Remember Franklin County
Linwood Avenue is a street in Precinct 5d, just southeast of where I-70 and I-71 meet on the south side of Columbus, Ohio. Months ago, registration drives tore through here, registering mostly changes of address and misspellings of names but quite a few actual first-time voters. Linwood is on the western edge of the precinct and is more relatively affluent than the places nearer the polling place, Main St. Elementary School. That is to say, the houses have phone lines.
My precinct was a target for voter registration because it is entirely low-income, 99% black and 99% Democrat. Coincidentally, the only pro-Bush voters I met were the neighborhood’s whites. Three of them were for him and the fourth was undecided.
Since the registration drives, the precinct had been entirely ignored until four days before the election when I and other members of Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., working as volunteers for MoveOnPAC, canvassed it with the names of infrequent and first-time voters. Our quotas were to contact 150 people, confirm 63 would vote and at what time, then to confirm that at least 44 had voted. On our first go-through, I was paired with a canvasser who was too anxious to knock on the doors by himself. His fears were unfounded: the Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on my clipboard worked like a shield; we encountered not one single problem, even with three or four people a night stopping to tell us the neighborhood was unsafe.
We could not canvass Linwood on our first pass because of the tragedy. The structural-awning over a front stoop detached on an abandoned house that, like almost all in the area, had not been adequately cared for. It fell ten feet straight down and crushed twelve-year-old Dwayne D. Gordon. From across the street the house looked like a face with its mouth closed.
I was MoveOnPAC’s Precinct Captain for Precinct 5d and we came back to canvass it on the night before the election. I came with my colleague Joanna. Joanna was assigned to the next precinct over, which voted at the Ohio Avenue School. She was with me because we threw sexism to the winds and split the two girls. Joanna came with me, and my poll-watcher, Stuart, went with the Precinct Captain for next door, Danielle, despite her black belt.
In a house across from the site of the tragedy we met Charlotte, a woman who had been explicitly disenfranchised. She had requested an absentee ballot; when it had not yet arrived five days before the election she called the Franklin County Board of Elections; the next day it arrived; upon calling the BOE again she was told that her absentee ballot had been voided; she asked if she could just send it anyway; no; couldn’t they send another?; no; could she go to the polls and vote (she’d been out for gum surgery, the reason for the absentee ballot to begin with); no, Charlotte would be crossed off the polls and explicit instructions would be given to the people at the polling location not to let her in or allow her to vote or cast a provisional ballot; then she was put on hold indefinitely and gave up.
We called the number on our MoveOnPAC election protection card and had to leave a message, their phone lines were packed.
A few houses down we were shown a flyer from the Ohio Democratic Party that had been given to every house on the block. It listed the wrong polling place. We had been finding varied mistakes of this sort with this particular flyer everywhere in our and the adjoining precinct (which voted at the Ohio Avenue School), but this was the first instance of an entire street being mispapered. The neighbors suspected foul play: one of them, a childhood friend of the kick-ass actress Pam Grier, contacted Pam, who announced the snafu on her radio show.
I was not so certain this particular instance was intentional fraud. I called the number listed on the flyer and spoke with a man at the party office who told me he had heard about this instance and that it was due to sheer incompetence; the polling place listed was for the same exact street, only on the south side of the bridge spanning I-70. The overzealous paperers had apparently disregarded their precincts boundaries and created confusion across the city that could have affected several thousand voters. They were making some calls to try to sort it out. As I mentioned before, most of the people in the precinct do not have a phone line. The man on the phone apologized that he could not tell me more; he explained that he was not an employee of the office but rather a voting rights attorney, whereupon I marched back up the street to Charlotte’s house and put her on the phone with him.
On Election Day, Stuart and I confirmed well over 100 infrequent and first-time voters had cast their ballots, most waiting over two hours to do so. The lines were so bad in these areas because the Board of Elections, overseen statewide by the Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, allotted my precinct three voting machines rather than the customary six. At Ohio Avenue School there were only two machines because the third was broken. In another adjoining district all three machines were inoperable at 6:30am when the polls opened, then one was fixed and open until 8am when the rest were at last up and running; hundreds left without voting, not wanting to wait or having to get to work as Election Day is not yet a national holiday. In another district I was told that one machine was closed early in the day because somebody allegedly wrote something upon the voting machine; it could not be used again until the BOE sent an official to inspect it and reopen it: they never did.
The average number of votes per machine, according to the Columbus Dispatch, was 150. The maximum number was about 200. That means that less than 600 people voted in my precinct, and that more than 1/6th of the ones who did were on our list of infrequent and first-time voters. Many of those that we confirmed as having voted in the early morning did not have their names checked on lists posted at the polling place at 11am and 4pm to confirm who has voted.
3% of the ballots cast statewide were discarded as “inconclusive,” a number north of 90,000, and 155,000 provisional ballots were cast, mostly by Democrats afraid of not having their votes counted. In an election that came down to 140,000 votes difference, how many of these people were among those left behind? How many more in every major city, especially in Ohio or Florida, under Republican Secretaries of State?
Twenty miles north of Columbus at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, ten working voting machines sat in an uncrowded gymnasium.