I'm not exactly a "news junkie" in the sense that my life doesn't revolve around reading up on everything that I possibly can, and I definitely don't have a tv permanently tuned to CNN or FoxNews...
But I do read CNN.com every day at work... sometimes 3 or 4 times a day just to see what might have occurred while I was chained to my desk. And I ALSO read CourtTV.com every day...
But for some reason, this story was never appeared as a major headline on either news outlet...
Apparently, on January 24th two election workers from Ohio's most populated county, Cuyahoga County, were convicted on felony charges of negligent misconduct of an elections employee, as well as misdomeanor charges of failure of an elections employee to perform their duty.
Those charges don't sound very horrible on the face, but once you realize what they did...
Jacqueline Maiden, the elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and Kathleen Dreamer, the Ballot Manager, worked behind closed doors and secretly reviewed pre-selected ballots for three days in an effort to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies with the original tallies in the recount effort.
Of course, no one can say for certain if the actions of these two publicly trusted individuals placed in positions of relative authority would have changed who won the presidency in 2004... but being as close as it was... it's certainly possible.
So if there was a conviction of poll workers who had tampered with a recount that possibly could have drastically changed the course of this nation for the past 4 years... wouldn't you think that story would be national news?
Apparently CNN.com didn't...
And neither did CBSNews.com... (even though CBS5.com from California had a story about it)
And neither did MSNBC.com...
I first searched Google using the name of one of the convicted persons...
Only the LA Times, Washington Post, and CBS5 (from CA) were in the top 20 results
Then I added the name of the news agency I wanted to have pop up in the search results along with the name of the convicted felon...
This time I also received ABCNews.go.com and CBSNews.com, but neither of these were stories about the conviction, they were about the fact that the trial was taking place...
I then searched the websites of all the major news outlets (ok... not all the major newspapers... but definitely the TV networks who also run major news websites). I finally was able to find a quick blurb on most of the news sites, but still not all of them.
CBSNews.com (in the article about the impending trial... they never ran a story about the convictions in that case, and neither did ABCNews.go.com) added that the defense attorney stated that the workers were "just doing it they way they were always doing it," suggesting that a faulty or possibly corrupt system has been in place in Ohio for years. And recall all the actions that Mr. Blackwell (Ohio's Secretary of State 1998-2006 AND co-chair of Bush's re-election committee 2004) took to disenfranchise voters in the 2004 election...
In Ohio, the process for a recount is for each county to randomly choose 3% of its ballots and tally them by hand and by machine... if the tallies match, the rest of that county's ballots may be counted by maching... if not, they need to be counted by hand. In this case, the poll workers instead "chose sample precincts that did not have questionable results to insure that no discrepancies would emerge," according to Prosecutor Kevin Baxter.
Most of you who read my blog know that I am an advocate for eliminating the electronic voting kiosks and reverting to hand-counting paper ballots so that results can be confirmed independantly. And most of you reading this are probably thinking, "Who cares... it probably didn't change the election anyway". And you might be right that it might not have changed the results of the election.
But if you couple this "minor" indiscretion with a conspiracy to hack or rig the electronic voting machines (which can be done with a Palm Pilot in less than 5 minutes), then you are looking at some VERY sketchy elections in the future.
I'm not saying that the hand-counted paper ballot is necessarily the best way to go in a society that is so technologically capable... but until a system is created that is infallible or at the very least difficult to tamper with and not easily get caught... I feel that it's the safest way to instill trust in the voting population of our country.
