Election Night was surreal.
   Ordinarily, the candidates’ share
   of the popular vote fluctuates
   throughout the night, depending
   upon which states have reported
   and which have not.  But on
   November 2, 2004, every time I
   looked at the screen, the popular
   vote was 51% Bush, 48% Kerry.
   The numbers stayed the same, all
   night long.  The fix was in.
        By the wee hours of the
   morning it became clear that
   neither candidate could win
   without Ohio.  The Republicans
   trotted out J. Kenneth Blackwell,
   the Ohio Secretary of State, to
   badger John Kerry into conceding
   the election.  Bush was ahead by
   136,000 votes and, according to
   Blackwell, there were only
   155,000 provisional ballots to
   be counted, they were from “all
   over the place,” and Bush’s margin
   could not be overcome.  It seemed
   a mathematical impossibility.

     CBS News reported a rumor that the number of uncounted ballots in
Ohio was more like 250,000.  If this were true, Kerry would need 77%
of them to win Ohio.  It mattered where these uncounted ballots were
located.  CBS declined to call Ohio for Bush.  John Edwards, looking
like he smelled a rat, vowed that all the votes would be counted.
I went to sleep, expecting another drawn-out battle, a replay of the
2000 election in Florida.
     The next day, John Kerry conceded the election.  What happened in
Ohio was not a story, so far as the media was concerned.  Anyone who
questioned the results was a spreadsheet-wielding internet conspiracy
theorist.
     Ten days later I received an e-mail from Fernwoods.  “Can anyone
explain these numbers?  This looks like proof to me!”  Her name was
Karen Giles.  From her mountain top home near Blair County,
Pennsylvania, she had compiled a large mailing list of political
activists.  Because some friends had once invited me to Altoona, my
e-mail address was on a political mailing list.  Karen had come upon
election results from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that could not be right.
There were more ballots cast than registered voters.  When examined
ward by ward, the discrepancy amounted to 246,919 votes.
     The official explanation provided by the Cuyahoga County Board of
Elections, having something to do with absentee ballots being counted
multiple times, never checked out.  These egregious errors did not
carry over into the candidates’ vote totals, we were told.  To find out
for myself, I downloaded the unofficial election results for Cuyahoga
County, precinct by precinct.  Right away I spotted anomalous data of
a different sort.  In certain precincts in Cleveland, there were
inexplicably high vote totals for third-party candidates.
In Precinct 4-F, 215 votes (40.9%) had gone to Michael Peroutka.
In Precinct 4-N, 163 votes (32.7%) had gone to Michael Badnarik.
Statewide, these two candidates combined received less than one-half
of one percent of the vote.
     This was obvious evidence of election fraud, in the number one
Democratic stronghold in Ohio, the state that had decided the 2004
presidential election.  Having seen the evidence, I was now a witness
to a crime, with a duty to report it.  I asked my neighbor, Klaus
Proemm, for a contact in Ohio.  He put me in touch with Cliff Arnebeck,
a Columbus attorney working with Common Cause and the Alliance for
Democracy.  Karen Giles sent me a link to the articles of Bob Fitrakis,
publisher of the Columbus Free Press, and self-described muckraker.
To my surprise, he answered the phone.
     “This is the kind of attention to detail that we need,” said
Fitrakis.  “We’ll publish your work.”  Fitrakis warned: “This is the
most difficult thing you will ever do.  There is a different story in
every county.”  I would need to utilize every investigative skill I
have, he said, and I would also need to learn some new ones.  Fitrakis
went on to say: “This is the most important thing you will ever do.”  I
have done some very important things in my life.  But I knew his words
were true.  Fitrakis concluded by saying: “This will make you famous.”
I did the work anyway.
     Fitrakis had much to say about J. Kenneth Blackwell, and this
revived my memory of him on Election Night, and of the rumors that
250,000 ballots were still uncounted in Ohio.  I began downloading all
the data I could find on Blackwell’s website.  The unofficial results,
county by county, for Bush and Kerry, were easy to find.  But what I
really wanted was the turnout data.
     Voter turnout equals the number of ballots cast divided by the
number of registered voters, expressed as a percentage.  By subtracting
the number of votes counted for president from the total number of
ballots cast, one can calculate the number of uncounted ballots.  These
would be the sum total of “undervotes” (ballots with no choice for
president) and “overvotes” (ballots with more than one choice for
president).  I knew that 85% of the votes in Ohio had been cast on
paper ballots, mainly punch cards.  If the electronic tabulators were
unable to detect a vote for President, the ballots could be counted by
hand, examined by human eyes, and voter intent might be determined.
     Finally I found the voter turnout data, already tucked away as
“Historical Election Data” on the official website of J. Kenneth
Blackwell.  It turned out that there had been 5,574,476 ballots cast,
and only 5,481,804 votes counted for president.  This meant that there
were 92,672 regular ballots still uncounted in Ohio, most of them punch
cards.  Together with the 155,428 provisional ballots, there were
248,100 uncounted ballots in Ohio.  I prepared a table showing the
number of uncounted ballots in each of the 88 counties in Ohio.
Lacking any way to contact John Kerry directly, I sent the results to
Cameron Kerry, brother of the presidential candidate, under the title
of “John Kerry Conceded Too Soon.”  I never received a response.
     I examined the Ohio election results, county by county, and
compared them to the results of the 2000 presidential election.  I also
read the articles by Bob Fitrakis at www.freepress.org.  Based on this
information, I targeted eight counties in which the election results
seemed anomalous or even suspicious: Butler, Clermont, Cuyahoga,
Delaware, Franklin, Hamilton, Miami, and Warren.  I began to collect
the precinct canvass records from each of these counties.  Four had
websites on which the precinct results were posted, and three others
faxed them to me promptly. Only Hamilton County refused to provide the
precinct results, saying that I needed to pick them up in person.
As I live in upstate New York, this would have been a hardship for me.
Upon hearing this, two attorneys from the Ohio Democratic Party in
Columbus descended upon the Board of Elections in Cincinnati and
obtained the precinct results for me.  This was the only cooperation
I received from the Democratic Party.  As soon as I started sending
them hard evidence of voter suppression in Columbus, by means of
deliberate and discriminatory withholding of voting machines from
inner-city precincts, the Democratic Party in Ohio stopped
communicating with me.
     By that time, Cliff Arnebeck had announced that the Ohio
presidential election results would be challenged in the Ohio Supreme
Court.  I wondered how I was ever going to finish analyzing the
precinct results from those eight counties, as I was using a pocket
calculator.
     On November 28, 2004, I appeared on Larry Bensky’s “Sunday Salon,”
on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.  When Bensky first called me on
the phone, I laughed and he asked me why.  Although some of my papers,
including “Stealing Votes in Cleveland” and “Stealing Votes in
Columbus,” had been posted on the internet for some time, Bensky was
the first reporter to call me.
     By the end of the day I had received numerous e-mails about my
radio appearance.  Four of the listeners became the core of a band of
angels that became known as the “Richard Hayes Phillips Research
Project.”  Before long I had eight “spreadsheet angels” preparing
tables and spreadsheets from precinct canvass records, Ellis Goldberg
to assume the task of collecting the records from the Boards of
Elections, and Emily Levy to coordinate the entire project.
     Suddenly it became feasible not only to analyze those eight
counties, but to add others to the list.  I targeted seven more counties
because of their large populations: Lorain, Lucas, Mahoning, Montgomery,
Stark, Summit, and Trumbull.  I submitted papers on all fifteen counties
to the Ohio Supreme Court in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the
Ohio electors.  There were papers showing that uncounted punch card
ballots in seven urban counties were highly concentrated in precincts
that voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.  There were papers on the
discriminatory allocation of voting machines in Columbus.  There were
papers questioning the results in southwestern Ohio, where Kerry
received fewer votes than Ellen Connally, the Democratic candidate for
Chief Justice.  There were papers documenting voter suppression in
Toledo, challenging the official voter turnout data in Miami County,
and showing that touch screen voting machines in Youngstown were
programmed to default to Bush.
     Testifying under oath was a lonely affair.  I was in a hotel room
being questioned by a lawyer who was largely unfamiliar with my work.
Everything we said was typed and recorded by a court reporter.  I
wondered how it had come to this.  Not so long ago I had posted my
earliest works on my own website, wondering who would ever read them.
Now I was swearing to these works, under oath, as the leading witness
in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of a presidential
election.  It felt like I was testifying against the President of the
United States.  Who was I to be doing this?
     I am not a high-powered statistician.  As a karst hydrologist, I
do have the ability to spot anomalous data among reams of statistics.
And I do have a long-standing interest in elections.  But I only used
four analytical techniques: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and
division.  Nothing more is necessary when the numbers don’t add up.
     We never did get a hearing before the Ohio Supreme Court.  There
was no discovery of evidence, no deposition of hostile witnesses.
Blackwell sought a court order protecting him from having to testify,
on the grounds that he was a public official.  Ohio Attorney General
Jim Petro sought to impose sanctions upon our attorneys for having the
temerity to argue the case, and he sought to dismiss me as a credible
witness with the following words: “He seems to be better known as a
poet and a lyricist.”  I was flattered by his testimonial.
     Our last remaining hope was to challenge the Ohio electors on the
floor of the Congress on January 6, 2005.  Unlike 2001, when not one
Senator willing to challenge the Florida results, there was one
Senator who challenged the Ohio results: Barbara Boxer.  At least three
of my papers were relied upon by John Conyers, ranking Democrat on the
House Judiciary Committee, when he spoke on the floor of the House.
John Kerry was nowhere to be found.
     On the day of the historic challenge, the “Boxer Rebellion,” I
lobbied several United States Senators.  This was a big issue.  Their
phones were ringing constantly, and their staff members were keeping
running tallies of how their constituents wanted them to vote.  In
Hillary Clinton’s office, on at least one of the telephones, the tally
was unanimous.  I saw it with my own eyes.  Every single caller wanted
her to challenge the 2004 election.  I was lobbying with a woman who
had been on the ground in Toledo on Election Day.  We had met in the
office of Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, where she heard me telling
horror stories of voter suppression, and she recognized the stories as
having come from Toledo.  We joined forces and lobbied together.
     As the time of the vote approached, we decided to enter the office
of John Kerry.  All of their telephone lines were tied up with personal
phone calls, so that constituents could not get through, and the sound
was turned off on the television.  “This is historic!  This hasn’t
happened in 128 years!”  I said, to no avail.  So we decided to occupy
John Kerry’s office until somebody on his staff would take a look at
the precinct results.  Finally a staff member obliged, and I showed her
the numbers from Cleveland, where 4% or more of the ballots remain
uncounted in 65 precincts, all of which John Kerry won overwhelmingly,
by a margin, in the aggregate, of 12 to 1.  She seemed astounded.
Either she was uninformed, or she was a very good actress.
     After the bus ride back from Washington to Columbus, I withdrew
from battle.  I had worked 54 of 56 days, a minimum of 10 hours a day,
and sometimes all night long, without any expression of interest from
John Kerry.  But then, this has never been about John Kerry.  The
struggle has always been about rescuing our democracy, which hangs by
a thread.  We, the citizens, have lost our most fundamental and basic
right – to cast our votes without interference and have them counted
correctly and without question.  We cannot win a free and fair election
if we do not have free and fair elections.  The winner should win, the
loser should lose, and the people should rule.
     On February 7, 2005, I prepared a “List of Forensic Evidence
Needed for Ohio,” covering Butler, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Franklin,
Lucas, Mahoning, Miami, and Warren counties.  I also targeted Triad
Governmental Systems, Inc., a private company which provided the vote-
counting software to 41 Ohio counties and, in at least two counties,
provided the election results as well.  The list was drawn up for
Congressman John Conyers at the request of his staff.  I received this
response from Michelle Richardson, Minority Counsel, House Judiciary
Committee:
     “Thanks for the list.  We'll keep it on hand in case any of
the counties are willing to work with us.  I'm sorry to
report that up until this point, we have been denied access
to such information.”
     Later in 2005 I was invited to speak at election reform
conferences in Nashville, Columbus, and Houston.  At the conference
in Nashville I learned for the first time that I can bring listeners
to their feet, and move them to tears.  My speech is posted online,
courtesy of Brad Friedman, at

http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Audio/rh_phillips_low.mp3

     I thought about submitting the “List of Forensic Evidence” to the
Carter-Baker Commission on election reform, which was to hold its final
hearing in Houston, Texas on June 30, 2005.  I decided not to do so,
lest it tip off the Boards of Elections and tell them what evidence to
destroy.
     On June 29, 2005 in Houston, Texas, at the Election Assessment
Hearing, an alternative to the Carter-Baker Commission, I submitted
three new papers: “Uncounted Ballots in Ohio,” a synthesis of seven
papers previously submitted to the Ohio Supreme Court; “Caterpillar
Crawl in Cuyahoga County,” an analysis of Kerry votes shifted to the
columns of other candidates; and “Log Cabin Republicans in Ohio,” an
exposé of four counties in Ohio where Bush received more votes than
Issue One, the constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.
I also presented, as “Direct Testimony,” a four-minute statement
summarizing my work to date.  A member of Jimmy Carter’s staff briefly
attended the hearing.  I asked him this question, on camera:
      “Many informed and knowledgeable people have testified here
today.  For my part, in a sentence:  I have examined the election
results, precinct by precinct, for 15 counties in Ohio comprising 62%
of the state's population, and I have found evidence of voter
suppression, failure to count ballots cast, and alteration of the vote
count, sufficient to reverse the outcome of the 2004 presidential
election.  My question is this: Are you going to allow us to testify,
under oath, under penalty of perjury, subject to questioning by the
Carter-Baker Commission, and if not, why not?”
     “We're not interested in what happened in Ohio,” he said.
     Not until February 17, 2006 did I resume my investigation of the
2004 presidential election, as a “cold case.”  Much of this work was
done at a law office in Columbus, where I spent many nights sleeping
on the floor, as I had done many years before as a homeless college
professor.  I conducted an estimated count, based upon precinct data,
of uncounted provisional ballots in all 88 counties.  I wrote papers
analyzing the “Connally anomaly” in five counties, and clean elections
in seven counties.  I wrote summaries on rejected provisional ballots
in Hamilton County, where the Democratic stronghold of Cincinnati was
targeted, and on voters challenged at the polls in Lucas County, where
Democratic wards in Toledo were targeted.  In preparation for the Rolling
Stone article “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
and with the help of a new “spreadsheet angel,” I analyzed the purging of
the voter rolls in Cuyahoga County, where Democratic wards in Cleveland
were targeted.  I analyzed the “freely amended results” drawn from a
computer data base of voter histories in Miami County.  And I began to
examine forensic evidence – copies of the actual ballots, poll books,
and voter signature books in Warren and Delaware counties – an effort
that soon expanded into other suspect counties as well.
     We encountered initial resistance in Delaware County, where an
armed private paramilitary police force and an array of County
Prosecutors were summoned in an attempt to prevent us from looking at
the ballots.  Not dissuaded, I submitted public records requests to
Butler, Cuyahoga, Clermont, and Miami counties as well.  The response
was mixed.  The Butler County Board of Elections readily agreed to
cooperate.  In Miami County, The Deputy Director of the Board of
Elections resigned the day my public records request was received in
the mail, but the Director, Steve Quillen, gave us free and unfettered
access to anything we wanted to examine.  In Cuyahoga County, we were
given full access to the voter signature books, but the Executive
Assistant to Michael Vu, Director of the Board of Elections, insisted
that he had misplaced the ballots, all 687,255 of them; we finally
found them ourselves.  And in Clermont County, the County Prosecutor’s
Office held us at bay for 79 days before finally allowing us to
photograph the evidence.
     Preliminary examination of the evidence revealed 359 consecutive
ballots for Bush in one precinct in Delaware County; 212 consecutive
ballots for Bush in one precinct in Butler County; outright ballot
alteration in Clermont County; shifting of votes from Kerry to Bush,
and from Kerry to Nader, in Cuyahoga County; and incorrect voter
turnout data in the official results for every single precinct in Miami
County.  But the most explosive finding was the reason why so many
punch card ballots in heavily Democratic inner-city precincts in
Cleveland were not counted as votes for President – they were
“overvotes,” punched in advance for one or two independent or third-
party candidates (Nader, Badnarik, and/or Peroutka).  When voters
placed their ballots in the machines and punched for Kerry (or Bush),
they were spoiling their own ballots.
     It was now August 7, 2006, less than one month before “Destruction
Day,” September 2, 2006, the end of the legally required 22-month
records retention period.  I sent out a flurry of last-minute public
records requests to Hamilton, Montgomery, Stark, Summit and Trumbull
counties, all of which had numerous heavily Democratic inner-city
precincts with extraordinarily high percentages of punch card ballots
not counted as votes for President.  The goal was to collect the
largest and most revealing data set of uncounted punch card ballots
that such a short time frame would allow, in hopes of persuading a
judge to extend the records retention period and prevent the Boards of
Elections from shredding the evidence.  I found the same patterns of
multiple punches for President in heavily Democratic precincts in all
five of these counties, and I was told that they had destroyed their
unused ballots, which might have proven that the ballots were punched
in advance.
     During the last week of August I dispatched Rady Ananda and Marj
Creech to small counties in western Ohio where Kerry had run behind
Ellen Connally.  This allowed me to concentrate on our impending lawsuit.
It was filed in Federal District Court in Columbus, Ohio on August 31,
2006.  At the very last minute a team of New York City lawyers had
deleted from our Complaint all mention of fraud and ballot tampering,
and there was no time to amend the Complaint.  So we gave a press
conference at which we described in detail the ballots with multiple
punches, of which we now had 1921 examples captured in digital photographs.
“If these ballots were punched in advance,” asked one reporter, “wouldn’t
the voters have noticed?”  “Some of them did,” I replied.  “We have sworn
affidavits from voters who stated that their ballots were already punched
for President.”  This was big news.  It made the New York Times, the Yahoo
home page, Morning Edition on National Public Radio, and the newspapers
of all the major cities in Ohio.  The irony was that nothing we said at
the press conference was actually included in our Complaint.
     The next day, wearing street clothes, I filed my Declaration to
Federal District Court, presenting evidence of ballot tampering in
eleven counties in Ohio, and asking Judge Algenon L. Marbley to “order
all Boards of Elections to continue to preserve and protect all
ballots, poll books, voter signature books, and associated records from
the November 2, 2004 election until a suitable repository is found for
their permanent preservation.”  To me it seemed the natural thing to
do.  I expected that my Declaration would be filed eventually, as part
of an Amended Complaint, but I wanted the evidence on the record before
“Destruction Day.” The New York City lawyers were furious, and they
wanted to know how I managed to file it without their permission.  They
assumed that I had purloined their privileged electronic pass code.  It
never occurred to them that I could simply walk over to the Federal
Court House and hand it to the Clerk.
     Shortly thereafter, pursuant to negotiations with attorneys, Judge
Marbley issued an Order to all Boards of Elections instructing them not
to destroy the ballots.  As of this writing, the new Ohio Secretary of
State, Jennifer Brunner, has taken possession of the evidence.  Some of
the records have been shredded, in defiance of a direct order from
Federal District Court.  This shocks me but it does not surprise me.
It is not always true that the cover-up is worse than the crime.  In
the words of Bob Fitrakis:  “Sometimes the cover-up is your only hope.”
     After the achievement of my primary goal, the preservation of
evidence for the historical record, I retreated to the mountains of the
Adirondacks and the Blue Ridge to reflect on what we had done.  In an
unprecedented operation, dozens of citizen volunteers equipped with
digital cameras had photographed tens of thousands of ballots, and
hundreds of poll books and voter signature books, in a coordinated
effort to uncover the evidence that proves our elections are rigged.
The number of images gathered by the fall of 2006 stood at over 30,000.
I knew that a monumental task of data analysis was still facing me, but
the depth and breadth of this enormous dataset enables me to answer
with certainty the claims that statisticians can only suggest.
     When exit polls differ significantly from reported election
results it is a red flag, but it does not prove fraud.  It proves that
there is reason for scrutiny.  If election results have been altered,
this will always be apparent at the precinct level.  Either the numbers
will be inconsistent with long-established voting patterns, or there
will be inexplicable choices attributed to the same voters on the same
day, or both.  But one should never assume that the exit polls are
correct, or use them as a measurement of fraud, or cite them as
sufficient proof to overturn an election.  Exit polls could be as
easily manipulated as election results.  There is no substitute for
painstaking precinct analysis and examination of the poll books, the
voter signature books, and the ballots themselves, if any.  It is
ultimately the task of the governed to guard their democracy from their
leaders.
     We went to the most suspect counties, and audited the most suspect
precincts.  Our data set is therefore not representative of the entire
State of Ohio, nor does it need to be.  We are crime scene
investigators, and we go where crimes appear to have been committed.
No doubt it was unnerving for the Boards of Elections to have citizen
activists brazenly descend upon them and photograph records all day
long, for days at a time, as if we were the F.B.I., whose job we were
doing because they will not do it.  It was an entirely new experience
for all parties concerned.  Sometimes the paper trail was as tight as
a noose.  For example, in some Miami County precincts, we can say with
certainty how many ballots were stuffed in the ballot box and what
their stub numbers were; and in one case, we know who is responsible.
Why would such incriminating documents exist in the first place?
Because they never thought anybody would look.
     To those who would rig American elections, let this book serve as
a warning.  We are looking.  If there is fraud, we will find it, even
if it comes too late to reverse the outcome of the election.  And you
will be held accountable.  We have taken away your impunity.
     To those who would argue that a little bit of fraud is of no
consequence, that the outcome has not been affected if it has not been
reversed, we say you are wrong.  If the vote count is not correct, the
outcome has been affected.  We are far less concerned with the fortunes
of the candidates than with the right of duly registered voters to have
their votes counted correctly, the first time.
     I am not a vindictive person.  But if there is motive, means, and
opportunity, and no penalty for cheating, this is never going to stop.
I hope that this book will assist certain public and private officials
in finding new jobs making license plates in a room with no view.
     I never sought to become an election fraud investigator.  If not
for that e-mail from a mountain top in Pennsylvania, it never would
have happened.  But now, it has been said, I know more about what
happened in Ohio than anyone else on the planet, except, perhaps, Karl
Rove.  And now, for the first time, my work to date is compiled in one
place, for the record.