Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost'
Voters in Ohio
By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a
tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which
is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a
line snaking out of the precinct door.
She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in
the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk
away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove
to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of
Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?
Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.
"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener
said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations,
and yet there weren't enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't
intentional."
Electoral problems prevented many thousands of
Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000
to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely
that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio
tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral
college majority.
But similar problems occurred across the state
and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared
particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with
voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials,
as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.
In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers
apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification
of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to
third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an
unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.
In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on
college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to
busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours --
many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations
had been purged.
"There isn't enough to prove fraud, but
there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year
that demand reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election
law program at the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state
solicitor. "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want
to minimize that."
Franklin County election officials -- evenly
split between Republicans and Democrats -- say they allocated machines based on
past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But they
acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000
registered voters.
Ohio is not particularly unusual. After the 2000
election debacle, which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an
election decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America
Vote Act in 2002. The intent was to help states upgrade aging voting machines
and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. To a point, it has had the
desired effect.
"Viewed dispassionately, the national
elections ran much more smoothly than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in
voting behavior and methodology. Because of improved technology
"nationwide, we counted perhaps 1 million votes that we would have lost
four years ago."
But much work remains. Congress imposed only the
minimal national standards and included too few dollars. Tens of thousands of
machines -- including 70 percent of Ohio's machines -- still use punch-card
ballots, which have a high error rate. A patchwork quilt of state rules governs
voter registration and provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are given to
voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls -- studies show that
minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio
recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. But in Georgia, one-third of the election
districts did not record a single provisional ballot in 2004.
In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election
meltdown, professors and graduate students from the University of California at
Berkeley studied this year's voting results, contrasting counties that had
electronic voting machines with those that used traditional voting methods. They
concluded, based on voting and population trends and other indicators, that
irregularities associated with machines in three traditionally Democratic
counties in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000 excess votes
for Bush in a state the president won by about 381,000 votes. The study prompted
heated critiques from some polling experts.
Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too. But he ran
the numbers and came up with the same result. "You can't break it; I've
tried," Stewart said. "There's something funky in the results from the
electronic-machine Democratic counties."
Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout, who directed
the study, said the problem in Florida probably lies with the technology.
(Florida's touch-screen machines lack paper records.) "I've always viewed
this as a software problem, not a corruption problem," he said. "We'd
never tolerate this level of errors with an ATM. The problem is that we continue
to do democracy on the cheap."
A Heated Run-Up
By October, the Bush and Kerry campaigns knew
that this midwestern state was a crucial battleground. Each side assembled
armies of 3,000 lawyers and paralegals, and unaffiliated organizations poured in
thousands more volunteers. Both parties filed lawsuits challenging rules and
registrations.
Two decisions proved pivotal.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly
interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must
cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct
where they reside. For cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati, where officials
long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the ruling
promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take those
ballots, but the alternative is disenfranchisement," said Michael Vu,
director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes Cleveland.
Earlier this year, state officials also decided
to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the
security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County
boards are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type
of machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County, officials decided to
quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines.
Other counties decided to muddle through. At
Kenyon College, a surge of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox
County officials allocated two machines, just as in past elections. In
voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus,
election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their
analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines.
"Does it make any sense to purchase more
machines just for one election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director
of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."
On Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans
voted, 900,000 more voters than in 2000.
In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on
the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day,
and hundreds of voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke,
54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the
predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on
walkers, and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse
their lateness.
"It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it
being this bad."
Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations had
been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election,"
Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept telling me, 'You must be
mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted. I
felt like I'd been scrubbed off the rolls."
Aftermath of Nov. 2
After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how
Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the
30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush.
At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest
machines delivered large margins for Kerry.
Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and turnout was
lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I
counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my precinct in
Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State Community
College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote.
Franklin County officials say they allocated machines according to instinct
and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the need to examine
the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles, we'll have to look more
closely at this," he said.
In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to vote.
"They had to skip classes and skip work," said Matthew Segal, a
19-year-old student.
In northeastern Ohio, in the fading industrial city of Youngstown, Jeanne
White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, an African American
newspaper, stepped into the booth, pushed the button for Kerry -- and watched
her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what happened; I started
screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting early!' "
It was not her imagination. Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced
what election officials called "calibration problems." "It
happens every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections
for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. "It's something we have to
live with, and we can fix it."
As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and officials disqualified
about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati and its Ohio
suburbs, 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the
wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those cases, voters found the right
polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them
to the wrong table.
In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the provisional
ballots. Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also
mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account for why a few
overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for
conservative third-party candidates.
Still, state officials saw little to apologize for, particularly in the case
of provisional ballots. A recent count of provisional ballots sliced 18,000
votes off Bush's margin in Ohio. "In Washington, D.C., a voter who casts a
ballot in the wrong precinct cannot have that ballot counted," said Carlo
LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell. "Yet in Ohio, it was 'voter suppression'
and 'voter disenfranchisement.' "
In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and talk of
Republican conspiracies mounted. "A lot of folks who, having put an
enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed in the
righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said Tim Burke,
chairman of the Hamilton County election board.
Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to play
down the anger. National Democrats -- including the chief counsel for Kerry's
campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm Bush's victory.
But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among
rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a
straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I
waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot
of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would
happen.'
"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"
Slevin reported from Cincinnati. Special correspondents Michelle Garcia in
New York and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.