Miami County probes suspected voter fraud

[darrels joy]

Miami County probes suspected voter fraud


By Nancy Bowman
Staff Writer

Friday, October 31, 2008

TROY — Miami County election officials Friday, Oct. 31, asked prosecutors and the sheriff's office to investigate suspected voter fraud involving at least 70 absentee ballots.

Elections Director Steve Quillen said elections staff began asking questions about absentee ballots previously set aside when several voters complained they had not received their ballots. The ballots were set aside because their envelopes were not signed by the recipients.

Election officials called those sent the absentee ballots in question, and only one voter acknowledged having received the ballot and forgetting to sign the envelope.

The election board met Friday with Prosecutor Gary Nasal, Sheriff's Capt. Dave Duchak and S.E. Sheets and Kathryn Woliung, postal inspectors from Cincinnati. The inspectors said they were asked by the Secretary of State's office to attend the meeting.

Quillen said the ballots in question appear to have been sent out between Oct. 8 and 13, primarily to the Tipp City-West Milton area, but some were to other locations.

Nasal said ballots probably were not taken from individual mailboxes. "It would seem this would be at some central point," he said.

Quillen said absentee ballots are left at the Troy post office, where officials said they then go to Dayton for processing and return to the county for delivery.

Jose Lopez, elections board member and a lawyer, said the envelopes and their ballots could be fingerprinted for evidence. Duchak said envelopes might contain DNA evidence depending on how they were sealed.

Investigators said they had no idea how long an investigation would take.

Quillen told the board the voters who should have received the absentee ballots are being allowed to vote a provisional ballot that will be counted election night. Those people have been asked to sign a statement swearing they did not receive a ballot, did not vote and did not send a ballot back to the elections office.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/con...svc=7&cxcat=16

[reeb]

Ya see Joy, I live in Troy ( pop 22,000) and it aint gonna grow.

There is so much that goea on around here and Tipp City that you could write a best seller of.

First, the Elected Officials such as Gary Nasal and the two Judges Welbaum andLindeman have been in this county for years and years, going to school with each other, going to trials with each other ( Welbaum prosecutor, Lindeman Defence Atty ) that there is no real law here, even though Prejudice is concerned cause they know everyone in the county.

Turn the investigation over to State Authorities or better yet Federal and let it go from there.

I wish I could dig up the article in the Troy Daily News about this situation that was printed about three weeks ago.

Crooked State and MORE a Crooked County that tries to make a liveing off poor people here, and there are alot.

BTW, Dont spit on the sidewalk here, just might get you 20 years or 20 years probation.

enough.......

reeb...........

[darrels joy]

Creases delay tally of absentee ballots

By JANE MUSGRAVE

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 31, 2008

Move over, butterfly ballot.

Meet the creased ballot.

In the latest Palm Beach County election mix-up, it appears that high-speed tabulators aren't properly reading some absentee ballots because of the crease that was created when they were folded to put in mailing envelopes.

Unlike the infamous butterfly ballot that threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, the creased ballot is unlikely to affect vote totals in Tuesday's election.

Instead, it will create more work - lots more work - for elections officials who are dealing with myriad issues in the run-up to what is likely to be the election with the biggest turnout in county history.

"Each election has its own lingo," said County Judge Barry Cohen, a member of the canvassing board, which monitors the election. "Where were you for the crease issue?"

The crease issue surfaced Friday when elections officials noticed that the machines were spitting out ballots that should have been tabulated. The reliability of the tabulators was questioned during a monthlong recount of a judicial race in the Aug. 26 primary.

When elections officials this week tried to figure out why good ballots were being rejected, they began suspecting that the machines are incorrectly reading the crease as a vote. That would mean they are incorrectly reporting that a person voted for more than one candidate in a race that lines up near the fold.

Since so-called overvotes aren't allowed, the machines are programmed to reject ballots where they occur. Those ballots, along with ones that voters didn't mark properly, are then given to the canvassing board to review.

In the course of normal events, the canvassing board would simply note the overvote and instruct staff to run the ballot back through the machine and count all the other votes on the ballot.

But, because of the crease issue, they are worried that legitimate votes could be discounted because the machine is reading the crease as an overvote.

While the races affected vary depending on the ballot, the crease runs through the 13-candidate presidential contest on all absentee ballots. Canvassing board members, however, said it appears more likely that it would affect other races, such as the District 89 state House race between Jeffrey Auslander and Mary Brandenburg.

Rather than risk miscounting votes in any race, they are asking staff to duplicate all questionable ballots. They will then review those ballots again to ensure they are duplicated properly. The amount of work involved to count the ballots doubles.

With a record-shattering 115,000 absentee ballots expected to be cast by Tuesday, Cohen said the extra work involved is troubling.

"I'm becoming overwhelmed by the number of hours it's going to require," Cohen said.

The extent of the problem is unclear.

Mike Simmons, fiscal director for Palm Beach International Airport, who is heading up efforts to organize ballot-counting, said it doesn't appear widespread.

Of the roughly 25,000 absentee ballots that were run through the machines, all but about 3,000 were tabulated successfully.

The canvassing board reviewed about 150 of the 3,000 ballots Friday. Of those, about 45 were affected by the crease issue.

Commissioner Karen Marcus, who is a member of the canvassing board, said she wants to make sure there really is a problem before asking an overburdened staff to do more work.

She asked that about 350 of the questionable ballots be run through the machines a second time to see if they are rejected again.

"We've used these absentee ballots forever with the same equipment," she said of the machines that date to 2002. There's never been a crease problem, she said.

But in the Aug. 26 primary there were problems with the high-speed tabulators. Attorneys representing losing Circuit Judge Richard Wennet had county staff run 102 ballots through two tabulators. One machine counted votes on 90 ballots and rejected 12 ballots. When the same ballots were put through another machine, it counted votes on 13 ballots and rejected 89. All of the ballots had been rejected in previous recounts.

Attorney Gerald Richman, who represents Wennet, then questioned the reliability of the machines, claiming the test results boded ill for the presidential election.

However, on Friday, while representing the Democratic Party and presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign, he said he wasn't concerned about the crease issue.

"What it means is more work," he said. "It's not a vote issue."

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localne...ntee_1101.html
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Gotta love Florida

Joy