VOTING INTEGRITY - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
The Stolen Election of 2004 |
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by Michael Parenti ZNet Entered into the database on Thursday, July 06th, 2006 @ 15:32:14 MST |
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The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator
JohnKerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted toanother
stolen election. This has been well documented by suchinvestigators as Rep.
John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis,Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris,
and others. Here is an overview of whatthey have reported, along with observations
of my own. Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbedto
at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among therecord 16.8
million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact thatwent largely unreported
by the press. In addition, there were about twomillion progressives who had
voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switchedto Kerry in 2004. Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about11.6
million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eightmillion more
votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved hisremarkable 2004 tally,
Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4million from 2000, plus a majority
of the new voters, plus a large shareof the very liberal Nader defectors. Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a masscrossover.
The numbers simply do not add up. In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success atregistering
new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five toone. Moreover the
Democratic party was unusually united around itscandidate-or certainly against
the incumbent president. In contrast,prominent elements within the GOP displayed
open disaffection, publiclyvoicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration's
huge budgetdeficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats
toindividual liberties. Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in2004; forty
of them endorsed Kerry. All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47percent,
giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and asolid victory
in the electoral college. Yet strangely enough, theofficial tally gave Bush
the election. Here are some examples of how theGOP "victory" was secured.
---In some places large numbers of Democratic registration formsdisappeared,
along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots.Sometimes absentee ballots
were mailed out to voters just beforeelection day, too late to be returned
on time, or they were never mailedat all. ---Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the StateDepartment
were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004.Nearly half of the
six million American voters living abroad---anoticeable number of whom formed
anti-Bush organizations---neverreceived their ballots or got them too late
to vote. Military personnel,usually more inclined toward supporting the president,
encountered nosuch problems with their overseas ballots. ---Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the RepublicanNational
Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms inNevada, promising
to turn them in to public officials, but thensystematically destroyed the
ones belonging to Democrats. --- Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rollsin
several states because of "felonies" never committed, or committed
bysomeone else, or for no given reason. Registration books in Democraticprecincts
were frequently out-of-date or incomplete. ---Democratic precincts---enjoying record turnouts---were deprived ofsufficient
numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many ofthe machines they
had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours manypeople went home without
voting. Pro-Bush precincts almost always hadenough voting machines, all working
well to make voting quick andconvenient. ---A similar pattern was observed with student populations in severalstates:
students at conservative Christian colleges had little or nowait at the polls,
while students from liberal arts colleges were forcedto line up for as long
as ten hours, causing many to give up. ---In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the votingmachines
were locked in an office and no one could find the key. InHamilton County
many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic votefor president because
John Kerry's name had been "accidentally" removedwhen Ralph Nader
was taken off the ballot. ---A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in MiamiCounty,
Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while apolling place
in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossiblylow turnout of 7
percent. ---Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexicowho
favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to havetheir ballots
spoiled and discarded in districts supervised byRepublican election officials.
Many were given provisional ballots thatsubsequently were never counted. In
these same Democratic areas Bush"won" an astonishing 68 to 31 percent
upset victory. One Republicanjudge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional
ballots cast forKerry, accepting only those that were for Bush. ---Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religiousfundamentalists,
were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to keyDemocratic precincts,
they handed out flyers warning that voters who hadunpaid parking tickets,
an arrest record, or owed child support would bearrested at the polls---all
untrue. They went door to door offering to"deliver" absentee ballots
to the proper office, and announcing thatRepublicans were to vote on Tuesday
(election day) and Democrats onWednesday. ---Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, whotried
to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut outby squads
of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after thepolls closed Republican
officials announced a "terrorist attack" alert,and ordered the press
to leave. They then moved all ballots to awarehouse where the counting was
conducted in secret, producing anamazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000
more votes than he hadreceived in 2000. It wasn't the terrorists who attacked
Warren County. ---Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of hisvotes
in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number ofregistered voters,
creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. InMiami County nearly 19,000
additional votes eerily appeared in Bush'scolumn after all precincts had reported.
In a small conservativesuburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people
were registered,the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush. ---In almost half of New Mexico's counties, more votes were reportedthan
were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently inBush's favor.
These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico'sRepublican Secretary of
State as an "administrative lapse." Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush in both the popular voteand the
electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accuratemeasure of elections.
In the last three elections in Germany, forexample, exit polls were never off
by more than three-tenths of onepercent. Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people whohave
actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote butnever make
it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because theyhave no telephone or
otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who areundecided or who change their
minds about whom to support, and those whoare turned away at the polls for one
reason or another. Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that internationalorganizations
use them to validate election results in countries aroundthe world. Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate becausethey
were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out ingreater numbers.
(Apparently Bush voters sleep late.) In fact, thepolling was done at random
intervals all through the day, and theevening results were as much favoring
Kerry as the early results. It was also argued that pollsters focused more on women (who favoredKerry)
than men, or maybe large numbers of grumpy Republicans were lessinclined than
cheery Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was putforth to substantiate
these fanciful speculations. Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and officialtallies were
never random but worked to Bush's advantage in ten ofeleven swing states that
were too close to call, sometimes by as much as9.5 percent as in New Hampshire,
an unheard of margin of error for anexit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico,
and Iowa exit polls registeredsolid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally
in each case went toBush, a mystifying outcome. In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quiteaccurate.
Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to26.4 percent; the
actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri,where the exit polls predicted
a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, thefinal result was 53 to 46 percent. One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found inthe widespread
use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. Thesemachines produced results
that consistently favored Bush over Kerry,often in chillingly consistent contradiction
to exit polls. In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petitionurging that
all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail.Touchscreen voting
machines can be easily programmed to go dead onelection day or throw votes to
the wrong candidate or make votesdisappear while leaving the impression that
everything is working fine. A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computernetwork through
one machine and thereby change votes at will. Thetouchscreen machines use trade
secret code, and are tested, reviewed,and certified in complete secrecy. Verified
counts are impossiblebecause the machines leave no reliable paper trail. Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, mysterious congressionalelection
results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate andHouse contests and
state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska,Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado,
and elsewhere produced dramatic andpuzzling upsets, always at the expense of
Democrats who were ahead inthe polls. In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed theDemocrat's
name found that the Republican candidate was chosen. InCormal County, Texas,
three GOP candidates won by exactly 18,181 votesapiece, a near statistical impossibility.
All of Georgia's voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, andGeorgia's
incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democraticsenator, who were both
well ahead in the polls just before the election,lost in amazing double-digit
voting shifts. This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerrylost
all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective ofincome levels,
ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing thatconsistently correlated
with his defeat in those precincts was thepresence of the touchscreen machine
itself. In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote(compared to
2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines. Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreenmachines
are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. Thesecompanies have
consistently refused to implement a paper-trail to dispelsuspicions and give
instant validation to the results of electronicvoting. They prefer to keep things
secret, claiming proprietary rights,a claim that has been backed in court. Election officials are not allowed to evaluate the secret software.Apparently
corporate trade secrets are more important than votingrights. In effect, corporations
have privatized the electoral system,leaving it easily susceptible to fixed
outcomes. Given this situation,it is not likely that the GOP will lose control
of Congress comeNovember 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an
even worseone-party tyranny. Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination
of JuliusCaesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The CultureStruggle
(Seven Stories Press). For more information visit:www.michaelparenti.org. _________________________ Read from Looking Glass News How
They Stole Ohio And the GOP 4-step Recipe to "Blackwell" the USA in
2008 |