Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe says he knows Democrats will not overturn the results of the 2004 presidential election but "we will spend whatever it takes" for a comprehensive study of the fairness of the Nov. 2 vote in Ohio.
The election results were certified Monday by Ohio Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, with President George W. Bush defeating Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., by 119,000 votes, giving the president Ohio's 20 electoral votes.
McAuliffe said the study is not to contest results of the balloting and will address legitimate concerns about election practices in Ohio. Experts from the Voting Rights Institute and the state and national Democrat parties will assemble a team of election, computer, polling and political science experts to investigate the Ohio vote.
"Our goal is to report on what happened and why. We will gather the facts, talk to the voters, conduct a rigorous analysis, and in doing so make recommendations on any further election reforms," he said.
Despite no evidence of election fraud, the DNC joined challenges by the Green Party and Libertarian Party seeking a recount of the state's presidential vote.
"Over a month has passed since the election, and people throughout Ohio and the nation continue to identify and expose patterns of voter disenfranchisement," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, in a statement. "That is why we support the lawsuit. It will pave the way for legal discovery and full investigation of the irregularities and inconsistencies in Ohio's handing and counting of the presidential election."
Kerry added his name to the Ohio lawsuit last week.
A federal judge provisionally granted a motion by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to intervene in the lawsuit filed by Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Michael Badnarik. Cobb originally sued Blackwell, one of several state co-chairmen of the Bush re-election campaign, in Delaware County, accusing the Ohio secretary of state of abusing his discretionary authority to stall the recount after the county board of elections asked a state judge to stop a recount in Delaware County.
"A record number of Americans participated in the 2004 election, especially in Ohio," McAuliffe said. "We owe it to the people who waited hours to vote, who voted for the first time or have voted in every election to understand what happened and what can be done in the future to ensure every voter's rights are protected."
The judge ruled a recount would be conducted in all 88 Ohio counties -- although not on an expedited basis. A recount would not start until Dec. 11 -- two days before presidential electors are to vote.
Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct for a recount -- $113,000 -- but Blackwell's office said a recount actually would cost state and county governments about $1.5 million.
"We are very pleased that the judge recognized our right to a recount and that the recount will go forward in each and every county in Ohio," said Cobb.
McAuliffe said a full report on the Ohio election would be issued in the spring. He cited former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's role in the 2000 election debacle and said the study would examine conflicts created by letting partisan officials oversee a presidential election.
Harris was chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida four years ago and was in charge of counting the state's disputed presidential vote.
A preliminary review of the election released by People for the American Way, a non-partisan liberal public-interest group, found persistent problems continue to disenfranchise millions of people in the United States. The group had more than 25,000 volunteers, including 8,000 lawyers, acting as poll monitors in 3,500 precincts nationwide on Nov. 2 and received more than 39,000 reports of voter problems.
The study, "Shattering the Myth," found in addition to long lines and unreasonable waiting times, the top five problems were registration processing, absentee ballots, machine errors, voter intimidation and suppression and problems using provisional ballots for people whose names were not in election binders.
Ohio newspapers have been following allegations of irregularities, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer plans a major report on the election.
"We have been chasing them down as they come up, and a lot of them are so groundless," Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton told Editor and Publisher magazine. "We are finding that there were some legitimate counting errors and glitches in the computer system. But they were found, and we have no evidence of conspiracies or anything showing that the outcome would have been different."
"It looks like there is an awful lot of smoke, but not much fire," Cincinnati Post Editor Mike Phillips told E&P.
After losing a second straight White House race, Democrats clearly are looking to 2008.
"We're come a long way since Florida in 2000, but we still have work to do," McAuliffe said. "We must do more as a nation and as a political party to keep voting rights and election reform on the front burner."
He said the DNC also would pay for a second statewide recount of the governor's race in Washington state won by Republican Dino Rossi by 42 votes of some 2.8 million ballots cast.
"Today I would like to focus on one of the fundamental principles of this nation. That every eligible citizen is entitled to cast their vote and have that vote counted," McAuliffe said. "As many of you know, since the end of the election the Democratic National Committee and the Voting Rights Institute of the DNC have supported a number of efforts to show that we stand behind that principle. We join the Kerry-Edwards campaign and the Ohio Democratic Party in monitoring the recount in Ohio that was requested by the third-party presidential candidates. We also sent more than a quarter of a million dollars to Washington state to help pay the cost for a full statewide recount in the governor's race in which only 42 votes now separate the two candidates."
Voters in precincts in predominately African-American and minority areas of Cleveland, Cincinnati and other parts of Ohio waited in long lines for up to eight hours to vote on Election Day, and there were numerous reports of obstruction and disqualification of legitimate voters, uncounted votes, too few machines and difficulties with provisional ballots. The complaints disproportionately came from blacks and young people in predominately Democratic areas.
"We know we're not going to overturn the results of the election," said McAuliffe. He said we need to fix all of these issues out there before 2006 and clearly before 2008. "It's going to take a lot to do it, but we are prepared to spend whatever it takes."
McAuliffe said although Kerry conceded Nov. 3 in Boston he had been very involved in the recount process and had received e-mail messages every day with one story after another of election irregularities.
"If he thought the results of the election could be overturned based on fraud, he'd be very interested," McAuliffe said.
Democrats had 3,000 voting-rights officials in Ohio on Election Day.
"This investigation will not only examine the issue of counting every vote, but seek to answer such questions as why so many people had to wait in certain Ohio precincts and not others," said Donna Brazile, chairwoman of the Voting Rights Institute, whose name has been mentioned to succeed McAuliffe as head of the DNC.
"Why weren't there enough machines in some counties and not others?" she asked. "Why were so many Ohioans forced to cast provisional ballots?"
Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and the House Judiciary Committee convene hearings Wednesday in Washington on election irregularities in Ohio.
--
(Please send comments to [email protected].)
