Election Issues

After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's "message".   As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way.  John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.  

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines. 

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted…except in the extremely remote event of a recount. 

March 19, 2005—After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's "message." As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way. John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines.

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted .. except in the extremely remote event of a recount.

Study Will Be Released Tomorrow March 31st
Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election

Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%[1] <#_ftn1>. According to a report to be released March 31^st by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.

In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.

Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.

Exit polls have a long history of exceptional accuracy in past decades in the US, in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the discrepancy was more than five times this (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.[2] <#_ftn2>)

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell finally testified – something he had refused to do in the Moss v. Bush Ohio election challenge before the State Supreme Court and refused to do in Washington, D.C. His testimony proved so contentious that at one point Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, D-OH, told him to “haul butt” if he was unwilling to answer questions about irregularities in the 2004 election.

Blackwell vigorously defended his role in last fall’s presidential election at a congressional hearing on Monday, March 21, at the Ohio Statehouse, claiming critics have smeared his state as if it were a “third world country” rather than the national model of election administration that Blackwell said it was. In December, Republican state senators blocked a similar Democrat-sponsored forum from using the Statehouse, forcing testimony to be taken at the Democrat-controlled Columbus City Council chambers. Meanwhile, hundreds of disenfranchised voters testified under oath in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Warren concerning their voting day hardships.

Was the election “stolen” from John Kerry?

I say probably, because it literally is about probabilities.

Almost all the so-called “irregularities” favored Bush. If, in fact, irregularities occurred because of innocent systems failure then why weren’t as many Republicans screaming about their votes flipping over to Kerry?

Why weren’t as many Republicans freaking out about more Kerry votes than their precincts had voters? Why weren’t as many Republican precincts as Democratic precincts inadvertently shorted voting machines?

What is the mathematical probability of nearly every irregularity in a Republican-manufactured voting system randomly favoring the Republican candidate? A gazillion to none, probably. So, yeah, I suspect fraud, big time. And sooner or later, someone somewhere will get religion or the guilts or a payoff and spill the beans.

On February 14, United States Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and 17 U.S. Representatives including Dennis Kucinich of Ohio joined U.S. Representative John Conyers in filing an amicus curiae brief opposing sanctions against the public interest attorneys. Cliff ARnebeck, Susan Truitt, Bob Fitrakis and Pete Peckarsky were primarily responsible for uncovering massive election irregularities in their challenge of the 2004 Ohio election. Ohio Attorney General James Petro asked the Ohio Supreme Court to sanction the election protection attorneys claiming the election challenge was “meritless” and “frivolous.” In Conyers memorandum to the court, he stated, “For over 200 years, one of the strengths of our democracy has been that citizens may question the results of an election. …under Ohio law, sanctions should be awarded against Ohio election contesters only in extreme circumstances, if ever, and are plainly inappropriate in this case.” Conyers asserts that contesters “protect the broader public interest.”

If you’re going to do dirty tricks and break election laws, you’d better go to Ohio and not New Hampshire. Allen Raymond, the President of the Republican consulting group Marketplace LLC, was sentenced to five months in jail and fined $15,600 for jamming Democratic phone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 election.

Court records indicate that Raymond and co-conspirators plotted to jam Democratic phone lines that offered voters rides to the polls in at least four New Hampshire cities. Additionally, the Republicans disrupted the phone line operated by the nonpartisan Manchester Firefighters Union, according to the AP. The Executive Director of the New Hampshire Republican Party Chuck McGee also pleaded guilty, and James Tobin, the regional chair of Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign was also indicted in the 2002 scheme.

In Ohio or Florida, instead of being indicted, the GOP would have nominated them for Secretary of State.

On January 30th at Whetstone Park, Columbus, Ohio there was a meeting of groups interested in election reform. The purpose was to, “Combine the efforts of the various election reform groups, as well as allow for communication between the groups so no one’s efforts are duplicated,” according to organizer activist Rady Ananda,

Among the 120 people present were members of CASE-Ohio, Ohio Vigilance, MeetUp, and Redefeat Bush. This cooperating group of organizations has dubbed themselves the “J30 Coalition.” Blackboxvoting.org’s Bev Harris encouraged each group to continue to work independently, in order to attack election problems from different angles, while at the same time keeping channels of communication open.

One of the problems that the J30 Coalition is addressing is conflict of interest in the electoral process due to party affiliations of members of the Board of Elections, and the privatization of voting machine contracts. Diebold is owned by a vocal Republican supporter, and Blackboxvoting.org revealed that ES&S is owned by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) and his campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy.

At least well-dressed wealthy people who smell good will get it. Christopher Hitchens’ story in the March 2005 Vanity Fair sums it up well under the headline: “Ohio’s Odd Numbers.” It reads like, well, a Free Press article. Hitchens finds “Ohio’s polling results impossible to swallow” and insists that, “Both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines.” Here, Here!