By Patricia L Johnson

Just finished reading an article on the Ohio 2004 election where the writers use the following words to describe the loss of unused ballots; stolen, criminal, fraudulent, absurd and pathetic.

The article babbles on about ballot destruction – yet contains the following sentence: 

Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has publicly stated she sees "no evidence" of intentional destruction in the disappearance in more than 60% of the state’s counties of the ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

Let me clean my glasses and read that sentence again "Democratic Secretary of State" sees ‘no evidence of intentional destruction’.

That’s enough for me to read.  If there is anyone anywhere that is going to find fault with the 2004 election it would be a Democrat, the fact that she is Secretary of State provides her with the materials necessary to publicly comment on whether the destruction of the ballots was intentional or just another mistake by untrained poll workers.

The average Jane/Joe will look at the article and immediately make the assumption that the missing ‘unused’ ballots  creating the stir, are not really unused ballots.  They will undoubtedly think these ballots had votes for John Kerry and were intentionally destroyed so an accurate recount could not occur.  [Shhhh….don’t tell anyone, but these are the same people that want paper ballots back for the 2008 election].

The missing key in the article is any mention of the fact that, more than likely, it is a proven fact that the ballots were in fact ‘unused’.

I’m a former election judge so I’ll give you a little history on how it is done in my state. 

Let’s begin with the basics – No matter how small there are at least two election judges in a precinct, one from each major political party.  If you have a small precinct you could conceivably just have two judges.

Larger precincts have more judges.  The precinct I worked  had 10 or 12 judges, five or six from each party,   Each election judge has exactly the same amount of power as the next judge, with the exception of ballot box judges.  In other words whether you have been an election judge for 30 years or for 30 minutes, you have as much power as the next guy/gal. 

Rule number one – there is nothing more sacred than a ballot and every ballot will be counted.  If your precinct gets 10,000 ballots no one leaves the precinct after the election until each and every one of the 10,000 ballots is counted.

Your ballots are counted as follows:

Voted ballots

Destroyed ballots (sometimes a voter needs a second ballot due to making any number of errors)

Unused ballots

Absentee ballots  [A voter has the option of coming into a precinct and casting their vote in person on election day, which is why absentee ballots are not counted in advance].

The count must add to the number of ballots issued to your precinct.

Once the final count is complete – each and every precinct judge signs off on the count and this page, with signatures, becomes an integral part of the election results.

All election materials are then placed in containers, and each and every election judge initials the seal placed on the containers.

The only thing pathetic about the 2004 election and future elections will be the failure of the American voting public to pay attention to what is going on around them.  The 2004 election wasn’t lost in Ohio due to failure to locate ‘unused ballots’, it was lost due to rewriting the precinct boundaries, which is a trick the Republican party will continue to do in every state in the union as long as voters are busy reading trash about stolen elections.  The 2004 election wasn’t stolen – it was handed to the Republicans on a silver platter by YOU.

Election 2008 – 001 is the first in a series of articles regarding the 2008 election, electronic voting machines, and election procedures.