What’s Double Digits Between Friends? — Political Scientist Praises Lawsuit Against Diebold

COLUMBUS, Ohio Bob Fitrakis is sitting beside himself these days because a Democratic state-office holder in Ohio is actually challenging the company whose electronic touch-screen voting machines cost Sen. John Kerry the 2004 presidential election.

But as he applauded Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, for her moxie 90 days before this next presidential election, Fitrakis was also scratching his head; when voting irregularities happened in Ohio in 2004, his quarterly investigative journal, Free Press, was tipped off to them by none other than state Democratic officials.

The week after election day 2004, Bill Anthony, chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party in Columbus, told him about Warren County’s voting problems and literally begged Fitrakis to help him get lawyers to other counties where the elections were in question, the political scientist professor at Columbus State Community College said.

“Then when Kerry said, ‘We’re not going to do anything here,’ they all sort of clammed up and went on the offensive against us. That’s the ultimate irony in all this,” Fitrakis told the Iconoclast in an exclusive interview. “A lot of our inital information all came from Democratic Party operatives who are now spending their time dismissing what we say even though we were intitally using some of their data in the analysis.”

Now Secretary of State Brunner is seeking damages, including punitive damages, from Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems) for faulty voting machines, breach of warranty and contract, and fraud that lead to missing votes across 11 Ohio counties the same counties that Free Press reporters had shed light on before being called “conspiracy theorists” themselves.

“There were over 30,000 unexplained undervotes in Montgomery County. Dayton primarily. That’s going to hurt, as it usually does, the Democrats, These glitches seemed to predominately occur in the urban areas. In Franklin County, there was a variety of missing votes in 2006 as well,” Fitrakis explained.

At the time, Democrats explained these discrepencies away with a number of strange theories and colorful jargon such as “calibration” and “the fat finger.”

“The fat finger problem, it’s one of my favorites,” said Fitrakis, sarcastically. “It’s that you’re pushing the button lightly, but your finger has got to be twice as fat in order to actually record the vote.”

Fitrakis noted that the DNC went out of its way to play junior partner in status quo politics with the Republicans. He called the DNC 2005 report on the Ohio election “one of the most bizzarest things you’ll see.” For example, the report calculated that the average white voter is taking 15 minutes to vote; the average black voter nearly an hour. But the DNC used the average of all black voters in the state including the Republican black voters in rural counties the 17 percent that tend to vote Republican.

What DNC didn’t want to point out were the large urban areas. The average wait for black voters in Columbus, for instance, was three to seven hours.

“In my analogy, if a to