Black Votes in Ohio "spoiled" - Invalidated by Defective Punch Card Machines

Secretary of State Certified Voting Machines with Knowledge of Defects

• "The exclusion of voters by reason of race does violence to constitutional ideals, whether or not the exclusion affects the outcome of any particular election." Barbara Underwood
  

The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are "spoiled" in presidential elections -- tossed away untallied as "unreadable." And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race.  Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the spoilage game for all it was worth. Over 93,000 ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all of them generated by those infernal chad-making punch-card machines. Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard? According to a recent ACLU analysis of Ohio's system, votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are "overwhelmingly" found in African-American -- read "Democratic" -- precincts. The result: 93,000 votes spoiled, uncounted. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ... sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

• Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card. Ohio Secretary of State and Bush Campaign Co-chair,(Pictured above)  Kenneth Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes. [more] and [more]
• A federal judge has postponed trial until after the election in a ACLU lawsuit that seeks to declare Ohio's punch-card system unconstitutional [here]. The ACLU said the aging machines are too error prone and violate the voting rights of Blacks, who are more likely to live in punch-card counties. All the predominantly Black precincts are in Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Montgomery and Summit counties. Only Franklin County uses electronic ballots; the rest use punch cards. Read the complaint of Stewart v. Blackwell [PDF File]