Bye Bye to Ohio's Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett: Tie in to Karl Rove

Bye bye to Cleveland GOP Election Chair Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett

By Harvey Wasserman

Created Apr 16 2007 - 7:53am

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Ohio's Bob "Ballots for Bush" Bennett, an essential player in putting George

W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, is no long chair of the Cuyahoga

County Board of Elections. His milestone resignation leaves a legacy of

scandal, recrimination, massive voter purges, felony convictions and a

pivotal role in a stolen presidential election.

Bennett has quit in a signature cloud of graceless accusations and cheap

shots at Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's newly elected Secretary of State, who

asked him to resign along with the rest of the Cleveland election authority.

His forced departure marks the biggest landmark yet in the unraveling theft

of the presidential elections in Ohio 2004.

Bennett remains chair of the Ohio Republican Party. In 2004 he was

apparently asked by White House consigliere Karl Rove to stay on at the

Cuyahoga BOE to help guarantee Bush's second term. Cleveland is Ohio's

biggest and most Democratic urban center. A massive sweep there by John

Kerry was widely expected to have given him the White House. It was

Bennett's job to mute that margin, and apparently that's exactly what he

did.

Leading up to the 2004 vote, Bennett oversaw the quiet purge of some 168,000

registered voters from the Cuyahoga rolls, including 24.93% of the entire

city of Cleveland, which voted 83% for Kerry. In one inner city majority

African American ward, 51% of the voters were purged. Centered on precincts

that voted more than 80% for John Kerry, this purge may well have meant a

net loss to the Democrats of tens of thousands of votes in an election that

was officially decided statewide by less than 119,000.

In a report issued December 7, 2004, the Greater Cleveland Voter

Registration Coalition (GCVRC) reported that in addition to the purge of

registered voters, some 3.5% of those applying for new registrations were

never even entered on the rolls by Bennett's BOE, or were entered

incorrectly, which would result in disenfranchisement of those who had just

tried to become new voters. Additionally, the GCVRC estimated that "over

10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County would be compromised because of these

clerical errors."

Bennett refused to respond to the report's initial conclusions. When the

study became public, BOE Executive Director Michael Vu accused the study

coordinator of "inciting panic." Vu did not respond to GCVRC's request for

the reinstatement of 303 voter registrations where there was direct evidence

that they had been wrongly cancelled.

The GCVRC also documented that the Cuyahoga County BOE incorrectly

classified 463 properly registered voters as not registered. This included

201 voters who were registered on BOE computers on August 17, but for some

unexplained reason, were removed from the rolls by October 22. They then

were forced to vote provisionally and their votes were rejected as not

registered.

In Brunner's formal complaint against Bennett she cited the fact that

Bennett's BOE did nothing when an estimated 10,000 voters were thrown off

the voting roll by a Diebold voter registration computer glitch.

Also, Bennett's BOE rejected 262 properly registered voters included on its

own list as of October 22. They incorrectly listed 183 as not registered and

79 as no signatures. "The Board did not contest our data," said the GCVRC,

"but said again it was just a small percentage due to human error, and then

proceeded to certify the entire Cuyahoga County vote even though they

thereby knowingly possibly disenfranchised 463 individuals."

Parallel purges were conducted by Republican-controlled boards of election

in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) where some 105,000 voters were purged from

the rolls, and in Lucas County (Toledo), where some 28,000 were purged in an

unprecedented move in late August 2004. These remain the only three counties

in the state known to have conducted massive registration purges prior to

the 2004 election. The three mass urban purges decimated the rolls in

heavily Democratic areas. Since then, another 170,000 voters have been

purged from the rolls in Franklin County, primarily in the heavily

Democratic Columbus precincts. Many rural Republican counties, like Miami,

practice a "no-purge" policy.

From his post at the helm of both the Ohio GOP and the Cuyahoga BOE, Bennett

was at the center of the purges. Many of the 300,000-plus purged voters

reported that they never received notice that their voting rights had been

cancelled. Should the general 80% pro-Democratic inner city margins have

prevailed for all three purged lists, the net loss to the Kerry camp could

have been in the range of 100,000 votes.

In addition to the purges, Bennett was also at the center of the election

challenges to college students in Democratic enclaves.

Bennett is infamous for far more than massive voter purges. Under his

supervision, a legally mandated recount of the 2004 presidential vote was

illegally manipulated. Ohio law says precincts must be chosen at random for

hand counting as part of the recount process. But two Cuyahoga BOE employees

have been convicted of a felony and a misdemeanor each, and have each been

sentenced to eighteen months in prison for what prosecutors have called

"rigging" the recount.

Bennett was also instrumental in the purchase of some $20 million in Diebold

voting machines for 2006 statewide elections. Election protection activists

vehemently opposed the purchase, as seen in a nationally televised HBO

special, "Hacking Democracy." Under Bennett and Cuyahoga BOE Executive

Director Michael Vu, the machines malfunctioned in Ohio's 2006 primary, with

vote count reporting delayed for five days.

Long-time election activist Adele Eisner characterizes Bennett's reign at

the Cuyahoga BOE as a "culture with fear." Among other things, Bennett chose

to disregard long-standing laws requiring that election results be posted at

the precinct level, a decision backed by Ohio's former Secretary of State J.

Kenneth Blackwell.

In a recent audit of the general 2006 elections, Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips

found that in the initial vote count, "Cuyahoga County alone accounted for

148,928 undervotes, or 42.47% of the statewide total." The undervotes

occurred in the race for U.S. Senate, where voters apparently opted to not

vote for either incumbent Sen. Mike DeWine or Democrat Sherrod Brown, the

eventual winner. The undervotes represented 26.48% of the county's voters.

But, says Philips, "Once the official results were posted, Cuyahoga's

undervote total fell to 3.25%," leaving him to wonder "how the unofficial

results could have been so erroneous in the first place."

Hayes also found that Cuyahoga County reported 30,791 uncounted absentee and

provisional ballots. After these ballots were counted, they reported 39,262

votes, an outcome Phillips terms mathematically "impossible."

Bennett and Vu were also responsible for more than $12,900,000 in BOE cost

overruns, more than doubling the agency's original budget of $11,000,000.

Vu resigned earlier this year, and has since been hired as an Assistant

Registrar of Voters in San Diego County, the number two spot, with a $10,000

salary increase to $130,000 a year. The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that,

"Vu's resignation followed a tumultuous 3 1/2-year tenure as election chief,

including a disastrous May 2006 primary when the county began using new

electronic voting machines."

In response to the chaos and recrimination, Brunner requested the

resignations of the Cuyahoga board's two Democrats and two Republicans. Only

Bennett vowed to fight his removal.

But he has now become the highest election board official to resign here

amidst the deepening scandals surrounding the 2004 election. He has joined

the growing Republican chorus echoing Rove's line that the Democrats are

preparing to steal the 2008 election.

But Brunner has taken custody of the 2004 ballots and other vote count

materials, which are currently protected by a federal court decision. She is

expected to bring them from Ohio's 88 county boards to a central repository

in Columbus.

Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that Karl Rove and the GOP had real-time

computer access to both the actual vote numbers in Ohio as well as the exit

polling data that would have allowed them to direct how many votes they

needed from the suspect Ohio southwestern Republican counties that gave Bush

his official margin of victory in the 2004 election. Stay tuned.

_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson