Election Issues

Green Party candidates who submitted more than twice the legally required number of petition signatures to get on this fall's Ohio ballot are being stonewalled by the state's infamous Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who has expressed personal contempt for the Greens' gubernatorial candidate, Bob Fitrakis.

Blackwell served as co-chair of the Ohio 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. As chief administrator of the statewide ballot, he delivered Ohio's 20 electoral votes---and thus the presidency---to George W. Bush in a bitterly contested election riddled with charges of intimidation, fraud and theft, electronic and otherwise. Nearly two years later, the charges that the election was stolen continue to escalate.

Blackwell is now Ohio's Republican nominee for governor. His Democratic opponent in the fall, 2006, vote is U.S. Congressman Ted Strickland. A moderate Methodist minister from southern Ohio, Strickland currently holds a slight lead in the polls over the extreme right-wing fundamentalist Blackwell.

We have alleged since shortly after the 2004 presidential election that in many counties in Ohio, thousands of votes were shifted from Kerry to Bush. Comparison of the 2004 presidential results with other contests, on a precinct by precinct basis, reveals anomalies that are simply not explainable except by alteration of the vote count. In the forefront of these is Warren County, in southwestern Ohio.

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- The Oakland Tribune scooped other newspapers yesterday on the story.
- Pennsylvania's Michael Shamos sequestered all Diebold touch-screens.
- California is invoking emergency procedures.
- The state of Iowa is trying to figure out a way to scrub Diebold clean.

Harri Hursti has just come out with Hursti Report II, a Black Box Voting project.

Here it is:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf

A second study with 12 more defects will be released Monday May 15.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS?

Back doors were found in three separate levels. They can be used one at a time or combined for a deep attack that can permanently compromise the Diebold touch-screens.

Almost nothing will work to ensure that machines that have already been delivered have not been contaminated -- the very forensic procedures that MIGHT identify tampering also wipe clean any evidence.

Georgia was the first state in the nation to go 100 percent with electronic voting, thanks to Secretary of State Cathy Cox. This was a mantle she carried, and continues to carry, proudly. In fact, she's using it to bolster her run for governor in 2006, and indeed she is currently the Democratic front-runner.

But when you look at the facts Cathy Cox should be ashamed. She has failed the voters of Georgia. She has ensured that our elections are subject to fraud; she has knowingly allowed software that violates certification standards to be used in elections. She has wasted huge amounts of taxpayer funds on an election system that is proven to be ineffective at best, a downright scam at worst. And she has hidden or lied about these problems, not only to the voters of Georgia, but also to the state legislature.

A Trail of Amendments

In May of 2002 the state signed a contract with Diebold to provide DRE (Direct Record Electronic) voting machines for the entire state at a cost of $54 million. In July of the same year the first amendment to that contract was signed. It stated that:

That the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen has become an article of faith for millions of mainstream Americans. But there has been barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with the electronic voting machines that made those thefts possible---until now.

A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll (http://tinyurl.com/hgkgl) of Pennsylvania residents, found that “39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let’s look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically.”

Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%; FOX 0.5%.

HEAR ONE OF THEM--LARRY DAVID--TELL YOU THE STONE-COLD EVIDENCE THAT, YEP, GEORGE BUSH STOLE IT IN 2004. AGAIN.
From Armed Madhouse, the new book by Greg Palast


Hear Larry David, auteur of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and principal writer of the "Seinfeld" series reading Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse, Chapter 4: The Con-Kerry Won at www.GregPalast.com

Read the excerpt here:

THE CON

Kerry Won. Now Get Over It . . .

...because they're putting '08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future, rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger-Americans and the undead.

WARNING! There are cranks and kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who say that George Bush lost the 2004 election, like one titled, "Kerry Won" published on the TomPaine.com web site two days after the election. I wrote it.

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has grabbed the GOP nomination for governor in a vote count riddled with machine breakdowns. In Franklin and Delaware Counties, election officials had to "shut down and recalibrate [machines] throughout the day," according to the Columbus Dispatch. Election officials use recalibration as a code word when machines are malfunctioning including the recording of votes for wrong candidates.

Blackwell became infamous in 2004 for his role in swinging the Buckeye State, and the presidency, to George W. Bush, with whom he met with on Election Day in Columbus. Karl Rove also accompanied Bush on his visit to Columbus.  Exit polls showed a clear victory for John Kerry until a massive mysterious late vote surge reversed the popular vote for Bush.  The state was later the target of the first Congressional challenge to an electoral delegation in US history.

After locking out all media observers and declaring a Level 10 Homeland Security Alert, the Republican-dominated Warren County, Ohio reported the vote tally in the wee hours of the morning on November 3, 2004 -- and gave George W. Bush a surprising 14,000 vote boost. Two election workers told the Free Press that the ballots had been diverted to an unauthorized warehouse where they had been possibly stuffed. That is, punched for Bush only. Maps were supplied to the Free Press showing the locations of the warehouse and the Board of Elections.

Warren County officials refused to allow the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism to handle the ballots, but they did allow us to photograph a few. Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., has analyzed the ballots for the Free Press and concluded that there is evidence of fraud in Warren County. The ballots as photographed with Dr. Phillips' commentary below each ballot are included here for the first time.

The right to vote, as well as the principle of “one person, one vote,” are cornerstones of our democracy. The anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as the expansion of voting to young people are all part of the history of electoral reform in this country. Equally fundamental is the assurance that each voter knows that her or his vote counts and is counted as intended. At this time in our history, many have lost confidence in our voting system.

Right-wing church movements have been a staple of American politics since well before the 1692 witch trials at Salem. But only in the past few decades has the extremist church served as the grassroots base for a new breed of corporate totalitarianism. That unholy union has been nowhere more powerful than here in Ohio, and it has finally provoked a response from the state’s mainstream churches.

With huge torrents of cash from Richard Mellon Scaife, the Ahmanson family and other super-rich ultra-rightists, the fundamentalist church has formed the popular network that has spawned the Bush catastrophe. The totalitarian alliance between pulpit, corporation and military is unique in U.S. history.