Home > Attack on election protection attorneys draws mountain of documentation...
Attack on election protection attorneys draws mountain of documentation...
by Open-Publishing - Thursday 3 February 20051 comment
Ohio Attorney-General’s attack on election protection attorneys draws mountain of documentation on state’s stolen election, including new study on exit polls
by Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
February 3, 2005
Stiff legal sanctions sought by Ohio’s Republican Attorney General James Petro against four attorneys who have questioned the results of the 2004 presidential balloting here has produced an unintended consequence — a massive counter-filing that has put on the official record a mountain of contentions by those who argue that election was stolen.
In filings that include well over 1,000 pages of critical documentation, attorneys Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt, Peter Peckarsky and Cliff Arnebeck have counter-attacked. Their defense motions include renewed assertions that widespread irregularities threw the true outcome of the November vote count into serious doubt. That assertion has now been lent important backing by a major academic study on the exit polls that showed John Kerry winning the November vote count.
Petro’s suit is widely viewed as an attempt at revenge and intimidation against the grassroots movement that led to the first Congressional challenge to a state’s Electoral College delegation since 1876. The attorney general’s action was officially requested by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who administered the Ohio presidential balloting while serving as co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney campaign. Petro and Blackwell have labeled as "frivolous" the election challenge filing. Their demand for sanctions will be reviewed by the Republican justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.
Though Petro’s filing was aimed at backing down further challenges to the Ohio vote, it has allowed the election protection attorneys to enter into the official archives critical documentation detailing dozens of problems with Ohio’s presidential balloting. Among the documents now made part of Ohio’s legal archives is a congressional investigation report from Rep. John Conyers that seriously questions the November 2 outcome.
The two now-infamous lawsuits in question, Moss v. Bush and Moss v. Moyer, argued that irregularities involving enough votes to switch the state’s electors from Bush to Kerry, and from Supreme Court justice Tom Moyer to challenger Ellen Connally, gave the public the right to file suit. Underlying much of the challenge have been wide ranging questions about whether Blackwell administered the election in a partisan manner.
Blackwell refused to testify in the case, and he has removed from public access critical documents relating to the vote count.
Under Ohio law, an original action to contest election allows only deposition testimony. It was impossible during the ten days of discovery to take the depositions of tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters, the majority African-American. But, as a result of Petro’s sanctions motion, the attorneys were able to enter into evidence (as Exhibits 1 & 2) explosive first-hand sworn testimony from November 13 and 15 public hearings in Columbus about voting irregularities. Excerpts from these first-person accounts were published on the House Judiciary Committee Democrats webpage and were used by some three-dozen U.S. Representatives and Senators to challenge Ohio’s Electoral College certification in Congress on January 6.
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Forum posts
3 February 2005, 18:26
The more the Ohio Republican officials protest and try to retaliate, the more obvious it becomes there is much they need to hide. The more the press ignores these important newsworthy developments, the more obvious it becomes they are controlled by or involved in the Republican conspiracy.
Unfortunately, the conspiracy is NOT imagined, it is NOT purely internet chitchat or blog hype, it is NOT X-file improbable.
The Republican approach to date has been to arrange an ‘absence of evidence’ [of fraudulent acts]. However, absence of hard evidence is not the same thing as ‘evidence of absence’. By refusing to allow an investigation, it supports suspicions that these officials have been involved in something highly unethical/illegal. Furthermore, it is anti-American and anti-democratic.