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From: "Dstacey" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Fw: DID WE KNOW THIS? Ohio Election Workers Indicted /
Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:24:26 -0400
<http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1439>
The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Election 2004
Ohio recount lawsuit set for trial; election workers indicted
by Blair Bobier
September 4, 2005
On Tuesday August 30, a federal district judge set a trial
date for the Green Party's Ohio Recount lawsuit and
indictments were handed down against two Cuyahoga County
elections officials for their roles in the bungled
election audit. The timing was coincidental; the two
actions are not related though they both stem from charges
that the recount was conducted in violation of state and
federal law.
Judge James Carr set the trial date for August 22, 2006.
The lawsuit was initiated by Green Party presidential
candidate David Cobb and his Libertarian counterpart,
Michael Badnarik.
The Ohio election and recount has been the subject of a
number of investigations and reports. A report by the
U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff states
that "there were massive and unprecedented voter
irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these
irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and
illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State
J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney
campaign in Ohio." The August issue of Harper's magazine
featured an article by Mark Crispin Miller on the Ohio
election fraud and the lack of "mainstream" media coverage
devoted to it, entitled "None Dare Call it Stolen."
ARTICLE CONTINUED AT:
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1439
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 by the Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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 Freepress.org and harveywasserman.com. Their
upcoming What Happened in Ohio, with Steve Rosenfeld, will
be published by The New Press in spring, 2006.
<http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502>
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