Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio (washingtonpost.com): "By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin | Washington Post Staff Writers | Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A01
Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door.
She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?
Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.
"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."
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In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots ...
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The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts ...
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In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots ...
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In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column
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Franklin County election officials ...acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters
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professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley ... that irregularities ... in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000 excess votes for Bush in a state the president won by about 381,000 votes ... Stewart of MIT ... he ran the numbers and came up with the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," ...
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Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines ...
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... In voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus, election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines.
"Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."
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... They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.
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... "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote.
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... Jeanne White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, ... pushed the button for Kerry -- and watched her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what happened; I started screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting early!'
It was not her imagination. Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." ...
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... 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them to the wrong table
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... Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for conservative third-party candidates.
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But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.'
"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"
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