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Articles begin November 1, 2004.
Republicans can’t win straight up on the issues, because their policies
are inimical to the best interests of 99% of Americans. To win, they have to
cheat.
PR Newswire
RNC in Blatant Violation of Court Consent Decree, Says Advancement Project
10/27/2004 8:41:00 PM
NEWARK, N.J., Oct. 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, Advancement Project submitted a motion to intervene, reopen, and enforce the Consent Decrees reached in the case of DNC v. RNC.
For more than twenty years, the Republican National Committee has repeatedly operated so-called "ballot security programs" that have sought to suppress and intimidate African-Americans and other minorities from exercising their constitutional right to vote. These illegal schemes have been previously enjoined by the Federal Court in the case of DNC v. RNC. The Decree in that case prohibits the RNC from implementing any "ballot security program" without prior court approval. That lawsuit, brought in 1981, resulted in a nationwide injunction against the RNC that is still in effect today.
"The RNC has consistently sought to cloak its discriminatory efforts to suppress the minority vote in a law enforcement guise," said Judith Browne, acting co-director, Advancement Project. "Such "racial profiling" of the electorate is itself illegal. The Consent Decree in RNC v. DNC permanently enjoins the RNC from implementing any "ballot security program" without prior court approval."
The Republican Party and Republican candidates have already designated an unprecedented number of poll watchers for the November election. Moreover, Republicans have detailed these poll watchers disproportionately to predominantly African American counties…
Republicans can’t win straight up on the issues, so they try to intimidate
people into not voting.
Associated Press
Judge Rules Polling Place Challengers Unconstitutional
Mon, Nov 01, 2004
A federal court judge rules that partisan challengers at polling locations is unconstitional [sic], NewsChannel5 reported.
The judge was asked to stop more than 3,000 Republicans who are planning to monitor polling places and challenge voters.
Two civil rights activists asked U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott to issue an emergency restraining order barring partisan challengers from polling stations in all 88 Ohio counties.
The attorneys said the Republican challengers intend to intimidate newly registered black voters…
Republicans can’t win straight up on the issues, so they deface the signs
of the opposition and promote lies about their opponent. Stolen honor, indeed!
Tamara K
Associated Press, posted at Law.com
Justice Thomas Says He'd Prefer Not to Decide Another Election Lawsuit
John Hanna, The Associated
Press
11-01-2004
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Thursday he would prefer not to face another election-related lawsuit, but defended the high court's decision to get involved in the contentious dispute over the 2000 presidential vote in Florida.
"What are you supposed to do when somebody brings a lawsuit?" Thomas asked University of Kansas law students. "You hear people say the Supreme Court jumped into the last election. I find it very ironic that the very people saying judges are interfering are bringing lawsuits."
"What do you think? Donald Duck is going to decide it?"
When asked about the prospect of more litigation over the 2004 vote, Thomas said, "I would prefer not to have to decide it, but that joins a long list of things," adding: "It's my job."…
[Thomas displays the exact problem with Republican judicial appointments. What he was supposed to have done in 2000 was exactly what the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals did. They properly refused to review Bush v. Gore. It was a state issue, not a federal issue, and Thomas and Scalia, Bush’s named models for any appointments he might make to the Supreme Court, went against every principle they had every expressed by taking the case. Vincent Bugliosi called them criminals. Alan Dershowitz said they broke their judicial oath by making a decision for a particular person, instead of for a principle of law.—Caro]
Salon.com
"Nobody should have to go through so much to vote"
A poll watcher reports from the grueling, sunbaked front lines of a
poor Dade County voting station.
- -
- - - - - - - - - -
By Gail Williams
Nov. 1, 2004 | I'm deeply inspired by the African-American voters here in Florida. And angry at how hard it is to vote, due to horrific waiting times.
It's Monday morning. I'm very tired already, and due back volunteering soon. My group of four friends down here to monitor the voting process is in danger of burnout before Election Day, and we intend to pace ourselves today. I'm going to just blurt out some stream of consciousness notes before we go.
Saturday we were at North Dade Regional Library. Voters here are overwhelmingly African-American. Hot sunny day, with a line out onto the sidewalk. Standing in the hot sun, surrounded by a cacophony of bullhorns. We wore NAACP-Election Protection shirts and handed out voter bill of rights sheets with instructions about need for identification, right to vote if you are in line when the polls close, and more. Voters are leaving the building satisfied that everything was smooth. Only one man complains to us about the small number of machines, and fills out one of our forms.
We're concerned about the lack of water, and especially about the heat for curbside handicapped voters waiting to vote. We hear a few expressions of lack of trust about the machines. Two people told me that if this is stolen there will be revolution -- "a worldwide riot will break out."
A man sings "We Shall Overcome" through a bullhorn. When voters came out they said it went fine, and thanked us for being there, shining a light on the process. References to the civil rights movement are the theme of the day…
The New York Times
Published: November 2, 2004
Florida's early polling was designed to make voting easier, but enormous voter turnout swamped the limited number of early polling sites. Over the weekend, people in some polling places had to stand in line for four, five, even six hours, often in the hot sun. Some of them - African-Americans in particular - surely suspected that those lines were so long because officials wanted to make it hard for them to vote. Yet they refused to be discouraged or intimidated.
Here's what a correspondent from Florida wrote to Joshua Marshall, of talkingpointsmemo.com: "To see people coming out - elderly, disabled, blind, poor; people who have to hitch rides, take buses, etc. - and then staying in line for hours and hours and hours ... Well, it's humbling. And it's awesome. And it's kind of beautiful."
Yes, it is. I always get a little choked up when I go to the local school to cast my vote. The humbleness of the surroundings only emphasizes the majesty of the process: this is democracy, America's great gift to the world, in action.
But over the last few days I've been seeing pictures from Florida that are even more majestic. They show long lines of voters, snaking through buildings and on down the sidewalk: citizens patiently waiting to do their civic duty. Those people still believe in American democracy; and because they do, so do I…
[I]t's already clear that the people of Florida - and, I believe, America as a whole - have refused to give in to cynicism and spin…
Talking Points Memo
The final Fox News poll -- with calls on Saturday and Sunday only -- has Kerry over Bush 48% to 46% among likely voters. Among registered voters it's Kerry 47%, Bush 45%. Among those who've already voted, it's Kerry 48%, Bush 43%.
Fox has been releasing not a tracking poll, but a new poll every day for the last four days: Friday, Bush +5; Saturday Bush +2; Sunday, tied; Monday, Kerry +2.
-- Josh Marshall
St. Petersburg Times, FL
By HOWELL
RAINES
Published October 31, 2004
If George Bush wins the presidential election, Americans can mark it down as a triumph of thug politics. If John Kerry wins, as I believe he will, that conversely will not mean that thug politics will be finished as the dominant style of modern American presidential campaigns…
By thug politics, I mean the tireless repetition of misleading "facts" designed to depict an opponent as personally despicable and, in regard to governance, dangerous to the physical and spiritual life of the nation.
Certainly, campaigning of this rough sort has a root system that reaches back to earlier outbreaks of ignorance, nativism and intolerance in American politics. But starting with the Reagan campaign of 1980, thug politics has developed in such a way as to deserve classification as the distinctive style of an era..
[T]he "anything-to-win" mentality, while always a feature of hard-fought democratic elections, has been perfected by the Bush family into a monumentally amoral strategic doctrine…
[E]ven if the Bush family dynasty gets chopped off at this last, best chance, the underlying dynamics that created this historical moment - religion run amok, informational decay in the mass media and in the appetites of its audience, a campaign environment of insulting irrationality - will still be in place…
Howell Raines is the former executive editor of the New York Times and former political editor of the St. Petersburg Times.
My letter to the editor regarding the column above
I’m amazed that Howell Raines isn’t begging for forgiveness from the American people for the part The New York Times played in putting the Bush thug in office in 2000.
Raines was editorial page editor during the campaign and the election’s aftermath, but you’d think he’d have had some influence on the editors in charge of the reporters who ran rampant to turn Al Gore into a devilish liar and to make a saint of George Bush.
Kit Seelye, not content with printing over and over again the many lies made up by the Bush oppo research team about Al Gore being a liar, made up some of her own. And so did Rick Berke. Meanwhile, Frank Bruni drank the Kool-Aid provided by the Bush campaign, causing him to tell Americans that Bush was some kind of amiable bumbler.
On my website, The New York Times is known as the
Liar of Record.
http://makethemaccountable.com/podvin/media/031208_TheLiarOfRecord.htm
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Republicans can’t win straight up on the issues, so they intimidate people
trying to vote.
Reuters
Court OKs Voter Challengers at Ohio Polls
Tue, Nov 02, 2004
BY LISA CORNWELL, Associated Press Writer
CINCINNATI - A federal appeals court has cleared the way for challengers to be present at polling places throughout Ohio, ruling early Tuesday that their presence on Election Day was allowed under state law…
The Supreme Court helps the Republicans intimidate voters.
Associated Press, posted at the Miami Herald
Posted on Tue, Nov. 02, 2004
Justice declines to block election challengers in Ohio
WASHINGTON - Partial text of order by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens refusing to block election challengers in Ohio.
"While I have the power to grant the relief requested, I decline to do so for prudential reasons. "…
But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
AlterNet.org
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted November 2, 2004.
Tuesday's vote should be the highest turnout in decades. But Americans are now realizing that Florida in 2000 was no fluke, but a broader reflection of voting in America. Indeed, the U.S. has a deeply decentralized, fragmented and compromised system of voting – where Republicans can challenge new voters in key states because basic voting rights are not enshrined.
But there is an even bigger obstacle – and this is critical in the rush to Election Day – and that is realizing the current Supreme Court does not believe in voting rights in the way most Americans assume.
As voting rights scholar and activist attorney Jamin Raskin points out in his recent book, "Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. the American People," the current court does not believe in the principle of "one person, one vote." Instead it has a decade-long record, in case after case – culminating in their 2000 decision to stop the Florida recount and make George W. Bush president – of disenfranchising voters, limiting the right to vote and making political representation harder for minorities. As Raskin writes, "Behind Bush v. Gore lies a thick and unprincipled jurisprudence, hostile to popular democracy and protective of race privilege and corporate power."
Raskin persuasively argues that this Supreme Court has subverted the very democratic principles that millions of new voters believe await them: the right to vote, participate, have access to the ballot, and faith their vote will count. Indeed, in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court wrote, "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote" in presidential elections (Bush, 531 U.S. at 104) Moreover, in Bush v. Gore, the court was emphatic that state legislatures have the power to bypass the popular vote and select presidential electors. "The State legislature's power to select the manner of appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself." (Bush, 531 U.S. at 104)…
Sometimes the Republicans go way overboard in their hatred of democracy.
Palm Beach Post
Deputy tackles, arrests journalist for photographing voters
By Jane Daugherty
Palm Beach Post Staff
Writer
Monday, November 01, 2004
A widely published investigative journalist was tackled, punched and arrested Sunday afternoon by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy who tried to confiscate his camera outside the elections supervisor's headquarters.
About 600 people were standing in line waiting to vote early when James S. Henry was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of waiting voters about 3:30 p.m. outside the main elections office on Military Trail near West Palm Beach.
A sheriff's spokesman and a county attorney later said the deputy was enforcing a newly enacted rule from Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore prohibiting reporters from interviewing or photographing voters lined up outside the polls.
But the arrest drew expressions of outrage from a leading Florida civil liberties expert — and even from one of LePore's fellow county election supervisors…
WAY overboard.
Argus Leader, Sioux Falls, SD
Judge orders GOP to halt poll tactics
Mike Madden, Argus Leader Washington Bureau
published: 11/2/2004
Daschle sues to stop 'intimidation' of Indians
Republican poll workers in Lake Andes were intimidating Native American voters on Monday, a federal judge ruled early today.
Republicans may not write down license plate numbers or follow Native Americans from polling places during today's election, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol ruled in a temporary restraining order.
The ruling comes after Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle sued his opponent, John Thune, and the GOP in federal court in Sioux Falls on Monday, asking Piersol to stop what Democrats say was intimidation of voters.
"This ruling will hopefully ensure that every legitimate voter can vote free of intimidation on Election Day," said Daschle spokesman Dan Pfeiffer…
Miami Herald
Posted on Mon, Nov. 01, 2004
Republicans lose 11th-hour suit challenging Broward voter rolls
By ERIKA BOLSTAD AND SARA OLKON
With less than 12 hours before the polls open, Republicans laid the groundwork for a possible legal challenge to the presidential election with an eleventh-hour lawsuit questioning the accuracy of the voting rolls in Broward County, the most heavily Democratic county in Florida.
In an emergency court hearing that ended at 8:30 tonight, Broward County Circuit Judge David Krathen ruled that the suit was groundless and he didn't want to ``micromanage the election.''
The suit, filed late Monday, argued that inaccuracies in the county's voting rolls will raise the possibility of fraud and double voting.
The party also challenged Broward County's procedures for poll watchers, saying that they keep Republicans from adequately monitoring the polls for people who are registered more than once, or who are ineligible to vote because they are felons.
''We haven't really seen the level of disparity in application of the law, or failure to follow it as we have in Broward County,'' said Hayden Dempsey, a former top aide to Gov. Jeb Bush who is now heading up the Bush-Cheney campaign team of lawyers in Florida. ``In our experience over the last two weeks it appears election laws and procedures have not been implemented on an even basis.''
Republican Party of Florida officials denied that their lawsuit was designed to interrupt voting in heavily Democratic Broward County…
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Election Day has its (dirty) tricks, too
By Richard Byrne Reilly
Thursday, October
28, 2004
Somebody is campaigning hard to confuse Allegheny County voters ahead of Election Day.
At the Ross Park Mall, for example, people are distributing leaflets printed on bogus, but official-looking, county stationery telling Republicans to vote Tuesday, Nov. 2, and Democrats to wait a day.
The election will be over on Nov. 3.
The fliers have succeeded in spreading confusion, and county officials spent parts of Wednesday fielding phone calls from residents…
Daily Kos
Which is more credible: exit polls or Diebold?
by
Alexander
Wed Nov 3rd, 2004 at 04:47:41 GMT
What is puzzling everyone at the moment is the discrepancy between the exit polls and the votes that are being reported. The way the pundits are framing this issue is: what went wrong with the exit polls?
But what reasons do we actually have for thinking the exit polls were wrong? Previously, exit polls have reflected fairly closely the finally recorded vote. (On MSNBC, I heard Matthews suggesting that Republicans not liking to talk to pollsters explained the discrepancy: that's a new one to me.)
The technology of exit polling has not changed. There has been a change in voting technology, however -- namely, electronic voting machines. Neither electronic voting machines nor exit polls leave a paper trail. (Actually, exit polls do leave a paper trail, but it has no legal import.) So why should we believe electronic voting machines more than exit polls?
Associated Press
Ohio May See Court Battle Over Election
Wed, Nov 03, 2004
By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Ohio emerged as the likely setting for another overtime presidential court fight, with the focus this time on tens of thousands of uncounted ballots cast by people who would otherwise have been turned away from the polls.
Lawyers for President Bush boarded a plane in Washington before dawn, bound for Ohio. They will join hundreds of Republicans lawyers already there.
Democrats have thousands of lawyers in Ohio already, and held off sending any of their trained "SWAT teams" of election lawyers, a precaution this year because of the close presidential race and the bitter memory of the 36-day recount battle in Florida in 2000.
Trailing in the Electoral College count, the Kerry campaign did not concede the election. "Tonight, we are keeping our word, and we will fight for every vote," vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards said.
Election law specialists said either side could file lawsuits Wednesday to try to get the best footing for evaluating and counting provisional ballots…
International Herald Tribune
Not a simple election, global vote monitors say
Earlier title: Global monitors find faults
By Thomas Crampton
International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said…
Wired
Watchdogs Spot E-Vote Glitches
By Kim Zetter
06:21 PM Nov. 02, 2004 PT
The jury is still out on e-voting machines used in the election but reports collected by late Tuesday evening by election watchdogs seem to contradict assurances by voting company representatives that the election should "put to rest the unreasonable suspicion" about e-voting machines.
The National Protection Coalition, composed of several nonpartisan groups that include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Verified Voting, reported Tuesday afternoon it had received more than 600 calls from voters complaining about problems with e-voting machines around the country.
A separate group, Common Cause, reported receiving 50,000 calls, though not all of them were related to voting technology. Both groups had established toll-free phone lines for voters to report problems…
David Dill, a founder of Verified Voting and Stanford computer scientist, said although the reports might not appear to be statistically significant -- given that more than 100,000 touch-screen machines are being used in 29 states this year -- they raise questions about the number of problems that are not being caught or reported.
"We're only receiving a small percentage of (reports) on the problems that are actually out there," Dill said. "Most voters wouldn't be motivated to call in and complain and may not know about the number for calling."
Cohn said most voters, if they report problems at all, tend to report them to election officials. She said election officials have been "stingy" in the past about sharing that information with lawyers and watchdog groups…
Moderate Independent
A FIXED ELECTION, A FAILED PARTY, AND A FIRED UP MODERATE INDEPENDENT
by Thomas J. Bico
From the Republican Party Website, posted the day before the election…
“Before the day is out, Democrat lawyers will begin to argue that all provisional ballots should be counted… If they are successful in keeping the polls open in Democrat precincts and eliminating traditional safeguards… Democrat lawyers will effectively… give John Kerry the advantage.”
When the UN monitors international elections, the way they determine if the election process is credible or fraudulent is to take exit polls and compare the actual results to those of the exit poll.
Exit polls in America have always been accurate, confirming that our elections are fair and honest – except in the last two elections in which President Bush was involved.
The non-M/I media, of course, will not raise the obvious question as to what is wrong with this picture. All last night, this question was not raised once, while the question of should we actually count all votes was pushed again and again.
Now, take all of the above to heart, and then look at the memo posted on the RNC’s website the day before the election. It is what is called a pre-emptive strike, such as when Arnold ran for Governor and launched his campaign on the Tonight Show by saying, “They are going to call me a womanizer.” He knew he was a womanizer, so he was attacking those who would point this out first, trying to turn the tables on them, making it as if they are doing something wrong. It is a desperate, amoral ploy that those who wish to get away with something heinous use.
Enter the RNC memo. It is the pre-emptive defense of a party that knew they were up to something that might be challenged. (see: Statement From RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke On Anticipated Kerry-Edwards and Democrat Election Day Litigation Strategy) …
Let’s see, now. The exit polls were “wrong” in 2000. The exit polls were
“wrong” in 2002. The exit polls were “wrong” in 2004. Are you starting to see
a pattern here?
Agence France Presse
'Blogs' embarrassed by misleading poll data in US vote
Thu Nov 4, 1:44 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Internet "blogs" ended up with egg on their faces this week after releasing early exit-poll data from Tuesday's vote suggesting John Kerry was on his way to a victory against George W. Bush.
Blogs, short for web logs, are online diaries, became a major phenomenon in the 2004 campaign. But the mistakes, while not of the magnitude of the 2000 election fiasco, opened a debate over the credibility of the sites and of the exit polls being used.
Although the preliminary exit poll data were not widely used by television networks and other mainstream media, the misleading news spread like wildfire and even prompted a selloff late in the day Tuesday on Wall Street when it appeared Bush was in trouble…
Greg Palast
Kerry Won.
Here are the Facts.
excerpted from
TomPaine.com
Thursday, November 4, 2004
by Greg Palast
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
Whose Votes Are Discarded?
And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned…
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.
Common Dreams News Center
Published on Saturday,
November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling…
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies…
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush…
I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
You betcha!
Wired News
House Dems Seek Election Inquiry
By Kim Zetter
04:38 PM Nov. 05, 2004 PT
Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.
The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.
There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.
Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.
In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."…
I kept wondering why Bush and Cheney never broke a sweat, no matter how
bad things got before the election. They knew something we didn’t know—that
machines were rigged to ensure their win.
consortiumnews.com
Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
November 9, 2004
George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.
While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.
Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.
By comparison, in 2000, Bush’s Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans…
Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across the country – especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.
Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually inconceivable.
“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”…
If Bush’s totals weren’t artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.
In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004…
[W]here did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?...
From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear – maximize Bush’s support among social and economic conservatives – including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives – and turn them out by driving up Kerry’s negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry’s leadership credentials.
This strategy emerged from Rove’s estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.
But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush’s 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.
Altogether, Bush’s new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush’s performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas…
Bush took turnout throughout the state to a new level, testing the bounds of statistical probability by winning votes seemingly from every corner of the state, from the panhandle to the Gulf Coast, from the I-4 corridor to the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville to Miami…
While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations.
Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much hope of quelling these rising suspicions.
Steve Bradenton
Suspicion abounds.
Suspicious results in Florida counties
Suspicious results at the state level
Berkeley Daily Planet
Another Stolen Election: By JAMES K. SAYRE
COMMENTARY (11-09-04)
The exit polls that showed a sweeping victory for Sen. Kerry on Nov. 2 were right. Unfortunately, the 2004 presidential election was cleanly stolen by Bush & Co. How, you say? With the help of Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC, four interlocked secretive right-wing electronic voting machine manufacturers. We have entrusted the most important election task, that of actually counting and tabulating the vote totals to extremist organizations with secret proprietary vote-counting computer software with no auditable paper trail for hand recounts. How very convenient, how very clean, how very slick and with all the evidence of election rigging is buried deep on their computer hard drives.
Sen. Kerry won a landslide victory by between two million and five million votes. The pre-election public opinion polls pointed to a large and growing Kerry election day majority and the election day exit polls also indicated a Kerry victory. Unfortunately, theocratic extremely right-wing computer election machine manufacturing corporations were in charge of “counting” the votes of millions and millions of Americans. Some how, a few million Kerry votes didn’t get counted and a few million bogus Bush votes showed up in the final election tallies and voila, a Bush “victory.”
Democracy in 21st century America has been kidnapped and destroyed by extreme right-wing control of the new secret computerized electronic vote counting systems. Verifiable hand-counted paper ballots are the only way to restore legitimate elections in America…
The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were both stolen by Bush & Co. The 2008 and 2012 presidential elections will suffer the same fate unless we institute a complete and total return to traditional, verifiable hand-counted paper election ballots.
The Republican Party will never lose another presidential election as long as we allow their corporate buddies to “count” our votes in secret.
Diebold Variations
DemocraticUnderground.com
TruthIsAll
To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe...
1- That the exit polls were WRONG...
2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
3- That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
4- The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.
5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)
6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)
7- That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.
8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.
9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.
10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.
11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.
12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.
13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election.
Help America Recount!
If the Politicians and the Parties Won't Do It, America's Citizens Will!
WEDNESDAY NOV 10, Washington D.C. -- Consumer groups rallying citizens for recounts in Ohio, Florida; voters can fund audits of Ohio and court challenges in Florida by donating to HelpAmericaRecount.org, a 527 tax exempt organization set up exclusively for recount funding.
Getting out the vote is good, but getting a 123 percent turnout is too good to be true. This happened in Fairview Park, Ohio. In Broward County, Florida, voting machines can do the moon walk: They count back-wards, but only on certain ballot measures…
As hundreds of anomalies pop up, citizens are thinking:
Who really won? Don’t know. Gotta audit!
Black Box Voting, a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection group for elections, has been investigating election irregularities for two years. The group has honed in on voting machines, citing problems with internal audit logs, tamperability, improper testing and certification, and bogus results. The National Ballot Integrity Project is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that has approached voting machines from another angle. The organization lobbies for transparency and public accountability in election systems. Both groups are now calling for citizen-initiated recounts. To fund these recounts, BlackBoxVoting.org and the National Ballot Integrity Project have formed a separate, 527 organization, the Help America Recount Fund.
Ralph Nader, who earned notoriety for decades as a consumer protection advocate, just wants to know the truth. How accurate are the Diebold voting machines in New Hampshire?...
OF COURSE they want to end exit polls. That’s the only check we have on
the reasonableness of the “official” vote count.
BuzzFlash.com
November 10, 2004
As a BuzzFlash Reader said: "Gee, let's make it REALLY easy to cheat..."
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct.
GOP Wants News Organizations to Abandon Exit Polls
(subscription req'd)
By Doug Halonen, TVWeek.com
After early exit polls in Tuesday's election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.
In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. "I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession -- look at the precincts and the turnout, see who's turning out to vote," Mr. Gillespie said. "Don't build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be."
Mr. Gillespie conceded that the exit polls weren't reported directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we're kidding ourselves, aren't we, to think that everybody in America doesn't know what the exit data is showing?" he said…
[Kidding ourselves? Yes, we certainly are.—Caro]
The Black Commentator
Massive irregularities in the November 2 presidential vote count “will probably lead to congressional hearings in the Committee on the Judiciary,” predicts Rep. John Conyers, the committee’s ranking Democrat and longest sitting member of the Congressional Black Caucus. If tampering is found, said the Detroit lawmaker, “there will be prosecutions” under federal law…
But first, Rep. Conyers and five congressional colleagues have to make sure the evidence doesn’t disappear quicker than John Kerry’s projected lead in the exit polls…
The corporate media, who disavowed their own exit polls when the numbers came out “wrong” (Kerry leading) on Election Day, are institutionally invested in the legitimacy of George Bush’s presidency. “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2,” wrote Bev Harris, head of Black Box Voting and veteran mover-and-shaker on the dangers of electronic ballots…
If Conyers can expand and maintain his congressional Coalition of the Unwilling through to the hearings that he is entitled by rank to conduct, even the craven corporate media will find it difficult to dismiss the “conspiracy theorists.” Literally hundreds of reporters are aware in detail of the real conspiracy – the late night decision to validate the craziest election numbers in modern times – and some of them have a conscience…
[T]he true engines of resistance to Bush’s crime accompli are the grassroots investigators, technicians and numbers crunchers busily in search of patterns of anomalies in the corrupted election returns – numbers that should not be there – and answers to how the tallies might have been engineered. These are the people who will craft the technical indictment against the Bush men. Bev Harris is at the center of the rebellion. On Monday she renewed her call for “lawyers, computer people, statisticians” and “funds to pay for copies of the evidence.”…
David Swanson, former spokesman for the Dennis Kucinich presidential campaign and now media coordinator for the AFL-CIO associated International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), notes that
“the exit polls were accurate within their margin of error in many states but were surprisingly far off in a number of swing states, and always off in the same direction, showing more support for Kerry than was found in the official counts. Warren Mitofsky, co-director of the National Election Pool, told the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that ‘Kerry was ahead in a number of states by margins that looked unreasonable to us.’ Mitofsky speculated that perhaps more Kerry voters were willing to participate in the exit poll, but did not suggest any reason for that speculation other than the difference between the exit polls and the final counts.”
As Swanson says, it’s all “circular reasoning” – an attempt to avoid the obvious, and all the more maddeningly ironic since, by [Republican strategist] Dick Morris’s reasoning, Mitofsky is the guy best-placed to “rig” the exit polls in Kerry’s favor. Instead, he ordered them shut down, for presidential choice purposes. Swanson’s article cites University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven F. Freeman, whose November 9 study of the exit poll and official tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania finds the figures totally incompatible. “The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is in the order of one-in-a-million. The odds of all three occurring together are 250 million to one,” the MIT Ph.D calculated…
The digital vote tricksters are the same people who created a day-long Hell for voters in the mostly Black Broward County, Florida precinct where Marsha Johnson, an African American attorney from New York City, was assigned as a voter protection volunteer:
”I saw an incompetent poll clerk telling approximately 1 in every 5 registered voters (who voted at the very same polling place last year and who's voter registration cards indicated that they were at the correct polling site) that they had mysteriously been ‘reassigned’ to other sites but failing to tell them where to go, or worse, giving them incorrect information.”
And so on, at thousands of locations, thefts of awesome dimensions and howling arrogance – the humiliation of African Americans in order to secure George Bush another chance to destroy the planet…
Richard Nixon didn’t personally plan the Watergate break-in – his subordinates did. However, two years of lying about the crime so thoroughly discredited Tricky Dick that he found it necessary to resign. We at bc doubt that George Bush knew the details of his henchmen’s high- and low-tech election crime wave – why would anybody tell that fool anything? – and we would be surprised if the evidence pattern reveals enough purloined votes to reverse the results of November 2. But fixing elections is a crime, and covering up a crime is a bigger felony, as Nixon’s crew discovered. If Conyers and Bev Harris and squadrons of citizens run their show right, we may at least look forward to four years of a once-again “illegitimate” Bush presidency. With luck, we might even send Karl Rove to prison…
Click here for the full article.
consortiumnews.com
Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis
By Sam Parry
November 12, 2004
The Washington Post and the big media have spoken: Questions about Nov. 2 voting irregularities and George W. Bush’s unusual vote tallies are just the ravings of Internet conspiracy theorists.
In a Nov. 11 story on A2, the Post gave the back of its hand to our story about Bush’s statistically improbable vote totals in Florida and elsewhere. While agreeing with our analysis that Bush pulled off the difficult task of winning more votes in Florida than the number of registered Republicans, the Post accuses us of overlooking the obvious explanation that many independents, “Dixiecrats” and other Democrats voted for Bush.
Mocking us as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists,” Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating signaled their determination to put questions about Bush’s victory outside the bounds of responsible debate. Yet, if they hadn’t been so set in this agenda, they might have avoided sloppy mistakes and untrue assertions.
In an example of their slipshod reporting, Roig-Franzia and Keating state that we focused our data analysis on rural counties in Florida. They suggest that Bush’s gains in these rural counties might be explained by the greater appeal of son-of-the-South Al Gore in 2000 than Bostonian John Kerry in 2004.
But we didn’t focus on rural counties in Florida. Rather we looked at the vote tallies statewide and zeroed in on Bush’s performance in the larger, more metropolitan counties of southern and central Florida, where Bush got the vast majority of his new votes over his state totals in 2000.
It was in these large counties where Bush’s new totals compared most surprisingly with new voter registration because Democrats did a much better job in many of these counties of registering new voters…
Historically, increases like those Bush registered throughout Florida and across much of the country occur when there are huge swings in voting patterns caused by national landslides [which 2004 was not]…
While Bush’s totals are not statistically impossible, they do raise eyebrows. Our question was: where did these gains come from? We are not claiming that the surprising numbers are evidence of fraud, but we do believe the tallies deserve an honest and independent review.
It also should be the job of journalists to probe questions as significant as the integrity of the U.S. voting system, not to simply belittle those who raise legitimate questions. The fact that Internet journals and blogs are doing more to examine these concerns than wealthy news organizations like the Washington Post is another indictment of the nation’s mainstream press…
Where in the hell are the Democrats?
Hardball, MSNBC
November 11, 2004| 6:15 p.m. ET
Ohio— The recount of 2004 (David Shuster)
This afternoon, I spoke with Blair Bobier, the attorney/spokesman for David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 candidate for President. Bobier confirms that the press release floating on the net is legitimate. The Green Party is combining forces with the Libertarian Party to seek a statewide election recount in Ohio.
Unlike Florida in 2000, Ohio's recount rules are straightforward and specific. Once the Ohio vote is certified, which I'm told could happen as early as next week, the Green/Libertarian group will have five days to file a formal application for statewide recount. In addition, the group must then deposit $10 for every precinct to be recounted.
Based on the number of precincts in Ohio, a statewide recount will cost the Green/Libertarian group about $110,000. However, the group expects to raise that money "rather easily" within the next few days.
Once the recount application has been filed, the recount itself must begin within 10 days. So, expect to see the formal recount kick-off in early December…
Washington Post
Worst Voter Error Is Apathy Toward Irregularities
By Donna Britt
Friday, November
12, 2004; Page B01
Is anyone surprised that accusations of voter disenfranchisement and irregularities abound after the most passionately contested presidential campaign in memory? Is anybody stunned that the mainstream media appear largely unconcerned?
To many people's thinking, too few citizens were discouraged from voting to matter. Those people would suggest that not nearly enough votes for John Kerry were missed or siphoned away to overturn President Bush's win. To which I'd respond:
Excuse me -- I thought this was America.
Informed that I was writing about voter disenfranchisement, a Democratic friend admitted, "I'm trying not to care about that." I understand. Less than two weeks after a bruising election in a nation in which it's unfashionable to overtly care about anything, it's annoying of me even to notice.
But citizens who insist, election after election, that each vote is sacred and then shrug at hundreds of credible reports that honest-to-God votes were suppressed and discouraged aren't just being hypocritical…
Greg Palast
KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE
BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.
By Greg Palast
This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.
The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots…
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted…
Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House…
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.
But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted…
Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes … but that won't happen.
Sutton Impact
Associated Press, posted at USA Today
Posted 11/12/2004 12:15 PM
Kerry campaign lawyers checking Ohio vote
Lawyers with John Kerry's presidential campaign are in Ohio on what they describe as a "fact-finding mission" following the Democrat's election loss to President Bush last week.
Dan Hoffheimer, the statewide counsel for the Kerry campaign, said they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted.
"We're not expecting to change the outcome of the election," Hoffheimer said.
In unofficial returns, Bush outpolled Kerry by 136,000 votes in Ohio.
Hoffheimer said the goal is to identify any voting problems and quell doubts about the legitimacy of the Ohio election being raised on the Internet.
He said the Kerry campaign has compiled a list of more than 30 questions for local election officials. They are asking about the number of absentee and provisional ballots, any reports of equipment malfunctions on election night and any ballots that still listed third-party challenger Ralph Nader as a candidate…
From the Moonie-owned, Bush-loving UPI, posted at the Moonie-owned,
Bush-loving
Washington Times
Major bugs found in Diebold vote systems
Washington, DC, Nov. 12 (UPI) -- The voting machine controversy likely will linger after a look at the systems source code software from Ohio-based Diebold yielded reports of numerous bugs.
Diebold was one of three companies -- including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia -- that provided updated technology for the 2004 election.
Computer Science Professor Avi Rubin of John Hopkins University analyzed Diebold's 47,609 lines of code and found it uses an encryption key that was hacked in 1997 and no longer is used in secure programs.
Rubin said Diebold has said it repaired the security flaws in subsequent programs, but that the company has not produced the code for analysis.
Diebold did return a call for comment…
OpEdNews
This is amazing and very hopeful! Bev Harris http://www.blackboxvoting.org and Ralph Nader had a press conference in DC today. They have teamed up with http://www.ballotintegrity.org/ and have set up a 527 special fund http://helpamericarecount.org/ to buy recounts. They worked with Bev Harris's lawyer who is an election specialist attorney. They have found a little used law that allows a recount if it's requested by five citizens who voted in that state and did not vote for the candidate who won. The state wants a down payment of ten dollars a precinct, so they need money fast!
Send to the fund http://helpamericarecount.org/ All the funds are for recounts and will be prioritized by the most suspicious counties first. It will be about $200,000 to recount Ohio, which is the first target because it has very provable anomolies that show massive fraud- Bev says, "Very strange and impossible math"; then Florida.
If you go to http://helpamericarecount.org/ or www.blackboxvoting.org and can't get there, it's because their website keeps getting shut down and they keep having to put it back up. They are going to have to switch to a specialist host; a company who specializes in protecting websites that are under attack constantly. So if you can't get there, keep trying.
Also, there is a woman who has, on her own, filed for a recount in Nevada, using the same law.
And, Ralph Nader is going to pay for a recount in New Hampshire to audit the Diebold machines there.
ReDefeat Bush
Answers to Boston Globe's Dismissal of Voter Fraud Story
Posted on Thursday,
November 11 @ 07:56:59 EST by DavidAdmin
The Boston Globe and the Washington Post have run stories dismissing the questions about the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election as just another Internet hoax. Here, thanks to Washington attorney Cynthia Butler, are six reasons why they are wrong, foremost among them that the journalists are covering this as a rumor rather than analyzing the validity of the central allegation.
Journalislt Ron Klein in his front page Boston Globe article in wishfully dismissing the Internet stories of fraud, suppression and chicanery in the foul play of the Election of 2004 totally and completely misses the point and investigates the rumor, not the central allegation. Zogby had it right; Ron Klein did not.
Some of his error is found within his own story. First, if Cameron Kerry's law firm email server almost crashed for all the people who for at least two straight days deluged it beyond capacity, of first hand reports of voter fraud and intimidation (because that is what the email called for; if they had facts) that there might be something serious going on worth investigating?
Second, the issue with long lines isn't just convenience- it is a suppression issue when people are told (wrongly) that because of heavy turn-out they can come back tomorrow, and a fraud issue when they know that the turn out will be out the door, around the block and down the highway and only put two or three voting booths in minority locations- that is also potentially a Voting Rights Act of 1965 issue.
Third, when the computers malfunction to such a statistical percentage that in 12 Counties in Florida and all of Cleveland more voted came in for both Presidential Candidates tallied on election night than showed up at the polls, we know someone is playing fast and loose with basic arithmatic.
Fourth, when the statistically improbably if not impossible event occurs where after the numbers started coming in that jumped in five concurrent states at the same time for Bush, we know it is time to call the computer geeks at Stanford, MIT and Microsoft to investigate.
Fifth, we know that purging of the rolls was done aggressively, and in many cases improperly (one woman I obtained an Affidavit from in Texas declared under oath that she was told she was purged because she did not show up for jury duty for example.)
Sixth, we know that people were often not told of the HAVA law right to obtain a provisional ballot, were actively discouraged from casting them because of statements such as "they are too much paperwork to bother" and "they probably won't count" which when coupled with long lines, people simply left and did not vote while they wanted to. In many places the Republican precinct 'Election Judges" who are neither attorneys nor judges simply advised voters that they ran out of forms -- as early as 11:00 am…
Tip of the iceberg?
Indianapolis Star
Glitch causes Franklin Co. recount
November 11, 2004
BROOKVILLE, Ind. - Election equipment counted straight-party votes for Democratic candidates as Libertarian votes, an error that could affect election outcomes in as many as nine counties, the Richmond Palladium-Item reported today.
Democrats discovered the error in Franklin County, where ballots will be counted again tonight.
The county's election equipment vendor, Fidlar, notified officials Wednesday of the error…
Zogby International
I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius…
Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.
With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.
This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.
The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.
(11/12/2004)
- By Colin Shea, The Freezer Box
“Moral values”? Maybe not.
MSNBC
Bloggerman, by Keith Olbermann
November 14, 2004 | 3:05 p.m. ET
I swear: I'm on vacation (Keith Olbermann)
[T]he most remarkable read of the day is probably the item buried on page A5 of The Washington Post. There, Charles Babington and Brian Faler take the wind out of the primary post-election grist for the yak-fests of radio and television: the overwhelming relevance of “Moral Values” to 2004’s presidential voters.
You will recall that the Exit Polling on November 2nd ranked the most important issues as follows:
1. Moral Values, 22%
2. Economy and Jobs, 20%
3. Terrorism, 19%
4. Iraq, 15%
The authors point out that those results came when pollsters offered voters a list of which issues factored most into their decision to vote. They note that last week, Pew Research went back and surveyed voters again, and took their temperatures in two ways - with a list (as was offered on election day), and without one (in other words, voters had to remember their issues; it ceased to be multiple choice). Those working off the checklist responded similarly to the election day exit pollees:
1. Moral Values, 27%
2. Iraq, 22%
3. Economy and Jobs, 21%
4. Terrorism, 14%
But the free-form Pew survey produced entirely different data. Given nothing to work with, simply asked to name the deciding factor in their vote, “moral values” shrunk back to human size:
1. Other, 31%
2. Iraq, 25%
3. Moral Values, 14%
4. Economy and Jobs, 12%
5. Terrorism, 9%
Babington and Faler point out that “other” included such gems as not liking Bush, not liking Kerry, honesty, and presumably “I was following instructions from Jon Stewart.”
Oh and by the way: how come the “Kerry’s winning” part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the “Moral Values” part of the same polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century? [Emphasis added.]
Institute for Public Accuracy
November 15, 2004
Ohio: Official Recount Now Expected
DAVID COBB
Cobb was the 2004 presidential candidate for the Green Party. He said today: "We announced our intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered. Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio." The Green Party is working with the Libertarian Party in securing a recount. The presidential candidates for the two parties have demanded that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who co-chaired this year's Bush campaign in Ohio, recuse himself from the recount process.
The media director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign, Blair Bobier, said today: "The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African-American voters…
[Do not count on any good results here. A Katherine Harris act-alike is in charge of the electoral process in Ohio, and he will do everything he can to block a recount. If he fails in that regard, he will fight every single change in the vote count away from Bush and toward Kerry. Even if he has to be entirely inconsistent in his words and actions from county to county or even precinct to precinct. Republicans do not believe in democracy, my friends, they are afraid of it. And where in the hell are the Democrats?—Caro]
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Letter to
the Editor
Posted November 15 2004
I would like to thank the authors of two Nov. 9 letters, regarding the real results of the Nov. 2 election. These letters are the only mention I have seen in the media about the fraudulent election we just had.
Obviously, the mainstream media has been unable to print the truth about this election. For those of us who thought we voted for the candidates of our choice, our votes very well may not have been counted that way. For instance, in Baker County, where 69.3 percent of 12,887 registered voters are Democrats and 24.3 percent are Republicans, the supposed Democratic vote count was 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. Does anyone believe that is correct?...
Nevertheless,
Associated Press
Florida Panel Approves Election Results
Sun Nov 14, 7:08 PM ET
By BRENT KALLESTAD, Associated Press Writer
