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Senator barbara boxer joins reps to challenge ohio vote { January 6 2005 }

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   http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/06/MNG2VALOMD1.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/06/MNG2VALOMD1.DTL

Local Democrats lobby Boxer to officially challenge Ohio vote
- Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2005

In a scene that could be reminiscent of the end of the bitter 2000 presidential race, several members of the House of Representatives plan to challenge Ohio's election results today when Congress meets to confirm President Bush's reelection.

That challenge is based on what they said were "widespread irregularities" in the Nov. 2 vote in Ohio and legal problems with the subsequent recount conducted last month.

The Ohio secretary of state's office adamantly rejects all those claims, and the House members need a senator -- any senator -- to join them in order to levy an official challenge. No senator has said he or she would do so, though several -- including California's Barbara Boxer -- have been lobbied hard by constituents.

Three hundred people rallied Monday outside Boxer's San Francisco office, and her staff was given a petition with 3,000 signatures urging her to support the effort. Several hundred people attended a Tuesday night rally at Herbst Theatre, where speakers promised to either thank or shame her based on her decision.

Boxer is considering a challenge but had not made up her mind as of late Wednesday, according to David Sandretti, her spokesman.

Those who want the challenge say such action is unlikely to change the result of the presidential race -- that would take the Republican-controlled House and Senate voting to dismiss the Ohio results -- but rather, they hope to air the debate over problems with the voting system at the highest level.

"I don't know if Bush won Ohio. I don't think anyone can say that with certainty, because there are too many unanswered questions," said David Cobb, the Green Party's presidential candidate. Cobb is responsible for forcing Ohio to conduct a recount and is leading a rally near the White House today with the Rev. Jesse Jackson asking Congress not to certify the vote.

"To me it's always been about democratic reform of the U.S. election system," he said.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee released a report Wednesday detailing what they say were the major problems in Ohio. Those include long lines on election day that they argued led to the disenfranchisement of some voters, and confusion over provisional ballots.

During the recount, employees of the voting machine company Triad GSI gave some county officials "cheat sheets" on how to count the vote to avoid a full hand recount, according to the report, which quotes an affidavit from an election official in Hocking County, Ohio.

Each county was required to hand count 3 percent of the vote and run those same ballots through a tallying machine. If the totals matched, all ballots could be counted by machine. If they were off, the whole county had to be counted by hand.

The president of that voting machine company said pending lawsuits prevent him from talking in detail about the "cheat sheet" claim.

"The only thing I can tell you is that it's a lack of understanding of the systems that is bringing these allegations on," said Brett Rapp, president of Triad GSI. "We welcome any investigation, and we've done nothing wrong."

Officials at the Ohio secretary of state's office also say there is nothing to the claims made in the Democrats' report.

"All the issues have been thoroughly vetted and reviewed by our office, by county boards of election and by every major newspaper in the state of Ohio, and none of these issues is found to be valid," said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

Additionally, the nonpartisan Social Science Research Group looked at major claims of irregularities in Ohio and Florida and found no indication of fraud or tampering.

"We found that no single claim held water to any degree," said Henry Brady, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and an author of the group's study.

Still, many Democratic Party activists say that they feel abandoned by the party's leadership on the voting issue and that there will be real consequences if no senator stands up for them today.

"People are going to take a real hard look at what this party stands for, " said Don Goldmacher, chairman of the voting rights task force of the Wellstone Democratic Club headquartered in Berkeley. "For those of us who are really serious about election fraud and voter repression, we feel this is a cornerstone issue."

E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.

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