Ohio 2004 Stolen Election

Forced resignations and stiff prison sentences intensify the escalating blowback from Ohio’s 2004 stolen election By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman Online Journal Guest Writers Mar 21, 2007, 00:34 In a bold move “to restore trust to elections in Ohio,” Ohio’s newly-elected Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has requested the resignation of all four members of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The two Democrats and two Republicans were formally asked to resign by the close of business on March 21. Cuyahoga County includes the heavily Democratic city of Cleveland. Brunner is a Democrat who was elected, last November, to be Ohio’s Secretary of State. Felony convictions have also resulted in 18-month prison sentences for two employees of the Cuyahoga BOE as a result of what the county prosecutor in the case calls the “rigging” of the outcome in the recount following the 2004 presidential election. Further problems surfaced in the conduct of Cuyahoga County’s May, 2006 primary, in the wake of which Michel Vu, Executive Director of the county’s Board of Elections recently resigned. [snip] In the 2004 presidential election, Cuyahoga County suffered serious election irregularities that worked to the disadvantage of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Among them: the purging of 24.93 percent of all the voters in the city of Cleveland, where Kerry won 83 percent of the vote; mysterious and suspect vote totals for third party candidates in majority African American wards; unexplained “security” problems that caused the last-minute shift of voting locations in the inner city Cleveland Public School polling places; improbably low apparent turnouts in heavily Democratic inner city wards, and more. more