- Archives

December 5, 2004

Unusual Vote Totals Found in Black Neighborhoods in Cleveland. Unknown Candidates Get Black Votes

Voter fraud in the Ukraine? Give me a break. It has been a month now and we still don't have a clear count of the votes for our own presidential race from the state of Ohio. For those who may have forgotten, Ohio supposedly assured George W. Bush a second term in the White House - only the most important job on the planet. More unusual vote totals have been uncovered, this time in black neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located. In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.

In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-immigrant Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes! That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as all those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach County in 2000.
In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally was Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik 163.

The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them. In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. [more]

Pictured above: Presidential candidates Michael Badnarik [more] and Michael Anthony Peroutka [more]