In the final days leading up to the election, almost a thousand people in Summit County, Ohio received subpoenas requiring them to go down to court to prove they lived where they said they lived on their registration card in order to vote.

Why and how were they subpoena'ed?

The State Republican Party sent out a mailer to these people and used registered mail as the means of delivery. Most of the people had not been home when the mailman came and chose not to go to the post office to accept registered mail from the Republican Party.

The Party then took the names of the people who had not signed for the mailer, and then called four elderly people and convinced them to fill out challenge forms. So, these four people, filled out over 200 cards each and verified the information by signature "under the penalty of election falsification", claiming that the people weren't living where they said they were.

A raucous hearing took place at the County Board of Elections on Thursday, October 28th, five days before the election, whereupon 976 challenges were thrown out. The County Republican head, Art Arshinkoff claimed no knowledge of any of this. In an article from the Akron Beacon Journal (that's oddly enough no longer available online), Arshinkoff compared the proceedings to a ``train wreck'' and said representatives from the Ohio Republican Party should have been at the hearing to defend the lists of challenges that it prepared.

There were 35,000 challenged voters in Ohio.

A transcript of the Board hearing can be found here: http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2004/oct/ohio/boardofelections281004.pdf

So, you tell me how many people does a conspiracy take? The law says two or more. In this case, it sounds like it would take one State party operative to make a few phone calls to sucker four local people into "helping out" by commiting fraud, so the answer is five people, four of whom didn't know they were doing anything wrong.

Not only was Blackwell Chief Elections Officer for the state, he also was the co-chair of the Committee to Re-elect George Bush in Ohio. Conflict of interest much?

Add this to the litany of suspicious activity that occured throughout the country over the last few election cycles, do your homework and then try to tell me that there wasn't a concerted, illegal, and in the end, successful effort to subvert the will of "We the People" not only in Ohio, but in the whole of the United States in the 2004 Presidential Election.

Irish Guy,

The four challengers were subpoena'ed. Those challenged were asked to report to a hearing at a specified date on a Thursday morning at the Board of Elections in order to respond to the challenges and secure their right to vote. Those challenged were sworn in before their testimony was accepted. What would you call that?

Go read the transcript - http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2004/oct/ohio/boardofelections281004.pdf

Bush should have been beaten by at least a 10 point margin and it is the fault of the DEMOCRATS that it didn't happen. And stop bellyaching that it means the Democratic Party needs to become more radical. The Democratic Party needs to become merely competent.

-- Anonymous

That's exactly the point. Had so many citizens not been denied the right to vote, perhaps Bush would have been beaten by at least a 10 point margin, but we'll never know because of the tactics of the Republican Party.