Letter from John Burns
John Burns is an activist whose "Greetings From the Road" column is regularly featured on the Howard Dean Was Right blog. He sent in the following letter last week
It is against the law to campaign closer than 100 feet from a polling place in Ohio. Normally this distance is marked with small U. S. flags or a notice. The flag was present at our polling place and we respected it.
Nevertheless, a poll worker came out and gave me a dirty look. She soon returned with her supervisor, who told myself and Carolyn from MoveOn that we had to move because we were too close to the polling area. Carolyn asked where we needed to go and the polling supervisor pointed to the street corner some 300 feet away.
I asked the supervisor what legal distance was required for campaigning. She said 100 feet. I told her that it looked like the posted boundary was accurate, and the corner was far beyond 100 feet. Unless we got an accurate measurement that showed an error, I was going to abide by the boundary posted by the Franklin County Board of Elections. When I asked her if she had a tape measure, she and her sidekick went back inside.
Twenty minutes later, two police officers showed up. I figured it was time to break out the camcorder. I was kicking myself for not recording the earlier encounter with the polling place supervisor.
Allegedly, someone had called the police and reported that I was on school property within 100 feet. I assured the officer that this was not the case. In fact, I mentioned that I hadn't left the sidewalk and had stayed outside the boundary posted by the Franklin County Board of Elections. He wouldn't tell me who had called in the report. I told him that whomever it was had lied. I suspect it was the polling officials.
Just then a female police captain arrived and asked the other police what the "judge" had said. Apparently, the police had called a judge before talking to me. They ended up leaving us for a pow-wow with the polling place supervisor. After that, they walked away without saying anything to me. I followed the police captain to her cruiser, asking her questions she didn't want to answer. I got it all on tape.
We did find some irregularities with the voter lists. It became obvious after my wife, Karen, and I compared notes, that for some husband-wife teams who claimed they had voted together only had one vote recorded. We called the voter protection hotline and reported the problem to the Franklin County Democratic Party. To my knowledge no one has looked into this irregularity. We documented the problem and turned it in to the Kerry/Edwards folks.
This election could have been lost due to a number of separate issues that chipped away at the votes. Here is another example of a problem that is undefined in scope. Note who is on the ballot that should not be:
Ralph Nader's name is second from the top on this Franklin County Ballot
The Columbus Dispatch reports that "no one can determine how many Ohioans intentionally did not cast a vote in the presidential election or how many this year lost their presidential vote by supporting independent Ralph Nader, whose name was mistakenly included on ballots in a handful of locales."
What has been reported is that almost 93,000 votes will go uncounted due to Nader being "accidentally" included on the ballot as well as other issues.
When I called the author of the newspaper article and pressed him on his statement, he admitted to me that the Nader votes were not counted as per the instructions of Kenneth Blackwell. Other issues include fewer voting machines in Democratic downtown areas than ever before (yielding longer lines and fewer votes).
Needless to say, there is some smoke here in Ohio. Hard to say if there is enough smoke that this place will burst into fire. We exceeded all goals set for this state; however, Bush and Company either got out the vote better than we did, or did a number on us.
George Bush's last stop on election eve was here in Columbus, Ohio. My friend Leni tells me George Bush met one-on-one?behind closed doors?with Kenneth Blackwell. This was not reported by the press.
Best Wishes for Peace and Believable Elections,
?John Burns
Columbus, Ohio