General Discussion

First, I am a strong Democrat, and this was before the Green party went Ruski, and it was the green party that applied for the recount because Kerry would not.

I talked to the Assistant supervisor of elections in my county because the Voting machine rep had come into the office and suggested the recount was a waste of time and they should just put a card on the wall with what the totals were and make sure that came up again. Many of the election workers were agreeing but she was appalled and wanted me to pass along to the Green party recount people this could happen in other counties. (Many years later I now know that this was actually a conspiracy to commit election fraud and suborning perjury). The voting machine tech was there to supposedly just check the machines but had a replacement hard drive for the system. It was some sort of pc connected to the punch card reader. It was actually against the law to modify the voting equipment but it happened.

The recount actually just consisted of re-running the cards through the machine. No hand count was ever done. So the results were the "same".

The local BOE actually fired the woman who was the Assistant supervisor of elections. They claimed she 'embarrassed' the BOE by telling about the post the numbers meeting. There were some lawsuits about that but she was given a job at the Ohio Lottery commission to make it go away.

One last thing was that she and I applied to examine the punch cards after the election which is supposed to be available by law. We were going to just do a hand count of a couple of precincts ourselves as it would not take very long to go through a couple of hundred ballot cards. I was sent a letter from the BOE that we could not see them since there 'might' be other lawsuits. We were never allowed to see them and they were eventually destroyed.

By the way if Ohio were flipped, Kerry would have won. There were some strange things like some of the recount people in other areas were mysteriously ran off the road into a ditch. I stayed at my parents for a few days until the dust settled and did have a hunting stick close by.

The write up of this was read at an unofficial hearing some Democratic congressmen had in Columbus. This was actually why I joined DU 20 years ago.

So did they have crooked machines in 2004? I don't know, but they sure acted like it. A hand recount of at least a few precincts in these swing states would always be a good idea.