Peace Researcher 30 – March 2005
"As
democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely,
the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of
the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron". HL Mencken, 1920.
George Dubya Bush has extended his reign for
another four years. Not bad for a moron.
How did this happen? To put it bluntly the 2004 “election” was stolen,
as was the 2000 one. Because no country, no person, is immune to the ravages of
the American corporate and military machines, the continued reign of Bush
matters deeply. Peace Researcher
thinks it’s important that our readers have some insight into just how this
election was stolen. You won’t have read about it in the mainstream media. The
Internet is the place to look (see Website addresses at the end). This article
describes the major tactics that help to explain how “they did it and got away
with it”, at least so far. Whatever you might think about American politicians
(and there are plenty of problems with the defeated Democrat candidate, John
Kerry), this article is not about them. It’s about how the Bush cabal is close
to delivering the death knell to American democracy and its Constitution while
justifying unlimited pre-emptive war in order to jam the American concept of
“democracy” down the throats of sovereign nations.
The amount of information on the November 2,
2004 US election and its aftermath is huge, and it keeps coming. Our purpose
here is to cover a few of major topics that reveal and help explain the extent
of corruption of the US voting system, both before and after election day 2004.
Unless you are an American, and perhaps even if
you are, you might wonder just how a Presidential election could end up in such
a mess as the Kerry-Bush one did, and indeed the 2000 one between Bush and Al Gore. The answer is that there is no
federal or other central guidance of national elections – no federal law, no
agency to codify and coordinate the voting process. It is left entirely to the
states to conduct an election as they see fit. As a consequence there are as
many “systems” as there are states in the Union. Everything from the method of
voting to the method of counting, tabulating and reporting the results is a
matter for state decision, and in many cases individual county decision. And
there are thousands of counties in the US. Elected state officials, such as
secretaries of state, are vested under state laws with considerable powers to
influence election procedures as shown in the key Ohio recount fiasco described
below.
Exit polls are used in the US and in other
countries as predictive tools on the day of polling. They are conducted by interviewing voters as they leave the
polling places. They have been used in many elections and have been shown to
have high predictive accuracy, usually better than ±2% of the actual vote
tally. Exit polling is refined by careful statistical procedures and is widely
accepted as a good way of monitoring the credibility of an election. However,
not everyone accepts the accuracy and validity of exit polling. There is
currently a vigorous exit poll debate underway in the US and it has become
mind-numbingly complex and mired in detailed analysis. But it is probably safe
to conclude that while the polls cannot provide hard evidence of election
fraud, they are useful as indicators of possible fraud.
The US government actually likes exits polls
when they are used in somebody else’s country, for example in the 2004 election
in Ukraine. A new election had to be conducted there because of the big
discrepancies between exit poll predictions and the reported results. The Bush
government had the gall to cry foul based on the exit polls in Ukraine. Public
protest was enormous and the election result was reversed in the new election.
All this happened practically on top of the
November election in the US. Early exit polls showed Kerry winning handily in
several battleground states, including Florida and Ohio whose electoral votes
were crucial to the final result. But we all know what happened. A meticulous
statistical analysis of exit poll predictions compared with reported vote
tallies in eleven key states showed impossible shifts for Bush in ten of the
eleven states (the shift for Bush in New Hampshire was a whopping 9.5%). Not
one state shifted to Kerry. Dr Steven Freeman, a professor at the University of
Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, conducted the analysis and compiled
a detailed report. He concluded that the large shifts in favour of Bush were
statistically impossible, compelling evidence of fraud. There was plenty of
other evidence of fraud on and before election day.
A huge effort was made by Kerry supporters both
before and on election day to get out the liberal vote. Did the Republicans do
the same for the conservative vote? The evidence indicates that their chosen
tactic in a number of states was to prevent likely Kerry voters, most of them
poor or from minority groups such as blacks and Latinos, from ever casting a
vote. This tactic was used
systematically and on a large scale in Florida in the 2000 election when the
infamous Katherine Harris (now a member of Congress) was Secretary of State
under Bush-brother, Governor Jeb Bush.
Here is a sampling of ways to frustrate voting
by minorities and the poor:
·
Severely
restrict the number of voting machines in urban, minority and Democratic
(party) areas. Provide plenty of machines in predominantly white, Republican
and rural areas. Would you wait in
lines for over eight hours to vote – in winter?
·
Direct
liberal voters to the wrong polling places using deceptive phone calls and
flyers. If they show up at the wrong polling place, give them provisional ballots
and then don’t count them, based on technicalities.
·
Reject
all voter registration forms not printed on white, uncoated paper of not less
that 80 pound text weight (by order by the Ohio Secretary of State who was
Bush’s state campaign manager).
·
Shift
voting stations from large to small facilities so voters have to wait in queues
outside in the cold.
·
At
normal poll closing time tell voters in queues that they cannot vote, even
though this is illegal if they were in the queues before closing time.
·
Harass
voters while they wait in queues. Intimidation was common in Ohio and included
demanding excessive and unfair forms of identification by minorities.
The list of tactics goes on and on. And the
tactics were used well beyond Ohio and Florida. Thousands of examples of vote suppression have been documented in
all of the key battleground states.
If Kerry had won the popular vote in Ohio, that
state’s electoral votes would have tipped the balance for him and Bush would be
out of office. But the official count in Ohio gave Bush a winning margin of
118,775 votes. The entire election in Ohio has been challenged in State Court
as a fraud in a legal move identical to the recent successful one in Ukraine.
Detailed analysis led to the conclusion, stated in the Ohio complaint, that
Kerry actually won Ohio by 149,326 votes. Stated with stark simplicity, 130,656
Kerry votes were given to Bush through a myriad of counting errors, screw-ups
and downright fraudulent actions. Here are just a few examples of what happened
in Ohio.
Electronic voting machines lie at the heart of
the problems in Ohio and probably most other American states. Some machine
designs leave paper trails that are susceptible to recounts, others do not. The
main reason a recount was deemed feasible in Ohio but not in Florida (where
fraud was equally likely under Jeb Bush) was that a large majority of counties
used punch-card/optical scan machines that leave a paper trail, i.e. the
infamous hanging-chad * cards. Touch-screen machines predominate in Florida and
leave no recountable trail. * The
textbook case of electoral incompetence and corruption that was the 2000 US
Presidential election, specifically in Florida, gave the disbelieving world a
whole new vocabulary. Voting machines were supposed to punch holes to indicate
the voter’s choice. Chads were the minuscule bits of paper left when the holes
were not fully punched. The fate of a nation and, arguably, the world, hung on
a dizzying variety of “dangling, dimpled and pregnant” chads. Ed.
The gist of the fraud allegations is that
machines are notoriously susceptible to various kinds of tampering to influence
the vote count. Evidence for deliberate tampering includes numerous affidavits
testifying to touch-screens that automatically showed a vote for Bush even when
the voter pushed the Kerry button. This is called vote hopping and occurred in
at least 36 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Another glitch was lower-level candidates on
ballots receiving Democrat votes but with no vote registered for President.
This happened in thousands of cases. And how do you account for many voting
precincts registering more votes than people who were documented as having
voted? In one county alone this amounted to a surplus of over 90,000 votes,
most of them for Bush, not Kerry. Electronic ballot “boxes” were stuffed in
some precincts as evidenced by unbelievable voting percentages, some as high as
99%. It appears that fraudsters were able to register votes for people who did
not actually show up to vote. Again, the “stuffing” favoured Bush by an
overwhelming amount.
Perhaps the most outrageous indictment of
machine voting in Ohio was a statement by the Chief Executive Officer of the
Diebold company, which produces electronic voting machines, that he would do
everything he could to assure a Bush victory in Ohio. He appears to have
delivered.
With evidence of fraud mounting by the minute,
two candidates for president from minor parties in Ohio, the Greens and the
Libertarians, filed for a recount in all 88 Ohio counties. Republican election officials predictably
were not about to facilitate a recount. “Supervised by Secretary of State
Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio
simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount.
…while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio’s Presidential election was
being pursued, the state’s Republican political machine blocked the rights of
those seeking to verify the vote” (Fitrakis et al. 2004, cited by Aldridge; see
reference at the end of this article). It took a variety of legal manoeuvres,
including a court injunction against Secretary Blackwell, to force the state to
initiate a recount. The key to making this happen was Kerry finally joining the
case as a plaintiff. The story of the resulting recount is long and involved.
Suffice it to say that it was a farce, distorted at every turn by Blackwell and
his minions and a Republican-dominated court system, and did not prevent Ohio’s
20 electors from casting their votes for Bush (it is necessary to remind readers here that American Presidential
elections are not a direct ballot. Voters vote for electors to the Electoral
College, and the candidate who wins the state in the First Past the Post ballot
wins all its electors. Each state has its number of electors determined
according to its population - Ohio has 20. It is the Electoral College, not the American voters directly, which
elects the President. Ed.).
This recount farce has led to the legal
challenge to the overall Ohio election as mentioned above. That challenge is
now mired in a legal quagmire that only the litigious American people could
appreciate. In the meantime the national
electoral vote, including the crucial 20 Ohio votes, was certified on January 6th,
2005, by both Houses of the US Congress. A historic challenge to the
validity of the Ohio votes was mounted by two courageous legislators, only the
second such challenge since 1877. Senator Barbara Boxer of California and
Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio filed the challenge and forced
both the House and Senate to debate the merits of the fraud case for two hours.
Surprise, surprise – Bush was certified.
A further consequence of the January 6th
certification of Bush was the dropping of the legal challenge in Ohio since it
had become legally moot. Secretary of State Blackwell had succeeded in stalling
the challenge until its’ fate was sealed. Blackwell himself now faces lawsuits
charging criminality in his blatantly illegal and anti-democratic actions
during the Ohio recount. These lawsuits could get some traction.
Don’t hold your breath. Although the state of Ohio
was the focus of allegations of vote fraud and election stealing in 2004, fraud
is systemic within the massive, confusing and totally uncoordinated election
system that underpins American democracy. We can take some heart from the fact
that a lot of Americans are now fighting mad over this stolen election. Unfortunately, that anger and desire for
reform does not extend to the seats of power. The challenge to Ohio’s electoral
vote certification was backed by an impressively detailed and comprehensive report
filed by Michigan Representative John Conyers. But it became available only a
day or so before the certification on January 6, 2005. It is doubtful that any
of the hundreds of Representatives and 100 Senators had even cracked the cover
of the report, let alone read it. Over 30 Representatives, many of them black,
voted against the certification along with a lone Senator, Barbara Boxer.
Every other Senator who attended the joint
session, Democrats and Republicans, voted to seat Bush on his throne for a
second term. John Kerry wasn’t even there. He was in the Middle East,
presumably doing something far more important than fighting for the Presidency
that would have been his, if the election had been fair.
A comment on Bush’s January 20th, 2005,
inaugural speech: “So the President had no need for place names, not just to avoid his
well known penchant for mangling them, but because his intention in his
inaugural address was to take possession of the whole planet in the name of
‘freedom’ (whose essence, like ‘torture’, turns out to be all in the
definition). After all, as the speech made clear, he wasn't addressing just
Americans or Iraqis or Pakistanis or North Koreans or Israelis; he was, in
near-revolutionary fashion, issuing a warning to ‘every ruler and every nation’
(you know who you are); he was addressing ‘anew’ all ‘the peoples of the
world’, no exclusions or exceptions. It was the all-embracing inaugural
equivalent of those frequent smaller moments when our President simply states
that other countries, peoples, movements must do this or that. This time, in an
excess of retro-triumphalism, he laid his giant "must" like a
footprint on the planet itself!” -Tom
Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, January 2005.
A Note On Sources
Much of the material for this article
was summarised from a very recent paper by Bob Aldridge (Pacific Life Research
Center in California) entitled: “Understanding the ‘War on Terrorism’:
Manipulating Elections, Part 3: Stealing Ohio in 2004”. To read this excellent
paper, go to the first Website listed below. The rather harsh tone of this
article is my own and should not be attributed to Bob Aldridge.
If you want to read more about this
subject, here are some excellent Websites:
http://www.plrc.org/docs/050108.pdf
http://www.flcv.com/ussumall.html
http://www.cannonfire.blogspot.com/
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