Election Issues

During the last weekend in January, the National Association of Secretaries of State met in Washington DC with their usual entourage of private partisan voting machine and software salespeople.

NBC political director Chuck Todd blessed the gathering of vote-changers and money-makers – and their system of faith-based voting.

Andrew Kreig, the Executive Director of the Justice Integrity Project, captured the essence of the absurd undemocratic assembly in his article “NBC’s Todd mocks election fraud critics, wins Washington applause.”

Free Press readers are aware that the United States is the only advance industrial democracy that fails to meet minimum standards of transparency in their election process. Private for-profit partisan corporations secretly encode the computers and software used to tabulate our votes.

Todd is a huge fan of so-called push-and-pray voting and told the voting machine vendors and the secretaries of state they contribute to, “That’s just stretching the bounds of reality” to suggest that computers could be programmed to rig an election.

The re-election of Barack Obama was made possible in part by the triumph of a new social movement---a great grassroots upheaval aimed at election protection and meaningful universal suffrage, that must include a transparent and reliable vote count.

The Republican Party’s concerted effort to steal the presidency again failed in 2012, but only because of major breakthroughs that have been forcing their way into the mainstream since Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004.

Throughout these past dozen years, the GOP “suppress and shift” election theft strategy has focused on two main tactics:massive disenfranchisement of citizens (mostly non-white, poor and young) suspected of voting Democratic; and the manipulation of electronic voting machines and tabulating devices with software capable of flipping thousands of votes with a few late night keystrokes.

Dear Ms. Rhimes:
You are one of the bravest, most extraordinary women on TV and you are going to help save us from election fraud.

Thank you for creating the ABC television series "Scandal," -- and in particular for taking on the bedrock of democracy, voting rights. All of our other rights rest upon voting rights.

I also applaud your diverse cast, which includes many women in leading roles.

Over the last ten years, I, like many others, have written to numerous media and entertainment outlets to implore them to help us get rid of all electronic voting machines and bring democracy to our voting system and our country. To no avail, alas.

And then I saw a recent episode of "Scandal," entitled "Defiance," which did just this, in part, by addressing charges of election fraud in Defiance, Ohio in a fictional format.

The Republican Party and the Romney presidential campaign’s voter repression machine produced nearly 30,000 provisional ballots in Franklin County, Ohio. This accounts for roughly 5% of all the votes cast.

On Election Day, the Free Press reported a high number of early provisional at a majority African American polling location, Driving Park, on the Near East side. After complaints from Green Party observers and election attorneys from the Obama campaign, the illegal practice of forcing voters who were registered in the pollbook to vote provisionally, ceased.

Sherri Hamilton, a Green Party observer at Driving Park, complained about provisional voters being sent to the wrong precincts and being allowed to vote provisionally at the wrong location. These actions could have potentially disqualified their votes.

More than a year ago, a reporter named Craig Unger asked me a brilliant question about the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. Referring to reports that the counting of votes was rerouted through SMARTech computers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at precisely 11:14 PM EST, and the possibility that the vote count was altered thereby, he asked me about the forensic evidence we had photographed or otherwise uncovered in eighteen counties in Ohio. He asked me to look at the timeline. Did the counties in which we found evidence of fraud report their results before 11:14 PM, or after? And, if after, was the evidence consistent with an after-the-fact effort to get the election records to match an altered vote count?

We saved hundreds of votes across the state, but there were not enough concentrated in any of the close races to claim that we saved any races. In 2008 we looked at close races to see if Maricopa County's 30,000 uncounted provisional ballots would have made a difference in any of them and we concluded they would not have changed the outcomes of any races.

Two weeks have passed since the night of the Rove meltdown and Romney's electoral loss. Like the days after a major sports championship, everybody has an opinion on two things: why victory was achieved this time and how victory can be achieved the next time. However, political reality is quite different than sports. Democracy is more than a game. And if our current democracy is a game, the people lost in 2012.

America is at best a minimal democracy. It functionally has two parties, one more than a dictatorship. It allegedly grants one person one vote each election, although this is not constitutionally guaranteed. Our elections fail to meet even minimal standards by allowing the racist suppression of votes that we thought was outlawed in 1965. What this election has made clear is that more than a small minority seek to erase 140 years of struggle from Andrew Jackson to Lyndon Johnson to secure and defend these most basic tenets of democracy: the right to vote.

Preview Clips from a new EON/FreePress.org joint Work in Progress. This a a trailer for our Indiegogo project - a documentary on the inside story of how investigative reporting, the Green Party, the Election Protection movement, pre-emptive litigating and just plain angry voters saved the Dems from Karl Rove in a key 2012 battleground state. Please go to:

Swing State to help support it and please spread the word to your networks!

YouTube Link



You can read our full print report on our blog:

Ohio Confidential - How the Fix was Nixed

Yes, my side won. So, the argument could be made that I was wrong when it comes to election fraud. The real story is more complicated. I believe that my side – your side, the women’s side – won in part because voting rights activists were vigilant. They kept Americans watching, to make sure to document irregularities at the polls.

As the result of a fair election, women now have a far better opportunity to lead and influence. More glass ceilings were shattered, although we still await total demolition. We also won due to a heavy turnout from diligent voters. At one polling place in Boston, many were still standing in line to vote at 9:30 PM. Women voted in large numbers, as did African Americans, Latinas, LGBTQs and youth. They voted for our side – for their side – and thanks to voting rights activists their votes were counted. On The Issues Magazine - PARKSpostelection height=Suffrage parade, NYC, Oct. 23, 1915. Photo: Library of Congress. Here are some ways in which activism worked:

The goal of this book is to show the average voter that we have not been told the truth about our elections. As one who has spent a lifetime building computer models in engineering, corporate finance and investment analysis, I am not alone in claiming that our electoral system is broken. But this is not a book about politics. It is about rational and faith-based thinking.

A thorough analysis of the 1988-2008 state and national unadjusted exit polls has revealed startling results which prove systemic election fraud beyond any doubt. The one-sided pattern of “red shift” discrepancies to the recorded vote is mathematically impossible. Informing the average voter of this information is a major focus of this book.