cover to something they are hiding or it really was humid. Can any Ohioans corroborate this story for us?

[tridim]

11. I checked weather.com and it was 93% humidity

High, but not enough to soak card stock. But as you say, there's little doubt they had AC, so it shouldn't have been an issue at all.. Unless someone took a hose to the ballots (Remember that happened in 04).

[liam_laddie]

7. My DU post Tues night 11:22 pm

I may not have actually sent it due to finger fatigue, but here was/is my take on it that night. I live in Cincinnati and have been
assisting with the 2004 crime investigation. Paper Ballots!
(edits are on Thurs 8-4)
====================================
My BS/tab fraud meter is pinned on HIGH

About fifteen minutes ago, a rethug official, a Clermont County
party officer, said that the delay in finishing the last 91 precincts
was due to "high humidity causing some problems in handling the ballots..." BULLSHIT ! (edit - I heard this LIVE on air from an
interview with this official, I think a rethug BoE director. And I believe he said "...we'll hand-count the remaining 91 precincts." So this could have been a lie to give time to rig the tab output. Jes' sayin'.
We NEED to have eyewitness reports.)

The ES&S opscan tabulators and the election workers are in AIR-CONDITIONED ROOMS!!! Are they really so arrogant as to think we're THAT STUPID? Of course they do! (edit - I'd be VERY surprised if ANY polling places were not A-C'd)

BTW, Clermont uses ES&S tabs to "count" opscan paper. This IS the county where ballots were discovered with white stickers
over Kerry votes. WTF happened to THAT crime?

And there's word that "some monitors (people) have been shoved out of the rooms." Not sure if this was in Clermont or
another county, but this has ALL the hallmarks of FRAUD!
(edit - this was reported on air at same time that "there are reports of voting irregularities... But that story died in the media.
Perhaps just a rumor, later proven not true. I don't know...)

The rethugs wait until they see how many votes are needed to
assure a victory, and keep the margin just above what's needed
to trigger a recount. Betcha it'll be just over 1/2%, which is what
I think is needed to auto a recount...the infamous "3% random
precinct selection."

I'm tellin' ya, Americans, there's gotta be blood in the streets to
take back the country from the Corpo-Fascists. Shee-it!

(edit - apparently some analysts have worked out that the last
91 precincts broke about 60-40 Schmidt as anticipated. Still doesn't prove that there wasn't tabulator manipulation. There
should be a recount of half of those last 91 and results compared with the machines' report. I will NEVER believe another election result in this country until we can audit every last vote!)

[Fly by night]

10. Doesn't Ohio law allow a recount if a) the vote is within 0.5% OR

b) if a candidate requests it and pays $10/precinct to have it done? (This was posted by DemoDonkey on another thread on the same issue).

If Hackett knows (recent) history -- particularly the magical stickers covering Kerry/Edwards votes that appeared on Clermont ballots prior to the faux recount -- then he should consider investing some of our money that we sent him to request a recount.

And if he is unaware of that history, then some DUer ought to wisen him up pronto. After all, you folks are on the wild frontier up there in Blackwell-world.

"Voters, voters? We don't need no steenkin' voters. Here in Ohio, the 'consent of the governed' is what we say it is. Now just move on before we pour a little 'humidity' all over your ass."

Them should be fightin' words to an Iraqi vet who knows the truth about the direction this country is heading (and the motives behind the Republi-Nazi compass that is pointing us in that direction), and who has the huevoes to fight the Rethugs on their home turf.

The Ohio Fat Lady hasn't sung -- hell, she's hardly squealed yet.

[skids]

12. Here are the numerical facts.

Clermont started the day reporting 1911 absentee ballots with a 750/1158 shmidt lead (plus 3 writeins.) That's 39.2% for Hackett and 60.6% for Schmidt.

Then they counted 12082 ballots in 100 precincts. That's about 121 ballots per precinct. These gave 6711 more votes to Schmidt and 5349 more votes to Hackett, and 22 more writeins. That's 44.3% for Hackett and 55.6% for Schmidt.

Then they counted 15825 ballots in 91 precincts. That's about 174 ballots per precinct. These gave 9451 more votes to Schmidt and 6340 more votes to Hackett, and 34 more writeins. That's 40.1% for Hacket and 59.7% for Schmidt.

According to the Clermont BOE's numbers, these last 91 precincts -- the ones that we all had to wait for -- were 44% larger on average than the first 100 (in terms of turnout.) In addition according to the numbers, the voters in these precincts were 8.3% more in favor of Schmidt than the voters in the first 100 precincts.

As far as I can tell, the central tabulation works like this: ballots are collected and shipped to a building, where they are counted. One would suspect that this building might be located in a city, and that large precincts might likewise. But I won't speculate beyond that, since we are supposed to stick to the facts here.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of things the above numbers claim that can be tested, if we get a precinct-by-precinct breakdown and other data.

[adolfo]

15. Precinct Results

http://www.recountflorida.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewsdownload&sid=4

(Has county totals, Clermont precinct results, and screenshot summary)

[skids]

18. That's what I was afraid of....

...they folded the absentee votes into the precincts, which makes it very difficult (if not impossible) to numerically pinpoint which precincts were in the first batch.

[Febble]

16. FWIW

I did a chi square on those numbers. First batch and third are not significantly different from each other. Second batch is significantly different from first and third.

But all that means is that the difference between the second batch and the other two was not simply due to sampling error. In other words it means that the 100 precincts were "drawn from a different population" than the last 91 or the absentees.

Nothing intrinsically improbable about that - it just means that the second batch was not a random sample from the whole. The question you could ask is: what characterised the demographics of the second and third batch? And why did the third batch resemble the absentees?

But it is possibly worth noting that it is the batch with the smallest margin that is out of line with the other two, not the batch with the largest margin.

[skids]

17. The first batch is absentee

...which are well known for being deviant compared to batches from polling.

[Febble]

19. Yes, I know

I'm just doing the stats on the three batches. Absentee and final are not significantly different from each other. The middle batch is significantly different from the others.

Someone wanted some numbers crunching, so I crunched 'em.

I'm just pointing out that of the three, first and last are not significantly different, so it's the middle one that's the odd one out. Next step is to find out why that might be.

[skids]

20. What I'm saying...

...is that you shouldn't consider the middle one to be the odd man out, because absentee ballot groups just cannot be used for a valid comparison. Absentee is usually heavily biased towards the alignment of elderly voters. (Though conventional wisdom says that absentee is biased towards Republican all the time, this is not the case in, for example, Washington State.)

If anything, it's stranger that the third group, coming from polling, would agree at all with the absentee group, than it is that the second group would not.

[Febble]

28. Fair enough

That's why I did the chi square. To show if any one batch was different from the rest.

The middle one is.

[shance]

13. Optical scanners worked fine? Do you mean for ES&S?

Once ANY ballot data is entered into an optical scanner, the manipulation can be programmed in to occur, so essentially the votes then become invalid because we cannot know after the ballots have been recorded if they have been manipulated or not.

To say the optiscans worked "fine", is like saying the machines are working "fine". Fine according to whom? Fine according to those who are counting the votes electronically? Perhaps.

There is no way for poll workers to know once the data enters the tabulator if the votes were manipulated. The same potential for fraud happens just as easily with an optical scanner.

[adolfo]

14. I meant mechanically fine

:argh:

[roseBudd]

23. Old salt reporters such as Howard Wilkinson may not understand ...

this may not understand this because reporters tend to be computer illiterate unless they cover the technology beat.

BTW a tabulation program can pass preelection testing and then be triggered to start counting fraudulently by a time, after 10:30 pm on 080205, by an improbable sequence of bubbles being colored in on an optiscan ballot or by reaching a certain threshold, Schmidt not winning by more than 50%

IMHO and I live here, the counties that Hackett kicked ass in trended so blue that indicates to me, the god, guns, gay voters got over their dem phobia because something about Hackett resonated with them. The counties hackett did well in should have been more like Clermont. The fact that they weren't is what makes me suspicous of Clermont.

[philb]

24. Fraud was found in 2004 election: here is Green Party observer report

Clermont County (Punch card) ***
http://www.votecobb.org/recount/ohio_reports/counties/clermont.php
3% random sample was not random; only small precincts included; hand count didn't match machine but didn't follow Ohio rule to count all by hand There was indication of inconsistent policies in counting favoring Bush and evidence of tampering according to witness. County officials uncooperative; would not let observers see info needed to confirm results, such as overvotes. Kerry votes on some cards had stickers over them so could not be counted by compiler. No explanation given. http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=7
***********************************

[garybeck]

26. there were STICKERS on the ballots in Clarmont

there are signed affadavits from 7 people who saw the stickers and even photos of them. stickers covered ovals that were votes for Kerry. I have the affidavits if anyone wants to see them.

[emlev]

27. Just wundrin--do stickers stick when it's humid? n/t

[mopinko]

29. really, how many more "facts" do we need?

and since when does the "official" story have anything to do with facts? we need to get to hackett. how much does it cost to recount this one county? put up the bat.