Recount Ohio

cashPolitics in its truest, boldest and most base form: Cash. Time is Money; Money is Power; Moneeeey… It’s a gas… Keep your hands off my stash…(Musical post: listen to this one while you read this post).

This week closes with two important power-moves revolving around the cold hard cash. California, who doesn’t have any, finally agrees with itself on how to spend it and the U.S., who doesn’t really have any either, decides to give $200 million to the Palestinian Authority.

Let’s start there. Read more

Ohio is one of the twelve states likely to see some troubles on Election Day.  Check out the story at http://www.alternet.org/election08//voting_watch

"Controversy and lawsuits swirled around the state s six-day one-stop registration and voting period that ended earlier this month. Republicans say the options should have never been allowed, arguing that it violated the state s voter registration deadlines, though it has been on the books in the state for more than a quarter century"

In Ohio voting is getting pretty messy.  From suspicious voter registrations, to unveryfiable provisional votes, now it is being reported that the chances of election theft from rigged or faulty electronic voting machines is a likely scenario.  Democrats fear loosing thousands of votes to purging, out-right intimidation and computerized manipulations.

[...]Vote shifting has also surfaced where citizens attempt to select a straight party ticket. Even during less pressured advance balloting, machines are breaking down, causing delays and opening wide the door to theft and fraud. The magic word "recalibration" has come to mean mid-stream re-rigging of electronic machines, and is being strategically conjured in voting booths throughout the nation.

The antidote is clear: paper ballots must be made universal. In Ohio, Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has attempted to make this happen, but has been beaten back by Republicans. Maryland and Virginia have announced they will return to paper ballots, but AFTER this year's election. Read more

From the NY Times

Experts are saying there could be another recount nightmare this election.

“Provisional ballots are really the Achilles’ heel of our electoral process, because in a close race that is the pressure point lawyers use to try to undo the results,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting litigation. “The larger the number of provisional ballots cast in a state, the more vulnerable the Achilles’ heel, and Ohio has for a couple of elections used more of these ballots than most any other state.”

In 2004 and 2006, Ohio, unlike most other states, increased the percentage of provisional ballots used by voters. In the 2004 presidential election, which hinged on Ohio, the margin between the candidates was about 118,000 votes, of 5.7 million cast. Read more

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/17/ohio-secretary-state

Democratic Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has been ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to provide a system for implementing voter fraud prevention methods.

The decision by the full court repudiates the lower court's ruling siding with the Ohio Republican Party and ordering Brunner to verify records of about 200,000 of 666,000 new voters this year whose driver's license and Social Security records don't match information in other government databases.

Brunner said the court's decision would help ease confusion in the run-up to Election Day.

The ruling states: "Respondents, however, are not sufficiently likely to prevail on the question whether Congress has authorized the District Court to enforce Section 303 in an action brought by a private litigant to justify the issuance of a TRO. ... Read more