Green Party official pleased with local recount of presidential vote 
2004-12-20 
By David Laber 
Athens NEWS Writer 
 

The statewide presidential recount is not over yet, but in most of southeastern Ohio, county boards of elections have complied with requests and the voting counts are accurate, a regional coordinator said.

The recount variations are "within the noise spectrum for an analogue signal," according to Orren Whiddon, a retired mechanical engineer. "An analogue signal is always going to have noise. In fact the presence of noise is one of the things that tells you it's a genuine system."

Whiddon, now a church treasurer in Pennsylvania, is the Green Party's Southeast Ohio Regional Coordinator for the presidential recount. The counties where he has overseen recounts include Adams, Athens, Gallia, Hocking, Jackson, Lawrence, Meigs, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Vinton and Washington.

"The majority of theses counties have been very good," Whiddon said. "Their (election boards) are professionally run, they've been cooperative, courteous, they've answered questions, they've been excellent. And all of their numbers match. They clearly are doing a good job."

But the recount is not without its troubles. Most notably, Hocking County has received national coverage over an affidavit submitted by Sharole Eaton, the county's deputy director of the BOE (see related story).

In Washington County, Whiddon said his witnesses were barred from reviewing the poll signature votes records, but he does not believe there was any tampering with the records.

"In my opinion, some members of the board of elections were aggressively preventing the recount," Whiddon said. He said he suspects this may be because the elections board is not well run and their records are in disarray, and they want to conceal these facts.

Whiddon said he joined the recount effort in Ohio because he wanted to verify the vote here. As someone who has voted for Democrats, Republicans and third party candidates, he said, he has no interest in which candidate Ohio chose as president.

In fact, Ohio was not even Whiddon's first choice as a state in which to do a recount. He said he would have preferred to have a recount in Georgia, Florida or New Mexico, but their state laws are such that it was impossible to have recounts.

It is important that citizens understand they do not have the Constitutional right to vote for president, Whiddon said. Rather, this right is grated to citizens by the states. The only legal reason why the recount is allowed to happen is because Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb claimed he was wronged.

"In a contested election, the plaintiff is not the people, but rather the candidate," Whiddon said. "And if you think about that, you understand how absurd it is."

The only way to audit an election is through a recount, he said, and "we want to provide the citizen's of Ohio with an audit of their electoral system. And again, I am pleased to say in these rural counties, it is reasonably good... I cannot speak for the big cities. I think that is going to be a zoo."

According to certified election results, President Bush defeated his Democratic challenger John Kerry by more than 120,000 votes in Ohio, and Whiddon said he does not think there are that many fraudulent votes in the state.

In his opinion, however, Whiddon said, it is possible that there were 120,000 voters who wanted to vote for Kerry but were not able to.

Sometimes this was because a board of election did not set up enough voting machines in some precincts, resulting in voting lines that lasted longer than eight hours.

In some precincts, though there was an increase in voter registration, the number of voting machines were reduced, Whiddon said. "And guess what, it almost always happens in Democratic precincts. Just by chance, just oddly enough, it usually works out that way," he said.

But that was apparently not the case in southeastern Ohio, he said.

"I personally intend to write a letter to the (elections board) directors of all the counties that have a done a very good job to let them know how much it is appreciated," Whiddon said.

One of the negative side effects of the recount is that the directors feel as if they are under attack, he said. And their professional competence is being besmirched by a small group of others.

On the other hand, "the best possible outcome of this recount is that we will find that a vast majority of these counties are very well run," Whiddon said.

Though it has nothing to do with his work in Ohio, Whiddon said he suspects there was voter fraud nationally.

"I think the exit polls are the smoking gun," he said. "I don't know how it was done. But statistically they couldn't have been that far off."

In Colorado, some raw data from the exit polls were released, and state and federal elections were an exact match with a small margin of error, but the exit polls were wrong in the presidential race, he said.

In Germany, ballots are hand-counted in a process that takes about two weeks. But to announce the winner by midnight, and Germany has state-supported exit votes that are accurate within a few percentage points.

Whiddon said he would support a similar system using either optical or punch card ballots. He said he is deeply concerned that many Ohio counties plan to use Diebold voting machines in future elections.

"The Diebold systems are terrifying," he said, and leave Ohio wide open for statewide fraud. "It is clear, it is absolutely clear and technically possible, that if you have the intent, if you have the money, if you have the technical expertise, and if you have the time, these systems can be hacked."

Though that does not guarantee fraud, he said, it does mean leave a door open for fraud.

"If I were a citizen of Ohio, I would be demonstrating in the streets," Whiddon said.