Studies: thousands of voters unable to vote in Franklin minority areas in 2004 due to machine alocat

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ions; (plus this many more due to other voter suppression efforts)

New research on voting machine availability and voter turnout in Ohio in 2004
http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2006/01/new-research-on-voting-machine.html
There is a paper by Ben Highton (UC-Davis) that is forthcoming in a political science journal (PS), "Long Lines, Voting Machine Availability, and Turnout: The Case of Franklin County, Ohio in the 2004 Presidential Election." Highton is a well-known scholar who has produced a series of good studies of a variety of issues associated with voter turnout.

Highton uses precinct-level data from Franklin County, Ohio, and undertakes a series of different statistical analyses to estimate the effect of availability of voting machines in precincts on 2004 voter turnout.
The strong association between the availability of voting machines and turnout in Franklin County, Ohio in the 2004 presidential election was largely the result of factors unrelated to the causal effect of the availability of voting machines on turnout. That said, after controlling for other causes of turnout, the relationship does not disappear, suggesting that machine scarcity was a cause of lower turnout. The magnitude of the effect in terms of votes was about 22,000 had there been no scarcity of voting machines on Election Day. Thus long lines at polling places in Franklin County do not appear to have cost John Kerry the presidential election as a single factor, but they do appear to have cost him large numbers of votes .


Voting Machine Allocation in Franklin County, Ohio, 2004: Response to U.S. Department of Justice Letter of June 29, 2005
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
February 11, 2006 http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/franklin2.pdf
Voting Machine Allocation and Voter Turnout
The analysis of Ohio precincts in the Democratic National Committee's report on Ohio 2004 (Mebane and Herron 2005) _nds that in precincts across the state, as the ratio of voting machines per registered voter in each precinct increases, voter turnout increases. The mechanism conjectured in that report is that more machines per registered voter meant there were shorter lines, and that shorter lines meant that more people could take the time to vote. The report in this way connects official decisions to place different numbers of voting machines in different precincts with disparities in different voters' access to the polls.
Mebane (2005) reports evidence that tends to confirm that mechanism among precincts in Franklin County. The analysis in the current report refines the analysis by taking into account the racial composition of each precinct. Mebane (2005) estimates that the effect of inadequate provision of voting machines in Franklin County reduced voter turnout much more than was implied by the estimates presented in Mebane and Herron (2005). The DOJ report finds that voter registration data from Franklin County are unreliable, due to failure to purge lapsed voters (Tanner 2005, 2). The current analysis shows that replacing voter registration with a measure of the number of voters active in each precinct produces estimates of the effect of inadequate machine provision on voter turnout that agree with the estimates Mebane and Herron (2005) present as typical throughout the state.
Conclusion
The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African Americans when measured using the standard of the November, 2004, electorate. In precincts with high proportions of African American voters there were 13.6 percent more active voters per voting machine than in precincts having low proportions of African American voters. While shortages of voting machines caused long delays in voting throughout the county, the allocation of voting machines among the county's precincts affected different voters differently. The most severe effects in terms of reduced voter turnout were incident on voters in precincts that had high proportions of African Americans. The most conservative estimate.based on the reported size of the active electorate in November.is that typically the shortages of machines reduced voter turnout by slightly more than four percent in precincts in which high proportions of the voters were African American, while shortages in precincts where very few voters were African American reduced voter turnout by slightly less
than 1.5 percent. If the allocation of voting machines is compared to information about the size of the active electorate that was available to Franklin County election of_cials at the end of April, 2004, then the allocation of machines is not biased against voters who were active at that time in precincts having high proportions of African Americans. But if we use the April information to evaluate the allocation plans, then we must note that the plans involved using a total number of machines that was nearly 45 percent too small. Using the April measure of the size of the active electorate, 5,023 working voting machines were needed, not 2,800 machines as data supplied by the county indicate were actually deployed on election day.
Using plans made in .mid-summer. meant that Franklin county officials ignored information during the late summer and fall that should have showed them that the November electorate would be substantially larger. Between April and November, the active voter population in the county increased by more than 15 percent. If nothing else, the surge of new registrants should have indicated that their plans made in mid-summer would prove woefully insuffcient.

www.flcv.com/frankln6.html

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1. Article claims large scale voter suppression in 2006 may cost Dems 2 congressional seats

Ohio's 2006 vote count now includes a higher percentage of uncounted ballots than in 2004, and a statistically impossible swing to the Republicans
By Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Ron Baiman
Online Journal Guest Writers

The percentage of uncounted votes in the allegedly "fraud free" 2006 Ohio election is actually higher than the fraud-ridden 2004 election, when the presidency was stolen here. A flawed voting process that allowed voters to be illegally turned away throughout the morning on Election Day may have cost the Dems at least two Congressional seats and a state auditor's seat.

The evidence comes directly from the official website of GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell Blackwell website. But researchers wishing to verify the number of uncounted ballots from that web site should do so immediately, as Blackwell is known for quickly deleting embarrassing evidence. In 2004, Blackwell deleted the evidence of excessive uncounted votes after the final results were tallied.

Despite Democratic victories in five of six statewide partisan offices, an analysis by the Free Press shows a statistically implausible shift of votes away from the Democratic Party statewide candidates on Election Day, contrasted with the results of the Columbus Dispatch's final poll. The Dispatch poll predicted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland winning with 67 percent of the vote. His actual percentage was 60 percent. The odds of this occurring are one in 604 million.

The final Columbus Dispatch poll wrapped up on Friday before the Tuesday election. This poll was based on 1541 registered Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.2 percentage points and a 95 percent confidence interval. The Dispatch noted "The survey's 7-point variance from Democrat Ted Strickland's actual percentage total broke a string of five straight gubernatorial elections in which the poll exactly matched the victor's share of the vote."

The hotly disputed central Ohio congressional race between incumbent Deborah Pryce, a close friend of George W. Bush, and challenger Mary Jo Kilroy, a Democratic Franklin County Commissioner has not been officially resolved as of today, November 14. The Franklin County Board of Elections has postponed the official recount of this race until after the November 18 Ohio State-Michigan football game. Another bitterly disputed congressional race, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, also awaits a recount.

Today, in 2006, the percentage of the official total vote that remains uncounted is actually higher than in 2004. According to Blackwell's web site, there are 211,656 absentee and provisional ballots still uncounted in 2006, out of 4,177,498 votes officially cast. This is 5.1 percent of the total official vote.

The high percentage of provisional ballots is due mainly to new strategies used by Blackwell and the GOP legislature to eliminate votes in targeted areas. In Franklin County (Columbus), which is now heavily Democratic, there were 14,462 provisional ballots---2.7 percent of total votes---cast in 2004. In 2006 the number soared to 20,679, a substantial jump constituting more than 6 percent of all voters, in an election in which fewer total votes were cast.

According to Blackwell's site, in 2006, there are 46,458 uncounted ballots in Franklin County alone. According to Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, some 19,524 are in Franklin County, where Kilroy is a Commissioner. Another 900 or so Kilroy-Pryce votes remain uncounted in the Madison and Union Counties

This article originally appeared in The Free Press. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2250

(Its clear that the rules under which its decided which of the uncounted absentees and provisionals will be counted will determine the winner of Congressional Dist 13- and its likely that the uncounted votes of thousands of eligible voters that aren’t counted may be the deciding factor)
www.flcv.com/frankln6.html

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2. Detailed analysis of precinct data from 2 elections in Palm Beach Co.,Fl. finds major effect of long

lines and voter suppression:

Detailed analysis of effects of apparent vote machine fraud and voter suppression in minority precincts in Palm Beach County in 2004: Based on voter reported irregularities to the EIRS election hotline(www.voteprotect.org )

Since only a relatively small portion of voters had the knowledge and motivation to report irregularities, only a small portion of total irregularities were reported, but Florida had the largest number of reported irregularities of any state and the thousands of reported irregularities serve as a good paper trail of election fraud and irregularities in the 2004 election. Exit poll data showed that a higher percentage of Democratic voters voted for Kerry in 2004 than for Gore in 2000, over 90%, and that Independent voters preferred Kerry by a significant margin. Exit polls showed a dead heat in Florida in 2004.

The analysis found that precincts with reported long lines or machine problems had a significant reduction in official vote turnout from the 2000 to the 2004 elections, with a swing of 7.8% on average for such precincts.

It seems ironic that precincts with extremely long lines correlated with extremely low official turnout compared to other precincts. This would seem to imply that the low official turnout was due to the electoral system rather than voter apathy. This consistently was found to be in minority precincts.

Summary of precinct data and statistics for affected areas:
http://www.flcv.com/pbvsum.html

Summary of all precinct data and statistics for Palm Beach county precincts:
http://www.flcv.com/pbvdata.html

The effects on vote totals in precincts with widely reported switching was similar.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x457943#457944

The same thing occurred in minority precincts in Ohio