Did Ohio really vote NO on election reform?

[Bill Bored]

This was a landslide, in the wrong direction wasn't it?
So if there are paper trails, let's audit some?

Reversing the Yeses and Nos on the DRE ballots would reverse the outcome without the voters knowing it. But auditing even a small percentage of the VVPATs would catch this right away.

How were these initiatives doing in the pre-election polls? Is there ANY indication that they would be defeated by the voters of Ohio by such a large margin?

Even the Carter/Baker Commission suggested having non- or bi-partisan BoEs!

What's the matter with Ohio (or is it Kansas)?

This was not some 51-49% election. People apparently voted overwhelmingly to keep Blackwell or some partisan successor in charge of their elections! WTF?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

1. Those results are NOT believable by any stretch. nt.

[Botany]

2. I don't know ..... but look @ this data

Issue #1:
Poll: 53% YES, 27% NO, 20% Don't Know
Actual: 54.1% YES, 45.9% NO
YES was 1.1% off
----------------------------------------------------

Issue #2:
Poll: 59% YES, 33% NO, 9% Don't Know
Actual: 36.5% YES, 63.5% NO
YES was 22.5% off in favor of Blackwell

----------------------------------------------------
Issue #3:
Poll: 61% YES, 25% NO, 14% Don't Know
Actual: 33% YES, 67% NO

YES was 28% off in favor of Blackwell
----------------------------------------------------

Issue #4:
Poll: 31% YES, 45% NO, 25% Don't Know
Actual: 30.2% YES, 69.8% NO

YES was 0.8% off in favor of Blackwell
----------------------------------------------------

Issue #5:
Poll: 41% YES, 43% NO, 16% Don't Know
Actual: 29.8% YES, 70.2% NO

YES was 11.2% off in favor of Blackwell


Poll Link:
http://www.dispatch.com/election.php?story=dispatch/200...

Actual Link:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/Results20...

Funny how the poll was accurate in Issue#1 and TOTALLY off for all but one of the election reform issues 2 thru 5

[Bill Bored]

3. Yeah just saw LALA's post in GD and linked back to here.

We spend half our time on this board cross linking this stuff.

[Botany]

4. I live in Columbus OH ..... Franklin County

The #s and the vote don't make sense to me. Although some smart
people are saying they are legit.

I canvassed for these issues and got a good response. Why would
Ohio back a crooked Governor and a highly unpopular S of State?

We went opposite the national trend and voted to help the repubs???

The repugs did dump tons of money and lies trying to beat these
issues though.

I am still confused about the outcome. The 04 vote I have no
doubt about .... it was dirty.

[Bill Bored]

5. 2 and 3 are practically mirror images of the polls. Very suspicious. nt

[EFerrari]

6. The "word" is that the PR on the reform side was too early and

somewhat inept.

But, I have a hard time believing the people of Ohio voted with Blackwell.

[IndyOp]

20. Some smart people are saying results are legit - who?

Really, who?

Please name names (and organizations).

:kick:

[Ms. Toad]

8. Excuse me, but

My no votes on two of the issues had NOTHING to do with being "in favor of Blackwell." Can't stand the man - and my concerns about decisions he made in his election oversight capacity in 2004 are the ONLY reason I voted Yes on anything other than absentee balloting.

Neither did the No votes on ALL of the issues by several of my liberal friends (which were switches from "don't know" or "yes" 24 hours earlier have anything to do with being "in favor of Blackwell." They generally supported the principles of the reform, but when they actually read the amendments (or the summaries in the ballot booth) decided the implementation of those principles was not something they could accept.

See my post below, and try reading the text of the amendments (or even the summaries) here: http://www.reformohionow.org/downloads/ron_amendments.pdf

Do you understand all of the details well enough to be confident that they implement the principles at all, let alone well enough that those details should be embedded in the constitution (which is not subject to clarification and tweaking except by another statewide vote)?

[philb]

13. So the problem was manipulation by wording by those in charge of election?

[philb]

14. Why didn't anyone do any exit polls? Didn't they learn anything from 2004

election?

Its clear we don't have real democratic elections in most places in the U.S., and the only way to move in that direction is through as much effort as possible in oversight and monitoring and investigation of corruption/manipulation.

[Ms. Toad]

16. No.

The amendment language was drafted/presented by RON (the pro-amendment group), which made a deliberate choice to make them that detailed. My understanding is that the only substantive change made by folks running the election was to require that the longest amendment (redistricting and state election board) be separated into two separate amendments.

RON’s reasoning (based on their response to a direct question) was that putting all that detail into the constitution would prevent the legislature from changing it.

Unfortunately, that also means that errors, unintended consequences, unworkable procedures, etc. cannot be easily corrected. I don’t know about you, but I can barely craft a DU post without errors – let alone craft a 4-5 page constitutional amendment that I would be confident spells out the details of new intricate procedures.

Bottom line – it was a deliberate choice by RON to draft the amendments as they did. It was a choice I had difficulty supporting at all, even though I agree with the principles they were attempting to implement. That assessment was shared by a number of (but not all) liberal voters with whom I discussed the amendments. Apparently enough of us liberals were troubled enough to reject the amendments - and half (by my informal poll) of the rejection came within the last 24 hours when the procrastinators got around to reading the amendments rather than the relying on the brief advertising tag lines.

Aside from the basic question as to whether the detail belonged in the constitution, I believe RON seriously underestimated the overwhelming impact of being confronted with a two page summary in the ballot booth. I've been voting for ~30 years and I do not believe I have ever seen more than a single page summary.

Next time around, I hope they go for brief clear and strong statements of principle accompanied by a mandate to the legislature to draft statutes which implement the principles. It is not a perfect solution, but it would be a much easier option for voters to accept (both those who think about the amendments ahead of time and try to reason through the details, and those who would be confronted with a much shorter summary for the first time in the voting booth).

[Ms. Toad]

7. Yes.

The problem is that the reform principles (which likely would have been approved) were packaged in a way that even folks who support the reform principles (like me) could not support.

See my earlier posts.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=400534&mesg_id=400696

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=400534&mesg_id=400704

If you haven't actually read the text of the proposed amendments text, you should: http://www.reformohionow.org/downloads/ron_amendments.pdf (pages 9-19) and see if (1) you understand all of the details and (2) if you think all those details are clear enough that they should be stuck in the constitution (which requires another statewide vote to fix any ambiguity/mistakes).

Among the liberal leaning folks I spoke with who supported the principles, I was in the middle. I held my nose and voted for two of them. Half voted against all four.

As noted in the second post above, those liberal folks voting against them generally supported the principle behind each of the four amendments as recently as 24 hours before the election but had not yet actually read the proposed amendments. Some who did not actually read the amendments before they entered the voting booth were overwhelmed by the summary and voted no. (The summary required two full pages for most amendments - the actual text was not available on the ballot, and if a summary is 2 pages long what does that say about the original...) Others read the text of proposed amendments on the night before or the morning of the election and decided on the basis of reading the full amendments (one of which required nearly 5 pages of single spaced text) that even though the principle was good they could not support the execution.

Of the liberal folks I spoke with, only those of us who read the text of the amendments weeks ago, giving us time to wrestle with the pros (good principle) and cons (creating an untested, minutely detailed, superlaw that would be difficult to fix if it created unintended consequences), voted in favor of any of them.

[Bill Bored]

10. OK, OK, I'm willing to look into this, but it won't explain why the polls

were so far off. This isn't some 3-6% exit poll discrepancy, it's a mirror image of the election results on issues 2 and 3 and the vote count and the polls were landslides in opposite directions!

So while there may be some deep-thinking people who disagree with the way in which these changes would have been implemented (there always are), it doesn't explain the apparent discrepancy between the polls and the election.

Any comments on that?

[OnTheOtherHand]

11. well, I can offer the naysaying conventional wisdom...

I'm literally in no position to have an opinion on what happened -- haven't heard any of my Ohio friends and family screaming bloody murder.

For what it's worth, the Ohio election was the sort of election where you expect the polls to struggle. The electorate is very small (about half of last year's), and awareness of the issues is usually very low, so there is plenty of room for last-minute campaigns to have an impact. And conventional wisdom has it (probably rightly) that when in doubt, people vote no. The Dispatch Poll is a mail poll, so it's not going to detect any late changes in opinion.

Y'know, I think every one of these issues (2 through 5) went down in every county in Ohio (dunno, one may have passed somewhere). I don't get the people who are sure they know these issues passed if they haven't seen a paper trail that proves it. But that argument works both ways, doesn't it?

[Ms. Toad]

12. The polls I've seen cited weren't exit polls

They were pre-election polls. Of the (liberal) folks with whom I have discussed their specific votes, over half were leaning in favor of all of the amendments 24 hours before the election (so the polls would likely have counted them as "yes." Only one (other than me) had read the amendments at that time. The one who had read them ahead of time voted in favor of all the amendments (consistent with her pre-election position) The others read the amendments overnight or read the summary in the ballot booth, and voted "NO," the opposite of what they would have answered in a pre-election poll.

The votes that I know changed didn't change so much as result of the result of deep thinking dictating a principled "NO" vote as it was a matter of not realizing how intricate the amendments were until it was too late to do enough thinking to be sure they were really ok.

The ones I know (including me) who who read and thought ahead of time voted as they would have polled 24 hours in advance - but although I have been wrestling with these amendments since September one of my votes was not absolutely fixed until the last moment when my disgust with Blackwell won out over my very strong objections to permanently embedding this kind of detail in the constitution.

[Columbus]

15. Undecideds and ODP

One possible reason, aside from the RON incompetence, is the undecideds in the Dispatch poll. The Dispatch in fact provided a caveat in their article. The undecideds were 30%. It is possible that they broke massively for no. Also, the Republicans were forcefully against the measures. By that I mean the Republican Party itself came out against the proposals, not just Republican voters.

The Ohio Democratic Party of course remained neutral on the proposals and several high ranking Dems actually worked against the proposals. In Cuyahoga County the Dem chair recorded phone messages to be robo-called against the proposals.

It's ODP again. They like the idea of $10,000 contributions and they think they will win in 2006 so they want to redistrict. They are so incompetent at winning elections however that it is very possible that Blackwell will be the next governor of Ohio.

[riqster]

9. There HAS to be suspicion

since Ohio has had rigged elections before. Since the powers that be cannot prove that this one is clean, it must be viewed as suspect.

[mtnester]

17. Personally, I supported the idea behind the amendments, however

what we really needed in Ohio was real election reform, which BEGINS with verified voting. That is where Reform should begin. THEN the rest.

And I got to tell you, when Ahhhnold decided to cut a commercial supporting the amendments here, that just about killed it. The Repubs were never going to vote for election reform here anyway, and when Arnold came out and supported them, it made Dems wary, and IMO I believe convinced many Dems that something was hidden in the PAGES of amendment language. His damn add ran solid for three days prior to 11/8, on TV, radio, in the papers.

On a note, I believe with all my heart that the 2006 elections WILL be the ONLY way to effect reform here.

[JWS]

19. I have this idea that Ohio may be the only state we need to worry about

getting stolen or whatnot. That will be aided with the results of the 06 race, but I have a feeling DeWine'll win in a landslide despite pre election polls.

[JWS]

18. 2 and 3 should've passed.

It's a shame there was no exit polling data. That would have immediately given it away.