Cuyahoga county--where Cleveland resides--was critical to this election. The Kerry campaign was counting on this county to carry Ohio, and had that happened, he would've won the majority of electoral votes. What happened in Coyahoga county? Many things have already been reported, but here's another that I haven't seen talked about....

Late into the night when Bush was leading in Ohio with 90% of precincts reporting, the democratic party was still optimistic of pulling out a win because they were still expecting huge numbers of additional votes from Cleveland that they thought would give them the lead. The votes never materialized. What happened?

55 precincts in Cleveland show a turnout of less than 40%. Several show a turnout of less than 20%, and one even shows a turnout of 7%. That's right, SEVEN PERCENT. Despite reports of very strong ground efforts, record turnouts, and long lines throughout Cleveland, 60, 70, 80, even 90+% of the people who took the time to register didn't bother to show up?!? Or did they? Was there massive voter suppression in these precincts? Were voters in these precincts forced to vote via provisional ballots, ballots that are not audited in Ohio, so that we have no way of knowing how many were cast?

We need to get a handle on this. In the 55 precincts I mention, 84.3% of the counted votes went to Kerry, 15.1% to Bush. We're talking about many thousands of votes here, just in Cleveland alone. It could be that we got a horrific turnout, far worse than our expectations. But it could also be that people showed up and there was massive voter suppression, a massive compaign to challenge voters in these precincts, and/or a massive compaign to force voters into using unaudited (and therefore easily "lost") provisional ballots because of challenges, machine malfunctions, etc. Whatever the case may be, we had a HUGE shortfall of votes from Cuyahoga County and Cleveland in particular--literally tens and tens of thousands less than expected--and we need to see if we can find out why.

Cleveland 6C, 7.1% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 45-1
Cleveland 13D, 13.05% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 207-42
Cleveland 13F, 19.6% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 156-4
Cleveland 13O, 21.01% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 44-5
Cleveland 6B, 21.8% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 82-4
Cleveland 10L, 24.72% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 207-7
Cleveland 6D, 28.43% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 127-5
Cleveland 5C, 28.97% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 195-29
Cleveland 7V, 29.25% turnout, counted votes favor Kerry 249-33

and the list goes on and on...

Unravelling the Mystery of the Cuyahoga County vote totals
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x33600

I have looked at the data posted by the county, and saw something really unusual - different municipalities have the exact same number of "extra" votes.

* Typically, the "extra" votes appear in the totals for the municipality. Where the municipality is broken down by ward, the sum of the wards does not match the total for the municipality.

* If we use the sum of the wards as the turnout, the numbers are reasonable (about 60%). I suspect the ward counts are accurate.

* The sum of the wards and the reported total for the municipality DIFFERS BY THE SAME AMOUT IN MULTIPLE MUNICIPALITIES. That is to say, differnent towns have the exact same number of "extra" votes.

Examples:

Computer glitch still baffles county clerk
http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/news02.txt

The day after a two-and-a-half-hour delay in counting ballots due to a glitch in a computer program, LaPorte County election officials are still trying to figure out what happened.

"Maybe there was a power surge," LaPorte County Clerk Lynne Spevak said. "Something zapped it."

At about 7 p.m. Tuesday, it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters.

That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters.

A power surge does not alter specific data on a hard drive - the word "hacked" springs to mind.

Judge Rejects Suit Over Uncounted Absentee Ballots
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041110/NEWS/411100373/1004

Election officials will not be forced to count absentee ballots delivered after 7 p.m. on Election Day, regardless of what problems caused late mailings, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The civil liberties group had asked for an emergency order requiring Miami-Dade and Broward election officials to count ballots received after last week's election-night cutoff. The absentees, counted or not, would not affect final statewide tallies that counties must submit to the state by Saturday.

After receiving complaints about undelivered ballots, Broward County dropped off 9,000 absentee ballots at a U.S. Postal Service distribution center on the Saturday before Election Day, which meant they would not be delivered until the eve of the election. Voters were told they could return ballots by overnight mail at county expense.

Soooooo, if you want to suppress votes in a district, just mail them their absentee ballots late and the courts will say it's okay to ignore them when they get sent back late.

Why did Florida voters with one type of machine vote one way, and voters with a different machine vote another?
http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html#Florida

In Florida, the figures show that, in counties with one type of voting machine, voters with no Democrat or Republican party affiliation appeared to split their votes roughly 50/50 between Bush and Kerry, which was to be expected; yet in counties with another type of voting machine, unaffiliated voters seemed to vote nearly 100% for Bush!