Published: June 23, 2005
No systematic fraud in Ohio - Election Science Institute
The Election Science Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that studies elections in the United States.
The institute made the following comments on "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," a major report released today by the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute.
(DNC report )
"This appears to be a technically solid report - thorough, careful and objective," said Steven Hertzberg, director of the Election Science Institute. "The recommendations are close to the mark. The public has a right to know exactly how elections work, and to verify for themselves that the voting is conducted fairly and the counting is done right."
"The DNC's conclusion on the allegations of fraud that were based on the exit polls is very similar to ours," said Dr. Fritz Scheuren, an adviser to ESI. "We found that the exit polls, in and of themselves, don't support the allegations of systematic fraud." Scheuren is president of the American Statistical Association and a vice president at the University of Chicago's NORC research center.
Dr. Ted Allen, an associate professor of engineering at Ohio State University, is conducting a detailed study of waiting times in Franklin County (Columbus) Ohio for ESI.
On the DNC's statement that "African American voters reported waiting an average of 52 minutes before voting, while voters overall reported waiting only 18 minutes," Allen said, "It's important to see what's behind these numbers. Despite the DNC figures, we have found that machines were allocated pretty much according to how many active voters there were during the previous election. But you also have to take into account how long the ballot is, for example. We're looking at multiple factors to see why wait times varied."
(DNC statement)
The Election Science Institute (ESI) is a non-profit, non-partisan scientific organization based in San Francisco and founded in 2002 under the name Votewatch. ESI monitors public elections in the U.S. to identify voting anomalies which impact election results, and works with election officials to help them improve voting and election systems. See
http://www.electionscience.org.
Source:
www.pressreleasenetwork.com
For more information, contact:
Rich Garella
Tel:(212) 473-6929
Email: rich@electionscience.org
Steven Hertzberg
Tel:(650) 373-4960
Email: steven@electionscience.org
Website: http://www.electionscience.org
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