Latest Ohio Suspicions

Via The Brad Blog, who thinks this is a right winger, but it's from a Daily Kos Democrat, but good info anyway:

The following is from the Rightwing "Red State" blog...and expresses an honest concern about what the hell may have happened in Clermont County during last Tuesday's OH-2 U.S. House Special Election race between Democrat Paul Hackett and Republican Jean Schmidt...

While you may think Democrats cry wolf on election fraud at the drop of the hat, and I agree, suspicion of the results from Clermont County in Ohio is reasonable based on what's happened there in the last year. What am I talking about? Within the last year, in this one county, there has been; an FBI investigation, a "second draft" of voting results, and yesterday's "machine breakdown".

I am one of those "kossacks" who thinks that the election irregularities in Clermont county are not a fluke. Before you write me off as a lunatic, please just look at the following situation;

1. The FBI investigated allegations of fraud made by some involved in the vote counting process in this county in 2004.
[Broken Link to Cincinatti Enquirer article]

2. There were also irregularities in this county in the GOP primary this year, favoring Schmidt. From the Enquirer:


"When all seven counties had reported their votes to the Hamilton County Board of Elections Tuesday night, Schmidt led McEwen by 705 votes. But when Hamilton County Elections Director John Williams came to work Wednesday morning, he found a second corrected version of Clermont County's final results on his fax machine.

The new totals increased Schmidt's lead to 2,667 votes. Williams said Clermont County officials explained to him that one of their workers accidentally marked an earlier report with the word "final'' and sent it to the Hamilton County board, where all the county reports were being collected."
[Broken Link to Cincinatti Enquirer article]


3. The "ballot sticking" explanation may indeed be a true one; however, it does sound fishy, you have to admit. You have to ask, why was this the only county with this problem, and why did the problem only materialize halfway through the vote counting process?

4. Why did the live-updating vote counting website go down immediately before the new results were posted?

You may not think that anything fraudulent happened, but I think it's understandable that there's suspicion. Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to make clear that just because we yell "fraud" doesn't mean it's not there. I think we all agree that fraud does occur, in some places; for some reason, this one county has had three serious irregularities in the last year. I think it's obvious there's a possibility that a county in which there are 3 irregularities in the space of a year is doing something wrong.