Bob “Ballots for Bush” Bennett 

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Ohio’s Bob “Ballots for Bush” Bennett, an essential player in putting George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, is no longer chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE). His milestone resignation leaves a legacy of scandal, recrimination, massive voter purges, felony convictions, and a pivotal role in a stolen presidential election. 

Bennett quit in a signature cloud of graceless accusations and cheap shots at Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s newly elected secretary of state, who asked him to resign along with the rest of the Cleveland election authority. His forced departure marks the biggest landmark yet in the unraveling theft of the presidential elections in Ohio 2004 (Bennett remains chair of the Ohio Republican Party). 

In 2004 Bennett was apparently asked by White House consigliere Karl Rove to stay on at the Cuya- hoga BOE to help guarantee Bush’s second term. Cleveland is Ohio’s biggest and most Democratic urban center. A massive sweep there by John Kerry was expected to have given him the White House. It was Bennett’s job to mute that margin and apparently that’s exactly what he did. 

Leading up to the 2004 vote, Bennett oversaw the purge of some 168,000 registered voters from the Cuyahoga rolls, including 24.93 percent of the city of Cleveland, which voted 83 percent for Kerry. In one inner city majority African American ward, 51 percent of the voters were purged. Centered on precincts that voted more than 80 percent for John Kerry, this purge may well have meant a net loss to the Democrats of tens of thousands of votes in an election that was officially decided statewide by less than 119,000. 

In a report issued December 7, 2004, the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition (GCVRC) reported that, in addition to the purge of registered voters, some 3.5 percent of those applying for new registrations were never even entered on the rolls by Bennett’s BOE or were entered incorrectly, which would result in disenfranchisement of those who had tried to become new voters. Additionally, the GCVRC estimated that “over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County would be compromised because of these clerical errors.”  

Bennett refused to respond to the report’s initial conclusions. When the study became public, BOE Executive Director Michael Vu accused the study coordinator of “inciting panic.” Vu did not respond to GCVRC’s request for the reinstatement of 303 voter registrations when there was direct evidence that they had been wrongly cancelled. 

The GCVRC also documented that the Cuyahoga County BOE incorrectly classified 463 properly registered voters as not registered. This included 201 voters who were registered on BOE computers on August 17, but for some unexplained reason, were removed from the rolls by October 22. They then were forced to vote provisionally and their votes were rejected as not registered. 

In Brunner’s formal complaint against Bennett, she cited the fact that Bennett’s BOE did nothing when an estimated 10,000 voters were thrown off the voting rolls by a Diebold voter registration computer glitch. 

Also, Bennett’s BOE rejected 262 properly registered voters included on its own list as of October 22. They incorrectly listed 183 as not registered and 79 as no signatures. “The Board did not contest our data,” said the GCVRC, “but said again it was just a small percentage due to human error and then proceeded to certify the entire Cuyahoga County vote even though they thereby knowingly possibly disenfranchised 463 individuals.” 

Parallel purges were conducted by Republican-controlled boards of election in Hamilton County (Cin- cinnati) where some 105,000 voters were purged from the rolls and in Lucas County (Toledo), where some 28,000 were purged in an unprecedented move in late August 2004. These remain the only three counties in the state known to have conducted massive registration purges prior to the 2004 election. The three mass urban purges decimated the rolls in heavily Democratic areas. Since then, another 170,000 voters have been purged from the rolls in Franklin County, primarily in the heavily Democratic Columbus precincts. Many rural Republican counties, like Miami, practice a “no-purge” policy. 

From his post at the helm of both the Ohio GOP and the Cuyahoga BOE, Bennett was at the center of the purges. Many of the 300,000-plus purged voters reported that they never received notice that their voting rights had been cancelled. Should the general 80 percent pro-Democratic inner city margins have prevailed for all three purged lists, the net loss to the Kerry camp could have been in the range of 100,000 votes. In addition to the purges, Bennett was also at the center of the election challenges to college students in Democratic enclaves. 

Bennett is infamous for far more than massive voter purges. Under his supervision, a legally mandated recount of the 2004 presidential vote was illegally manipulated. Ohio law says precincts must be chosen at random for hand counting as part of the recount process. But two Cuyahoga BOE employees have since been convicted of a felony and a misdemeanor and have each been sentenced to 18 months in prison for what prosecutors have called “rigging” the recount. 

Bennett was also instrumental in the purchase of some $20 million in Diebold voting machines for 2006 statewide elections. Election protection activists vehemently opposed the purchase, as seen in a nationally televised HBO special, “Hacking Democracy.” Under Bennett and Vu, the machines malfunctioned in Ohio’s 2006 primary, with vote count reporting delayed for five days.  

Long-time election activist Adele Eisner characterizes Bennett’s reign at the Cuyahoga BOE as a “culture with fear.” Among other things, Bennett chose to disregard longstanding laws requiring that election results be posted at the precinct level, a decision backed by Ohio’s former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. 

In a recent audit of the general 2006 elections Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips found that in the initial vote count, “Cuyahoga County alone accounted for 148,928 undervotes or 42.47 percent of the statewide total.” The undervotes occurred in the race for U.S. Senate where voters apparently opted not to vote for either incumbent Sen. Mike DeWine or Democrat Sherrod Brown—the eventual winner. The undervotes represented 26.48 percent of the county’s voters. But, says Phillips, “Once the official results were posted, Cuyahoga’s undervote total fell to 3.25 percent,” leaving him to wonder “how the unofficial results could have been so erroneous in the first place.” 

Hayes also found that Cuyahoga County reported 30,791 uncounted absentee and provisional ballots. After these ballots were counted, they reported 39,262 votes, an outcome Phillips terms mathematically “impossible.” Bennett and Vu were also responsible for more than $12,900,000 in BOE cost overruns, more than doubling the agency’s original budget of $11,000,000. 

Vu resigned earlier this year and has since been hired as an Assistant Registrar of Voters in San Diego County, the number two spot, with a $10,000 salary increase to $130,000 a year. The San Diego Union-Tribune noted, “Vu’s resignation followed a tumultuous 3 1/2- year tenure as election chief, including a disastrous May 2006 primary when the county began using new electronic voting machines.” 

In response to the chaos and recrimination, Brunner requested the resignations of the Cuyahoga board’s two Democrats and two Republicans. Only Bennett vowed to fight his removal. But he has now become the highest election board official to resign here amid the deepening scandals surrounding the 2004 election. 

Brunner has taken custody of the 2004 ballots and other vote count materials, which are currently protected by a federal court decision. She is expected to bring them from Ohio’s 88 county boards to a central repository in Columbus. Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that Karl Rove and the GOP had real-time computer access to both the actual vote numbers in Ohio, as well as the exit polling data, that would have allowed them to direct how many votes they needed from the suspect Ohio southwestern Republican counties that gave Bush his official margin of victory in the 2004 election. Stay tuned. 

Z 

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman’s books include How The GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election (www.free press.org) and What Happened In Ohio, with Steve Rosenfeld (New Press).