An Akron man filed a complaint with the Summit County Board of Elections saying he "witnessed election judges telling potential voters that they could cast a provisional ballot at any table or precinct and if they did so, it would be counted."

Neil F. Schoenwetter Jr. was a volunteer election challenger for the Democratic Party on Nov. 2 at Copley High School, where six precincts voted.

Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from Ohio and elsewhere, has begun to look into the vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.

The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations at the request of Congress, but the agency's head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of ballot-counting complaints.

The investigation was not triggered by several House Democrats who had written the agency this month, seeking an investigation. That effort was led by senior Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, of Michigan.

Conyers yesterday said he would like the investigation to include allegations that not enough voting machines were available in some Democratic areas, such as Franklin County.

Meanwhile, attorneys for various citizen action groups that plan to contest the results said they are puzzled that vote totals in the presidential race in Warren County far exceed totals in most other statewide and countywide races.

And since it seems that Tara is reading the blog, FWIW it would be helpful to have a blog entry with a link to Dean's article of the week. I never remember which week he's published and don't always check.

LARRY DOSSEY: One of the best-kept secrets I've come across in the past few years is an organization in Salem, Oregon called Spindrift. If you look up the term "spindrift" in the dictionary it comes from an old Scottish word referring to the fuzzy spray where a wave breaks and meets the air. It's the interface between something ethereal and something concrete, which is how they chose the name. The people at Spindrift have performed experiments for over ten years, showing the ability of what they call "prayer practitioners" to make a difference in what happens in the development and metabolism of extremely simple biological systems, such as sprouting seeds and yeast cultures. They have measured the amount of carbon dioxide a yeast culture gives off to determine how active it is. One reason they don't work with human beings is that plants are much simpler. You can count sprouting beans, and do it time and time again to see if it's replicable. Beans don't change as drastically as humans. It far easier to work with yeast, sprouting beans, wheat seeds and so on. So that's what they have done. They have gone beyond showing that prayer works, and have examined the issue of which prayer strategy works best. They have tested two. The first is a directed prayer strategy, where not only do you provide God, Goddess or the Absolute with the diagnosis of the problem, but you provide the treatment too. You say, "John's got carcinoma of the lung, so make it go away." Or "Harry has a heart attack, we want to see it healed." This is the kind of petitionary prayer most of us grow up thinking is the only klind of prayer there is. But then they tested what they call a nondirected prayer strategy, which is completely open ended, and does not attach a goal to the prayer. They have several of these nondirected prayer strategies. The most famous prayer of this type is "Thy will be done." Another one they used is from the Beatles tune, "Let it be." My all-time favorite nondirected prayer strategy is the caption on the back cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog, "You can't put it together. It is together." One of the assumptions of this nondirected prayer strategy is that at some level, in some way, at some deep level of reality, things are just fine, perfect as they are. Over a decade, Spindrift has shown, and this is the bottom line, that both methods of prayer work. But working with these prayer pracitioners, they have shown that the nondirected prayer method is two to four times more powerful than the directed.

Click to read more. What I am going to put out there is that anyone who wants to take part in this say a prayer or intention or hope for Kimmy's sister on the hour as often as you are able to. Again, this is totally grasping at straws. Look at the rest of the article I linked to for description of the connection to physics and "nonlocal effects". I don't get this from my religion--it is probably blasphemous to a lot of people. But maybe "thought energy" can change things in a way we don't understand.

Any way, in my gut level feeling that this might be true, it seems like focussing the thought energy at certain times would be more effective than everyone just saying a prayer, intention, or affirmation when they think of it. So if you want to, please join me, whenever you are aware of the time and are able to, on the hour--9 p.m., 10 p.m. and so on.

Also, I have an intentions page set up here for people we are keeping in our thoughts and prayers.