KPFA re Ohio vote irregularities

transcript of interview about the election irregularities hearings in Ohio yesterday (there are supposed to be more hearings starting tomorrow -- also check http://www.goxray.com , where they have put up some audio from the hearings (so far just the first half hour.):
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http://kpfa.org/archives/archives.php?id=22
rough transcript of Pacifica Radio's Larry Bensky - Sunday Salon 11/14/04, segment starts at minute 52:20 of the recording:

Larry Bensky intros:
Bensky was at the first day of the Ohio public forums about voting irregularity yesterday (11/13/04) with a Pacifica crew ...
important and moving event ...
we will be bringing a portion of this to you in the next few days, because it's very relevant, and "it ain't over yet" ...
Bush won by 136k votes, but provisional & absentee votes counts have just been started ...
then there's the question of a recount, which could change the results of this election ...
20 electoral votes switched would make Kerry pres.
can it happen? Who knows?
but one person working hard on this is Marty Gelphan (sp?)
...Bensky had asked Kucinich, but he just said -"we're looking into it"
...Yesterday Bensky met MG, who is a senior counsel in Kucinich's office

----- interview starts:

Q: What people most want to know is, with the amount of votes still outstanding here in Ohio, is there any way that kerry could become pres.?

MG: that's why I'm here - it can happen, ... as an attorney and as an aide to Kucinich, we want to make sure votes count ...
people stood in lines, voted provisional, overseas, military need to be counted ... 155k provisional ballots need counting, that alone begs the question "who won the election." If there had been a million-vote disparity, then we wouldn't bother to count them, I think, but the fact that more are uncounted than the disparity between the winner and loser, unofficially, -- we have to count the votes. Plus you have as many as 100k undervotes, plus overseas = probably more than 1/4 million votes that need to be counted. ...

Q: Also the recount of the other votes, Green & Libertarian parties, about 5.6 million or something like that, ...
that could change some things too, esp in light of what we've heard today here in Columbus, where so many irregularities have been alleged by so many people

MG: I was frankly shocked by what I heard today. I was one of the attys working in Cuyahoga County, we had challengers in every polling place, we had area counsel roving around to many precints, I was in the Kerry war room hearing challenges from the area supervisors, and we had some problems but we nipped them in the bud, we had a board of elections who wanted to do the right thing, we had a prosecutor who put the word out to all the challengers that he wasn't going to tolerate any shenanigans. What I'm hearing here in Franklin County, I'm surprised and saddened by it, I think that more attention needs to be put here, because our constituents in the 10th district will not have all their votes counted if other parts of the state are skewing the election one way or the other

Q: But you come from a heavily Democratic county, and district ...
here we have a Repub elections official, the Sec of State who's a partisan Republican ...
I think people don't have a lot of confidence that people who are partisans can be fair in a process like this

MG: all needs to be looked at and addressed. When I came to columbus today my purpose was to be supportive of this process, of counting the votes ...
but now what we're hearing from Franklin County is that the problems that they're reporting could skew the entire state, and as you know whoever wins Ohio in the official vote count, will determine who the president will be, early concessions notwithstanding. There's no legal significance to a concession, and whoever wins ohio brings the electoral vote count up to the winner for the presidency

Q: at what point does what you heard here today in Columbus rise to the level where you think it could be evidentiary in a lawsuit challenging the outcome of the Ohio election, no matter what various recounts show ... . At what point does this rise to the threshold of evidence where you think you could be confident going into a court and suing to invalidate the election in Ohio?

MG: There are dozens of people right now downstairs who have signed affidavits who have discussed with this panel, which I sat on for a little while today, serious irregularities, so it will have to be determined by whatever parties have standing to sue...

Q: who has standing, you're a lawyer .. I think people want to know
can you run it into a federal court and say this election in ohio is invalid?

MG: Anyone with standing to sue could go to court, it could be the Democratic party, it could be a group of voters, could be someone with some kind of oversight; when you talk about the govt, usually that would be someone on the criminal side and it would be a question of whether there is enough evidence that rises to the level of a criminal case -- then it would be a matter of either getting a county prosecutor or a US attorney

Q: How about invalidating the election? I think that's what people are concerned about, that we hear so many irregularities here that there may be enough that somebody could go and sue and say "We gotta revote or something, this didn't happen in a fair way"

MG: I think that's what this hearing is about and I think that once it's over and the attorneys who are here are able to sit down and discuss what's been said and ...
they do have affidavits signed by dozens of people downstairs, I think that determination will be made.

Q: thank you very much, etc.