Palast: Ohio Made Thousands of Black Voters Cast Absentee Ballots

By Greg Palast

From [HERE] Several thousand African-American voters in Dayton, Ohio, may find their ballots left uncounted, and they, and America, won’t know it––even if the lost votes change the presidency.

First, you need to know, there are two elections for President in Ohio held on two days and in two colors. Today, White Ohio will vote: Evangelicals, rurals, small businessmen, big and bigger businessmen, the whole Rotary Club. Black Ohio already voted. More African-Americans vote early than on the official Election Day.

The big day for African-Americans––and for Barack Obama’s hopes for reelection––was on Sunday, “Souls to the Polls” day, when church buses filled with the ladies of the choir and their men vote as a group.

This Sunday, I joined the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church group, with cameraman Daniel Russel, following a feast of sweet potatoes, banana pudding and gospel and headed to the one and only Sunday polling station in all of Dayton and Montgomery County … as they stood in a line with nearly one thousand voters.

From [HERE] The line, about 80% African-American, snaked through the state building then out, through and around the building’s parking complex. After the hours of waiting, the patient citizens got their ballots—or thought they did. They didn’t get ballots. They got this: “APPLICATION FOR ABSENT VOTER’S BALLOT.”

WHAT???????

In prior elections, and in some other counties in this current polling, early voters got ballot ballots, not absentee ballots.

I immediately got voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis, on the phone. I told Fitrakis, also a professor at Columbus State College, about handing voters absentee ballots instead of regular, vote-now ballots. “That’s insane!” he said, “Completely wrong.” And stone cold dangerous to the vote count.

It’s simple: Not all absentee ballots get counted. Indeed, as I pointed out in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, the US government data indicates that 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected after they were cast in 2008. The New York Times puts it at two or three million cast and not counted. Not incidentally, the US Civil Rights Commission found that African Americans are 900% more likely to cast “spoiled” votes (those cast and not counted) than a white voter.

Fitrakis had a hard time believing Republican officials would pull a stunt this raw. So, I shot off from Dayton to Columbus to show the professor my smoking gun.

Sure enough: an absentee ballot application. The voters filled it out, stuck it in an envelope, sealed it, handed it to a clerk who ripped it open and gave them an absentee ballot to mark and seal––and leave to be counted on Election Night. Maybe. Maybe counted.

This is not the same as the ballot ballot given to voters on Election Day, i.e. the white voters.

“An Absentee ballot is not an early ballot.” On a real ballot, when you cast a vote, the law requires it be counted. Not so for absentee ballots. There are a gazillion ways for officials to discard your absentee ballot. Unlike with the normal Ohio voting machines, if you put an “X” or check the box next to your candidate’s name, your ballot goes in the dumpster. (The bubble next to the candidate’s name must be blackened in––enough but not too much.)

In Ohio, there are extra tricks to trash your absentee ballot. “See this form? See all these blank spaces?” Fitrakis explained that Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, requires absentee voters to fill out these long “applications,” the ones handed out in Dayton to early voters. Failure to include even picayune information on the application or its envelope, or use a “suspicious” signature (whatever that is), and your ballot goes bye-bye.

How many? Enough ballots were rejected and voters purged in Ohio in 2004 to re-elect George Bush as President.

I asked Fitrakis if many of these voters would lose their vote. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Jon Husted is the most partisan Secretary of State in America.”

I asked the elections manager at early voting why early voters were given absentee ballots, not allowed to use voting machines, as in prior elections.

“In case there is a need to re-count votes.” Huh? Then why not have white-day voters also use these not-quite-ballots?

What’s this all about? After all, these “absent” voters on Sunday weren’t absent at all. One thousand were lined up right outside his office.

This absentee ballot game was only the latest attack on the right of citizens of color to vote. He noted that Ohio had purged a million and a quarter voters from the voter rolls in the past two years. Which voters? In some rural white counties, not one name was purged. But in Cleveland, Ohio, some Black precincts suffered the removal of more than half the voters’ names from the rolls.

And those crazy long lines? We would have hoped this Block-the-Black vote game had ended after the notorious 2004 election when another Ohio Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, finagled the allocation of voting machines to keep Black voters in line an average of 4.5 hours, while white voters waited 15 minutes. (Experts measured it.)

In 2008, a Democrat held the Secretary of State’s office, and there were no lines. Ohio held a month of early voting, including a full month of Sundays.

This time, GOP vote chief Husted tried to end early voting completely. When a federal court stopped that scheme, he simply cut the days and hours––only one Sunday, and then for only four hours for Souls to the Polls.

Where cities usually had several early polling stations, Husted allowed only one per county, including just one for 1.5 million Cleveland residents. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was there with the hungry voters near midnight, waiting since before the polls closed at 5pm.

“It’s the New Jim Crow,” Fitrakis said.

Back at the early voting station in Dayton, I asked the Freedom Faith group in the church van how they were doing. They were in a terrific mood, happy they got to cast ballots, some for the first time.

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that those votes may never be counted.