Jacqueline Maiden, center, stands with Rosie Grier, left, and Kathleen Dreamer, during court proceedings, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007, in Cleveland. Maiden, who was the elections board's third-highest ranking employee, faces six counts of misconduct over how ballots were reviewed in Cuyahoga County in the 2004 presidential election. Grier, manager of the board's ballot department, and Kathleen Dreamer, an assistant manager, face the same charges. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak) (Tony Dejak) |
CLEVELAND – Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of manipulating a recount of the 2004 U.S. presidential election to avoid a more thorough ballot review in Ohio's most populous county.
Ohio gave U.S. President George W. Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Senator John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House. However, a special prosecutor did not claim that the workers' actions affected the election's outcome.
Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.
Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.
Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them.
Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.
Maiden and Dreamer, who still work for the elections board, face a possible sentence of six to 18 months for the felony conviction. Sentencing is Feb. 26.
[Later note: both Maiden & Dreamer got 18 months in prison.]
source: 24jan2006
CLEVELAND - Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio’s most populous county.
Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.
Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.
Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them.
Ohio gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.
Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election - Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.
Maiden and Dreamer, who still work for the elections board, face a possible sentence of six to 18 months for the felony conviction. Sentencing is on Feb. 26.
A message left for Elections Board Director Michael Vu was not immediately returned Wednesday. The board released a statement that said its goal is to restore confidence in the county's election progress and pursue reforms in addition to those made since 2004.
source: 24jan2007
CLEVELAND -- The jury reached a verdict Wednesday in the trial of three Cuyahoga County Board of Elections workers accused of mishandling the 2004 presidential election recount.
The verdict was split, with two of the workers being found guilty on some of the charges, and the third found not guilty.
The three were charged with six counts each of misconduct. The charges alleged that Ohio laws were not followed in the selection and review of ballots for the recount. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison.
Rosie Grier, the assistant manager of the board's ballot department, was acquitted on all the charges against her.
The two other workers were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct. Jacqueline Maiden is the elections coordinator who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March. The other is ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer.
Both also were each convicted of a misdemeanor count of failure of an elections employee to perform her duty and each acquitted of five counts.
Both were acquitted of five other charges.
Grier, though happy with her acquittal, said she refuses to let her vindication overshadow her coworkers.
"I think they're just as innocent as I am. Because we did nothing wrong, none of us did anything wrong. None of us should have been here," she said.
All three employees have been on paid leave from the board, which has defended the workers, saying the employees did not knowingly commit fraud or break any laws.
Maiden and Dreamer have both lost their jobs at the BOE as a result of their convictions. They are scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 26.
source: http://www.newsnet5.com/news/10835552/detail.html 24jan2007
The Green and Libertarian presidential candidates have been involved in ongoing efforts to get a recount of the 2004 Ohio presidential vote. Ohio's election rules for a recount mandate that 3% of the precincts be recounted by hand, and if the results from this initial recount match up with the election night totals, then the rest of the county's precincts can be recounted by machine. However, if the results of the initial manual recount don't match up, then the entire county has to be recounted by hand.
Now, the important thing to note about this 3% recount is that the precincts included in it must be randomly selected. Otherwise, elections officials who don't want to risk the cost and labor of manually recounting millions of ballots could just select precincts where they suspect (or in some cases, know for certain) that the manual recount will come out right. This is what elections officials in Cuyahoga County pulled, and it's why two of them may be going to jail.
Cuyahoga County officials spent three days behind closed doors doing an illegal "pre-count" so that they could identify which precincts would produce correct results, thereby allowing them to do the rest of the recount by machine. Then, they delivered stacks of these pre-counted ballots to the official recount team, who then went through (by now pointless) theatrics of manually recounting the (already counted) ballots.
The reason that the Cuyahoga folks got busted was that there was someone at the official recount with a video camera, and this person videotaped election workers Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer dropping off boxes of ballots for the recount that were pre-sorted into "Bush" and "Kerry" stacks. When they were asked why these supposedly randomly selected ballots were already sorted into neat piles, the workers responded on camera to the effect that the 3% sample was not in fact random, but had been carefully selected so that it would product the correct results.
It's because of this videotaped evidence that these two workers were convicted. Blackbox Voting reports that their supervisors—the folks ultimately responsible for this farce—got off scot-free, as did elections officials in other counties where this was done but no one was dumb enough to admit to it on camera.
Michael Vu (30, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, $119,000/year salary) although unindicted, resigned on 6 Feb. 2007.
The statewide recount, paid for by the Green and Libertarian Parties, was marred in 87 of the state's 88 counties by the types of illegalities that led to this week's convictions. Only in Coshocton County was a full, manual recount performed.
Throughout the rest of the state, under the direction of Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, mandatory random sampling was not done, as prescribed by law. Instead, poll workers illegally chose sample precincts for recounting where they knew there would be no problems, and then routinely recounted the rest of the ballots by machine, rendering the recount meaningless.
Blackwell simultaneously served as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign...
County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter opened the Cuyahoga trial by charging that "the evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless." Baxter said three election workers "did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months" on the recount. "This was a very hush operation."...
Dreamer's defense attorney Roger Synenberg, said the defendants "were just doing [the recount] the way they were always doing it."
But Cuyahoga's precinct-by-precinct vote counts and turnout numbers varied wildly and improbably. Several predominantly black precincts showed turnouts of less than 30% in a county where overall turnout was around 60%. One ward showed a 7% turnout as compared to surrounding precincts with turnouts nearly ten times as high.
Further prosecutions may now hinge on what Maiden and Dreamer might tell prosecutors about the role played by higher-ups. The assumption is widespread that the decision to consciously designate test precincts, rather than choose them at random, must have been at least tacitly approved by Secretary of State Blackwell.
In Cleveland, Robert Bennett, chair of the state's s Republican Party, also served as chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Cuyahoga BOE Executive Director Michael Vu was chosen by the county Democratic Party. Under Vu's direction, the county's elections have been rife with chaos, irregularities and apparent fraud. When the Democrats recently tried to remove him from his post, Vu was supported by Bennett and the Republican Party. He kept his job when Blackwell strategically abstained from a key removal vote.
There is growing evidence that what happened in Cleveland was the rule, rather than the exception, in Ohio's 2004 presidential recount. Sworn testimony at a public hearing in Toledo indicates Diebold technicians were involved in picking "random" precincts to be recounted there. A memory card was apparently lacking from at least one optiscan machines.
Miami County election officials admit they merely ran the optiscan ballots through the ES 550 counter, rather than doing the prescribed random recounts. Free Press reporters have found recount results varied signficantly from official results, which should have triggered a hand recount of all the ballots in the county. This was never done in Miami or in any other Ohio County except Coshocton.
Cuyahoga County contains the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland. Immediately following the 2004 election 562,498 votes were reported cast with 30,791 listed as absentee or provisional ballots. But the official results show 468,056 counted in Cuyahoga. Hence 94,442 ballots cast in the unofficial total officially disappeared. That's 16.8% of all the votes cast in Cuyahoga.
Other Ohio counties with large vote losses include Auglaize (15.7%), Coshocton (14.1%), Jackson (11.3%), Licking (14.1%), Lucas (10.6%), Morrow (17.4%), and Tuscarawas (11.7%). These happen to coincide quite nicely with pro-Democrat counties.