Election Update: 119,000

That's right, the election continues. Ohio is STILL counting and is STILL not official. 119,000 is what stood between a Kerry presidency and disaster. And there are PLENTY of irregularities in Ohio.

Jan 20th is more than a month away.

Narrower Bush Win Seen in Ohio

By Brian Faler
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, December 4, 2004; Page A03

President Bush's margin of victory in the all-important battleground state of Ohio appears to have been closer than previously believed.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Associated Press, which conducted separate county-by-county surveys of the final election results there, found that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry netted more than 17,000 votes in the post-Election Day ballot count. That would shrink the president's margin there from about 136,000 to 119,000 -- or about 2 percent of the 5.5 million ballots cast.


Protesters Gather at Ohio Statehouse

By JOHN McCARTHY
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, December 4, 2004; 4:19 PM

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- About 400 protesters gathered outside the Statehouse on Saturday to support a recount of the presidential election in Ohio and call for an investigation into Election Day irregularities.

Critics say Ohio's numbers are suspect because of several irregularities on election night. Those included disparities in the vote totals for different Democrats on the same ballot and the disqualification of more than 90,000 presidential votes on punch-card ballots because the choices could not be determined. A computer glitch on election night also recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in one precinct in suburban Gahanna.

New Ohio Vote Tallies Question Legitimacy of Election

And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have uncovered some more unusual vote totals, 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.

Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting.

"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward since 1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."

But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51 votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27 ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent candidates received 9 votes from both precincts.

The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them.