Ohio's 2004 Ballots Saved For Now

Investigators seeking to understand what happened in Ohio's 2004 presidential election have won a big victory — a pledge by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to delay destruction of the election's ballots by several months — instead of disposing of them after Labor Day, when they could be destroyed under federal law.

Investigators seeking to understand what happened in Ohio's 2004 presidential election have won a big victory — a pledge by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to delay destruction of the election's ballots by several months — instead of disposing of them after Labor Day, when they could be destroyed under federal law.

Blackwell told the New York Times that he would issue new rules on destroying the 2004 ballots in response to a civil rights suit filed Thursday, August 31, 2006, in federal court in Columbus, Ohio. The lawsuit claims minority voters were treated unequally by Blackwell and other officials in 2004, depriving voters of their right to vote and have those ballots counted.

The lawsuit was filed by civil rights attorneys in Columbus, Ohio and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. It sought to preserve the ballots and other local election records as evidence. It also asked the federal court to appoint a special master to oversee Ohio's 2006 general election to ensure that Ohioans are not again deprived of their voting rights.

The temporary reprieve of Ohio’s 2004 election records means investigators can continue to probe what happened in the election that re-elected President George W. Bush. Nearly two years after the election, the full story is not known.

Here's what we do know: Across Ohio's cities, a deluge of voter suppression tactics kept more than 170,000 people who intended to vote from voting, according to the Democratic National Committee’s post-election report. And of those who voted, nearly 130,000 ballots were never counted, because they were rejected by computer voting machines, or disqualified by poll workers for reasons that included being turned in at the wrong table.

Meanwhile, in Republican-dominated rural areas, the voter turnout and returns that re-elected the president defied political logic. More than 10,500 people voted for Bush and in favor of gay marriage, if the official results are true. And John Kerry received fewer votes in 12 counties than an obscure Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice candidate, whose race drew 1.2 million fewer votes statewide.

A handful of investigative reporters, lawyers, Ph.D. statisticians, and voting rights activists have been following the presidential election evidence trail since the 2004 election. This spring, the team started looking at ballots in suspect counties for the first time. When the team did their own hand counts, they found evidence that strongly suggests ballot box stuffing — with paper ballots and vote-counting computers — and official precinct results that were off by hundreds of votes.

The reporting, analysis and evidence gathered in the 20 months since the 2004 vote has been compiled into a forthcoming book from the New Press, "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," by Robert Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman.

Please make a tax-deductible contribution. We need to keep looking at the ballots. We need to know why more than 75,000 computer punch card ballots and more than 6,000 paper optical-scan ballots were rejected, never examined and not counted in 2004. We need to know how rural Ohioans really voted in 2004 and if vote totals were inflated.

Join us in this campaign to Save the Ballots.

For additional information about the Save the Ballots campaign, please email info@savetheballots.org.

Media Contacts:

Harvey Wasserman, 614-738-3646

Steven Rosenfeld, 415-652-1145

For the lawsuit:

David Lerner, Riptide Communications, 212-260-5000

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