I'm a cuyahoga county absentee voter, and I actually bothered to read the instructions on how to vote in the booklet, and the instructions said to follow the numbers.
see this post here on the ballot instructions

In short, this appears to be just another example of the poor organization and management of Cuyahoga County and its electoral board.

It's almost certainly a Democrat-run Board of Elections, but the latest updates on Power Line make it clear it's a matter of incompetence, not design.

But let's not forget the 30,000-odd invalid registrations submitted by Democrat-supporting groups, or the attempt to let people vote at any precinct, any number of times.

Hey guys, I posted to this over at http://acepilots.com/mt/

The truth is that every absentee ballot rotates the name at the top so that no one candidate is always first. No conspiracy. Someone please tell Spoons. My ballot had Bush/Cheney on top and Kerry/Edwards on bottom. They even rotated the two other candidates.

I love a "gotcha" on the Dems as much as the next girl but this is seeing a tree without the forest.

Cuyahoga County voter for the GOP -Gail in Ohio

Hey, American Republicans. Maybe you do need some U. N. election observers. To make sure the election doesn't get stolen. By the Democrats.

HahaHaHa! Just yankin' your chain, boys. Don't send me billions of f.o. emails.

I don't doubt Gail's description of the ballot, but how would you count the votes? Once the card is separated from the ballot, how would you know which hole/number matched up with which candidate? With a punch-card ballot like this, the machine reads which hole is open and records the number.

A much simpler explanation (remember Occam's Razor) is that the ballot is mis-printed. The 2 lines up with 12 and the 4 lines up with 14. In both cases, the 1 was left off. Visual inspection shows that, had the disqualified candidate been on the ballot, the arrow would have pointed to 8. The candidates are in order by name of their party:

Democratic - 6
Other (Disqualified) - 8
Other - 10
Other - 12
Republican - 14

Note the pattern.

I think too much is being made of this. It was a mis-print and no one bothered to inspect the ballots when they came from the printer. Here, we use the same type ballot adn, during the spring primaries, our ballots came in with a whole race missing. Fortunately, our election commission inspected the ballots and caught it in time to have it fixed before the election.

Oh man, I was so afraid of that - on top of it all, being bloody ramadan - a friggin holy month that only makes things worse for Bush even though things would still be the same over there with or without him, I have a great fear that if the democrats win this election, we are going to need more than hip boots to get through it. I am not kidding; this is a real fear of mine. God I wish it were over.

~C

C'mon, guys, it sounds really lame when the GOP accuses the Dems of trying to "steal" votes, states, or the election.

Standard operating procedure for most things political -- for the Dems anyways -- is to immediately level a counter-accusation. This sounds, coming from the other side of the aisle, like a tit-for-tat sorta thing. We need something else which sounds less hysterical, like "voting fraud".

The Dems have been screaming about a "stolen" election for 4 years, now, so the word "stolen" will likely fall on deaf ears to those on the fence.

This is a hoax. An above post notes that the number one is missing before the 2 and the 4 of two of the candidates marks. Close inspection of the image shows that the digital image has been altered to remove the number 1 to make this ballot appear bad. Look at it the image. You can see the graphic artifacts where the one used to be.