Electoral fraud in the United States

[Wayne Hall]

Why can't the left face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?
If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the
American left seems unable to face the reality that the election
of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something
radical is done, 2008 will be too.
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman


www.opednews.com

Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com and
Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the
reality that these stolen elections mean nothing less than the
death of what's left of American democracy, and the permanent
enthronement of the Rovian GOP.

As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed
first-hand, up close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election
was stolen, and how it will most likely be done in 2008. In the
precinct in which Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where
Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly
cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the
Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a victory for
John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy.

That Kerry and the spineless Ohio and national Democratic Parties
have been complicit is a crucial part of the problem much of the
left also seems unwilling to face. But if you live in Franklin
County, Ohio, and watch the Republican and Democratic Parties run
joint pickets against progressive candidate, and cut backroom
deals allowing incumbents of either party run unopposed, you may
miss the full scope of the disaster.

And until the left faces the rot that defines the Democratic
Party, there is no hope for a fair election in this country. In
other words: those who think the White House can be retaken in
2008, but refuse to face the theft of the vote in 2004, should
prepare to be ruled by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever.

Before we go into the sordid details, we have to ask: exactly
what is it about Team Bush that makes people think they could not
or would not steal an American election? Do they lack funds? Do
they lack expertise? Is there something in the
Machiavellian/mobster moral code of Karl Rove and the Bush Family
that would prevent them from doing here what they've been doing
throughout the Third World for so long?

CIA meister Poppy Bush long ago perfected the art and science of
stealing elections. US manipulators have interfered with and
tipped elections for decades. Why should Ohio be any different?
Especially when all the world knew control of the most powerful
office on earth would be decided right here.

Lets do the bookends: before the voting, Ohio's infamous
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell clearly and
vehemently denied poll access to teams of international observers
from the United Nations and other international election observers.

Since the election, he has effectively stonewalled and sabotaged
all recount attempts, to the point that no credible accounting of
the Ohio election has ever been done. To this day, at least
100,000 votes remain uncounted, electronic voting machines remain
unaudited, key hardware and data files have been trashed, paper
ballots have sat unguarded for anyone to pilfer and tallies in
dozens of key counties remain filled with statistical
impossibilities.

[Wayne Hall]

In our HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING
2008, we list more than 180 bullet points on how this theft was
perpetrated. It was a brilliant, cynical and masterfully executed
campaign of death by a thousand cuts.

In Florida 2000, the means of the crime were limited to a few
instances of intimidation, butterfly ballots, computer
manipulation and a corrupt Supreme Court. But four years after,
in Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant tricks
were designed to steal a few thousand votes here, a few thousand
more there, until victory was in GOP hands. Unless they are
exposed and blocked, every one of these scams can and will be
duplicated throughout the United States in 2006 and 2008. The
question is: will the left follow mainstream Democrats with
sheep-like acceptance as every election goes the same way from
here on? And if so, why bother even staging more votes in this
country at all?

Starting with Russ Baker at TomPaine.com, the indicators are
grim. Last January, Baker penned an absurd, ill-reported piece of
nonsense called "What Didn't Happen in Ohio." Baker traipsed into
Columbus for a few days, interviewed the usual faux Democrats,
and left with a Big Story: "The Election Was Fair."

If Baker had done any meaningful research he might have seen the
dozens of other instances of intimidation, irregularities and
fraud that went unmentioned in his glib paragraphs. Instead he
relied on Bill Anthony, chair of the Franklin County Democrats
and Board of Elections.

Bill is a pleasant, affable African-American with no commitment
or fight for democracy or even the Democrats. He has appeared on
Bob's local radio show and with Harvey on others. On one of them,
Bill admitted that the Franklin County BOE knew there would be
problems with voting machines, and asked Blackwell for paper
ballots well before the 2004 election. Blackwell, Anthony said,
turned them down. The result was the now infamous chaos at the
polls, with inner city voters stuck in the rain for hours. Just
what Blackwell wanted.

But did Bill Anthony fight Blackwell's absurd ruling? Did he make
it a public issue prior to the election?

Not a chance.

For a quickie reporting job, Anthony is a dream. He's
well-spoken, charming and convincing. As an African-American with
union connections, he would seem the perfect liberal source.

In 2003, Anthony endorsed the Republican mayor's former press
secretary for the Columbus School Board. He then supported two
Republican candidates on a "Reform Slate" aimed at ousting the
Board's only progressive Democrat, an African-American.

Bill Anthony is just one of a legion of what are known throughout
the state as DINOs---Democrats in Name Only. The Ohio Democratic
Party is a national embarrassment. Its chair, Denny White, was
not long ago a Republican, and will soon be one again, once the
party is fully disemboweled, a job very close to done. Throughout
Ohio, DINOs piously cover this piece of fraud and that piece of
theft with glib "I hate Bush" rhetoric. The pity is, out-of-state
reporters actually take them seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard is a well respected author and reporter and a
long-time friend of Harvey Wasserman, and of election critic Mark
Crispen Miller. He has contributed some very valuable work over
the years. But he's done himself---and the voting public---very
wrong on "Recounting Ohio" in the new Mother Jones.

Mark is smart and thorough enough to leave open the possibility
that Ohio's election was, indeed, stolen. But he also falls prey
to the DINO trap, failing to cover far too much of what happened
here while taking seriously centrist Democrats who are known
locally to have no credibility.

So Mother Jones questions the significance of the firing of a
Democratic election official who blew the whistle on computer
manipulations by Triad, an obscure Republican voting machine
company. But Triad was involved in counting the votes in nearly
half of Ohio's 88 counties. Questions are still being raised
about Triad, including: "How did they get all these contracts in
the first place?"

[Wayne Hall]

Mother Jones correctly points out that seven times the number of
votes by which Bush took Ohio were cast on Republican-controlled
machines. But the magazine fails to follow up with mention that
those votes have been tabulated on proprietary non-transparent
software---a fact we pointed out in our own article in
Motherjones.com many months prior to the election.

Mother Jones also discounts the fact that a phony Homeland
Security alert in Warren County landed the vote count in an
unauthorized warehouse rather than the official secure location,
and that reporters were barred from the vote count. That count,
which went hugely and suspiciously and very importantly for Bush,
was observed by nominal Democrats. But so were other highly
dubious vote counts around the state, as they had been in Florida
2000, which Mother Jones argues adamantly was indeed stolen.

The irony of this is that the same issue of Mother Jones leads
off with a dead-on story about Ohio and national Democrats who
are sabotaging the campaign of the aggressively electable Paul
Hackett for a key US Senate seat. And another MoJo piece bemoans
the fact that national Democrats seem adept only at losing.

Yet here the back of the book is a story discounting evidence
compiled by a legion of independent, grassroots election rights
advocates, while favoring phone interviews with the very
Democrats being denounced in the front of the book.

Above all, the core of evidence that the election was stolen in
Ohio 2004 comes from some 500 sworn statements and signed
affidavits taken by people of all political parties, including
two Republican hearings officers, in the weeks after the
election. Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened
here needs to start with that huge body of evidence.

As MoJo points out, none of this has been made easier by the
"abandon ship" of the biggest DINO of all, John Kerry. Kerry had
$7 million in the bank earmarked to "count every vote" and was
apparently losing by just 136,000 Ohio votes with more than
250,000 still uncounted when he turned tail and conceded. Even
Blackwell's corrupt, virtually meaningless first fake recount
dropped Bush's official tally by 18,000 votes.

The Democrats have since attacked the election protection
movement here through a lawyer named Daniel Hoffheimer who comes
from none other than the stalwart Cincinnati Republican law firm
of Taft, Stettinius et. al. MoJo quotes another Kerry/DINO lawyer
Michael O'Grady, counsel to the state Democratic Party, who
argues that for Ohio to have been stolen, the entire GOP would
have had to be "conspiratorial," while the Democrats were "dumb
as rocks."

In fact, that's an assessment many activists in Ohio heartily
endorse, though you might add the word "inert" to the description
of the Democrats.

O'Grady claims, for example, that an impossible vote count in
three southern Ohio counties that gave Bush his entire margin of
victory can be explained by a feminist outpouring for an
African-American court candidate who ran zero campaign in those
counties. But the presumption is that those same feminists
somehow didn't bother to vote for Kerry over George W. Bush. No
local student of that election could begin to take such an
assessment seriously.

Or how about the quote from Chris Rakocy, a "tech specialist"
about those notorious touchscreens in Mahoning County where
voters who chose Kerry saw Bush light up. Rakocy says that
problem was "only" on 18 of 1,148 machines, and that it was
corrected early.

But Rakocy stands alone against dozens of sworn statements and
affidavits confirming that the problem went on all day, and was
never fixed, and may have involved far more machines than 18, and
not only in Mahoning County but also in Franklin. Even at that,
in heavily Democratic Youngstown (not to mention Columbus), just
18 machines could have accounted for switching thousands of
votes. And, in fact, Kerry's margins in both Youngstown and
Columbus were suspiciously light.

And what would Mother Jones herself do to machines that
disenfranchised even one voter, no matter what the apparent
impact on the ultimate vote count? Why is the magazine named for
her discounting the you-couldn't-make-this-one-up reality of
voters pushing one candidate's name on a touchscreen and seeing
another's name light up, time after time after time? Or are we
taking this---and her---all too seriously?

Then there's the song and dance from Warren Mitofsky. The father
of exit polls saw his work used to overturn a stolen election in
Ukraine just prior to the American vote. But when his poll-taking
here showed John Kerry with a nationwide margin of 1.5 million
votes, somehow Mitofsky jumped ship on his own decades of
professionalism.

Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry
carrying Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on
Wednesday morning, well after balloting stopped even in Alaska
and Hawaii. These four "purple states" gave the election to the
"blue" Democrats, then miraculously switched to "red" for Bush,
giving him the White House once again.

Given all that's known about exit polls---and it's a lot---the
odds on one state switching like that are about one in one
hundred. For four, it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add
the fact that not one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states
showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm
of, well, a stolen election.

[Wayne Hall]

Add huge, unexplained shifts from pre-election polls to
post-election vote counts in crucial 2002 Senatorial races in
Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, then remember what happened in
Florida 2000, and examine the basic Bush attitude toward
democracy itself, and you've got a pattern to say the least. And
an obvious prescription for one-party rule as far as the eye can
see.

Except when you are dealing with America's Democratic Party in
2004 and with reportage that relies on a few phone calls and a
disheartening lack of grassroots perspective. If all politics is
local, as Tip O'Neill well knew, then so are all vote counts.

Our first article predicting what would happen in Ohio 2004 was
published many months before the election in, of all places,
MotherJones.com. We warned that electronic voting machines
deployed by the likes of Diebold could give Ohio and thus the
nation to George W. Bush. Wally O'Dell, Diebold's infamous CEO,
pledged to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, and
all evidence points to the fact that he at least helped.

What we missed in addition was the myriad clever tricks the GOP
would bring to bear in pulling this off. Ohio has a long history
as a test market. New products like white bread and spam are
brought here first, to see how they'll fly with America at large.

In Ohio 2004, scores of tools for stealing an American election
were tried and proven out. Outside reporters have come here again
and again to pull at this one and tear at that one. Almost
always, they get even that wrong. And almost always, they fail to
see the bigger picture.

If we have a "know it all" attitude, as is sometimes charged,
it's because we were (and are) here, we saw it happen, we
witnessed the seven-hour waits and the denials of the absentee
ballots, and we took the testimony of the hundreds who later went
under oath.

And we see more unravel every day. Conspiracy theories happen
sometimes when actual conspiracies occur. The stakes involved,
the players on both sides and the events that are out there plain
as day are all of a piece that's simply too obvious for anyone on
the ground here to miss.

Hertsgaard has the good sense to mention indictments that have
recently come down on election thieves in Cuyahoga County. We
know that to be the tip of the iceberg.

What matters now is whether the GOP will be allowed to repeat
nationwide in 2006 and 2008 what they saw they could get away
with in Ohio 2004.

Election theft skeptics tend to conclude their put-downs by
urging we forget about the vote-count stuff and concentrate on
coming up with candidates so good that "the election won't be
close enough to steal."

Having seen what we saw here, knowing what Mother Jones is
reporting about the Democratic attacks on Paul Hackett, and about
the loser instinct ingrained in the Dems' DLC/DNA, we must
charitably describe such a conclusion as being profoundly wishful
thinking.

[Wayne Hall]

Someday we may indeed have candidates far worthier than Al Gore
and John Kerry. But they both won the presidency of the United
States, however corruptible their margins of victory.

We need to guarantee that if someone worthwhile and willing to
fight ever does come along, we will have a left that's prepared
to make sure the votes are fairly counted.

As Rev. Jesse Jackson put it while speaking to election
protection activists here, "We can afford to lose an election. We
can't afford to lose our democracy."

Who would agree more strongly than Tom Paine and Mother Jones?

--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP
STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at
www.freepress.org and www.harveywasserman.com.
Their upcoming WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, with Steve Rosenfeld, will
be published by The New Press in spring, 2006.

[Wayne Hall]

19 States to Miss Fair Vote Law Deadline Wed Dec 21, 4:50 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Nineteen states will miss the Jan. 1 deadline for complying with the federal law ensuring accurate and honest elections, but most should be ready when votes are cast in 2006.

The National Association of Secretaries of State surveyed the states on compliance with the 2002 law that helps or requires states to replace outdated voting equipment, establish statewide voter registration databases, require better voter identification and provide provisional ballots so qualified voters can make their choices.

The association received responses from 43 states and released the results Wednesday. The organization provided only numbers and did not identify the specific states, part of the agreement to ensure that states participated in the survey.

However, during a conference call with reporters, association officials said California and Illinois won't have voter registration databases ready for the elections. Vermont would be in compliance; Washington would miss the Jan. 1 deadline but be ready for voting.

Sam Reed, Washington's secretary of state and the president of the association, said the states that will miss the deadline are working closely with the Justice Department. He added, "I know of no state in the country that the Department of Justice is planning to sue over noncompliance."

The association found that 24 states will be in compliance with the Help America Vote Act, the law that emerged from the disputed 2000 presidential election, which was marked by hanging chads, butterfly ballots and accusations of uncounted votes.

The 19 states that will miss the Jan. 1 deadline cited problems completing the voter registration database or getting voting equipment in place, or both.

Congress has provided some $3.9 billion for states to comply with the law.