WOULD YOU HIRE THESE GUYS? It's now fairly evident that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections screwed up its responsibilities in the November election to the extent that hundreds, if not thousands, of legitimate votes were not included in the total certified yesterday to the Secretary of State.

At the two-hour hearing yesterday prior to certification, the Voter Registration Coalition documented nearly 500 voters who were properly registered, showed up at the polls, but were then forced to use provisional ballots and subsequently excluded from the final count.

Nonetheless, the Board certified the results unanimously. According to the PD story, they characterized the problems with the count as "minimal".

Minimal? If you ran a company where the people in charge took orders and money from five hundred customers that you knew about (and probably lots more you didn't), failed to ship their orders, and then failed to make good on them when challenged, would you consider that a "minimal" problem? If you were one of those customers -- one who had stood in line in the rain for an hour or two to place that order -- would you consider the company's failure to deliver or rectify your order a "minimal" problem?

Board of Elections Director Michael Vu got lots of media after Election Day bragging about how well his operation performed. The reporters who carried this BS now have an obligation to go out and find some of the 500 documented disenfranchised voters, and ask them for an assessment of Vu's performance.

My assessment? Either Vu and his Board members -- Republican county chairman Robert Bennett and three others, all appointed by Bush campaign honcho Ken Blackwell -- have deliberately conspired to sideline thousands of voters in Cuyahoga County, or (more likely) they're just incompetent and irresponsible. In either case, they're unfit for their jobs and should be fired before they do any more damage.

ONE CLEVELAND, THE CITY AND WIFI: After covering the City of Cleveland's official hookup with One Cleveland last week, Chris Seper blogs:

The concept of free, citywide Wi-Fi service has slowly been de-emphasized in the evolution of OneCleveland. At first, some members used to talk of creating a vast, free Wi-Fi network that would give home access to every Clevelander. Others said they wanted to build a Wi-Fi corridor stretching from Case Western Reserve University to downtown, sprinkling large swaths of Wi-Fi access throughout the region.

At the news conference Thursday, Mayor Campbell said Wi-Fi was something Cleveland would consider down the road. When I discussed Wi-Fi proliferation with Scott Rourke, OneCleveland's president, he said his organization enables municipalities by providing wired high-speed networks but that it's up to the municipalities to determine how to use them.

Hmmm. Well, if you want to see a city taking a serious look at community-wide wifi, Philadelphia is moving right along. The mayor's Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee held a town meeting on the subject two weeks ago and put the whole two hours up as a webcast. The setting, the participants and the discussion are different from what we're used to around here -- I strongly recommend taking a peek. (The guy on the panel doing all the talking is my old friend and former co-worker Ed Schwartz of Neighborhoods Online.)

To get back to One Cleveland and our City government, Chris' blog entry has one other piece of news:

The mayor also said the city would flow high-speed service into community tech centers, which, coupled with efforts to create a standard computer literacy certification, would help raise the tech IQ of the city.

Now that's what I'm talkin about...

PUBLIC POWER PRICE DROPS... FOR NOW: My latest bill from Cleveland Public Power held a pleasant surprise. Our average kilowatt-hour cost was under ten cents... the lowest it's been since December 2000!

The bill would normally have been a little lower this month because we're back in Winter rate season. But the unexpected change was a drop in the "energy adjustment charge" -- the part of the bill that fluctuates monthly with CPP's cost of purchased power -- from four and a half cents per kwh, where it's been all Summer, to 2.7 cents. Sha-zam! My bill for about 500 kwh got $8 cheaper, and I owe CPP about 10% less than a CEI customer with the same usage.

The "EAC", which is broken out on the bill, is a very big factor in CPP's monthly charges because the system gets virtually all of its power supply from other utilities, generating only a thin margin of its own peak usage with some gas turbines. To get an idea of the scale of this cut in Public Power's EAC, take a look at this chart:


The red dot dangling at the right end of the graph line is the EAC for October. A big dropoff, yes? Sort of like the price of unleaded regular going back to $1.40 a gallon.

But just as the price of gasoline is only part of the cost of running your car, the cost of purchased power is only part of CPP's rates. Taking a cent and a half off the EAC still leaves Public Power customers paying a Winter rate of 9.7 cents a kilowatt-hour (10.9 cents in the Summer). While that's noticeably cheaper than CEI and its First Energy partners, Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, it's still more expensive than any other private or municipal electric company in Ohio.

And it probably won't last very long.

I called Public Power yesterday and asked to speak with someone who could explain why their October EAC was so much lower, and what consumers can look forward to. I ended up leaving a message for James Quayle, whose title (I think) is CPP's Deputy Commissioner for Finance. A few minutes later the phone rang. On the other end was Julius Ciaccia, the City's Public Utilities Director, along with Quayle and his boss, CPP Commissioner James Majer. I guess getting quoted in Crain's raises your profile. (Actually they seem to have asked around and were told I'm not a nut case, which is gratifying.)

I learned several things from the call, which I'll try to follow up and share, but here are the main things Quayle and Majer told me about the October price cut:

1) CPP gets its purchased power from established contracts with nine other utilities, one of which is American Electric Power. (They don't buy power on short term "spot" contracts.)

2) During the last few months, their average power cost was pushed up because electricity sales were lower than expected. Power contracts involve fixed as well as variable charges. CPP's summer contract with AEP, for example, obligates the City to pay for a certain minimum power load whether it's fully used or not. Because the summer wasn't very hot, CPP sold less electricity than it projected, so those fixed charges were distributed among fewer kilowatt-hours and had a bigger price impact than they expected. When the summer season ended in October, contract obligations lined up better with sales, CPP was able to use its cheapest sources, and the average cost came down a lot -- hence a much lower EAC on my November bill.

(Of course this doesn't explain why the EAC has been rising steadily for years -- see the "12 month running average" line on the chart above. That's a question for future discussion.)

3) The big reduction in averaqe power costs on the current bill probably won't last very long -- at least Majer and Quayle aren't willing to predict that it will. Majer said the current low EAC may last until December. After that, expect bills to rise again, though not necessarily to the record levels of the last few months.

Bottom line: My "low" Public Power bill for October probably represents the bottom end of what CPP can charge me under the current rate structure. It's going to trend up again soon. But even at the low end, while CPP is a little cheaper than CEI/First Energy, it remains one of the most expensive sources of home electricity in Ohio.

The CPP managers promised to meet with me soon to talk more about the system's rates and other issues, short and long term. I'll let you know what else I learn.

BOARD OF ELECTIONS WEBSITE: NEW CLEVELAND JOKE?

A couple of days ago I wrote something nice about the improved Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website and its rapid posting of last Tuesday's results. Well, be careful what you praise around here! Uberblogger Atrios took a look at the CCBoE's main results page, did a little math and got really confused, which has led to all kinds of mutterings about fraud, Diebold, suspect javacripts, etc. among his commenters. The word is clearly going out across blogland that the Ohio smoking gun has been found... or at least a thread that will unravel the scandal we're all looking for.

What got Atrios so confused? Well, it's the same thing that made me think that over 214,000 votes had been cast in the city of Cleveland, when I saw those results last Thursday. You see, the website says that over 214,000 ballots were cast in the city. It's only when you add up the numbers for the city wards, and find that the total is about 40,000 votes short of that 214,000, that it occurs to you that something is screwy.

In its presentation of "ballots cast" in the county's cities, villages, townships and wards, the Board has done a very strange and misleading thing -- it's posted municipal totals that are just plain wrong. And then it put a warning at the top of the page that's meant to tell you the numbers are wrong and you need to look elsewhere for the right numbers, but the warning doesn't actually say that. Here's the full text of the warning:

In even-numbered years, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections tallies absentee ballots by Congressional, House, and Senate district combinations. Because of this, the ballots cast totals for municipalities on this web page and on the summary report needs to be derived by using the following technique: For municipalities with wards, find the ballots cast total for each ward and total them. For municipalities without wards, please refer to the contest of interest on the canvass report. Absentee ballots cast totals appear separately at the end of each contest on the canvass report. If you have any questions, please contact the Board of Election’s Ballot Department Manager at (216) 443-6454.

Okay, do you have any idea what that they're talking about?

And does that "explanation" give you any clue why the Board hasn't just taken out the misleading numbers and put in the correct numbers?

Well, for whatever reason, they haven't. So when people all over the world come to our Board of Election's website for local results -- and believe me, lots of people are looking at that site -- what they find is bad information preceded by a gibberish cautionary note that says, deep down in its code, The information presented below is not to be taken seriously.

Welcome to Cleveland, Election Confusion Central. Have you heard about the time our river caught on fire?

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE... HOW THE SCHOOL LEVY LOST: The man who managed the campaign to pass Issue 112, the Cleveland school operating levy, has said some strange things to reporters since the issue's 55%-45% defeat last Tuesday. Here's how Arnold Pinkney was quoted in separate PD articles on Thursday and Saturday:

Pinkney, who ran successful school tax campaigns in 1996 and 2001, said in hindsight he would not have done anything differently. "We felt we had a strong message to the people of Cleveland," he said. "Unfortunately, they did not buy our message." (PD Nov. 4)

Pinkney had hoped a large voter turnout would help his cause, but he now thinks West Siders who came out to support a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage also opposed the school tax.

Pinkney also believes that police and firefighters in the West Park neighborhood, who faced layoffs in the last year, secretly campaigned against the tax. (PD Nov. 6)

He would not have done anything differently -- even though the campaign he ran lost. A big turnout should have helped, but those extra West Side voters turned out to be anti-gay bigots who don't like school taxes either. And there was a secret campaign against him!

Do you think this guy may be in denial?

I don't claim to know why Issue 112 failed, but the numbers make it abundantly clear how it failed. The key was not the big West Side turnout, which was on the same scale as the big East Side turnout, overwhelming supported John Kerry, and gave Issue 1 less support than the East Side. (Wards 1-10 favored the anti-gay amendment 58% to 42%, while Wards 14-21 split on it 51% to 49%, and Wards 17, 18 and 21 voted it down.)

I don't doubt that lots of police and firefighters voted against the school levy, but if they were running a secret West Side campaign it didn't have that much impact. The falloff in the Ward 14-21 "yes" percentage, compared to the 2001 school bond levy, was only about 5% -- not good for the levy, but not decisive.

What was decisive was the falloff in support on the East Side -- specifically Wards 1 through 10, which are 75% to 98% African-American and typically cast almost half the votes in Cleveland elections. In 2001 these wards supported the school bond levy, on average, by better than 80%. This year their average support for Issue 112 was only 55%. Ward 1, the biggest and highest-income, actually voted against the issue 53% to 47%.

It was this East Side retrenchment, not some unexpected outpouring of West Side anti-gays and cops, that ambushed Pinkney's campaign plan and killed the school levy.

The important question, of course, is why. As I said earlier, I don't claim to know. The easy answer is "Times are tough, voters just feel they can't afford it." And that's certainly an easy answer to believe.

Personally, I think there's more to it. But I'll save that for another day.

UNITED WE STAND: One of the few procedural improvements of this campaign season in Cleveland is the growing functionality of the Board of Elections website.

The detailed unofficial results of Tuesday's election, not yet including overseas and provisional ballots (the so-called "canvass report"), were posted yesterday. I'm going to take a look at the city and county votes from several angles over the two weeks, as we get closer to a final count (there are 25,000 provisional ballots not yet counted.) But here's a simple yet compelling fact about the city results as posted so far:

Out of 429 precincts in the City of Cleveland, not one single precinct went for George W. Bush.

Totals for votes cast at Cleveland polling places: 25,597 for Bush, 134,256 for Kerry. That's five and a half to one for Kerry, if you're keeping track.

P.S. Contrary to Wednesday's entry, I now think that the city turnout was somewhere between 190,000 and 200,000 depending on the distribution of those yet-to-be-counted provisional ballots. Cleveland ballots counted so far, including absentees, total about 180,000 -- not "more than 200,000", as earlier reports indicated. Of course this is still waaaaaay more than the 136,000 votes cast in the 2000 election... and still plenty of new voters to create a historic change in the city's political landscape.

P.P.S. There's a whole other issue about these numbers in Cuyahoga County and throughout the state: the issue of "spoiled ballots", why they don't get counted, and who would have won if they were. Read about it here.

THE DAY AFTER: About the events of the past twenty-four hours leading up to Kerry's concession, I have nothing much to add. I'm sure there's a lot more really bad news ahead for this city, the world and our country. But hey, that's why we have elections, and it sure looks like my side lost this one.

On another front, however, the Kerry/527 "epicenter campaign" has left in its wake an incredibly important change in Cleveland politics: Our voter base just grew by more than 50%.

In the 2000 Presidential election about 136,000 people voted in Cleveland.That was by far the biggest recent turnout -- until yesterday, when more than 200,000 may have cast ballots, according to the Board of Elections. (Yes, I checked this number with elections director Michael Vu personally.) That's an historic jump in the number of Clevelanders who are not just registered, but have actually voted.

How many are "likely voters" in next year's race for Mayor and Council? You can bet there are a lot of politicians and consultants pondering that question today.

GREAT EARLY TURNOUT: I'm taking a break from poll work at my neighborhood school (Denison Elementary in Cleveland Ward 15). This is normally a low to medium turnout place. This morning there was a line waiting at the door when it opened at 6:30. My own precinct had a twenty-minute wait... I was voter number 41 at 7:40, which is about twice the typical rate. And outside, I was asked at least twenty times in the first two hours, "Is this the right place to vote?" -- mostly by people who were carrying their cards from the Board of Elections.

All this despite rain. I think this is gonna be big.

P.S. Yes, there's a GOP "challenger" in the polling place (and two Dems). They're being very quiet.

KERRY AT THE TAPE? Gallup, which has been criticized for months for undercounting Democrats, released its final pre-election poll for CNN/USA Today yesterday, showing Kerry beating Bush in Ohio 50% to 46% among likely voters and 51% to 44% among all registered voters. And the Columbus Dispatch had the following:

After nearly 80 candidate visits to Ohio, untold millions spent in ads, 500 more Americans killed in Iraq and 13,300 additional jobs lost in the state, the presidential race is back to where it was seven months ago.

Dead even.

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are tied at just less than 50 percent in a new Dispatch Poll.

How close is this matchup? Kerry leads by a mere eight votes out of 2,880 ballots returned in the mail survey — the tightest margin ever in a final Dispatch Poll.

A similar survey in late March shortly after Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination put Bush ahead by 34 responses.

However, in the past four weeks Kerry has surged from a 7 percentage-point deficit into a tie with Bush. And several signs indicate the Massachusetts senator has gained the momentum in Ohio.

Kerry is ahead by 14 points among independent voters. He has a narrow lead in northwestern Ohio, the state’s most reliable bellwether media market. And he has brought black voters home, gaining 91 percent support among black respondents.

Meanwhile, the poll contains troubling signs for Bush. Only 44 percent say things in the nation are headed in the right direction. Fewer than half approve of his handling of Iraq and the economy. And his overall approval rating is 49 percent, a measure that many political experts say represents a ceiling on his support Tuesday.

But this election is so close in Ohio that the winner will be determined by which side gets its voters to the polls Tuesday, and by how the public perceives such late-breaking developments as the newly released video of Osama bin Laden. Perhaps the biggest question — aside from the effect of possible Election Day challenges at polling places — is how many of Ohio’s 1 million newly registered voters will cast ballots.

These newbies now represent one in eight Ohio voters, and they support Kerry by nearly a 2-1 margin in the poll.

One difference between the latest poll and the one published four weeks ago is the inclusion of more newly registered voters in the sample, whose names were in the latest available data from the secretary of state’s office. About 88 percent of the new voters — including those from Ohio’s largest counties — were among the potential poll participants.